From a low flat arch at the base of the cliff, about twenty feet in width, the river Aire rushes out, copiously fed by a subterranean source. The water sparkles as it flows forth into the light of day, and begins its course clear and bright as truth, yet fated to receive many a defilement ere it pours into the Ouse. Could the Naiads forsee what is to befall, how piteous would be their lamentations! The stream is at once of considerable volume, inhabited by trout, and you may fish at the very mouth of the arch.
Here, too, I scrambled up and down, crossed and recrossed the stream, to find all the points of view; then ascending to the hill-top I traced the line of cliff from the Cove to Gordale. It is a continuation of that great geological phenomenon already mentioned—the Craven fault—which, extending yet farther, terminates near Threshfield, the village by which we passed last Sunday on our way to Kettlewell.
My return walk was quiet enough, and favourable to meditation. The Yorkshiremen had set up the preconcerted signal by the gate. I hope the horse did not drive the Scar quite out of their memory. Perhaps a lasting impression was made; for “Gordale-chasm” is, as Wordsworth says,
“——terrific as the lair
Where the young lions couch.”
I left Settle by the last evening train, journeying for the third time over the same ground, and came to the Devonshire Arms at Keighley just before the doors were locked for the night.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Keighley—Men in Pinafores—Walk to Haworth—Charlotte Brontë’s Birthplace—The Church—The Pew—The Tombstone—The Marriage Register—Shipley—Saltaire—A Model Town—Household Arrangements—I isn’t the Gaffer—A Model Factory—Acres of Floors—Miles of Shafting—Weaving Shed—Thirty Thousand Yards a Day—Cunning Machinery—First Fleeces—Shipley Feast—Scraps of Dialect—To Bradford—Rival Towns—Yorkshire Sleuth-hounds—Die like a Britoner.
Keighley is not pronounced Kayley, as you might suppose, but Keatley, or Keithley, as some of the natives have it, flinging in a touch of the guttural. Like Skipton, it is a stony town; and, as the tall chimneys indicate, gets its living by converting wool into wearing apparel of sundry kinds. You meet numbers of men clad in long blue pinafores, from throat to instep; wool-sorters, who thus protect themselves from fluff.