‘But here is Morte below us. “The little grey church on the windy shore,” which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend Thomas à Becket’s murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy’s name; over which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he became a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the tomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of Cosenza.’
‘Peace be with him and with the Bishop! The flight to Italy seems a very needless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world. A bailiff would have had even less chance here then than in Connemara a hundred years ago.’
‘He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two hours after his arrival. Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza story is the safer one.’
‘What a chaos of rock-ridges!—Old starved mother Earth’s bare-worn ribs and joints peeping out through every field and down; and on three sides of us, the sullen thunder of the unseen surge. What a place for some “gloom-pampered man” to sit and misanthropize!’
‘“Morte,” says the Devonshire proverb, “is the place on earth which heaven made last, and the devil will take first.”’
‘All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees? I have not seen one for the last four miles.’
‘Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow here (and most things will) they will not, except, at least, hereafter the sea-pine of the Biscay shore. You would know why, if you had ever felt a south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at those black fields of shark’s-tooth tide-rocks, champing and churning the great green rollers into snow. Wild folk are these here, gatherers of shell-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels, which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers’ lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.’
‘Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. But what a merciless coast!’
‘Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two. You see there lying about the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, that black rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. That is the Morte stone, the “Death-rock,” as the Normans christened it of old; and it does not belie its name even now. See how, even in this calm, it hurls up its column of spray at every wave; and then conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirling winter’s night, when the land is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks.’
‘I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet so irrelievable. Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity House erect a light there?’