OREADS
I end this little book with an experience of my own, or rather a series of experiences, and will leave conclusions to a final chapter. I don't say that I have no others which could have found a place—indeed, there are many others. But they were fitful, momentary things, unaccountable and unrelated to each other, without the main clue which in itself is too intimate a thing to be revealed just yet, and I am afraid of compiling a catalogue. I have travelled far and wide across Europe in my day, not without spiritual experiences. If at some future time these co-ordinate into a body of doctrine I will take care to clothe that body in the vesture of print and paper. Here, meantime, is something of recent years.
My house at Broad Chalke stands in a narrow valley, which a little stream waters more than enough. This valley is barely a mile broad throughout its length, and in my village scarcely half so much. I can be in the hills in a quarter of an hour, and in five-and-twenty minutes find myself deeply involved, out of sight of man or his contrivances. The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved. Beautiful, with quiet and a solemn peacefulness of their own, they always are. They endure enormously, in sæcula sæculorum. Storms drive over them, mists and rains blot them out; rarely they are shrouded in a fleece of snow. In spring the clouds and the light hold races up their flanks; in summer they seem to drowse like weary monsters in the still and fervent heat. They are never profoundly affected by such changes of Nature's face; grow not awful, sharing her wrath, nor dangerously fair when she woos them with kisses to love. They are the quiet and sober spokesmen of earth, clad in Quaker greys and drabs. They show no crimson at sunset, no gilded livery at dawn. The grey deepens to cool purple, the brown glows to russet at such festal times. Early in the spring they may drape themselves in tender green, or show their sides dappled with the white of sheep. Flowers they bear, but secretly; little curious orchids, bodied like bees, eyed like spiders, flecked with the blood-drops of Attis or Adonis or some murdered shepherd-boy; pale scabious, pale cowslip, thyme that breathes sharp fragrance, "aromatic pain," as you crush it, potentilla, lady's slipper, cloudy blue milkwort, toad-flax that shows silver to the wind. Such as these they flaunt not, but wear for choiceness. You would not see them unless you knew them there. For denizens they have the hare, the fox, and the badger. Redwings, wheatears, peewits, and airy kestrels are the people of their skies.
I love above all the solitude they keep, and to feel the pulsing of the untenanted air. The shepherd and his sheep, the limping hare, lagging fox, wheeling, wailing plover; such will be your company: you may dip deeply into valleys where no others will be by, hear the sound of your own heart, or the shrilling of the wind in the upland bents. I have heard, indeed, half a mile above me, the singing of the great harps of wire which stretch from Sarum to Shaftesbury along the highest ridge; but such a music is no disturbance of the peace; rather, it assures you of solitude, for you wouldn't hear it were you not ensphered with it alone. There's a valley in particular, lying just under Chesilbury, where I choose most to be. Chesilbury, a huge grass encampment, three hundred yards square, with fosse and rampart still sharp, with a dozen gateways and three mist-pools within its ambit, which stands upon the ancient road and dominates two valleys. Below that, coming up from the south, is my charmed valley. There, I know, the beings whom I call Oreads, for want of a homelier word, haunt and are to be seen now and then. I know, because I myself have seen them.
I must describe this Oread-Valley more particularly, I believe. East and west, above it, runs the old road we call the Race-Plain—the highest ground hereabouts, rising from Harnham by Salisbury to end at Shaftesbury in Dorset. North of this ridge is Chesilbury Camp; immediately south of that is the valley. Here the falling flood as it drained away must have sucked the soil out sharply at two neighbouring points, for this valley has two heads, and between them stands a grass-grown bluff. The western vale-head is quite round but very steep. It faces due south and has been found grateful by thorns, elders, bracken and even heather. But the eastern head is sharper, begins almost in a point. From that it sweeps out in a huge demi-lune of cliff, the outer cord being the east, the inner hugging the bluff. Facing north from the valley, facing these two heads, you see the eastern of them like a great amphitheatre, its steep embayed side so smooth as to seem the work of men's hands. It is too steep for turf; it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not. No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her people more than once. And the first sign I had of them was this.
I
I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew. About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at all—and that was fitful—came from a fern-owl which, from a thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with the night.
The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt, the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short course and died. You never feel lonely when you have the stars; yet they do not pry upon you. You can hide nothing from them, and need not seek to hide. If they have foreknowledge, they nurse no after-thought.
Now, to-night, as I looked and wondered at their beauty, I became aware of a phenomenon untold before. Yet so quietly did it come, and so naturally, that it gave me no disturbance, nor forced itself upon me. A luminous ring, a ring of pale fire, in shape a long, narrow, and fluctuating oval, became discernible in the sky south of my stand-point, midway (I thought) between me and the south.