THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY
(IRELAND)
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The road to the Causeway is bleak, wild, and hilly.
The cabins along the road are scarcely better than those of Kerry, the inmates as ragged, and more fierce and dark-looking. I never was so pestered by juvenile beggars as in the dismal village of Ballintoy. A crowd of them rushed after the car, calling for money in a fierce manner, as if it was their right; dogs as fierce as the children came yelling after the vehicle; and the faces which scowled out of the black cabins were not a whit more good-humoured. We passed by one or two more clumps of cabins, with their turf and corn-stacks lying together at the foot of the hills; placed there for the convenience of the children, doubtless, who can thus accompany the car either way, and shriek out their “Bonny gantleman, gi’e us a ha’p’ny.” A couple of churches, one with a pair of its pinnacles blown off, stood in the dismal open country, and a gentleman’s house here and there: there were no trees about them, but a brown grass round about—hills rising and falling in front, and the sea beyond. The occasional view of the coast was noble; wild Bengore towering eastwards as we went along; Raghery Island before us, in the steep rocks and caves of which Bruce took shelter when driven from yonder Scottish coast, that one sees stretching blue in the northeast.
I think this wild gloomy tract through which one passes is a good prelude for what is to be the great sight of the day, and got my mind to a proper state of awe by the time we were near the journey’s end. Turning away shorewards by the fine house of Sir Francis Macnaghten, I went towards a lone handsome inn, that stands close to the Causeway. The landlord at Ballycastle had lent me Hamilton’s book to read on the road; but I had not time then to read more than half-a-dozen pages of it. They described how the author, a clergyman distinguished as a man of science, had been thrust out of a friend’s house by the frightened servants one wild night, and butchered by some Whiteboys who were waiting outside and called for his blood. I had been told at Belfast that there was a corpse in the inn: was it there now? It had driven off, the car-boy said, “in a handsome hearse and four to Dublin the whole way.” It was gone, but I thought the house looked as if the ghost was there. See, yonder are the black rocks stretching to Portrush: how leaden and grey the sea looks! how grey and leaden the sky! You hear the waters rushing evermore, as they have done since the beginning of the world. The car drives us with a dismal grinding noise of the wheels to the big lone house: there’s no smoke in the chimneys; the doors are locked. Three savage-looking men rush after the car: are they the men who took out Mr. Hamilton—took him out and butchered him in the moonlight? Is everybody, I wonder, dead in that big house? Will they let us in before those men are up? Out comes a pretty smiling girl, with a curtsey, just as the savages are at the car, and you are ushered into a very comfortable room; and the men turn out to be guides. Well, thank Heaven it’s no worse! I had fifteen pounds still left; and, when desperate, have no doubt should fight like a lion.
THE GIANT’S LOOM, GIANT’S CAUSEWAY.
The traveller no sooner issues from the inn by a back door, which he is informed will lead him straight to the Causeway, than the guides pounce upon him, with a dozen rough boatmen who are likewise lying in wait; and a crew of shrill beggar-boys, with boxes of spars, ready to tear him and each other to pieces seemingly, yell and bawl incessantly round him. “I’m the guide Miss Henry recommends,” shouts one. “I’m Mr. Macdonald’s guide,” pushes in another. “This way,” roars a third, and drags his prey down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and quarrelling after. I had no friends; I was perfectly helpless. I wanted to walk down to the shore by myself, but they would not let me, and I had nothing for it but to yield myself into the hands of the guide who had seized me, who hurried me down the steep to a little wild bay, flanked on each side by rugged cliffs and rocks, against which the waters came tumbling, frothing, and roaring furiously. Upon some of these black rocks two or three boats were lying: four men seized a boat, pushed it shouting into the water, and ravished me into it. We had slid between two rocks, where the channel came gurgling in: we were up one swelling wave that came in a huge advancing body ten feet above us, and were plunging madly down another (the descent causes a sensation in the lower regions of the stomach which it is not at all necessary here to describe), before I had leisure to ask myself why the deuce I was in that boat, with four rowers hurrooing and bounding madly from one liquid mountain to another—four rowers whom I was bound to pay. I say, the query came qualmishly across me why the devil I was there, and why not walking calmly on the shore.
The guide began pouring his professional jargon into my ears. “Every one of them bays,” says he, “has a name (take my place, and the spray won’t come over you): that is Port Noffer, and the next, Port na Gange; them rocks is the Stookawns (for every rock has its name as well as every bay); and yonder—give way, my boys,—hurray, we’re over it now: has it wet you much, sir?—that’s a little cave: it goes five hundred feet under ground, and the boats goes into it easy of a calm day.”
“Is it a fine day or a rough one now?” said I; the internal disturbance going on with more severity than ever.
“It’s betwixt and between; or, I may say, neither one nor the other. Sit up, sir. Look at the entrance of the cave. Don’t be afraid, sir; never has an accident happened in any one of these boats, and the most delicate ladies has rode in them on rougher days than this. Now, boys, pull to the big cave. That, sir, is six hundred and sixty yards in length, though some say it goes for miles inland, where the people sleeping in their houses hear the waters roaring under them.”
The water was tossing and tumbling into the mouth of the little cave. I looked,—for the guide would not let me alone till I did,—and saw what might be expected: a black hole of some forty feet high, into which it was no more possible to see than into a millstone. “For Heaven’s sake, sir,” says I, “if you’ve no particular wish to see the mouth of the big cave, put about and let us see the Causeway and get ashore.” This was done, the guide meanwhile telling some story of a ship of the Spanish Armada having fired her guns at two peaks of rock, then visible, which the crew mistook for chimney-pots—what benighted fools these Spanish Armadilloes must have been; it is easier to see a rock than a chimney-pot; it is easy to know that chimney-pots do not grow on rocks.—“But where, if you please, is the Causeway?”
“That’s the Causeway before you,” says the guide.
“Which?”
“That pier which you see jutting out into the bay right ahead.”
“Mon dieu! and have I travelled a hundred and fifty miles to see that?”
I declare, upon my conscience, the barge moored at Hungerford Market is a more majestic object, and seems to occupy as much space. As for telling a man that the Causeway is merely a part of the sight; that he is there for the purpose of examining the surrounding scenery; that if he looks to the westward he will see Portrush and Donegal Head before him; that the cliffs immediately in his front are green in some places, black in others, interspersed with blotches of brown and streaks of verdure;—what is all this to a lonely individual lying sick in a boat, between two immense waves that only give him momentary glimpses of the land in question, to show that it is frightfully near, and yet you are an hour from it? They won’t let you go away—that cursed guide will tell out his stock of legends and stories. The boatmen insist upon your looking at boxes of “specimens,” which you must buy of them; they laugh as you grow paler and paler; they offer you more and more “specimens”; even the dirty lad who pulls number three, and is not allowed by his comrades to speak, puts in his oar, and hands you over a piece of Irish diamond (it looks like half-sucked alicompayne), and scorns you. “Hurry, lads, now for it, give way!” how the oars do hurtle in the rowlocks, as the boat goes up an aqueous mountain, and then down into one of those cursed maritime valleys where there is no rest as on shore!
At last, after they had pulled me enough about, and sold me all the boxes of specimens, I was permitted to land at the spot whence we set out, and whence, though we had been rowing for an hour, we had never been above five hundred yards distant. Let all cockneys take warning from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the back door of the hotel, shout at once to the boatmen to be gone—that he will have none of them. Let him, at any rate, go first down to the water to determine whether it be smooth enough to allow him to take any decent pleasure by riding on its surface. For after all, it must be remembered that it is pleasure we come for—that we are not obliged to take those boats.—Well, well! I paid ten shillings for mine, and ten minutes after would cheerfully have paid five pounds to be allowed to quit it; it was no hard bargain after all. As for the boxes of spar and specimens, I at once, being on terra firma, broke my promise, and said I would see them all—first. It is wrong to swear, I know; but sometimes it relieves one so much!
THE KEYSTONE, GIANT’S CAUSEWAY.
The first act on shore was to make a sacrifice to Sanctissima Tellus; offering up to her a neat and becoming Taglioni coat, bought for a guinea in Covent Garden only three months back. I sprawled on my back on the smoothest of rocks that is, and tore the elbows to pieces: the guide picked me up; the boatman did not stir, for they had their will of me; the guide alone picked me up, I say, and bade me follow him. We went across a boggy ground in one of the little bays, round which rise the green walls of the cliff, terminated on either side by a black crag, and the line of the shore washed by the poluphloisboiotic, nay the poluphloisboiotatotic sea. Two beggars stepped over the bog after us howling for money, and each holding up a cursed box of specimens. No oaths, threats, entreaties, would drive these vermin away; for some time the whole scene had been spoiled by the incessant and abominable jargon of them, the boatmen, and the guides. I was obliged to give them money to be left in quiet, and if, as no doubt will be the case, the Giant’s Causeway shall be a still greater resort of travellers than ever, the county must put policemen on the rocks to keep the beggars away, or fling them in the water when they appear.
And now, by force of money, having got rid of the sea and land beggars, you are at liberty to examine at your leisure the wonders of the place. There is not the least need for a guide to attend the stranger, unless the latter have a mind to listen to a parcel of legends, which may be well from the mouth of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales, but are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of sixpence a lie. Fee him and the other beggars, and at last you are left tranquil to look at the strange scene with your own eyes, and enjoy your own thoughts at leisure.
That is, if the thoughts awakened by such a scene may be called enjoyment; but for me, I confess, they are too near akin to fear to be pleasant; and I don’t know that I would desire to change that sensation of awe and terror which the hour’s walk occasioned, for a greater familiarity with this wild, sad, lonely place. The solitude is awful. I can’t understand how those chattering guides dare to lift up their voices here, and cry for money.
It looks like the beginning of the world, somehow: the sea looks older than in other places, the hills and rocks strange, and formed differently from other rocks and hills—as those vast dubious monsters were formed who possessed the earth before man. The hilltops are shattered into a thousand cragged fantastical shapes; the water comes swelling into scores of little strange creeks, or goes off with a leap, roaring into those mysterious caves yonder, which penetrate who knows how far into our common world. The savage rock-sides are painted of a hundred colours. Does the sun ever shine here? When the world was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos, this must have been the bit over—a remnant of chaos! Think of that!—it is a tailor’s simile. Well, I am a cockney: I wish I were in Pall Mall! Yonder is a kelp-burner: a lurid smoke from his burning kelp rises up to the leaden sky, and he looks as naked and fierce as Cain. Bubbling up out of the rocks at the very brim of the sea rises a little crystal spring: how comes it there? and there is an old grey hag beside, who has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there sits and sells whisky at the extremity of creation! How do you dare to sell whisky there, old woman? Did you serve old Saturn with a glass when he lay along the Causeway here? In reply, she says, she has no change for a shilling: she never has; but her whisky is good.
This is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway (as some clever critic will remark), but of a Londoner there, who is by no means so interesting an object as the natural curiosity in question. That single hint is sufficient; I have not a word more to say. “If,” says he, “you cannot describe the scene lying before us—if you cannot state from your personal observation that the number of basaltic pillars composing the Causeway has been computed at about forty thousand, which vary in diameter, their surface presenting the appearance of a tesselated pavement of polygonal stones—that each pillar is formed of several distinct joints, the convex end of the one being accurately fitted in the concave of the next, and the length of the joints varying from five feet to four inches—that although the pillars are polygonal, there is but one of three sides in the whole forty thousand (think of that!), but three of nine sides, and that it may be safely computed that ninety-nine out of one hundred pillars have either five, six, or seven sides; if you cannot state something useful, you had much better, sir, retire and get your dinner.”
Never was summons more gladly obeyed. The dinner must be ready by this time; so, remain you, and look on at the awful scene, and copy it down in words if you can. If at the end of the trial you are dissatisfied with your skill as a painter, and find that the biggest of your words cannot render the hues and vastness of that tremendous swelling sea—of those lean solitary crags standing rigid along the shore, where they have been watching the ocean ever since it was made—of those grey towers of Dunluce standing upon a leaden rock, and looking as if some old old princess, of old old fairy times, were dragon-guarded within—of yon flat stretches of sand where the Scotch and Irish mermaids hold conference—come away, too, and prate no more about the scene! There is that in nature, dear Jenkins, which passes even our powers. We can feel the beauty of a magnificent landscape, perhaps: but we can describe a leg of mutton and turnips better. Come, then, this scene is for our betters to depict. If Mr. Tennyson were to come hither for a month, and brood over the place, he might, in some of those lofty heroic lines which the author of the Morte d’Arthur knows how to pile up, convey to the reader a sense of this gigantic desolate scene. What! you, too, are a poet? Well, then Jenkins, stay! but believe me, you had best take my advice, and come off.
The Irish Sketch-Book (London, 1843).