We have purposely said little of the repulsive side of the spectacle; of the terrible-looking men and women who have come out of their hiding-places to kneel at the shrine and to beg from strangers; who wander about like savages, and are propitiated with beads. Figures strange, weird, and grotesque, the like of which we shall see nowhere else in the world, pass round the cloisters of St. Anne d’Auray for two days in the year.
There is one half witted man from the sea-coast, evidently soon “going home”; as he drags himself along, the shadows seem to deepen, and the light from human eyes to burn more fiercely in their tenement. Fed with seaweed, thatched with straw, exposed to the wildest winds of the Atlantic, his home little better than a hole in the rocks, what wonder that he comes across the hills once a year to the Pardon of Ste. Anne for a blessing; that he prays for a land beyond the sea, visioned in his mind by innumerable candles, and paid for in advance through weary years in his Passage to the Cross!
Many of the pilgrims go through other religious observances before leaving Auray, including washing in the well, going step by step up the Scala Santa on their hands and knees; and all—the poorest and most pitiable—leave something in the coffers of Ste. Anne.
And so the long day passes, and at last the tide recedes. What if a strong north wind and the running river Auray could bear them away seaward to be seen no more? What if all the wretchedness, dirt, and disease, collected, as if by a miracle, at Ste. Anne for two days, could, by another miracle as great, be swept away for ever!
Carnac.
Turning southward and westward from Auray, a drive of eight or nine miles across a dreary-looking district, with patches of pasture interspersed with gorse and ferns, and here and there a peasant leading a cow, driving a cart, or digging in the poor soil—on reaching a rising ground, we see before us a wide stretch of open land, grey and monotonous in colour, and beyond, in the far distance, the horizon line of sea. Leaving the carriage-road, about a mile before reaching the village of Carnac, and turning off to the left, we come rather suddenly, as it seems, upon a stubble field strewn with large grey rocks or stones, some of them six or eight feet high, standing on end, upright, or leaning against each other, but the majority lying pêle-mêle on the ground, some half buried in the earth, or hidden by gorse or long grass. They are for the most part smooth and time-worn blocks of, apparently unhewn, granite, of all shapes and sizes, some covered with moss and lichen.
Is this, then, the famous field of Carnac, with its “avenues of menhirs,” the object of so many pilgrimages, the origin of so many theories, the birthplace of so many legends? The first impression, we need hardly say, is disappointing, and fills the traveller with that feeling of blank dismay which comes upon him on the first sight of the “Court of Lions” at the Alhambra in Spain. But in a little while, looking westward, and tracing a certain order and method in the position of “the Stones,” he begins to realise that by no ordinary forces of nature, but by some unknown hands in past ages, these pillars must have been raised. But how raised, and by whom brought and strewn on this desolate shore? That they were monuments of the dead, or that they mark the spot where burials took place, forming a consecrated ground for the ancient inhabitants of Armorica, is the commonly received opinion. We are told also that these irregular rows of unhewn stone are relics of serpent worship, that they represent serpents’ teeth and the waving lines of its body; also that they mark the places of sacrifice of the Druids; bones and ancient remains of human beings having been found to support this theory.
The “menhir,” or “long stone of the sun,” will suggest the form of monument used in all ages in religious worship, and the “dolmen,” or table stone (which we see in the neighbourhood of Locmariaker), consisting of a chamber formed by placing one large flat stone horizontally on two or more upright blocks, points to the theory of a place of sacrifice in Druidical times, or at any rate to a place of burial.[[9]] All else seems vague and mysterious, leading men of succeeding ages to surround the scene with legends and traditions. It has been said that “the ancient temples of aboriginal races are generally to be found where nature wears her saddest and most funereal aspect,” and certainly Carnac is no exception to the rule.
[9]. The forms of the menhir and the dolmen are indicated on the title-page.