BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - RONCESVALLES
We live a very little time. Before we have reached the middle of our
time perhaps, but not long before, we discover the magnitude of our
inheritance. Consider England. How many men, I should like to know, have
discovered before thirty what treasures they may work in her air? She
magnifies us inwards and outwards; her fields can lead the mind down
towards the subtle beginning of things; the tiny irridescence of
insects; the play of light upon the facets of a blade of grass. Her
skies can lead the mind up infinitely into regions where it seems to
expand and fill, no matter what immensities.
It was the wind off the land that made me think of all this possession
in which I am to enjoy so short a usufruct. I sat in my boat holding
that tiller of mine, which is not over firm, and is but a rough bar of
iron. There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung
slightly to the breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and her
baloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the
cheating semblance of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at
every roll the slack of the mainsheet tautened with a kind of little
thud which thrilled the deck behind me. I saw under the curve of my
headsail the long and hazy line, which is the only frontier of England;
the plain that rather marries with than defies her peculiar seas. For it
was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the coastline of my own
country, that these thoughts rose in me during the calm at the end of
winter, and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than I knew upon the
ebb of the outer tide. Far off to the south sunlight played upon the
water, and was gone again. The great ships did not pass near me, and so
I sat under a hazy sky restraining the slight vibration of the helm and
waiting for the wind.
In whatever place a man may be the spring will come to him. I have heard
of men in prison who would note the day when its influence passed
through the narrow window that was their only communion with their kind.
It comes even to men in cities; men of the stupid political sort, who
think in maps and whose interest is in the addition of numbers. Indeed,
I have heard such men in London itself expressing pleasure when a
south-west gale came up in April from over the pines of Hampshire and of
Surrey and mixed the Atlantic with the air of the fields. To me this
year the spring came suddenly, like a voice speaking, though a low
one--the voice of a person subtle, remembered, little known, and always
desired. For a wind blew off the land.
The surface of the sea northward between me and the coast of Sussex had
been for so many hours elastic, smooth, and dull, that I had come to
forget the indications of a change. But here and there, a long way off,
little lines began to show, which were indeed broad spaces of ruffled
water, seen edgeways from the low free-board of my boat. These joined
and made a surface all the way out towards me, but a surface not yet
revealed for what it was, nor showing the movement and life and grace of
waves. For no light shone upon it, and it was not yet near enough to be
distinguished. It grew rapidly, but the haze and silence had put me into
so dreamy a state that I had forgotten the ordinary anxiety and
irritation of a calm, nor had I at the moment that eager expectancy of
movement which should accompany the sight of that dark line upon the
sea.
Other things possessed me, the memory of home and of the Downs. There
went before this breeze, as it were, attendant servants, outriders who
brought with them the scent of those first flowers in the North Wood or
beyond Gumber Corner, and the fragrance of our grass, the savour which
the sheep know at least, however much the visitors to my dear home
ignore it. A deeper sympathy even than that of the senses came with
those messengers and brought me the beeches and the yew trees also,
although I was so far out at sea, for the loneliness of this great water
recalled the loneliness of the woods, and both those solitudes--the real
and the imaginary--mixed in my mind together as they might in the mind
of a sleeping man.
Before this wind as it approached, the sky also cleared: not of clouds,
for there were none, but of that impalpable and warm mist which seems to
us, who know the south country and the Channel, to be so often part of
the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our
seas. There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the
Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of
blue. I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh's Folly, and
I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel
Woods contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went over to port, the
jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so
many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it
was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered
hills.
Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so
little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of
the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one
thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind--and
the boat made three. There was work to be done in pressing against the
tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were,
for my boat was also small. Life came into everything; the Channel leapt
and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in
small white tips: in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat
and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that
caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free
streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from
the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the
water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the
humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was
exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves
made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which this first warmth
of the year had spread all over the Channel and shore, while it made
life one, seemed also to make it innumerable. We were now not only
three, the wind and my boat and I; we were all part (and masters for the
moment) of a great throng. I knew them all by their names, which I had
learnt a long time ago, and had sung of them in the North Sea. I have
often written them down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, for
good things never grow old. There was the Wave that brings good tidings,
and the Wave that breaks on the shore, and the Wave of the island, and
the Wave that helps, and the Wave that lifts forrard, the kindly Wave
and the youngest Wave, and Amathea the Wave with bright hair, all the
waves that come up round Thetis in her train when she rises from the
side of the old man, her father, where he sits on his throne in the
depth of the sea; when she comes up cleaving the water and appears to
her sons in the upper world.
The Wight showed clear before me. I was certain with the tide of making
the Horse Buoy and Spithead while it was yet afternoon, and before the
plenitude of that light and movement should have left me. I settled down
to so much and such exalted delight as to a settled task. I lit my pipe
for a further companion (since it was good to add even to so many). I
kept my right shoulder only against the tiller, for the pressure was now
steady and sound. I felt the wind grow heavy and equable, and I caught
over my shoulder the merry wake of this very honest moving home of mine
as she breasted and hissed through the sea.
Here, then, was the proper end of a long cruise. It was springtime, and
the season for work on land. I had been told so by the heartening wind.
And as I went still westward, remembering the duties of the land, the
sails still held full, the sheets and the weather shrouds still stood
taut and straining, and the little clatter of the broken water spoke
along the lee rail. And so the ship sailed on.
[Greek: 'En d thnemos prêsen mxson istion, thmphi de kuma]
[Greek: Sseirê porphureon megal' iache, nêos iousês.]
A man might discuss with himself what it was that made certain great
sights of the world famous, and what it is that keeps others hidden.
This would be especially interesting in the case of mountains. For there
is no doubt that there is a modern attraction in mountains which may not
endure, but which is almost as intense in our generation as it was in
that of our fathers. The emotion produced by great height and by the
something unique and inspiring which distinguishes a mountain from a
hill has bitten deeply into the modern mind. Yet there are some of the
most astounding visions of this sort in Europe which are, and will
probably remain, unemphasised for travellers.
The vision of the Berenese Oberland when it breaks upon one from the
crest of Jura has been impressed--upon English people, at least--in two
fine passages: the one written by Ruskin, the other, if I remember
right, in a book called A Cruise upon Wheels. The French have, I
believe, no classical presentment of that view, nor perhaps have the
Germans. The line of the Alps as one sees it upon very clear days from
the last of the Apennines--this, I think, has never been properly
praised in any modern book--not even an Italian. The great red
mountain-face which St. Bruno called "the desert" I do not remember to
have read of anywhere nor to have heard described; for it stands above
an unfrequented valley, and the regular approach to the Chartreuse is
from the other side. Yet it is something which remains as vivid to those
few who have suddenly caught sight of it from a turn of the Old Lyons
road as though they had seen it in a fantastic dream. That astonishing
circle of cliffs which surrounds Bourg d'Oisans, though it has been
written of now and then, has not, so to speak, taken root in people's
imagination.
Even in this country there are twenty great effects which, though they
have, of course, suffered record, are still secure from general praise;
for instance, that awful trench which opens under your feet, as it were,
up north and beyond Plynlimmon. It is a valley as unexpected and as
incredible in its steepness and complete isolation as any one may see in
the drawings of the romantic generation of English water-colour, yet
perhaps no one has drawn it; there is certainly no familiar picture of
it anywhere.
When one comes to think of it, the reason of such exceptions to fame as
are these is usually that such and such an unknown but great sight lies
off the few general roads of travel. It is a vulgar reason, but the true
one. Unless men go to a mountain to climb because it is difficult to
climb, or unless it often appears before them along one of their main
journeys, it will remain quiet. Among such masses is the Canigou.
Here is a mountain which may be compared to Etna. It is lower, indeed,
in the proportion of nine to eleven; but when great isolated heights of
this sort are in question, such a difference hardly counts. It can be
seen, as Etna can, from the sea, though it stands a good deal more
inland; it dominates, as Etna does, a very famous plain, but modern
travel does nothing to bring it into the general consciousness of the
world. If Spain were wealthy, or if the Spanish harbours naturally led
to any place which all the rich desired to visit, the name of the
Canigou would begin to grow. Where the railway skirts the sea from
Narbonne to Barcelona, it is your permanent companion for a good hour in
the express, and for any time you like in the ordinary trains. During at
least three months in the year, its isolation is peculiarly relieved and
marked by the snow, which lies above an even line all along its vast
bulk. It is also one of those mountains in which one can recognise the
curious regularity of the "belts" which text-books talk of. There are
great forests at the base of it, just above the hot Mediterranean
plain; the beech comes higher than the olive, the pines last of all;
after them the pastures and the rocks. In the end of February a man
climbs up from a spring that is as southern as Africa to a winter that
is as northern as the highlands of Scotland, and all the while he feels
that he is climbing nothing confused or vague, but one individual peak
which is the genius of the whole countryside.
This countryside is the Roussillon, a lordship as united as the
Cerdagne; it speaks one language, shows one type of face, and is
approached by but a small group of roads, and each road passes through a
mountain gap. For centuries it went with Barcelona. It needed the
Revolution to make it French, and it is full of Spanish memories to this
day.
For the Roussillon depends upon the Canigou just as the Bay of Syracuse
depends upon Etna, or that of Naples upon Vesuvius, and its familiar
presence has sunk into the patriotism of the Roussillon people, as those
more famous mountains have into the art and legends of their neighbours.
There are I know not how many monographs upon the Canigou, but not one
has been translated, I would wager, into any foreign language.
Yet it is the mountain which very many men who have hardly heard its
name have been looking for all their lives. It gives as good camping as
is to be had in the whole of the Pyrenees. I believe there is fishing,
and perhaps one can shoot. Properly speaking, there is no climbing in
it; at least, one can walk up it all the way if one chooses the right
path, but there is everything else men look for when they escape from
cities. It is so big that you would never learn it in any number of
camps, and the change of its impressions is perpetual. From the summit
the view has two interests--of colour and of the past. You have below
you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen stones: the whole field is an
arrangement of different culture and of bright rocks and sand; and below
you, also, in a curve, is all that coast which at the close of the Roman
Empire was, perhaps, the wealthiest in Europe. In the extreme north a
man might make out upon a clear day the bulk of Narbonne. Perpignan is
close by; the little rock harbour of Venus, Port Vendres, is to the
south. From the plain below one, which has always been crammed with
riches, sprang the chief influences of Southern Gaul. It was here that
the family of Charlemagne took its origin, and it was perhaps from here
that he saw, through the windows of a palace, that fleet of pirates
which moved him to his sad prophecy. That plain, moreover, will
re-arise; it is still rich, and all the Catalan province of Spain below
it, of which it is the highway and the approach, must increase in value
before Europe from year to year. The vast development of the French
African territory is reacting upon that coast: all it needs is a central
harbour, and if that harbour were formed it would do what Narbo did for
the Romans at the end of their occupation;--it would tap, much better
than does Cette, the wealth of Gascony, perhaps, also, an Atlantic
trade, and its exchanges towards Africa and the Levant. The
Mediterranean, which is perpetually increasing in wealth and in
importance to-day, would have a second Marseilles, and should such a
port arise--then, when our ships and our travellers are familiar with
it, the Canigou (if it cares for that sort of thing) will be as happy as
the Matterhorn. For the present it is all alone.
I knew a man once that was a territorial magnate and had an estate in
the county of Berkshire. I will not conceal his name. It was William
Frederick Charles Hermann-Postlethwaite.
On his estate was a large family mansion, surrounded by tasteful gardens
of a charming old kind, and next outside these a great park, well
timbered. But the thing I am going to talk about was a certain wood of
which he was rightly very proud. It stood on the slope of a grass down,
just above the valley, and beneath it was a clean white road, and a
little way along that a town, part of which belonged to Mr.
Hermann-Postlethwaite, part to a local solicitor and moneylender,
several bits to a brewer in Reading, and a few houses to the
inhabitants. The people in the town were also fond of the wood, and
called it "The Old Wood." It was not very large, but, as I have said
before, it was very beautiful, and contained all manner of trees, but
especially beeches, under which nothing will grow--as the poet puts it
in Sussex:
Unner t' beech and t' yow Nowt 'll grow.
Well, as years passed, Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite became fonder and
fonder of the wood. He began towards 1885 to think it the nicest thing
on his estate--which it was; and he would often ride out to look at it
of a morning on his grey mare "Betsy." When he rode out like this of a
morning his mount was well groomed, and so was he, however early it
might be, and he would carry a little cane to hit the mare with and also
as a symbol of authority. The people who met him would touch their
foreheads, and he would wave his hand genially in reply. He was a good
fellow. But the principal thing about him was his care for the old wood;
and when he rode out to look at it, as I say, he would speak to any one
around so early--his bailiff, as might be, or sometimes his agent, or
even the foreman of the workshop or the carpenter, or any hedger or
ditcher that might be there, and point out bits of the wood, and say,
"That branch looks pretty dicky. No harm to cut that off short and
parcel and serve the end and cap it with a zinc cap;" or, "Better be
cutting the Yartle Bush for the next fallow, it chokes the gammon-rings,
and I don't like to see so much standard ivy about, it's the death of
trees." I am not sure that I have got the technical words right, but at
any rate they were more or less like that, for I have heard him myself
time and again. I often used to go out with him on another horse, called
Sultan, which he lent me to ride upon.
Well, he got fonder and fonder of this wood, and kept on asking people
what he should do, and how one could make most use of it, and he worried
a good deal about it. He reads books about woods, and in the opening of
1891 he had down to stay with him for a few days a man called Churt, who
had made a great success with woods on the Warra-Warra. But Churt was a
vulgar fellow, and so Hermann-Postlethwaite's wife, Lady Gywnnys
Hermann-Postlethwaite, would not have him in the house again, which was
a bother. Her husband then rode over to see another man, and the upshot
of it was that he put up a great board saying "Trespassers in this wood
will be prosecuted," and it might as well not have been put up, for no
one ever went into the wood, not even from the little town, because it
was too far for them to walk, and, anyhow, they did not care for
walking. And as for the doctor's son, a boy of thirteen, who went in
there with an air-gun to shoot things, he paid no attention to the
board.
The next thing my friend did was to have a fine strong paling put all
round the wood in March, 1894. This paling was of oak; it was seven feet
high; it had iron spikes along the top. There were six gates in it, and
stout posts at intervals of ten yards. The boards overlapped very
exactly. It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw. He had it
varnished, and it looked splendid. All this took two years.
Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might
have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham. He was very proud
of this, and quite rightly too. He said: "I am the one Conservative
member in the Midlands." It almost made him forget about his wood. He
shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could
not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the
house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no
peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then
his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and
got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster,
overlooking the Green Park.
But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and
angrier. They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he
thought perfectly detestable. Then he did speak, and as he was an honest
English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had
no brains. So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back
to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had
never done before: he put a flag up over his house to show he was at
home. Then he began to think of his wood again.
The very first time he rode out to look at it he found the paling had
given way in places from the fall of trees, and that some leaned inwards
and some outwards, and that one of the gates was off its hinges. There
were also two cows walking about in the wood, and what annoyed him most
of all, the iron spikes were rusty and the varnish had all gone rotten
and white and streaky on the palings. He spoke to the bailiff about
this, and hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed the varnish
with his finger, smelt it, and said that it had perished. He also said
there was no such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he added there
wasn't any varnish, not the very best, but wouldn't go like that with
rain and all. Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite grumbled a good deal, but he
supposed the bailiff knew best; so he told him to see what could be
done, and for several weeks he heard no more about it.
I forgot to tell you that about this time the South African War
had broken out, and as things were getting pretty tangled,
Hermann-Postlethwaite went out with his regiment, the eighth battalion,
not of the Berkshire, but of the Orkney regiment. While he was out
there, his brother, in Dr. Charlbury's home, died, and he succeeded to
the baronetcy. As he already had a V.C. and was now given a D.S.O., as
well as being one of the people mentioned in dispatches, he was pretty
important by the time he came home, when the war was over, just before
the elections of 1900.
When he got home he had a splendid welcome, both from his tenants in
Berkshire in passing through and from those of his late brother in the
big place in Worcestershire. He preferred his Berkshire place, however,
and, letting the big place to an American of the name of Hendrik K.
Boulge, he went back to his first home. When he got there he thought of
the old wood, and went out to look at it. The palings were mended, but
they were covered all over with tar! He was exceedingly angry, and
ordered them to be painted at once; but the bailiff assured him one
could not paint over tar, and so did the carpenter and the foreman. At
this he had a fit of rage, and ordered the whole damned thing to be
pulled down, and swore he would be damned if he ever had a damned stick
or a rail round the damned wood again. He was no longer young; he was
getting stout and rather puffy; he was not so reasonable as of old.
Anyhow, he had the whole thing pulled down. Next year (that is, in 1901)
his wife died.
I wish I had the space to tell you all the other things he did to the
wood. How a friend of his having sold a similar wood on the Thames in
building lots at 500 an acre, he put up the whole wood at the same
rate. How, the whole wood being 200 acres in extent, he hoped to make
100,000 out of it. How he thought this a tidy sum. How he got no offers
at this price, nor at 100, nor at 50. How an artist offered him 20
for half an acre to put up a red tin bungalow upon. How he lost his
temper with the artist. How at last he left the whole thing alone and
tried to forget all about it.
* * * * *
The old wood to-day is just like what it was when I wandered in it as a
boy. The doctor's son is a man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney; so
he is gone. The townspeople don't come any more than before. I am the
only person who goes near the place. The trees are a trifle grander. I
happen now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, upon a stump of
a post or an old spike in the grass of this wood, but otherwise it is as
though all this had not been.
A solemn thought: How enduring are the works of Nature--how perishable
those of Man!
Friends of mine, friends all, and you also, publishers, colonials and
critics, do you know that particular experience for which I am trying to
find words? Do you know that glamour in the mind which arises and
transforms our thought when we see the things that the men who made us
saw--the things of a long time ago, the origins? I think everybody knows
that glamour, but very few people know where to find it.
Every man knows that he has in him the power for such revelations, and
every man wonders in what strange place he may come upon them. There are
men also (very rich) who have considered all the world and wandered over
it, seeking those first experiences and trying to feel as felt the
earlier men in a happier time--yet these few rich men have not felt and
have not so found the things which they desire. I have known men who
have thought to find them in the mountains, but would not climb them
simply enough and refused to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost
everything, and might as well have been walking in a dirty town at home
for all the little good that the mountains did to them. And I know men
who have thought to find this memory and desire in foreign countries, in
Africa, hunting great beasts such as our fathers hunted; yet even these
have not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead and dark in a
man make his whole soul dusty and useless, but which if they be once
rekindled can make him part of all the centuries.
Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find what the men who made us
found, and to see the world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it
were, in the freshness of beginnings; and that is to go to work as
cheaply and as hardly as you can, and only as much away from men as they
were away from men, and not to read or to write or to think, but to eat
and drink and use the body in many immediate ways, which are at the feet
of every man. Every man who will walk for some days carelessly,
sleeping, rough when he must, or in poor inns, and making for some one
place direct because he desires to see it, will know the thing I mean.
And there is a better way still of which I shall now speak: I mean, to
try the seas in a little boat not more than twenty-five feet long,
preferably decked, of shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks
and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, or with a friend at
most, one can wander all over the world.
Certainly every man that goes to sea in a little boat of this kind
learns terror and salvation, happy living, air, danger, exultation,
glory, and repose at the end; and they are not words to him, but, on the
contrary, realities which will afterwards throughout his life give the
mere words a full meaning. And for this experiment there lies at our
feet, I say, the Channel.
It is the most marvellous sea in the world--the most suited for these
little adventures; it is crammed with strange towns, differing one from
the other; it has two opposite people upon either side, and hills and
varying climates, and the hundred shapes and colours of the earth, here
rocks, there sand, there cliffs, and there marshy shores. It is a little
world. And what is more, it is a kind of inland sea.
People will not understand how narrow it is, crossing it hurriedly in
great steamships; nor will they make it a home for pleasure unless they
are rich and can have great boats; yet they should, for on its water
lies the best stage for playing out the old drama by which the soul of a
healthy man is kept alive. For instance, listen to this story:--
The sea being calm, and the wind hot, uncertain, and light from the
east, leaving oily gaps on the water, and continually dying down, I
drifted one morning in the strong ebb to the South Goodwin Lightship,
wondering what to do. There was a haze over the land and over the sea,
and through the haze great ships a long way off showed, one or two of
them, like oblong targets which one fires at with guns. They hardly
moved in spite of all their canvas set, there was so little breeze. So I
drifted in the slow ebb past the South Goodwin, and I thought: "What is
all this drifting and doing nothing? Let us play the fool, and see if
there are no adventures left."
So I put my little boat about until the wind took her from forward, such
as it was, and she crawled out to sea.
It was a dull, uneasy morning, hot and silent, and the wind, I say, was
hardly a wind, and most of the time the sails flapped uselessly.
But after eleven o'clock the wind first rose, and then shifted a little,
and then blew light but steady; and then at last she heeled and the
water spoke under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until in the
haze I could see no more land; but ever so far out there were no seas,
for the light full breeze was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a
strong, and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden parallel valleys
of the narrow sea. And I held this little wind till about two o'clock,
when I drank wine and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had them
by me, and just afterwards, still through a thick haze of heat, I saw
Gris-nez, a huge ghost, right up against and above me; and I wondered,
for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first time, and knew now what
it felt like to see new land.
Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this much sense, that I said
to myself: "The tide is right-down Channel, racing through the hidden
valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all
come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at
the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east
and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the
French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England
which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the
sea; and still I waited for the flood.
But in a little while the chain made a rattling noise, and she lay
quite slack and swung oddly; and then there were little boiling and
eddying places in the water, and the water seemed to come up from
underneath sometimes, and altogether it behaved very strangely, and this
was the turn of the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a moment
she lollopped about, till at last, after I had gone below and
straightened things, I came on deck to see that she had turned
completely round, and that the tide at last was making up my way,
towards Calais, and her chain was taut and her nose pointed down
Channel, and a little westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up
cool along the tide.
When this came I was very glad, for I saw that I could end my adventure
before night. So I pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned
with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt breeze just barely
filling the mainsail (the sheet was slack, so powerless was the wind),
and I ran up along that high coast, watching eagerly every new thing;
but I kept some way out for fear of shoals, till after three good hours
under the reclining sun of afternoon, which glorified the mist, I saw,
far off, the roofs and spires of a town, and a low pier running well out
to sea, and I knew that it must be Calais. And I ran for these piers,
careless of how I went, for it was already half of the spring flood
tide, and everything was surely well covered for so small a boat, and I
ran up the fairway in between the piers, and saw Frenchmen walking about
and a great gun peeping up over its earthwork, and plenty of clean new
masonry. And a man came along and showed me where I could lie; but I was
so strange to the place that I would not take a berth, but lay that
night moored to an English ship.
And when I had eaten and drunk and everything was stowed away and
darkness had fallen, I went on deck, and for a long time sat silent,
smoking a pipe and watching the enormous lighthouse of Calais, which is
built right in the town, and which turns round and round above one all
night long.
And I thought: "Here is a wonderful thing! I have crossed the Channel in
this little boat, and I know now what the sea means that separates
France from England. I have strained my eyes for shore through a haze. I
have seen new lands, and I feel as men do who have dreamt dreams."
But in reality I had had very great luck indeed, and had had no right to
cross, for my coming back was to be far more difficult and dreadful, and
I was to suffer many things before again I could see tall England, close
by me, out of the sea.
But how I came back, and of the storm, and of its majesty, and of how
the boat and I survived, I will tell you another time, only imploring
you to do the same; not to tell of it, I mean, but to sail it in a
little boat.
BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - RONCESVALLES