Death in the dusk

by Virgil Markham

It was in the Book of Sylvan Armitage that I ran across the clue. The Book is a chronicle of the diversions of a sixteenth-century gentleman, and mine is a genuine first printing of 1598. It contains an allusion which I am confident refers to a performance of the “Merchant of Venice” at Blackfriars, which allusion would stagger the erudite who prate glibly of the “order of Shakespeare’s plays,” if they gave it a thought. But much more interesting to me is the reference to the devotional seat of St. Tarw.

Sylvan Armitage, progressing through Wales in 1594, visited the house of an Englishman residing in that lately war-distraught country. On one of their “long gaddynges and peregrinations afoot,” for riding was not feasible among these broken mountains, they came upon a humble structure of “hewn stones, much dishevelled and marvellously coated by moss,” says Sylvan Armitage. He adds that the “cella” had been built under a bank, and that this very fact was then threatening its existence. Small chance of success then for me.

So yesterday while I sat on my ungrateful seat with the mist wreathing about me, I half-abandoned the search before it had properly begun. For the dozenth time I took out the letter I had received the day before from my dear old friends, Jack and Mary Bonnet of Bristol. Their barque, recently returned from Australia, will leave the dry-dock in a day or so and take the sea again from Bristol next Monday. Would I join them in a “terror and pleasure” trip somewhere around Africa or the Scandinavian coast? Of course, I reflected, it would take me fully a week to wind up my affairs in preparation for such an ocean journey. I must drop the saint business. I looked at the fog, felt sick of saints, and almost decided I would go.

I had let down my burden, a soldier’s knapsack and a fairly well-loaded one, to the grass beside my feet. I decided to eat my luncheon. I tucked the Bonnet letter away and took out my beef-sandwiches, milk in a thermos-flask, and walnut meats, a substantial meal in small compass. My long morning’s tramp on the uplands had made me very hungry. It was not only the tramp, but the slipping and falling and crawling, for the yellow grass was long and trodden flat by cattle, making the side slopes very toilsome, and, in the mist, risky, for you sometimes did not know whether you might fall ten feet or a thousand.

I had been exploring Aidenn Forest, but I had early left the lowland area of trees. The uplands, miles of broad-topped hills in a range of horseshoe shape, were given over largely to cattle-grazing. There were long pastures of rolling and heaving slopes, like the gently-breathing ocean of midsummer. My meal over, I unfolded my contour-map of the Geographical Institute and pondered over it, trying by recollection and inference to determine just where I was. But I had not the remotest clue to slope or distance. I might have been at one extreme of the horseshoe or the other, or any spot betwixt. It was two o’clock.

Neither my literary nor my philosophic studies, which are supposed to chasten the mind to resignation, comforted my thoughts in the least, but suddenly I was aware of a change in the atmosphere. The mist seemed suffused with silver, then with gold. Soon the phantoms of fog had retracted far on either side in lofty, shifting, sun-rayed banks, and the air became clear about me. But I remained in doubt about my position.

For the mist had cleared only to the shoulders of the hills, and left the rolling heights a-sparkle like early morning; but the valleys and the great outer hills of Wales, girding Aidenn Forest, were blind to me. From the declining sun I could tell which way was west, but knowledge of that direction alone was no use. Was I on the western curve of the horseshoe or the opposite? Nor did it help to recall that my ascent of Aidenn Forest had been the north, where the two curves meet, the open part of the horseshoe being to the south. I was as confused as ever.

At least I could walk freely, keep to the smooth uplands without peril of falling down some gap or gully. I strode on in the grandeur of the sun, the mighty halo of mist extending a mile all around, a more gorgeous glory than bully St. Tarw or any other of the blessed men of earth ever wore. The towering wall of mist was warm with the light that occasionally melted through and dazzled the ragged hill-slope underneath; the cloud-caps wreathed and spired like golden smoke, and I went on proudly and merrily in my enormous prison. I felt like a god, exultant. I reached out my hands and lifted my face to the heavens. My loneliness apotheosized me. I laughed. I shouted, ebriatus. Never before have I experienced that sense of space and power, that vigour beyond muscle and sense, that reckless rapture!

Nearly an hour passed. Grasshoppers leapt to either side of my path with little soft comings to earth; the sound was like the first drops of rain. Black-game and grouse twice or thrice scampered and scudded from my feet, and suddenly out of the fog which had closed in on my left swept a great bevy of unknown birds with a thunder of wings. I judged then that I was not far from the brink of a steep pitch on the edge of the uplands. The mist which had glorified me was beginning to hem me more straitly and I bore away to the right, being wary of pitfalls.

Gradually, while I moved up and down the placid slopes and crossed wide expanses wherein I was an ephemeral topic for cows and shambling tattered ponies, an inexpressible sense told me precisely where I was on the lofty horseshoe of Aidenn Forest. Fragmentary half-submerged memories of my contour-map, of the dip of the slopes where I trod, of instructions proffered me by scraggy, wry-spoken yokels (with obligato of a pig screaming at a gate), of the arc described by the sun, of the bated breath of the breeze—all these united to fix my certainty. My feet just at that moment were ascending on the flattened grass of a small summit; Mynydd Tarw I knew it was, whose highest spot was considerably above two thousand feet. Mynydd Tarw, on the verge of the horseshoe’s eastern bend, was where I had concluded the oratory of St. Tarw was most likely to be found.