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A West Country Pilgrimage, a non-fiction book by Eden Phillpotts |
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_ Upon this seaward-facing headland the great cliffs slope outward like the sides of an old "three-decker." They bulge upon the sea, and the flower-clad scales of the limestone are full of lustrous light and colour, shining radiantly upon the still tide that flows at their feet. For, on this breathless August day, the very sea is weary; not a ripple of foam marks juncture of rock and water. The cliffs are spattered with green, where scurvy-grass and samphire, thrift and stonecrop find foothold in every cleft; but the flowers are nearly gone; the rare, white rock rose which haunts these crags has shed her last petal and the little cathartic flax and centaury; the snowy dropwort, storks-bill and carline thistles have all been scorched away by days of sunshine and dewless nights. Only the sea lavender still brushes the great, glaring planes of stone with cool colour, and a wild mallow lolls here and there out of a crevice. By the coastguard path holiday folk tramp with hot faces, but, save for the gulls, there is little sound or movement, for land and sea are swooning in the heavy noontide hour. The birds are everywhere--cresting the finials of the rocks, swooping over the sea, busy teaching the little grey "squabs" to use their wings and trust the air. Now and then a coney thrusts his ears from a burrow, likes not the heat, and pops back again to his cool, dark parlour. Brown hawks hang above the brown sward. Life seems to be retreating before the pitiless sun, yet the sear, scorched grasses will be green again in a few weeks when the cisterns of the autumn rains open upon them. Already tiny, blue scilla autumnalis is pressing her head through the turf. Islets lie off-shore, so full of light that they glow like bubbles blown of air and seem to float on the surface of the sea. Their shadows fall in delicious purple on the aquamarine waters and warm hues percolate their ragged, silver faces, while the gulls cluster in myriads upon them, and, black and silent among the noisy sea-fowl, stand dusky cormorants with long necks lifted. Like pale blue silk, shot and streamed over with pure light, the Channel rises to the mists of the horizon. Light penetrates air and water and earth, so that the weight of land and water are lifted off them and lost; indeed the scene appears to be composed of imponderable hazes and vapours merging into each other; it is wrought in planes of light--a gorgeous, unsubstantial illumination as though the clouds were come to earth. The eternal melody of the gulls pierces the picture with sound, hard and metallic, until their din and racket seem of heavier substance and reality than the mighty cliffs and sea from which it pours. Yet the birds themselves, in their floatings and their wheelings, are lighter than feathers. They make the only movement save for fisher craft with tan-red sails now streaming in line round the Head to sea. For the Scruff they are bound--a great, sandy bottom where sole and turbot dwell ten sea-miles off-shore. Inland gleam cornfields of heavy grain ripe for harvest--pale yellow of oats and golden brown of wheat, where the poppies stir with the gipsy rose; and flung up upon the cliff-edge rise lofty ramparts, ribbed with granite and bored by portholes for cannon. A modern gun a league out at sea would crumble these masonries like sponge-cake; but they were lifted in haste a hundred years ago, when England quaked at the threatened advent of "Boney," whose ordnance could not have destroyed them. The great fortresses were piled by many thousands of busy hands, yet time sped quicker than the engineers, and before the forts were completed, Napoleon, from the deck of the Bellerophon in the bay beneath, had looked his last on Europe. Still the unfinished work sprawls over the cliffs, and whence cannon were meant to stare, now thrust the blackberry, brier and eagle-fern through the embrasures, and stunted black-thorns and white-thorns shine green against the grey. One clambers among them to seek the gift of a patch of shade, and wonders what the first Napoleon would have thought of the hydroplane purring out to sea half a mile overhead. _ |
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