The cows were clustered sleeping wherever they could find shadow;
faintly sheep-bells tinkled in the distance, and now and then a stream,
like broken glass, floated, cried, and was gone. They drove into a dark
wood, and the sun scattered through the trees in pieces of gold and
shadowy streams of arrowed light. The birds were singing, and whenever
the hoofs of the horses and the wheels turned onto soft moss or lines of
grass, in the sudden silence the air was filled with birds' voices. That
proved that it must now be turning to the evening of the day; the sun
was not very high above the wood, and the sea of blue was invaded by a
high galleon of cloud that hovered with spreading sail, catching gold
into its heart as it moved. They left the wood, crossed the River Garth,
and came out on to moorland. Here, for the first time, Jeremy smelt the
sea; the lanes had been hot, but here the wind blew across the moor,
with the smell of sea-pinks and sea-gulls in it. The grass was short
and rough; the soil was sand. On the horizon was the grey, melancholy
tower of a deserted mine. Some bird flew with swiftly driving wings,
crying as it went. The smell of the moor was as fresh as though the
foot of man had never crossed it--deserted, but not alone; bare, but not
empty; uninhabited, but peopled; silent, but full of voices.
Jeremy's excitement grew. He knew now how every line of the road would
be. They left the moor and were on the road leading to Rafield. These
were the days before they built the road from Liskane wide enough for
motor-cars and other horrible inventions. Thirty years ago the way was
so narrow that the briars and ferns brushed your face as you passed, and
you could reach out your hand and pluck snap-dragons and dandelions and
fox-gloves. Many roads twisted in and out upon one another; the corners
were so sharp that sometimes the wagonette seemed to hang upon one wheel
as it turned. Still no sight of the sea, but the smell of it now was
everywhere, and sometimes at a sudden bend there would come a faint
beat, beat upon the ear with something rhyming and measured in it, like
the murmur of a sleeping giant.
They came to the bend where the hill suddenly dips at a fearful angle
down into Rafield. Here they turned to the right, deep between edges
again, then through a little copse, and then, as though with a whisk of
the finger, right on to Cow Farm itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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