THE LOGAN ROCK.
There is an excellent good climb for the young and active and the reckless down from this grim granite promontory of Trereen Dinas to an exquisitely secluded sandy cove, and thence up again, and over more tumbled hummocks of the all-pervading granite, to the sandy and shelly shore of Porthcurno, properly Porth Kernow, the "Port of Cornwall."
But halt awhile! secluded, did I say that sandy cove to be? So it may seem at certain hours of the day, when the young barbarians of the Eastern Telegraph Company are in office, at work; but even then, when this yellow strand under Trereen Dinas is indeed solitary, the observant explorer, who thinks himself one of the very few who ever scale these rocks and pace these selvedges of the sea, will be startled, even as was Robinson Crusoe on a memorable occasion, by the imprint of a human foot. A human foot? Nay, dozens of them, for this is, in short, one of the favourite bathing-coves of the ninety or so telegraphist probationers of the Eastern Telegraph Company at Porthcurno. For at Porthcurno the cable lands from Gibraltar and all the wide world, including the Cocos Islands and places of unpronounceable name in tropic climes, where white men sweat and fume far from their kind and dwell lovingly on the good time coming, when they shall be home and in London again, living instead of existing.
At Banjoewangi (which is a real place on the Telegraph Company's system, somewhere back even of Back of Beyond, and not what it looks like, a nigger-minstrels' kingdom-come), London, you know, seems a very desirable place.
Well, here is the E. T. C. telegraph station, up inland a quarter of a mile from the cove; a square white building with a flat, bomb-proof roof, and here in various quarters are the officials, and here too are some ninety probationers of sixteen to eighteen years of age, or thereabouts, all learning telegraphese, the punching of dots and dashes on endless tapelike strips of paper and the reading of the same: a sufficiently beastly business, so what wonder if these ninety in their off-hours be somewhat untamable!
All these things are late developments. A few years ago Porthcurno was a wild little place, and quite behind the age. Now it is perhaps even a little in advance of it. An almost typically suburban street runs up inland, and on the elegantly thin iron telegraph-poles that carry the land-lines of the E. T. C. are incandescent electric globes with white shades, which light the road at night. And on the cliffs the Telegraph Company is trying a wireless installation of its own, of which the visible evidence is a very tall and very groggy-looking pole, stayed and tied elaborately. Such is Porthcurno, the "PK" of telegraphists.
From Porthcurno, to reach the church of St. Levan, you take the church path, avoiding the hideous houses on the headland, plastered and of a dismal neutral tint, that have recently been built there. Through three fields runs the church-path, and then the sea, with distant horizon, opens out between the flanks of a combe, the four pinnacles of St. Levan church-tower suddenly rising before you, scarce above your line of vision. The church, in fact, is built in a hollow—once a solitary hollow—giving upon the sea, a place where few strangers ever came in those distant fifth-century days when St. Levan lived the hermit life. We know very little of that saint, except the tale of the disastrous entertainment he offered his sister when she came to visit him here. It seems that he subsisted entirely upon the fish he caught, and thinking he would spread a dainty meal before his visitors, he went out and caught a chad. The fish that came to his line he did not consider good enough, so he threw it back. Not before the identical fish had been caught three times did he accept the inevitable, and he cooked it accordingly; but at the first bite the child was choked. St. Levan was illogical enough—and I think blasphemous enough—to consider this a judgment of Providence upon himself for refusing what had been sent him. The chad was long called locally "chack-cheeld." "St. Levan's Path" to the rocks where he used to fish is still pointed out.
ST. LEVAN.