The strong but gentle current swept in with the flowing water under the dark shadows of the land, past what seemed, in the wet night-gloom, like rugged banks of tree and forest, and finally floated me to where, among loose boulders and sand, the tamed water was lapping on a smooth and level beach. I staggered ashore, and sat down as wet and sorry as well could be. Life ran so cold and numb within, it seemed scarce worth the cost spent in keeping. My scrip was still at my side, but my sword was gone, my clothing torn to ribbons, and a more buffeted messenger never eyed askance the scroll that led him into such a plight. Where was I? The great gods who live forever alone could tell, yet surely scores of miles from where I should be! I got to my feet, reeking with wet and spray, the gusty wind tossing back the black Phrygian locks from off my forehead, and glared around. Sigh, sigh, sigh went the gale in the pines above, while mournful pipings came about the shore like wandering voices, and the sea boomed sullenly out yonder in the darkness! I stared and stared, and then started back a pace and stared again. I turned round on my heel and glowered up the narrow inlet and out to sea; then at the beetling crags above and the dim-seen mounds inland; then all on a sudden burst into a scornful laugh—a wild, angry laugh that the rocks bandied about on the wet night-air and sent back to me blended with all the fitful sobs and moaning of the wind.
The lonely harbor, that of a thousand harbors I had come to, was the old British beach. It was my Druid priestess’s village place that I was standing on!
I laughed long and loud as I, the old trader in wine and olives—I, the felucca captain, with cloth and wine below and a comely red-haired slave on deck—I, again, in other guise, Royal Edward’s chosen messenger—as good a knight as ever jerked a victorious brand home into its scabbard—stood there with chattering teeth and shaking knee, mocking fate and strange chance in reckless spirit. I laughed until my mood changed on a sudden, and then, swearing by twenty forgotten hierarchies I would not stand shivering in the rain for any wild pranks that Fate might play me, I staggered off on to the hard ground.
Every trace of my old village had long since gone; yet though it were a thousand years ago I knew my way about with a strange certainty. I left the shore, and pushed into the overhanging woods, dark and damp and somber, and presently I even found a well-known track (for these things never change); and, half glad and half afraid—a strange, tattered, dismal prodigal come strangely home—I pushed by dripping branch and shadowy coverts, out into the open grass hills beyond.
Here, on some ghostly tumuli near about, the gray shine of the night showed scattered piles of mighty stones and broken circles that once had been our temples and the burial places for great captains. I turned my steps to one of these on the elbow of a little ridge overlooking the harbor, and, perhaps, two hundred paces inland from it, and found a vast lichened slab of stupendous bulk undermined by weather, and all on a slope with a single entrance underneath one end. Did ever man ask lodgment in like circumstances? It was the burial mound of an old Druid headman, and I laughed a little again to think how well I had known him—grim old Ufner of the Reeking Altars. Hoth! what a cruel, bloody old priest he was!—never did a man before, I chuckled, combine such piety and savagery together. How that old fellow’s cruel small eyes did sparkle with native pleasure as the thick, pungent smoke of the sacrificial fire went roaring up, and the hiss and splutter half drowned the screaming of men and women pent in their wicker cages amid that blaze! Oh! Old Ufner liked the smell of hot new blood, and there was no music to his British ear like the wail of a captive’s anguish. And then for me to be pattering round his cell like this in the gusty dark midnight, shivering and alone, patting and feeling the mighty lid of that great crypt, and begging a friendly shelter in my stress and weariness of that ghostly hostelry—it was surely strange indeed.
Twice or thrice I walked round the great coffer—it was near as big as a herdsman’s cottage—and then, finding no other crack or cranny, stopped and stooped before the tiny portal at the lower end. I saw as I knelt that that tremendous slab was resting wondrous lightly on a single point of upright stone set just like the trigger of an urchin’s mouse-trap, but, nothing daunted, pushing and squeezing, in I crept, and felt with my hands all that I could not see.
The foxes and the weather had long since sent all there was of Ufner to dust. All was bare and smooth, while round the sides were solid, deep earth-planted slabs of rock—no one knew better than I how thick they were and heavy!—and on the floor a soft couch of withered leaves and grasses.
Now one more sentence, and the chapter is ended. I had not coiled myself down on those leaves a minute, my weary head had nodded but once upon my arm, my eyelids drooped but twice, when, with a soundless start, undermined by the fierce storm, and moved a fatal hair’s-breadth by my passage, the propping key-stone fell in, and all at once my giant roof began to slide. That vast and ponderous stone, that had taken two tribes to move, was slipping slowly down, and as it went, all along where it ground, a line of glowing lambent fire, a smoking hissing band of dust marked its silent, irresistible progress—a hissing belt of dust, and glow that shone for a half-moment round the fringe of that stupendous portal—and then, too late as I tottered to my weary knees, and extended a feeble hand toward the entrance, that mighty door came to a rest, that ponderous slab, that scarce a thousand men could move, fell with a hollow click three inches into the mortises of the earth-bound walls, and there in that mighty coffer I was locked—fast, deep, and safe!
I listened. Not a sound, not a breath of the storm without moved in that strange chamber. I stared about, and not one cranny of light broke the smooth velvet darkness. What mattered it? I was weary and tired—to-morrow I would shout and some one might hear, to-night I would rest; and, Jove! how deep and warm and pleasant was that leafy bed that chance had spread there on the floor for me!