Back Once More In Bird-Haunted Berks

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Title:     Back Once More In Bird-Haunted Berks
Author: Gordon Stables [More Titles by Stables]

"We have wandered in our glee
With the butterfly and bee,
We have climbed o'er heathery swells,
We have wound through forest dells:
Mountain-moss has felt our tread.
Woodland streams our way have led;
Flowers in deepest shadowy nooks,
Nurslings of the loneliest brooks,
Unto us, have yielded up
Fragrant bell and starry cup."

Back in Berkshire once again. Were we glad to return? It was a question many a worthy neighbour asked us. Could we answer it in the affirmative? We could not, and did not. Not even for politeness' sake.

But we dearly love Berkshire for all that, love its rolling meadows, its fields of waving corn, the trees that go sweeping over its round hills like cloudlands of green; its placid river, its quiet streams, where the glad fish leap in spring and summer; love its birds, love its beasts, all the way up from the timid wee field-mouse to the saucy fox who leads so merry a life in the woods; and love its people, its peasantry--honest and true are they, sometimes rough, but always right. Yes, and I am not sure we have not even a kindly regard for its long-nosed pigs. So there!

But the fact is that, in one sense of the term, we really had never been from home. We had taken our home with us.

And what a long delightful summer and autumn ramble we had had of it to be sure. No single one of us could remember everything we had seen and come through. But when we get chatting together of a winter's evening, and especially when I get my log-book alongside me, then it all comes back.

I have many log-books, for though I do not consider myself a great traveller, I have sojourned in many lands, and sailed on many seas. And those logs serve often and often to bring me back the past. Here, for instance, is--

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A REVERIE.

I am sitting alone in my wigwam. This pretty and romantic snuggery stands not anywhere near the forests of the Far West, nor by the banks of the broad Susquehana, nor on alkali plain, or rolling prairie, nor, despite its name, anywhere in the Red man's country at all. It is built on a green knoll in my orchard, down in bonnie Berks. An old well-thumbed log lies before me.

It is the month of February, and the cold winds moan carelessly through the black and gloomy Scotch pines out yonder, and through the lordly poplars, tall and bare, with a sound that carries one's thoughts seaward.

I read but a line or two of the dear old log, and lo! the scene is changed, the inky pine-trees, the weird and leafless poplars, the solemn cypresses and drooping yews, grow indistinct and fade away--the very wind itself is hushed. I am back once more in the Indian Ocean, and my Arab boat is quietly gliding over a calm unruffled sea of bright translucent blue.

It is a day that would make a man of ninety years of age feel life in every limb. Was ever sky so bright before I wonder, was ever sea so warm, so soft, so smooth--was ever air so fresh and balmy? The very sea-birds seem to have gone to sleep, and to be dreaming happy dreams, as they float, rising and falling on the gently heaving water.

Revooma, my boy or boatman--everybody has a boy as a kind of body servant who goes gipsying all alone on this lovely seaboard--Revooma, I say, holds the sculls, and I am dreamily steering.

"Gently, R'ooma, gently," I murmur. "Nay, never row so fast; the day is all before us, to do with as we will. Let the oars touch the water in silence. I would hear nothing harsher than the dripping of the water from their blades, or musical rhythm of rowlock. Now, R'ooma, pause-- nay, draw in your oars; we are a good way off yon coral island shore, yet see, we are in water that is almost shoal. Now, look overboard, R'ooma, down through the glassy water to the ocean's bed. Can't you, R'ooma, even you, admire that? You do. Is there anything so lovely on shore, R'ooma--anything else so lovely in Nature? I'm a poet, am I? Thank you; but look again, do not talk, but look; have your fill of the gorgeous beauty of that submarine garden, I will, R'ooma. And years and years after this, perhaps, when lying on a sick-bed, I will have but to close my eyes, and that sight will return to cheer me. Have ever you seen flowers that grow on earth like these? Why! every moving--for move they do, as if a gentle wind were for ever stirring them--every moving leaflet, twiglet, twig, or stem, is a flower in itself--alive with light and colour combined. Are they really weeds, or are they living things? Then, look at those anemones. What splendid tints! What gorgeous colouring!

"What a bright, white, clear patch of sand this is down here, R'ooma! How distinctly everything can be seen. See, I drop this pin, and it wriggles, wriggles, wriggles all the way to the bottom, and yonder it lies; somewhat distorted, I admit, but still it is the pin all the same. Look at that black, wrinkled claw, R'ooma, appearing from under the edge of yonder coral rock. And now the body slowly follows, and a strange-shaped, spider-legged, warty old crab stalks forth. How hideously ugly he is, R'ooma; and this very hideousness, I verily believe, is his defence against his foes. But watch him, boy; what is he going to do? He paws the sand. He stamps on it. Is it possible, R'ooma, he is about to dance a kind of a submarine Ghillie Callum? O, but look about a yard ahead now. See the white silvery sand gently, so gently, moved. And the white, warty crab stops dancing and listens, and rolls his stalky eyes around, Handy to have eyes on stalks, you say? You're right, R'ooma. But, behold, our warty friend has beaten a hasty retreat to his cave, and up from the sand appears another, a facsimile of the first--only more ugly, more warty, and more hideous still. They have been playing at hide-and-seek, R'ooma. That is all just a little game to pass the summer's day away.

"But, while we have been looking at the antics of these crabs, we have not been noticing the hundred and one other beautiful things that are floating about. Plenty of fishes down there, R'ooma; but we haven't seen a very large one yet. Lovely in colours all they are, especially those strange, wee, flat fish that sail on an even keel, and are more gaudy in colour than a goldfinch; but most of them are ridiculously grotesque in shape. I am quite certain of one thing, R'ooma, none of them can have very much sense of fun or humour, else they would laugh at each other till they split their sides, and floated dead on the top of the water. Yonder, look, goes a whole flotilla of jelly-fishes, as big as parasols; and watch how the bright blue or crimson light scintillates from their limbs as they kick and float. And here comes a fleet of quite another shape, so far as their tentacles are concerned. Most independent gentlemen these are at sea, R'ooma, and I wouldn't catch one for the Queen; but when stranded on a lee-shore, they are about the most helpless creatures in the universe. The little nigger boys kick them about, and they soon look more like a dish-cloth rolled in sand than anything alive. I've got them out to sea again, after such rough experience of shore-going life as I couldn't have believed even a jelly-fish capable of surviving, and have seen them revive, and float, and put away to sea once more, with the trifling loss, of perhaps one or more limbs or tentacles.

"They tell me, R'ooma, that those medusae, or jelly-fishes, have hardly any nervous system, but they have very large heads, if they haven't brains. They always put me in mind of dishonest lawyers, these medusae--they kick and sting for a livelihood. They live on little fishes. They throw out so many feelers all around them, that they are sure to inveigle some small, unwary innocents; and when they do--well, then, I'm sorry for the fishes. But when the medusae, or the lawyer, gets shoaled himself, he is a very pitiless object indeed; all the little fishes gather round, wag their heads or their tails, as the case may be, but no one is a bit sorry for him.

"What for I called de funny fish Metoosah? Is that what you ask, my innocent and unsophisticated body-slave. I will tell you. Once upon a time, R'ooma, far away in the Lybian wilds, and by the banks of a magic lake, there was a beautiful garden, more enchanting by far, boy, than that down under the sea beneath our boat. This garden grew all kinds of luscious fruit, and all kinds of lovely flowers; but there were also trees therein, laden with apples of purest gold. Yes, you may well open your eyes in wonder, R'ooma. But these apples of gold were guarded night and day by a dreadful dragon--a creature bigger than a crocodile, uglier than the iguana, with bat-like wings, as large as the jib-sails of a boat, that enabled it to fly wherever it had a mind to, and its teeth and eyes were frightful to behold. And in the garden, R'ooma, there dwelt three fearful ladies--and one was called Medusa. Her hands and claws were of brass, she had wings that shone like burnished gold. Her body was covered with scales, like the crocodile's, and her teeth were more formidable than those of the lion of the jungle. And she braided her hair with deadly snakes, that were for ever wriggling in and out, like the tentacles of yonder medusae just floating past us. And so awful were her eyes that, if she looked upon any one, he was turned into stone. She was slain at last, R'ooma; and they say that every drop of her blood changed into a thousand venomous snakes.

"Is dat where all de dreadful snakes come from? you ask me. Nay, boy, nay; never look so frightened, R'ooma. There, pull on shore into that little sandy bay, beneath that ridge of black rocks so beautifully fringed with green. In that cool spot, R'ooma, I would drink my coffee and rest; and there, too, I will tell you a simple story, that I tell all my boys, about Him who made and cares for us all, who gives motion to the air, flight to the birds, leaves to the trees, and life and joy to every creature we see around us. Row, R'ooma, row."

The above, reader, you may if you choose consider a kind of a reverie, nevertheless it is true in every touch. Poor R'ooma, I wonder where he is now! A good and a childishly innocent lad he was, and loved me so dearly he would have died to please me. That very day, I remember, which I allude to in the above reverie, after a good, long rest, and after telling the story to R'ooma, which I had promised, I went into the warm sea to bathe. R'ooma came too. I had an idea that there might be sharks, and these ground-sharks will not touch a black man. Well, if one had appeared R'ooma might have covered my retreat. I have seen a black man jump into the sea after a sailor's cap where sharks were in swarms.

We had a long way to walk through shallow water, before getting into a place deep enough to swim with comfort. On our way out, seawards, I came upon an immense univalve shell in about three or four feet of water. I could see that it was alive, and was a volute of some kind. It was by far and away the largest I have ever seen--quite an armful of a volute. I called to R'ooma to stand by and watch it while I bathed. After my swim, I hurried back shorewards to secure my prize, when, much to my chagrin, I found my boy floating about, enjoying himself.

"O, but, sah," he said to me, "I have marked de place where dat plenty mooch big cowrie sleep. We soon findee he for true."

My boy had marked the place by putting a piece of seaweed to float over it. So we didn't "findee he for true." The "plenty mooch big cowrie" was not to be caught napping, and, doubtless, moved away into deep water as soon as we had left. But I have even dreamed of that shell more than once since then.

In the sides of the cliffs that surrounded the bay where R'ooma and I had coffee that morning, and deeply imbedded in the rocks, were fossil shells, bivalves of some kind, in shape like the Patella, or cockle of our coast, only in size about two feet across. Fancy a cockle two feet across. As big as a turtle! It would make a dinner, I should say, for twenty hungry marines. In the shoal water were immense quantities of the common Holothuria, or sea cucumbers. They were of gigantic size. But the shores of these little uninhabited islands north of Zanzibar abound everywhere with shells of the most beautiful and curious kinds. Many of the islands are covered with wood, and snakes live there, if little else does. How did the snakes get there? Did they swim across from the mainland? Snakes can swim well; but I doubt if they could cross twelve or twenty miles of salt water.

On one of these islands I once had an encounter with a snake that cost me a pair of good shoes, and I had to go barefooted for a week. More about this in my next log-leaf.

R'ooma was a boy of an inquiring turn of mind, so I took a delight in teaching him many things which, perhaps, he remembers to this day. He used to make the oddest remarks about the creatures and things around him, which caused me often to say to him:

"You're a poet, R'ooma! I declare, R'ooma, that you are a poet!"

R'ooma was not slow in returning the compliment whenever he thought there was a chance.

"You are one poet, sah. I declare to goodness, sah, you are one poet."

This would be R'ooma's remark when I said anything he thought clever. Or if I did anything he thought clever, it was just the same. For example, in Lamoo one forenoon a half-caste Arab insulted me. I'm afraid I hit him. At all events he fell, and his turban came off, and he looked ridiculous without it, as he had a shaven skull.

R'ooma laughed till he was obliged to double himself up like a jack-knife to save his sides from cracking.

"O, yah!" he roared, "I declare to goodness, sah, you are one poet."

Yea, there really are worse places to go gipsying to than the Indian Ocean, and, if time and space permitted, I am sure I could tell you stories of my wanderings on the shores of Africa, in its woods and wilds--stories of its strange birds and beasts and beetles, of its wild beasts and wilder men--that would quite interest.

Some other day, perhaps--who knows?

Well, leaves have a time to fall, and so also have curtains.

Down drops ours, then; our little play is ended, and our tales are told.

But as regards the gipsying part of our story, if one further proof that such a mode of life is enjoyable in the extreme to all who love Nature and an outdoor life, it surely rests in the fact that in this first month of spring I now throw down my pen to go and prepare our great caravan for another thousand miles' tour through the length and breadth of Merry England.

[The end]
Gordon Stables's short story: Back Once More In Bird-Haunted Berks

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