CHAPTER XXII. HERMITS.
"'For thou,' quoth he, 'shalt be my wife,
And honoured for my queene;
With thee I meane to lead my life,
As shortly shall be seene.'"
Far away in an interminable vista of rock and forest, which lay behind the King's hunting-tower, like the littered ruins of a world, stretched out the wilderness. Silent lay the piles of desolation, rank after rank, and voiceless save for the tales which none could understand of the ages that were gone. And wildest of all, and more silent and full of inarticulate eloquence, was the rift where the Cañon of the Hermits split the waste in two.
Deep into the bowels of the stony land a soft, little, laughing river had licked its way; and now in a cool channel, flanked with perpendicular walls, it ran on, hundreds of feet below the level of the wilderness, and seemed to rejoice to think how unenduring beside itself was the everlasting rock.
Once or twice in a century a man might find the spot as he followed a trail or sought the riches that lay hidden in the hills. And there, as he stood upon the brink of that Titanic trench, he could not but feel the overpowering presence of the ages which were young when the foundations of the world were laid. He could not but feel, when he listened to the river far below, singing over its never-ending task, what a paltry scratching was the greatest work a man could do between the cradle and the grave.
Perhaps it was this that made the hermits choose it for a resting-place, and its utter solitude as well. Whatever was the cause, here they had settled, where the perpendicular walls were grimmest and highest; and here, far up in the face of the gaunt cliffs, they had hewn out caves to dwell in. Visibly there was no approach to them; but he who found his way to the little meadows at the foot, and pierced the luxuriant shrubs, that from which the mighty ramparts sprung, would have discovered on either hand a larger cave, which served at once as entrance-hall and corral to the monastery. From the inmost recess of these a rude spiral stair, cut in the solid rock, led upwards to a maze of crooked and inclined galleries communicating with the cells.