Between Trawsfynydd and Maentywrog
CHAPTER VI.
It was the longest day of the year,—so said the penny almanac in the Mahntooroch Hotel. So, with richer certainty, did we ourselves asseverate before nightfall. Before 9 A.M. the Tommies and their lop-sided burdens had been launched on their twelve miles’ journey to Beddgelert; and we, something depressed in spirit by the farewell warnings of our friend the roasted tourist, were hardening our hearts to the ascent of Snowdon.
We rode up through the Plas Oakley Woods, along the ramparts of the glens, and reaching higher levels, came on a vision of a mountain lake dreaming in the early sun. Three or four coots beat a silver path across it with their black wings, in alarm that testified to the rarity of the June tourist, and the pine-woods round it still held the purple shadows of morning. Out on the bare hills beyond it the heather was in bloom, and the wind’s freshness was softened by the scent of it. The Tommies crawled along with well-considered sluggishness. They had by this time a complete mastery of our characters. In the mornings they found that we were too light-hearted to resent their laziness, and in the evenings too humane. This, and the fact that Miss O’Flannigan made from Tom’s back a sketch of nothing in particular, may account for our having taken five hours over the twelve miles. However, it may be conceded that they were hilly miles, and were withal as circuitous in their approach of a given point as an Irishman in getting to the focal point of a bargain. Indeed, one turn of the road looked as if it might have
Miss O’Flannigan made a sketch from Tom’s back.
supplied the Irishman himself, when it led us past a dreary cabin whose ambition to be rectangularly frightful yielded to the prior necessity of being crooked in a manner that we thought to be achievable only by the Irish cottage architect. With squalid, squinting eyes it leered aside upon its cabbage-garden and the pigs that rooted therein, and outwards to the sea down a bare valley. We were sensible then, for the first time, of a greyness that was blunting the sunshine, and the cabin with its malign, dirty face seemed responsible for it.
The extremes of landscape met where tumbled heaps of grey rock slanted down from the sky to the flat boggy plain that runs out to Port Madoc. That the road should be protected from these suspended avalanches by a single strand of wire-fencing is a fact that no doubt admits of explanation, but at a cursory view of things its object was not apparent. The loneliness was absolute, whether we looked inland to crags and oak-woods, or seaward along the marshes, but by this time we did not expect anything except loneliness. Coventry on a memorable occasion was not more straitly penned behind its shutters than was Wales as we rode through it. The wayside villages seemed asleep, the farmhouse doors were shut, and the silence of the roads was comparable only to that supremest of earth’s silences when one is thrown out of a run, and hounds, riders, and runners have seemingly passed away into eternity.