We hastened to assure her that we were not of such, and a few moments of confidential discussion at the bar sufficed for a programme superior to any that the guide-books had to suggest. It is in such affairs as these that the landlady and the coffee-room-maid show qualities not to be found in the landlord, or even the ostler. They can rise above convention; they have an instinctive perception of what the tourist, in his bewildered heart, prefers, but fears to acknowledge; and they are capable of giving advice with a sound disregard for the logic of precedent. Therefore it befell that our bones are not now bleaching on the “Beddgelert ascent” of Snowdon, and that, after a large cold lunch, which included a delicious but embarrassingly stony cherry-pie, we found ourselves riding slowly towards the village of Rhyddu.
This was the scheme of the manageress. We were to ride on to Rhyddu, leave the ponies at the Quellyn Arms, get a guide, and having ascended Snowdon by the shortest route, sleep on top, see the sun rise, and be back at Rhyddu for breakfast. It was almost alarming in its simplicity, and in the way in which it degraded the ascent of the highest mountain in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon. But, with a barometrical future so uncertain that, as Miss O’Flannigan’s cook is in the habit of saying, “you couldn’t tell a day from an hour,” its merit was too obvious to be disregarded.
Low as we had sunk in the social scale, we yet retained just enough self-respect to preserve us from asking the rare passer-by which of the misty bulks that confronted us was Snowdon; but none the less, we should have liked to know. Snowdon had been to our minds a lonely autocrat, unmistakable as Vesuvius or Fuji-yama; but here were four or five round-shouldered monsters, all of about the same height, and none quite as monstrous as we had expected. We settled on several, and tried successively to make the best of them, and to experience the sensations of awe which the guide-book assured us were inevitable under the circumstances; but the telegraph wire that had been given as our clue still led us onwards, and the village of Rhyddu seemed, like all our destinations, to have pitched its moving tent a mile beyond our estimate.
At length a line of unlovely grey houses stood by the roadside on a broad green ridge, the telegraph wire sent a feeler down into one of these, and a modest signboard presently introduced to us the Quellyn Arms. It was a very small hotel indeed, but it contained a smell of fried bacon that would have filled St Paul’s, and an ignorance of the English language that was almost equally stupendous. We were at this moment on a flank of Snowdon, as we stretched our stiff legs along the horse-hair chairs; the terminus of the Snowdon Railway was above us, within a stone’s-throw, and a toy train was curling incredibly round corners and down into a green valley that was dovetailed in among the great roots of the mountain. Outside the parlour window a thick-set figure with a long stick waited immovably—as immovably as Snowdon, or as the misty
The Snowdon guide outside the parlour window.
cloud in which its horns were plunged. As we momently grew stiffer, the probability that the sun would rise next morning seemed slighter than usual, and we tried to persuade the thick-set man to regard the position from our point of view. But a Snowdon guide has an optimism about sunrises, and a conviction in the matter of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.
This, we were assured, was the longest day in the year. It would be light all night. There was a very good hotel on the top to which he, Griffith Roberts, had guided forty people the night before, all of whom had seen Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man at sunrise.