The South Country

by Edward Thomas

—how the cheek flushes and the heart leaps up with a pleasure which the incidents themselves hardly justify. We seem to recognize in them symbols or images of ideas which are important to mortal minds. They are of a significance beyond allegories. They are as powerful, and usually as mysterious in their power, as the landscape at sight of which the gazer sighs in his joy, he knows not why. In such passages the Nights abound.

One of the finest is in Seifelmolouk and Bedia Eljemal. The hero and his memlooks were captured by a gigantic Ethiopian king. Some were eaten. The survivors so pleased the king by the sweetness of their voices while they were crying and lamenting that they were hung up in cages for the king to hear them. Seifelmolouk and three of his companions the king gave to his daughter, and when the youth sat thinking of the happy past, and crying over it, she was overjoyed at the singing of her little captive. Perhaps more pleasing still is the door in the grass which has only to be removed to discover a splendid subterranean palace and a “woman whose aspect banished from the heart all anxiety and grief and affliction,” even when the finder is the son of a king cutting wood in a forest, far from his lost home and from those who know him as the son of a king. The incognito appearances of the great Caliph make scenes of the same class. A young man sits with his mistress, and the sound of her lovely singing draws four darwishes to the door; he descends and lets them in; they promise to do him an immense and undreamed-of service—

“Now these darwishes,” says the tale, “were the Khalifeh Harun Er-Rashid, and the Wezir Ja’far El-Barmeki, and Abu-Nuwas El-Hasan, the son of Hani, and Mesrur the Executioner.”

Then there is that page where Nimeh and the Persian sage open a shop in Damascus, and stock it with costly things, and the sage sits with the astrolabe before him, “in the apparel of sages and physicians”—to wait for Nimeh’s lover, or some one who has news of her, to appear. Of a more subtly appealing charm is a sentence in the story of “Ala-ed-din,” where a man tells the father of one who is supposed to have been executed that another was actually slain in his stead, “for I ransomed him, by substituting another, from among such as deserved to be put to death.” A good book might be made of the stories of such poor unknown men in famous books as this prisoner who was of those that deserved to die.

Lofty, strange, and infinite in its suggestiveness is the tale of Kamar-ez-Zeman and the Princess Budur. Two demons, an Efrit and an Efritch, contend as to the superiority in beauty of a youth and a girl whom they watch asleep in widely remote parts of the earth; and they carry them through the midnight sky and lay the two side by side to judge. On the morrow, the youth longs for the girl and the girl for the youth. Of their dreams, the King, the father of the youth, says: “Probably it was a confused dream that thou sawest in sleep,” and the father of the girl chains her up as mad. But in the end, after many wanderings and impediments, they transcend the separation of space and are married. Noblest of all, perhaps, is one of the short “Anecdotes” about the discovery of a terrestrial paradise.

Abd-allah went out to seek a straying camel, and chanced upon a superb and high-walled city lying silent in the desert. And when the Caliph inquired about that city, a learned man told him that it was built by Sheddad, the King. This prince was fond of ancient books, and took delight in nothing so much as in descriptions of Paradise, so that his heart enticed him to make one like it on the earth. Under him were a hundred thousand kings, and under each of them were a hundred thousand soldiers, and he furnished them with the measurements and set them to collect the materials of gold and silver and ruby and pearl and chrysolite. For twenty years they collected. Then he sought a fit place among rivers on a vast open plain. In twenty years they built the city and finished its impregnable fortifications. For twenty years he laboured in equipping himself, his viziers, his harem and his troops for the occupation of this Paradise. Then when he was rejoicing on his way, “God sent down upon him and upon the obstinate infidels who accompanied him a loud cry from the heaven of his power, and it destroyed them all by the vehemence of its sound. Neither Sheddad nor any of those who were with him arrived at the city or came in sight of it, and God obliterated the traces of the road that led to it; but the city remaineth as it was in its place until the hour of the judgment.”...

Beyond the gateway the Downland and the corn begins, and with it the rain, so that the great yellow-banded bee hangs long pensive on the lilac flower of the scabious. Hereby is a farm with a wise look in its narrow window on either side of the white door under the porch; the walls of the garden and the farmyard are topped with thatch; opposite rises up a medlar tree, russet-fruited: and those two eyes of the little farm peep out at the stranger. From the next hill-top the land spreads out suddenly—an immense grey hedgeless land of pasture and ploughland and stubble with broadcast shadows of clouds and lines, and clumps of dark-blue trees a league apart. These woods are of pine and thorn and elder and beam, and some yew and juniper, haunted by the hare and the kestrel, by white butterflies going in and out, by the dandelion’s down. Sometimes under the pines a tumulus whispers a gentle siste viator and the robin sings beside. Far away, white rounds of cloud bursting with sunlight are lifted up out of the ground; born of earth they pause a little upon the ridge and then take flight into the blue profound, their trains of shadow moving over the corn sheaves, over the ploughs working along brown bands of soil, the furzy spaces, the deeply cloven grassy undulations, the lines of yews and of corn-stacks. Slowly a spire like a lance-head is thrust up through the Downs into the sky.

Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from the low flowing land, huge and carved all round by an entrenchment as if by the weight of a crown that it had worn for ages. Certainly it wears no crown to-day. Not a human being lives there; they have all fled to the riverside and the spire, leaving their ancient home to the triumphs of the wide-flowering traveller’s-joy, to the play of children on the sward within its walls, and to the archæologist: and very sad and very noble it looks at night when it and the surrounding Downs lift up their dark domes of wood among the mountains of the sky, and the great silence hammers upon the ears.

Then a hedgeless road traverses without interrupting the long Downs. One after another, lines of trees thin and dark and old come out against the pale bright sky of late afternoon and file away, beyond the green turf and roots and the grey or yellow stubble. As the sun sets, dull crimson, at the foot of a muslin of grey and gold which his course has crimsoned, the low clouds on the horizon in the north become a deathly blue white belonging neither to day nor to night, while overhead the light-combed cloudlets are touched faintly with flame. Now the glory and the power of the colour in the west, and now the pallid north, fill the brain to overflowing with the mingling of distance, of sublime motion, and of hue, and intoxicate it and give it wings, until at last when the west is crossed by long sloping strata as of lava long cooled they seem the bars of a cage impassable. But even they are at last worn away and the sky is as nothing compared with earth. For there, as I move, the infinite greys and yellows of the crops, the grass, the bare earth, the clumps of firs, the lines of beeches and oaks, play together in the twilight, and the hills meet and lose their lines and flow into one another and build up beautiful lines anew, the outward and visible signs of a great thought. Out of the darkness in which they are submerged starts a crying of pewits and partridges; and overhead and close together the wild duck fly west into the cold gilded blue.

At dawn a shallow crystal river runs over stones and waves green hair past ancient walls of flint, tall towers and many windows, with vines about the mullions, past desolate grass of old elmy meads, high-gated, and umbrageous roads winding white by carven gateways, under sycamore and elm and ash and many alders and haughty avenues of limes, past an old great church, past a park where elms and oaks and bushy limes hide a ruin among nettles and almost hide a large stone house from which peacocks shout, past a white farm, red-tiled, that stands with a village of its own thatched barns, cart-lodges and sheds under walnut and elm, enclosed within a circuit of old brick with a tower that looks along the waters. It is a place where man has known how to aid his own stateliness by that of Nature. The trees are grand and innumerable, but they stand about in aristocratic ways; the bright young water does not flout the old walls but takes the shadow of antiquity from them and lends them dew-dropping verdure in return. The pebbles under the waves are half of them fallen from the walls; the curves round which they bend are of masonry; so that it is unapparent and indifferent whether the masonry has been made to fit the stream or the stream persuaded to admit the masonry. As I look, I think of it as Statius thought of the Surrentine villa when he prayed that Earth would be kind to it and not throw off that ennobling yoke. Everywhere the river rushes and shines, or roars unseen behind trees. The sun is warm and the golden light hangs as if it were fruit among the leaves over the ripples.