“To the water,” she cried, and the passive figures, scarcely arrested in their toil, answered back with murmurs of assent. Lhatto turned again, and Atalanta-like, sped down the path that started at the upland and ended on the distant shore.
She carried her clothing and the food basket, pressed in a bundle close beneath her left arm, while her hand held the harpoon, her right hand was raised before her and like a Grecian herald, “she ran swiftly.” She soon reached the edge of the upland where the path descended to the valley and the lake. Here her agility and sure footedness were seriously tested. The broken descent was a series of intervals between rough and angular blocks of stone, slippery with lichens or moss, and now wet from some recent shower. The path with long interruptions where no evidence of its direction could be seen, was detected by worn spots or traces, upon the larger blocks. Lhatto seemed to exert no thought upon the selection of her way. With light feet she sprang from point to point, and running along the narrow edge of some decumbent mass of rock, suddenly dropped from its side to a lower level without volition, so vigorous and just was her instinct of place and action.
She had reached the valley; the high grass nurtured by some favorable influence reached half way up to her own height and pressed upon her. Its swaying ran in radial waves outward from her vanishing figure, as her laggard arm, now thrown behind her, swept its mobile crests. Suddenly she emerged on the dome beyond, bare or scantily dressed in verdure, and here her figure became instantly and superbly visible.
A wind blowing freshly from the sea, and now chilling and raw, brushed backward the glistening hair, color throbbed in her cheeks with a deeper dye, her bosom pulsating with the efforts of her unusual exertion rose and fell, and to her eyes had risen some suppressed emotion that gave them brilliancy; her lips, after a moment’s pause while her uplifted head, with a sort of statuesque elation, greeted the blue sky, opened suddenly with song.
Or was it but a cry, a weird inchoate yearning for music’s melody and rhythm?
It rose upon the air of that immeasurably distant day, and floated out over the waves that were making their own rudimental symphonies on the lonely shores. It rose upward and floated backward to the forests where the birds in myriad ways were beating the same air, on which it came, with song. It was part of the intuition of all feeling things to put their feelings into the subtle measure of music. And she who sang had come upon earth before civilization or science or art, in formal types, had yet been dreamed of. It was the prototype of folk song, or nursery croon, of legendary melodies, of national anthem, the song of Lhatto, on the outskirts of all regulated thought and invention.
Imagine—all you who behind foot-lights, and in front of crescent platforms, hear the manifold choruses that shall in some way, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes clear, interpret for you feeling or fancy, that use all the sound resources of orchestras straining in all imaginable ways to construct new fabrics of notes, building in echoes of old tunes, forgotten lays, choral unions of tones, and hurrying from grave to gay, from slow to quick, in the laborious compilation that rises with elastic buoyancy, until the last chord crashes or sobs, and the listener departs numbed and despairing—imagine Lhatto on the door step of human time singing to the morning skies.
Yes! it was a song. It was articulate. This earliest woman had wedded music to words, and both, in her, perhaps from still more venerable traditions, or from the creative genius of merely strong feeling, were signals of man’s primal worship of the sea, and were intelligible. Thus she sang:—
THE SONG OF LHATTO.
Stay waves. Hold wind. Enough!