the fiend tore up great masses of rock and built the 'Devil's Mill'
on the mountain-top; and he was hurled down by the Almighty on the
rocks near 'Lord's Meadow,' where the marks of his claws may still
be seen, and where, by a diminishing number of undiminished ears,
his groans are still heard when a storm rages through the valley.
Such conflicts as these have been in some degree associated with every
mountain of holy or unholy fame. Each was in its time a prosaic Hill
Difficulty, with lions by no means chained, to affright the hearts
of Mistrust and Timorous, till Dervish or Christian impressed there
his holy footprint, visible from Adam's Peak to Olivet, or built
there his convents, discernible from Meru and Olympus to Pontyprydd
and St. Catharine's Hill. By necessary truces the demons and deities
repair gradually to their respective summits,--Seir and Sinai hold
each their own. But the Holy Hills have never equalled the number of
Dark Mountains [142] dreaded by man. These obstructive demons made
the mountains Moul-ge and Nin-ge, names for the King and Queen of
the Accadian Hell; they made the Finnish Mount Kippumaki the abode
of all Pests. They have identified their name (Elf) with the Alps,
given nearly every tarn an evil fame, and indeed created a special
class of demons, 'Montagnards,' much dreaded by mediæval miners,
whose faces they sometimes twisted so that they must look backward
physically, as they were much in the habit of doing mentally, for ever
afterward. Gervais of Tilbury, in his Chronicle, declares that on the
top of Mount Canigon in France, which has a very inaccessible summit,
there is a black lake of unknown depth, at whose bottom the demons
have a palace, and that if any one drops a stone into that water,
the wrath of the mountain demons is shown in sudden and frightful
tempests. From a like tarn in Cornwall, as Cornish Folklore claims,
on an accessible but very tedious hill, came up the hand which received
the brand Escalibore when its master could wield it no more,--as told
in the Morte D'Arthur, with, however, clear reference to the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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