Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (827 page)

This was such an entirely new way of regarding life to a woman of Baptista’s nature, that her attention, from being first arrested by it, became deeply interested.  By imperceptible pulses her heart expanded in sympathy with theirs.  The sentences of her tragicomedy, her life, confused till now, became clearer daily.  That in humanity, as exemplified by these girls, there was nothing to dislike, but infinitely much to pity, she learnt with the lapse of each week in their company.  She grew to like the girls of unpromising exterior, and from liking she got to love them; till they formed an unexpected point of junction between her own and her husband’s interests, generating a sterling friendship at least, between a pair in whose existence there had threatened to be neither friendship nor love.

October 1885.

A Tryst At An Ancient Earthwork

At one’s every step forward it rises higher against the south sky, with an obtrusive personality that compels the senses to regard it and consider.  The eyes may bend in another direction, but never without the consciousness of its heavy, high-shouldered presence at its point of vantage.  Across the intervening levels the gale races in a straight line from the fort, as if breathed out of it hitherward.  With the shifting of the clouds the faces of the steeps vary in colour and in shade, broad lights appearing where mist and vagueness had prevailed, dissolving in their turn into melancholy grey, which spreads over and eclipses the luminous bluffs. In this so-thought immutable spectacle all is change.

Out of the invisible marine region on the other side birds soar suddenly into the air, and hang over the summits of the heights with the indifference of long familiarity. Their forms are white against the tawny concave of cloud, and the curves they exhibit in their floating signify that they are sea-gulls which have journeyed inland from expected stress of weather.  As the birds rise behind the fort, so do the clouds rise behind the birds, almost, as it seems, stroking with their bagging bosoms the uppermost flyers.

The profile of the whole stupendous ruin, as seen at a distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay.  It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips.  It may indeed be likened to an enormous many-limbed organism of an antediluvian time — partaking of the cephalopod in shape — lying lifeless, and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance, while revealing its contour.  This dull green mantle of herbage stretches down towards the levels, where the ploughs have essayed for centuries to creep up near and yet nearer to the base of the castle, but have always stopped short before reaching it.  The furrows of these environing attempts show themselves distinctly, bending to the incline as they trench upon it; mounting in steeper curves, till the steepness baffles them, and their parallel threads show like the striae of waves pausing on the curl.  The peculiar place of which these are some of the features is “Mai-Dun,” “The Castle of the Great Hill,” said to be the Dunium of Ptolemy, the capital of the Durotriges, which eventually came into Roman occupation, and was finally deserted on their withdrawal from the island.

The evening is followed by a night on which an invisible moon bestows a subdued, yet pervasive light — without radiance, as without blackness.  From the spot whereon I am ensconced in a cottage, a mile away, the fort has now ceased to be visible; yet, as by day, to anybody whose thoughts have been engaged with it and its barbarous grandeurs of past time the form asserts its existence behind the night gauzes as persistently as if it had a voice.  Moreover, the southwest wind continues to feed the intervening arable flats with vapours brought directly from its sides.

The midnight hour for which there has been occasion to wait at length arrives, and journey towards the stronghold in obedience to a request urged earlier in the day.  It concerns an appointment, which I rather regret my decision to keep now that night is come.  The route thither is hedgeless and treeless — I need not add deserted.  The moonlight is sufficient to disclose the pale ribandlike surface of the way as it trails along between the expanses of darker fallow.  Though the road passes near the fortress it does not conduct directly to its fronts.  As the place is without an inhabitant, so it is without a trackway.  So presently leaving the macadamized road to pursue its course else whither, I step off upon the fallow, and plod stumblingly across it.  The castle looms  out off the shade by degrees, like a thing waking up and asking what I want there.  It is now so enlarged by nearness that its whole shape cannot be taken in at one view.  The ploughed ground ends as the rise sharpens, the sloping basement of grass begins, and I climb upward to invade Mai-Dun.

Impressive by day as this largest Ancient-British work in the kingdom undoubtedly is, its impressiveness is increased now.  After standing still and spending a few minutes in adding its age to its size, and its size to its solitude, it becomes appallingly mournful in its growing closeness.  A squally wind blows in the face with an impact which proclaims that the vapours of the air sail low tonight.  The slope that I so labouriously clamber up the wind skips sportively down.  Its track can be discerned even in this light by the undulations of the withered grass-bents — the only produce of this upland summit except moss.  Four minutes of ascent, and a vantage-ground of some sort is gained. It is only the crest of the outer rampart.  Immediately within this a chasm gapes; its bottom is imperceptible, but the counterscarp slopes not too steeply to admit of a sliding descent if cautiously performed.  The shady bottom, dank and chilly, is thus gained, and reveals itself as a kind of winding lane, wide enough for a waggon to pass along, floored with rank herbage, and trending away, right and left, into obscurity, between the concentric walls of earth.  The towering closeness of these on each hand, their impenetrability, and their ponderousness, are felt as a physical pressure.  The way is now up the second of them, which stands steeper and higher than the first.  To turn aside, as did Christian’s companion, from such a Hill Difficulty, is the more natural tendency; but the way to the interior is upward.  There is, of course, an entrance to the fortress; but that lies far off on the other side.  It might possibly have been the wiser course to seek for easier ingress there.

However, being here, I ascend the second acclivity.  The grass stems — the grey beard of the hill — sway in a mass close to my stooping face.  The deadheads of these various grasses — fescues, fox-tails, and ryes-bob and twitch as if pulled by a string underground.  From a few thistles a whistling proceeds; and even the moss speaks, in its humble way, under the stress of the blast.

That the summit of the second line of defence has been gained is suddenly made known by a contrasting wind from a new quarter, coming over with the curve of a cascade.  These novel gusts raise a sound from the whole camp or castle, playing upon it bodily as upon a harp.  It is with some difficulty that a foothold can be preserved under their sweep.  Looking aloft for a moment I perceive that the sky is much more overcast than it has been hitherto, and in a few instants a dead lull in what is now a gale ensues with almost preternatural abruptness.  I take advantage of this to sidle down the second counterscarp, but the time the ditch is reached the lull reveals itself to be but the precursor of a storm.  It begins with a heave of the whole atmosphere, like the sigh of a weary strong man on turning to recommence unusual exertion, just as I stand here in the second fosse.  That which now radiates from the sky upon the scene is not so much light as vaporous phosphorescence.

The wind, quickening, abandons the natural direction it has pursued on the open upland, and takes the course of the gorge’s length, rushing along therein helter-skelter, and carrying thick rain upon its back.  The rain is followed by hailstones which fly through the defile in battalions — rolling, hopping, ricochetting, snapping, clattering down the shelving banks in an undefinable haze of confusion.  The earthen sides of the fosse seem to quiver under the drenching onset, though it is practically no more to them than the blows of Thor upon the giant of Jotun-land.  It is impossible to proceed further till the storm somewhat abates, and I draw up behind a spur of the inner scarp, where possibly a barricade stood two thousand years ago; and thus await events.

The roar of the storm can be heard travelling the complete circuit of the castle — a measured mile — coming round at intervals like a circumambulating column of infantry.  Doubtless such a column has passed this way in its time, but the only columns which enter in these latter days arc the columns of sheep and oxen that are sometimes seen here now; while the only semblance of heroic voices heard are the utterances of such, and of the many winds which make their passage through the ravines.

The expected lightning radiates round, and a rumbling as from its subterranean vaults — if there are any — fills the castle.  The lightning repeats itself, and, coming after the aforesaid thoughts of martial men, it bears a fanciful resemblance to swords moving in combat.  It has the very brassy hue of the ancient weapons that here were used.  The so sudden entry upon the scene of this metallic flame is as the entry of a presiding exhibitor who unrolls the maps, uncurtains the pictures, unlocks the cabinets, and effects a transformation by merely exposing the materials of his science, unintelligibly cloaked till then.  The abrupt configuration of the bluffs and mounds is now for the first time clearly revealed — mounds whereon, doubtless, spears and shields have frequently lain while their owners loosened their sandals and yawned and stretched their arms in the sun.  For the first time, too, a glimpse is obtainable of the true entrance used by its occupants of old, some way ahead.

There, where all passage has seemed to be inviolably barred by an almost vertical facade, the ramparts are found to overlap each other like loosely clasped fingers, between which a zigzag path may be followed — a cunning construction that puzzles the uninformed eye.  But its cunning, even where not obscured by dilapidation, is now wasted on the solitary forms of a few wild badgers, rabbits, and hares.  Men must have often gone out by those gates in the morning to battle with the Roman legions under Vespasian; some to return no more, others to come back at evening, bringing with them the noise of their heroic deeds.  But not a page, not a stone, has preserved their fame.

Acoustic perceptions multiply to-night.  We can almost hear the stream of years that have home those deeds away from us.  Strange articulations seem to float on the air from that point, the gateway, where the animation in past times must frequently have concentrated itself at hours of coming and going, and general excitement.  There arises an ineradicable fancy that they are human voices; if so, they must be the lingering air-borne vibrations of conversations uttered at least fifteen hundred years ago.  The attentions is attracted from mere nebulous imaginings about yonder spot by a real moving of something close at hand.

I recognize by the now moderate flashes of lightning, which are sheet-like and nearly continuous, that it is the gradual elevation of a small mound of earth. At first no larger than a man’s fist it reaches the dimensions of a hat, then sinks a little and is still.  It is but the heaving of a mole who chooses such weather as this to work in from some instinct that there will be nobody abroad to molest him.  As the fine earth lifts and lifts and falls loosely aside fragments of burnt clay roll out of it — clay that once formed part of cups or other vessels used by the inhabitants of the fortress.

The violence of the storm has been counterbalanced by its transitoriness. From being immersed in well-nigh solid media of cloud and hail shot with lightning, I find myself uncovered of the humid investiture and left bare to the mild gaze of the moon, which sparkles now on every wet grass-blade and frond of moss.

But I am not yet inside the fort, and the delayed ascent of the third and last escarpment is now made.  It is steeper than either.  The first was a surface to walk up, the second to stagger up, the third can only be ascended on the hands and toes.  On the summit obtrudes the first evidence which has been met with in these precincts that the time is really the nineteenth century; it is in the form of a white notice-board on a post, and the wording can just be discerned by the rays of the setting moon:

CAUTION. — Any Person found removing Relics, Skeletons, Stones, Pottery, Tiles, or other Material from this Earthwork, or cutting up the Ground, will be Prosecuted as the Law directs.

Here one observes a difference underfoot from what has gone before: scraps of Roman tile and stone chippings protrude through the grass in meager quantity, but sufficient to suggest that masonry stood on the spot.  Before the eye stretches under the moonlight the interior of the fort.  So open and so large is it as to be practically an upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be designated as one building.  It is a long-violated retreat; all its corner-stones, plinths, and architraves were carried away to build neighbouring villages even before mediaeval or modern history began.  Many a block which once may have helped to form a bastion here rests now in broken and diminished shape as part of the chimney-corner of some shepherd’s cottage within the distant horizon, and the corner-stones of this heathen altar may form the base-course of some adjoining village church.

Yet the very bareness of these inner courts and wards, their condition of mere pasturage, protects what remains of them as no defences could do. Nothing is left visible that the hands can seize on or the weather overturn, and a permanence of general outline at least results, which no other condition could ensure.

The position of the castle on this isolated hill bespeaks deliberate and strategic choice exercised by some remote mind capable of prospective reasoning to a far extent.  The natural configuration of the surrounding country and its bearing upon such a stronghold were obviously long considered and viewed mentally before its extensive design was carried into execution.  Who was the man that said, “Let it be built here!” — not on that hill yonder, or on that ridge behind, but on this best spot of all?  Whether he were some great one of the Belgae, or of the Durotriges, or the travelling engineer of Britain’s united tribes, must for ever remain time’s secret; his form cannot be realised, nor his countenance, nor the tongue that he spoke, when he set down his foot with a thud and said, “Let it be here!”