The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
before me, and--to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
the wood, with light about him.
But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
fragments of dreams--they seemed such then--might, perhaps, be gathered
into the clearness of vision.
It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
often.
It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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