“That I do. I don’t wonder now that you come all the way from London to see our hills.”
We crossed the fall, climbed up the rock into another bend of the chasm, where the water makes its first plunge, unseen from below, shut in by crags that wear a sterner frown. You look up to the summit and see the water tumbling through a ring of rock, so strangely has the disruptive shock there broken the cliff. The effect both on ear and eye as the torrent breaks into spray and dashes downwards in fantastic channels, is surprisingly impressive.
Only on one side is the pass accessible, and there so steep that your hands must aid in the ascent. We scrambled to the top and found ourselves on the margin of a table-land sloping gently upwards from the edge of the precipice, so bestrewn with upheaved rocks and lumps of stone, that but for the grass which grows rich and sweet between, whereof the sheep bite gladly, the aspect would indeed be savage. Along an irregular furrow, as it may be called, which deepens as it nears the precipice, flows the beck—coming, as the boy told us, from Malham Tarn. There was another small stream, he said, which disappeared in a ‘swallow’ on his father’s pasture; and in that swallow he had many times found large trout, struggling helplessly in their unexpected trap. And, pointing to the highest shoulder of the cliff, he said that a fox, once hard pressed by the hounds, had leaped over, followed by a dog, and both were killed by the fall.
After a few minutes of admiration, the Yorkshiremen and their guide began to move off across the fell, in search of the horse. One of them hoped we should meet again on the way back. The other said, “Not much hope o’ that; for he won’t go away from this till he have learnt it all by heart.” Then we shook hands, and they promised to set up a pile of stones at a certain gate on their return, as a signal to me that they had passed through.
True enough, I was in no haste to depart, and there was much to admire as well as “to learn.” The sight of the innumerable shelves, with their fringe of grass, the diversity of jagged rocks thrusting their gray heads up into the sunlight, of the rugged and broken slopes, set me longing for a scramble. Hither and thither I went; now to a point where I could see miles of the cliffs, and mark how, in many places, owing to the splitting and shivering, the limestone wall resembles a row of organ pipes. Now into a gap all barren and stony with immemorial screes; where, however, you could hear the faint tinkle of hidden water, and pulling away the stones, discover small ferns and pale blades of grass along the course of the tiny current. Anon, returning to the Scar, I climbed to the top of the crag that juts midway in the rear of the chasm, surveying the scene below; then selecting a nook by the side of the beck, a little above its leap through the ring, I lay down and watched the water as it ran with innumerable sparkling cascades from the rise of the fell. Here the solitude was complete, and the view limited to a few yards of the hollow water-course patched with green and gray, and the bright blue sky above.
And while I lay, soothed by the murmur of the water, looking up at the great white clouds floating slowly across the blue, certain thoughts that had haunted me for some days shaped themselves in order in my brain; and with your permission, gracious reader, I here produce them:
A cloud of care had come across my mind;
Ill-balanced hung the world: here pleasure all;
There hopeless toil, and cruel pangs that fall
On Poverty, to which but death seemed kind.
And so, with heart perplexed, I left behind
The crowd of men, the town with smoky pall,
And sought the hills, and breathed the mountain wind.
Hath God forgotten then the mean and small?
I mused, and gazed o’er purple fells outroll’d;
When, lo! beneath an old thatched roof a gleam
That kindled soon with sunset’s gorgeous gold:
Broad panes, nor fretted oriel brighter beam.
If glories thus on lattice rude unfold,
Of life unlit by Heaven we may not deem.
The sun was beginning to drop towards the west before I left the pleasant hollow; and then with reluctance, for my holiday was near its close, and months would elapse before I should again hear the voice of a mountain brook, and slake myself in sunshine. Having returned to the village, I kept along the river bank to the head of the valley, where copse and enormous boulders, scattered about the narrow grassy level and in the bed of the stream, make a fine foreground to the magnificent limestone cliff of Malham Cove. Rising sheer to a height of nearly three hundred feet, the precipice curving inwards, buttressed on each side by woody slopes, realizes Wordsworth’s description—“semicirque profound;” and while you look up at its pale marble-like surface, broken only by a narrow shelf—a stripe of green—accessible to goats and adventurous boys, you will be ready to say with the bard,
“Oh, had this vast theatric structure wound
With finished sweep into a perfect round,
No mightier work had gained the plausive smile
Of all-beholding Phœbus!”
At a distance you might well imagine it to be a towering ruin, from which Time has not yet gnawed the traces of fallen chambers and colonnades. And perhaps yet more will you desire to see the cataract which once came rushing down in one tremendous plunge from the summit, as is said, owing to some temporary stoppage of the underground channels. What a glorious fall that must have been! more than twice the height of Niagara.