In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie ...”
But at one hand lies the first house in the world, a little ark of grey stone, pierced by windows behind which a velvet darkness weaves a spell and by a gloomy doorway; knock there and at once you will be barricaded again against the annihilating sea and night. All about it a trim garden of white and gold and dying red sends up a thin tower of scent that stands bravely in the salt wind. A tower!—at such an hour, when the easements of all the senses are opened wide upon eternity, this perfume not only satisfies the desiring and aspiring sense, but, with all its unsearched, undiscovered powers, builds for us here upon the shore a specular tower and, more, a palace lovely and shadowy, where the mind roves slowly and at ease, saluting vaguely apprehended shapes, finding now long lost memories of men and things which time has locked against a thousand keys, and now bold hopes and unexpected consolations. Content herself lurks here and many a pleasant ghost that seems immortal because it has died many times, and they may be enjoyed, until suddenly the night wind, without mercy, overturns the tower and desolates the palace and leaves us forsaken. Yonder the lighthouse flashes. The ships go out with wings as of a moth that cannot leave its chrysalis behind. The church bells moan; the sea birds whimper and shriek, and the road that goes on so long as we can walk lengthens out along the marsh and up the hill.
CHAPTER XLV
ONE SAIL AT SEA
This is a simple world. On either hand the shore sweeps out in a long curve and ends in a perpendicular, ash-coloured cliff, carving the misty air as with a hatchet-stroke. The shore is of tawny, terraced sand, like hammered metal from the prints of the retreating waves; and here and there a group of wildly carved and tragic stones—unde homines nati, durum genus—such as must have been those stones from which Deucalion made the stony race of men to arise. Up over the sand, and among these stones the water slides in tracery like May blossom or silver mail. A little way out, the long wave lifts itself up laboriously into a shadowy cliff, nods proudly and crumbles, vain and swift, into a thousand sparks of foam. Far out the desolate, ridgy leagues vibrate and murmur with an unintelligible voice, not less intelligible than when one man says, “I believe,” or another man, “I love,” or another, “I am your friend.” Almost at the horizon a sharp white sail sways, invisibly controlled. In a minute it does not move; in half-an-hour it has moved. It fascinates and becomes the image of the watcher’s hopes, as when in some tranquil grief we wait, with faint curiosity and sad foretelling, to see how our plans will travel, smiling a little even when they stray or stop, because we have foretold it. Will the sail sink? Will it take wing into the sky? Will it go straight and far, and overcome and celebrate its success? But it only fades away, and presently another is there unasked, yet not surprising, and it also fades away, and the night has come, and still the sea speaks with tongues. In the moonlight one strange flower glistens, white as a campanula, like a sweet-pea in shape—the bleached thigh-bone of a rat—and we forget the rest.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE CASTLE OF CARBONEK
The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its feet a little river can be seen running in a narrow valley. A few miles off it rises in the red moorland, then it falls with many a cascade down ladders of crag, broadens among willows where long leaves are all horizontal in the wind, and here by the castle it has reached an elvish, merry old age already, as it moves clear over the brown stones and out among the rocks to the sea. Opposite the castle, across the river, the other side of the valley is clothed in dense and luminous oak wood. Where the river joins the sea both the castle hill and the wooded hill break away into a broken multitude of bristling rocks, and among their alleys and hidden corridors and halls the waves leap with the motion of a herd of ridgy cattle galloping through narrow gateways. Beyond, and away for ten miles, the high dark coast sweeps in a curve which the sea whitens by showing its teeth; and round the headland at the end the ships come and go at starry intervals. Landward, the country rises in long, steep, furzy curves, interrupted by sudden rocks, to the red moor and the autumn evening sky of towering, tumultuous and yet steady grey cloud.