The Purple Cloud
Page 25
Wensleydale, theday being very warm and bright, with large clouds that looked likelakes of molten silver giving off grey fumes in their centre, castingmoody shadows over the swardy dale, which below Thwaite expands, showingMuker two miles off, the largest village of Upper Swaledale. Soon,climbing, I could look down upon miles of Swaledale and the hillsbeyond, a rustic panorama of glens and grass, river and cloudshadow, andthere was something of lightness in my step that fair day, for I hadleft all my maps and things, except one, at Reeth, to which I meant toreturn, and the earth, which is very good, was--mine. The ascent wasrough, and also long: but if I paused and looked behind--I saw, I saw.Man's notion of a Heaven, a Paradise, reserved for the spirits of thegood, clearly arose from impressions which the earth made upon his mind:for no Paradise can be fairer than this; just as his notion of a Hellarose from the squalid mess into which his own foolish habits of thoughtand action turned this Paradise. At least, so it struck me then: and,thinking it, there was a hiss in my breath, as I went up into what moreand more acquired the character of a mountain pass, with points ofalmost Alpine savagery: for after I had skirted the edge of a deep glenon the left, the slopes changed in character, heather was on themountain-sides, a fretting beck sent up its noise, then screes, andscars, and a considerable waterfall, and a landscape of crags; andlastly a broad and rather desolate summit, palpably nearer the clouds.
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Two days later I was at the mines: and here I first saw that wide-spreadscene of horror with which I have since become familiar. The story ofsix out of ten of them all is the same, and short: selfish 'owners,' anousted world, an easy bombardment, and the destruction of all concerned,before the arrival of the cloud in many cases. About some of the Durhampit-mouths I have been given the impression that the human race laycollected there; and that the notion of hiding himself in a mine musthave occurred to every man alive, and sent him thither.
In these lead mines, as in most vein-mining, there are more shafts thanin collieries, and hardly any attempt at artificial ventilation, exceptat rises, winzes and cul-de-sacs. I found accordingly that, though theirdepth does not exceed three hundred feet, suffocation must often haveanticipated the other dreaded death. In nearly every shaft, both up-takeand down-take, was a ladder, either of the mine, or of the fugitives,and I was able to descend without difficulty, having dressed myself in ahouse at the village in a check flannel shirt, a pair of two-buttonedtrousers with circles of leather at the knees, thick boots, and aminer's hat, having a leather socket attached to it, into which fitted astraight handle from a cylindrical candlestick; with this light, andalso a Davy-lamp, which I carried about with me for a good many months,I lived for the most part in the deeps of the earth, searching for thetreasure of a life, to find everywhere, in English duckies and guggs,Pomeranian women in gaudy stiff cloaks, the Walachian, the Mameluk, theKhirgiz, the Bonze, the Imaum, and almost every type of man.
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One most brilliant Autumn day I walked by the village market-cross atBarnard, come at last, but with a tenderness in my heart, and areluctance, to where I was born; for I said I would go and see my sisterAda, and--the other old one. I leaned and loitered a long time on thebridge, gazing up to the craggy height, which is heavy with waving wood,and crowned by the Castle-tower, the Tees sweeping round themountain-base, smooth here and sunlit, but a mile down, where I wishedto go, but would not, brawling bedraggled and lacerated, like a sweetstrumpet, all shallow among rocks under reaches of shadow--the shadow ofRokeby Woods. I climbed very leisurely up the hill-side, having in myhand a bag with a meal, and up the stair in the wall to the top I went,where there is no parapet, but a massiveness of wall that precludesdanger; and here in my miner's attire I sat three hours, broodingsleepily upon the scene of lush umbrageous old wood that marks the longway the river takes, from Marwood Chase up above, and where the rapidBalder bickers in, down to bowery Rokeby, touched now with autumn; thethickness of trees lessening away toward the uplands, where there arefar etherealized stretches of fields within hedgerows, and in the sunnymirage of the farthest azure remoteness hints of lonesome moorland. Itwas not till near three that I went down along the river, then, nearRokeby, traversing the old meadow, and ascending the old hill: andthere, as of old, was the little black square with yellow letters on thegate-wall:
HUNT HILL HOUSE.
No part, no house, I believe, of this country-side was empty of strangecorpses: and they were in Hunt Hill, too. I saw three in the weedy plotto the right of the garden-path, where once the hawthorn and lilac treehad grown from well-rollered grass, and in the little bush-wilderness tothe left, which was always a wilderness, one more: and in thebreakfast-room, to the right of the hall, three; and in the new woodenclinker-built attachment opening upon the breakfast-room, two, halfunder the billiard-table; and in her room overlooking the porch on thefirst floor, the long thin form of my mother on her bed, with crushed-inleft temple, and at the foot of the bed, face-downward on the floor,black-haired Ada in a night-dress.
Of all the men and women who died, they two alone had burying. For Idigged a hole with the stable-spade under the front lilac; and I woundthem in the sheets, foot and form and head; and, not without throes andqualms, I bore and buried them there.
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Some time passed after this before the long, multitudinous, andperplexing task of visiting the mine-regions again claimed me. I foundmyself at a place called Ingleborough, which is a big table-mountain,with a top of fifteen to twenty acres, from which the sea is visibleacross Lancashire to the west; and in the sides of this strange hill area number of caves which I searched during three days, sleeping in agarden-shed at a very rural and flower-embowered village, for every roomin it was thronged, a place marked Clapham in the chart, in Clapdale,which latter is a dale penetrating the slopes of the mountain: and thereI found by far the greatest of the caves which I saw, having ascended apath from the village to a hollow between two grass slopes, where thereis a beck, and so entering an arch to the left, screened by trees, intothe limestone cliff. The passage narrows pretty rapidly inwards, and Ihad not proceeded two yards before I saw the clear traces of a greatbattle here. All this region had, in fact, been invaded, for the cavemust have been famous, though I did not remember it myself, and for somemiles round the dead were pretty frequent, making the immediate approachto the cave a matter for care, if the foot was to be saved frompollution. It is clear that there had been an iron gate across theentrance, that within this a wall had been built across, shutting in Ido not know how many, perhaps one or two, perhaps hundreds: and bothgate and wall had been stormed and broken down, for there still were thesledges and rocks which, without doubt, had done it. I had a lamp, andat my forehead the lighted candle, and I went on quickly, seeing ituseless now to choose my steps where there was no choice, through apassage incrusted, roof and sides, with a scabrous petrified lichen, theroof low for some ninety yards, covered with down-looking cones, likean inverted forest of children's toy-trees. I then came to a round hole,apparently artificial, opening through a curtain of stalagmiticformation into a great cavern beyond, which was quite animated andfestal with flashes, sparkles, and diamond-lustres, hung in theirmyriads upon a movement of the eye, these being produced by largenumbers of snowy wet stalagmites, very large and high, down the centreof which ran a continuous long lane of clothes and hats and faces; withhasty reluctant feet I somehow passed over them, the cave all the timewidening, thousands of stalactites appearing on the roof of every size,from virgin's breast to giant's club, and now everywhere the wet drip,drip, as it were a populous busy bazaar of perspiring brows and hurryingfeet, in which the only business is to drip. Where stalactite meetsstalagmite there are pillars: where stalactite meets stalactite infissures long or short there are elegances, flimsy draperies, delicatefantasies; there were also pools of water in which hung heads and feet,and there were vacant spots at outlying spaces, where the arched roof,which conti
nually heightened itself, was reflected in the chill gleam ofthe floor. Suddenly, the roof came down, the floor went up, and theyseemed to meet before me; but looking, I found a low opening, throughwhich, drawing myself on the belly over slime for some yards inrepulsive proximity to dead personalities, I came out upon a floor ofsand and pebbles under a long dry tunnel, arched and narrow, grim anddull, without stalactites, suggestive of monks, and catacomb-vaults, andthe route to the grave; and here the dead were much fewer, provingeither that the general mob had not had time to penetrate so far inward,or else that those within, if they were numerous, had gone out todefend, or to harken to, the storm of their citadel. This passage led meinto an open space, the grandest of all, loftily vaulted, full of genieriches and buried treasures of light, the million-fold _ensemble_ oflustres dancing schottishe with the eye, as it moved or was still: thisplace, I should guess, being quite half a mile from the