“I saw the wood for what it was,
The lost and the victorious cause,
The deadly battle pitched in line,
Saw silent weapons cross and shine,
Silent defeat, silent assault,
A battle and a burial vault.”
Stevenson’s attitude towards nature was a very remarkable one. Like Wordsworth, he endued her with a real, living personality, but unlike Wordsworth, he never seems to enter into a direct communion with her. She does not soothe him into “a wise passiveness,” she rather inspires him with a strange, fierce energy. Take this passage, selected almost at random from one of his published letters to Sidney Colvin: “I wonder if any one ever had the same attitude to nature as I hold and have held for so long. This business (of weeding) fascinates me like a tune or a passion, yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste. The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present in my mind, the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of the plants comes through my finger tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications, I feel myself blood boltered—then I look back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart.”
The living individual personality of nature is here as clearly recognised as Wordsworth himself recognised it, but the standpoint of regard is wholly different. Stevenson was aware of the spirit that clothed itself with the visible, but he was no dreamy lover enamoured of that spirit. He was rather (as he so often says) the ally in a fair quarrel, only desirous of bending Nature to his will, of pitting his strength against hers.
But I am digressing, and the mountain top and the grave are before me, and I am in the forest on my way thither. Now and again a tiny bright-coloured bird would flash across the path, now and again a huge trail of giant convolvulus, blue as the sky, would bar our progress. Over an hour had elapsed before we gained the summit, and the latter half of the ascent was by far the most difficult.
Small wonder that sixty natives were required to get the coffin up, and even so the question will always remain, How did they accomplish the feat? One may talk of the Road of the Loving Heart, but this was a veritable Via Dolorosa, a road of Sorrow and of Pity. The path zigzagged through the forest until it ended in a slender, fern-grown, almost imperceptible bush-track. More than once it led over the face of the solid rock, but branches of creepers, by which it was easy to swing oneself up, were abundant, though still the top appeared to recede, and to become more and more unattainable.
The mosquitos made the lives of my two companions a burden; on all sides of us we heard their sinister aereal trumpeting, the heat was insupportable—stifling, the very air seemed stagnant and dead, but, quite unawares, we were gradually nearing our goal. Suddenly our little brown-skinned guide, who was travelling ever so far ahead, in spite of the burden of our heavy basket of fruit, flung herself down on a small plateau just above us, and we, toiling painfully after, knew we had attained.
A minute later and we stood in reverent silence beside a massive sarcophagus, constructed of concrete and surrounded by a broad slab. Not an ideal structure by any manner of means, not even beautiful, and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man and the place. The broad slab was strewn with faded wreaths and flowers, and on one side of the sarcophagus were inscribed Stevenson’s name, with the date of his birth and death, also these eight lines, familiar to all who have read his poems:
“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I lay me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me,
Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
On the other side was an inscription in Samoan, which translated is “Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.” On either side of this text was graven a thistle and a hibiscus flower.
The chiefs have tabooed the use of firearms, or other weapons, on Mount Veea, in order that the birds may live there undisturbed and unafraid, and build their nests in the trees around Tusitala’s grave.