Cornwall (England : County) -- Description and travel
Nearly as impressive is it to catch by night the glimmer of the Morse
code flashing from ships which are revealing their names and journeys to
those ever-vigilant watchers in the signal station as they pass. What
stories that signal station might tell of the journeyings to and fro, of
the ships conveying food and clothes and necessaries from port to port!
Here is a vessel bound from Galveston to Havre with cotton, she is
British; about every second or third that come by is laden with coals
from Cardiff; here is another from the other direction, bringing fruit
from the Mediterranean to Liverpool, with all the beating up the Irish
Channel yet to face; passing it, and doubtless hailing it in transit, is
another Liverpool ship carrying a general cargo to Italy, and when times
are peaceful and there are no scares from submarines, the great American
liners from Plymouth swell the number with their enormous bulk. It is a
regular, and, if one may use the expression, a well-beaten track around
this great blunt headland, and it is small wonder the enemy submarines
haunted it to find their prey, as men wait hidden beside the tracks of
wild animals in the jungle.
V
KING ARTHUR'S LAND
Tintagel can never disappoint anyone. The very spirit of romance is in
the place. If you have climbed across the narrow neck that links the
"island" to the main, and passing through the low doorway of the ruined
castle, have crossed the space surrounded by the broken wall, and so
gone out again to the plateau above, you will find yourself among the
sheep and cut off from the world, apparently swinging in space. There
are great mounds all around, in shape like graves, covered with coarse
tufty grass munched by the ragged sheep whose hair is blown into knots
by the ceaseless wind. It takes very little imagination to picture that
around lie the bodies of a mighty host of warriors, at peace at last in
sound of the booming sea which clashes in its mad rush through the
caverns deep beneath, with the wind whistling over them boisterously, or
crooning low even on the mildest summer day.
It is quite likely, as experts say, that the present ruins date only
from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Arthur may never have set foot
on the tufty grass of the cube-shaped island; there may never, for that
matter, have been an Arthur at all, but lying in the grass above the
slaty ruins and looking through the serrated arch to the onyx-green sea,
fretting the black rock, all these doubts seem simply silly and fly away
light as the spume flying inland in great balls.
The spirit of Arthur and his fighting men lives here still. It may
possibly have been summoned up by the thoughts of the countless host of
pilgrims who have come expectantly to the most beloved of all the
shrines of British history. For thoughts if repeated may conjure up
visions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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