He laughed at that.
"Not very interesting, even to myself, so it's sure I can't be to anybody else," he answered. "Now we'll take Hey Tor Rock on our way back. It'll throw a bit of light on one or two things you've asked me."
They approached the granite bosses of the tor and stood presently beside it, where high on the cliff above them a face bulked enormous and stared into the eye of the westering sun.
The chisels of Nature carve slowly on granite, but once a masterpiece has been wrought, it will outlast many generations of mankind. Such things chance out of slow mouldings, or by sudden strokes. They may be the work of centuries, or the inspiration of a moment—plastic, moulded by patient Time, as the artist models his clay, or glyphic—struck with a blow of lightning, or earthquake, from the stone.
The great rock idols come and go, and haunt lonely cliffs, crown lonely heights, gaze out upon the surges of lonely seas. To Nature these whimsical figures, near enough to man to challenge him, are but faces in the fire, peeping to-day from the flux, and cinders again to-morrow; but, to the short-lived thing they imitate, they endure, while his own generations lapse.
This giant's head was smaller than the Sphinx and of an antiquity more profound. The countenance lacked majesty and was indeed malignant—not with the demoniac intelligence of man-cut fiends, such as "Le Stryge" on Notre Dame, but rather with the brutish, semi-human doubt and uncertainty of a higher ape. So the Minotaur might have scowled to seaward. The expression of the monster trembled on the verge of consciousness; it suggested one of those vanished beings created near the end of our hundred thousand years' journey, after man's ancestors descending from the trees set forth on the mighty march to conscious intelligence.
The face belonged to the forefathers of the neolithic people: it burlesqued hugely those beetle-browed, prognathous paleoliths of old time, and for them, perchance, possessed an awe and sublimity we cannot grant it to-day.
But it had challenged a boy and girl, who were still many thousands of years nearer to prehistoric ancestors than their parents. For children still move through the morning of days, and through minds ten and eleven years old the skin-clad dreamers and stone men were again reflected and survived.
Now Dinah heard with what force the discovery of the stone Titan had struck upon the boy and girl.
"A new baby was coming," said Lawrence, "and sister and me were each given a bit of food and told to run out on the moor and play till nightfall. That pleased us very well and we made our games and wandered and picked hurts.* And then I suddenly found yonder face and shouted to Milly and made her see it too. It excited me a lot, and Milly always got excited when I did. She said 'twas like father, but I said, 'No, 'tis a lot grander and finer than father.' Then she was frighted and wanted to run away; but I wouldn't have that. 'He'd blow out of his mouth and scat us to shivers if we ran,' I told her. I took pleasure in giving great powers to the monster, and wondered if he was good, or wicked. And little sister thought he must be wicked, but I didn't see why he should be. 'Perhaps he's a good 'un,' I said; and then I decided that he might be good. Milly was for sloking off again, but my child's wits worked, and I very soon lifted up the stone into a great, powerful creature. 'Us'll say our prayers to him,' I told Milly, but she feared that also. 'I never heard of nobody saying no prayers except to Gentle Jesus,' answered Milly to me. 'The Bible's full of 'em,' I told her. 'How would it be if we offered to be his friends?'"