by M. P. Shiel
Midland Canal, and went northward, leisurelyadvancing, for I was in no hurry. The weather remained very warm, andgreat part of the country was still dressed in autumn leaves. I havewritten, I think, of the terrific character of the tempests witnessed inEngland since my return: well, the calms were just as intense and novel.This observation was forced upon me: and I could not but be surprised.There seemed no middle course now: if there was a wind, it was a storm:if there was not a storm, no leaf stirred, not a roughening zephyr ranthe water. I was reminded of maniacs that laugh now, and rave now--butnever smile, and never sigh.
On the fourth afternoon I passed by Leicester, and the next morning leftmy pleasant boat, carrying maps and compass, and at a small station tookengine, bound for Yorkshire, where I loitered and idled away two foolishmonths, sometimes travelling by steam-engine, sometimes by automobile,sometimes by bicycle, and sometimes on foot, till the autumn was quiteover.
* * * * *
There were two houses in London to which especially I had thought togo: one in Harley Street, and one in Hanover Square: but when it came tothe point, I would not; and there was a little embowered home inYorkshire, where I was born, to which I thought to go: but I would not,confining myself for many days to the eastern half of the county.
One morning, while passing on foot along the coast-wall from Bridlingtonto Flambro', on turning my eyes from the sea, I was confronted by athing which for a moment or two struck me with the most profoundastonishment. I had come to a mansion, surrounded by trees, threehundred yards from the cliffs: and there, on a path at the bottom of thedomain, right before me, was a board marked: 'Trespassers will beProsecuted.' At once a mad desire--the first which I had had--to laugh,to roar with laughter, to send wild echoes of merriment clapping amongthe chalk gullies, and abroad on the morning air, seized upon me: but Ikept it under, though I could not help smiling at this poor man, withhis little delusion that a part of the earth was his.
Here the cliffs are, I should say, seventy feet high, broken by frequentslips in the upper stratum of clay, and, as I proceeded, climbingalways, I encountered some rather formidable gullies in the chalk, downand then up which I had to scramble, till I came to a great mound orbarrier, stretching right across the great promontory, and backed by anatural ravine, this, no doubt, having been raised as a rampart by someof those old invading pirate-peoples, who had their hot life-scuffle,and are done now, like the rest. Going on, I came to a bay in the cliff,with a great number of boats lodged on the slopes, some quite high,though the declivities are steep; toward the inner slopes is a lime-kilnwhich I explored, but found no one there. When I came out on the otherside, I saw the village, with an old tower at one end, on a bare stretchof land; and thence, after an hour's rest in the kitchen of a littleinn, went out to the coast-guard station, and the lighthouse.
Looking across the sea eastward, the light-keepers here must have seenthat thick cloud of convolving browns and purples, perhaps mixed withsmall tongues of fire, slowly walking the water, its roof in the clouds,upon them: for this headland is in precisely the same longitude asLondon; and, reckoning from the hour when, as recorded in the _Times_,the cloud was seen from Dover over Calais, London and Flambro' must havebeen overtaken soon after three o'clock on the Sunday afternoon, the25th July. At sight in open daylight of a doom so gloomy--prophesied,but perhaps hoped against to the last, and now come--the light-keepersmust have fled howling, supposing them to have so long remained faithfulto duty: for here was no one, and in the village very few. In thislighthouse, which is a circular white tower, eighty feet high, on theedge of the cliff, is a book for visitors to sign their names: and Iwill write something down here in black and white: for the secret isbetween God only, and me: After reading a few of the names, I took mypencil, and I wrote my name there.
* * * * *
The reef before the Head stretches out a quarter of a mile, looking boldin the dead low-water that then was, and showing to what extent the seahas pushed back this coast, three wrecks impaled on them, and a bigsteamer quite near, waiting for the first movements of the alreadystrewn sea to perish. All along the cliff-wall to the bluff crowned byScarborough Castle northward, and to the low vanishing coast ofHolderness southward, appeared those cracks and caves which had broughtme here, though there seemed no attempts at barricades; however, I gotdown a rough slope on the south side to a rude wild beach, strewn withwave-worn masses of chalk: and never did I feel so paltry and short athing as there, with far-outstretched bays of crags about me, theirbluffs encrusted at the base with stale old leprosies of shells andbarnacles, and crass algae-beards, and, higher up, the white cliff allstained and weather-spoiled, the rock in some parts looking quitechalky, and elsewhere gleaming hard and dull like dirty marbles, whilein the huge withdrawals of the coast yawn darksome gullies and caverns.Here, in that morning's walk, I saw three little hermit-crabs, a limpet,and two ninnycocks in a pool of weeds under a bearded rock. Whatastonished me here, and, indeed, above, and everywhere, in London even,and other towns, was the incredible number of birds that strewed theground, at some points resembling a real rain, birds of nearly everysort, including tropic specimens: so that I had to conclude that they,too, had fled before the cloud from country to country, till conqueredby weariness and grief, and then by death.
By climbing over rocks thick with periwinkles, and splashing throughgreat sloppy stretches of crinkled sea-weed, which give a raw stench ofbrine, I entered the first of the gullies: a narrow, long, winding one,with sides polished by the sea-wash, and the floor rising inwards. Inthe dark interior I struck matches, able still to hear from outside theponderous spasmodic rush and jostle of the sea between the crags of thereef, but now quite faintly. Here, I knew, I could meet only dead men,but urged by some curiosity, I searched to the end, wading in the middlethrough a three-feet depth of sea-weed twine: but there was no one; andonly belemnites and fossils in the chalk. I searched several to thesouth of the headland, and then went northward past it toward anotheropening and place of perched boats, called in the map North Landing:where, even now, a distinct smell of fish, left by the old crabbers andherring-fishers, was perceptible. A number of coves and bays opened as Iproceeded; a faded green turf comes down in curves at some parts on thecliff-brows, like wings of a young soldier's hair, parted in the middle,and plastered on his brow; isolated chalk-masses are numerous, obelisks,top-heavy columns, bastions; at one point no less than eight headlandsstretched to the end of the world before me, each pierced by its arch,Norman or Gothic, in whole or in half; and here again caves, in one ofwhich I found a carpet-bag stuffed with a wet pulp like bread, and,stuck to the rock, a Turkish tarboosh; also, under a limestone quarry,five dead asses: but no man. The east coast had evidently been shunned.Finally, in the afternoon I reached Filey, very tired, and there slept.
* * * * *
I went onward by train-engine all along the coast to a region ofiron-ore, alum, and jet-excavations round Whitby and Middlesborough. Byby-ways near the small place of Goldsborough I got down to the shore atKettleness, and reached the middle of a bay in which is a cave calledthe Hob-Hole, with excavations all around, none of great depth, made byjet-diggers and quarrymen. In the cave lay a small herd of cattle,though for what purpose put there I cannot guess; and in thejet-excavations I found nothing. A little further south is the chiefalum-region, as at Sandsend, but as soon as I saw a works, and the greatgap in the ground like a crater, where the lias is quarried, containingonly heaps of alum-shale, brushwood-stacks, and piles of cement-nodulesextracted from the lias, I concluded that here could have been found nohiding; nor did I purposely visit the others, though I saw two later.From round Whitby, and those rough moors, I went on to Darlington, notfar now from my home: but I would not continue that way, and after twodays' indecisive lounging, started for Richmond and the lead minesabout Arkengarth Dale, near Reeth. Here begins a region of mountain,various with glens, fells, screes, scars, swards, becks, passes,villa
ges, river-heads, and dales. Some of the faces which I saw in italmost seemed to speak to me in a broad dialect which I knew. But theywere not numerous in proportion: for all this country-side must have hadits population multiplied by at least some hundreds; and the villageshad rather the air of Danube, Levant, or Spanish villages. In one, namedMarrick, I saw that the street had become the scene either of a greatbattle or a great massacre; and soon I was everywhere coming upon menand women, English and foreign, dead from violence: cracked heads,wounds, unhung jaws, broken limbs, and so on. Instead of going direct tothe mines from Reeth, that waywardness which now rules my mind, assqualls an abandoned boat, took me somewhat further south-west to thevillage of Thwaite, which I actually could not enter, so occupied withdead was every spot on which the eye rested a hundred yards about it.Not far from here I turned up, on foot now, a very steep, stony road tothe right, which leads over the Buttertubs Pass into