and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his tombstone and reported it as reading:
Caten hic jacit filius Marconi.
The drive to Tintagel was through a world of slate,—slate everywhere. There were slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, banks of broken slate feathered with gorse and heather, yawning mouths of disused slate quarries. We passed through defiles where slate was piled cliff-high on either side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths that ran along the top of the hedge-banks. By way of this forsaken region we came to a sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before us, hoary, silent. Not a soul was in the streets,—not the fierce ghosts of Gorlois and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost of Igraine, nor the loving ghosts of Tristram and Iseult. We left the carriage and climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, which is no castle, but a colossal confusion of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared once by human hands, some grouped in the fantastic architecture of nature. There we sat astonished and dismayed, for the place is like a robber hold, a den of pirates fortified against the land, rather than a court of chivalry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. The ocean on which we looked was a dazzling blue, and far to north and south stood out the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The sunshine that filled the surf with shimmering tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull enthroned on the summit rock of the castle,—most likely the spirit of Guinevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish chough,
"Talons and beak all red with blood,"—
a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot.
The monstrous crags and huge fragments of old wall were cleft in a fashion strongly suggestive of
"casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn,"
and we shuddered to imagine with what stupendous force the terrible tides of winter must beat against that naked coast.
We realised what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressed with masonry and, even so, tip and lean over those graves too old for grief. All is ancient about Tintagel church, and most of all the Norman font whose sculptured faces are worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, each year bringing its quota of babies for the blessing of the holy water.