Then we went on to see the Logan Rock, and got a guide to find it for us. We could never have found it for ourselves, because it is so mixed up with so many other rocks. It is a huge rocking stone. It weighs I don't know how many tons, but a strong man can move it a little, if he knows just how and where to take hold of it and push. The guide rocked it for us, and he said that we did it ourselves when we tried, but I think he flattered us. He helped us to climb on the top of it—not an easy thing to do at all—and then he rocked it with us sitting on it. As he led the way back he took us through a narrow passage between two great rocks and told us that we must each of us make a wish as we passed through and never tell what it was, and then it would come true. "But we don't need to ask what the young ladies wish," he said, "they all wish the same thing." We wondered how many years he had been making that same joke over and over again. No doubt he must have got some pretty tips by it, when there were young women and young men both in the party.
We were going to walk from here to the Land's End, five miles, for it was one of the places where we had been told that we must walk, so as to see the scenery. We had already told the driver to go on to the Land's End and wait there for us. The guide showed us how to go and offered to go with us, but we thought that we did not need him. "You won't be able to see the Scillys to-day," he said. "Sometimes you can see them from the Land's End, but it isn't clear enough to-day. But you can be sure of a fine day to-morrow. When it is clear enough to see the Scillys it almost always rains the next day."
So we felt cheered at missing a sight that we had hoped to see, and went on our way. All the way the walk was up headlands and down ravines, with many grand and beautiful pictures—great crags and domes and pinnacles of rock and deep valleys and gorges and caves, and the sea always crashing and roaring down below us.
And when we came to the Land's End, of course that was the best of all. For there the sea seemed rougher than anywhere else, though it was not a rough day. It was no new thing for us to stand on a point of rock, with all the land behind us and nothing but boundless ocean before us. We did not need to come to the Land's End or to England for that. But there was something awful and solemn about these towers of stone that stood here to keep the sea from washing England away, and about the sea that was working at them while we looked, dashing up against them and slipping back and dashing up again, as it had been doing for thousands of years before we had come to look, and as it would do for thousands of years after we were gone. And after all these ages of work and struggle the waves seemed to be still angry, still fierce and full of wrath that the land should resist them so long. "Old rocks," they seemed to say, "you think that you are firm and steady and strong. But wait—and wait—there is much time before both of us still. Stand against us as you will; we shall still clash and beat upon you, and at last, in spite of all your firmness, we shall wear and wash you away, and we shall cover you sometime as we covered old Lyonnesse."
Lyonnesse! That, after all, I believe, is the wonderful thing to think of at the Land's End. "Yes, now," I said, "we are looking straight out over Lyonnesse—Tristram's country, the country that is lost. This is where it began, and it stretched away out there where there is nothing now but ocean, away out to the Scilly Islands, which we are not to see to-day. For thirty miles old Lyonnesse reached out from here, and even now, they say, for all that way, the bottom of the ocean lies at an even depth, and not like the bottom in other places. And they say, too, that when the water had covered Lyonnesse for so long that people had almost forgotten that there ever was any land there, the fishermen used to think of it again, because they sometimes drew up their hooks with pieces of doors and windows caught upon them. And nothing more than these ever came back of a country that had its towns and its fields and its forests and its people, which were all lost under the water together.
"And I remember an old book which says that more than Lyonnesse was taken away from Cornwall by the sea. For the old book says that St. Michael's Mount, which we saw this morning, used to have another name, that meant 'the rock in the wood.' And from this it was thought that St. Michael's Mount stood in a forest once, and not in the sea, as it does now. And the book, which was written about three hundred years ago, says that even then, when the tides were low around St. Michael's Mount, the stumps and roots of great trees were sometimes seen half buried in the sand."
Perhaps this is all nothing but old fable, but the land of Cornwall and the sea of Cornwall look as if it were true. How could these terrible waves and tempests tear and beat and surge upon this country, even with its walls of rock, without taking something away? You can laugh at the old wives' tales—if it is your way to laugh at such things—it is not ours—while you are at home, but when you stand at the Land's End and look out to sea, if you have a bit of the love of a story in you, you must and you will believe in Lyonnesse.
The Land's End
CHAPTER IX