Part 18

Already the rest of England had been Christian a hundred years when St. Wilfrid came down into the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this sparse and ignorant tribe. They were living in the ruins of the Roman palaces; they were too stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman things they had destroyed. They had kept, perhaps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all the Roman slaves. They had, therefore, vague memories of how the Romans tilled the land.

But those memories were getting worse and worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since the ships of Aella had sailed into Shoreham (which showed him to be a man of immense determination, for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were then no piers and lights)--it was nearly two hundred years, and there was only the least little glimmering twilight left of the old day. These barbarians were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever will when they are cut off from the life and splendour of the south. They had become so cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came wandering among them they did not know how to get food. There was a famine, and as their miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists)--their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly energy which all decent Western religion gives a man, they being also by the wrath of God deprived of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, but probably they thought their horizon was the end of the world)--their religion, I say, being of this nature, they had determined, under the pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw them tying themselves together in bands (which shows that they knew at least how to make rope) and jumping off the cliffs into the sea. This practice he determined to oppose.

He went to their King--who lived in Chichester, I suppose, or possibly at Bramber--and asked him why the people were going on in this fashion, who said to him: "It is because of the famine."

St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said: "Why do they not eat fish?"

"Because," said the King, "fish, swimming about in the water, are almost impossible to catch. We have tried it in our hunger a hundred times, but even when we had the good luck to grasp one of them, the slippery thing would glide from our fingers."

St. Wilfrid then in some contempt said again:

"Why do you not make nets?"

And he explained the use of nets to the whole Court, preaching, as it were, a sermon upon nets to them, and craftily introducing St. Peter and that great net which they hang outside his tomb in Rome upon his feast day--which is the 29th of June. The King and his Court made a net and threw it into the sea, and brought out a great mass of fish. They were so pleased that they told St. Wilfrid they would do anything he asked. He baptised them and they made him their first bishop; and he took up his residence in Selsey, and since then the people of Sussex have gone steadily forward, increasing in every good thing, until they are now by far the first and most noble of all the people in the world.

There is I know not what in history, or in the way in which it is taught, which makes people imagine that it is something separate from the life they are living, and because of this modern error, you may very well be wondering what on earth this true story of the foundation of our country has to do with the Looe Stream. It has everything to do with it. The sea, being governed by a pagan god, made war at once, and began eating up all those fields which had specially been consecrated to the Church, civilisation, common sense, and human happiness. It is still doing so, and I know an old man who can remember a forty-acre field all along by Clymping having been eaten up by the sea; and out along past Rustington there is, about a quarter of a mile from the shore, a rock, called the Church Rock, the remains of a church which quite a little time ago people used for all the ordinary purposes of a church.

The sea then began to eat up Selsey. Before the Conquest--though I cannot remember exactly when--the whole town had gone, and they had to remove the cathedral to Chichester. In Henry VIII's time there was still a park left out of the old estates, a park with trees in it; but this also the sea has eaten up; and here it is that I come to the Looe Stream. The Looe Stream is a little dell that used to run through the park, and which to-day,--right out at sea, furnishes the only gate by which ships can pass through the great maze of banks and rocks which go right out to sea from Selsey Bill, miles and miles, and are called the Owers.

On the chart that district is still called "The Park," and at very low tides stumps of the old trees can be seen; and for myself I believe, though I don't think it can be proved, that in among the masses of sand and shingle which go together to make the confused dangers of the Owers, you would find the walls of Roman palaces, and heads of bronze and marble, and fragments of mosaic and coins of gold.

The tide coming up from the Channel finds, rising straight out of the bottom of the sea, the shelf of this old land, and it has no avenue by which to pour through save this Looe Stream, which therefore bubbles and runs like a mill-race, though it is in the middle of the sea.

If you did not know what was underneath you, you could not understand why this river should run separate from the sea all round, but when you have noticed the depths on the chart, you see a kind of picture in your mind: the wall of that old mass of land standing feet above the floor of the Channel, and the top of what was once its fields and its villas, and its great church almost awash at low tides, and through it a cleft, which was, I say, a dell in the old park, but is now that Looe Stream buoyed up on either side, and making a river by itself running in the sea.

Sailing over it, and remembering all these things at evening, I got out of the boil and tumble into deep water. It got darker, and the light on the Nab ship showed clearly a long way off, and purple against the west stood the solemn height of the island. I set a course for this light, being alone at the tiller, while my two companions slept down below. When the night was full the little variable air freshened into a breeze from the south-east; it grew stronger and stronger, and lifted little hearty following seas, and blowing on my quarter drove me quickly to the west, whither I was bound. The night was very warm and very silent, although little patches of foam murmured perpetually, and though the wind could be heard lightly in the weather shrouds.

The star Jupiter shone brightly just above my wake, and over Selsey Bill, through a flat band of mist, the red moon rose slowly, enormous.

RONCESVALLES

Sitting one day in Pampeluna, which occupies the plain just below the southern and Spanish escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another remembered with an equal desire that we had all our lives desired to see Roncesvalles and the place where Roland died. This town (we said) was that which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to the Pass, and I, for my part, desired here, as in every other part of Europe where I had been able to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to re-create his time.

The road leads slantwise through the upper valleys of Navarre, crossing by passes the various spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the main range. As you leave Pampeluna the road grows more and more deserted, and the country through which it cuts more wild. The advantages of wealth which are conferred by the neighbourhood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly lost as one proceeds; the houses grow rarer, the shrines more ruinous and more aged, until one comes at last upon the bleak valley which introduces the final approach to Roncesvalles.

The wealth and order everywhere associated with the Basque blood have wholly disappeared. This people is not receding--it holds its own, as it deserves to do; but as there are new fields which it has occupied within the present century upon the more western hills, so there are others to the east, and this valley among them, from whence it has disappeared. The Basque names remain, but the people are no longer of the Basque type, and the tongue is forgotten.

So gradual is the ascent and so continual the little cols which have to be surmounted, that a man does not notice how much upward he is being led towards the crest of the ridge. And when he comes at last upon the grove from which he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before him, he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees (which here lie out along in cliffs like sharp sunward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to the distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason that this white wall of cliffs seems so low is that the traveller is standing upon the last of a series of great steps which have led him up towards the frontier, much as the prairie leads one up towards the Rockies in Colorado. When he has passed through the very pleasant wood which lies directly beneath the cliffs, and reaches the little village of Roncesvalles itself, he wonders still more that so famous a pass should be so small a thing. The pass from this side is so broad, with so low a saddle of grass, that it seems more like the crossing of the Sussex Downs than the crossing of an awful range of mountains. It is a rounded gap, up to which there lifts a pretty little wooded combe; and no one could be certain, during the half-hour spent in climbing such a petty summit, that he was, in so climbing, conquering Los Altos, the high Pyrenees.

But when the summit is reached, then the meaning of the "Imus Pyrenaeus," and the place that passage has taken in history, is comprehended in a moment. One sees at what a height one was in that plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the main range dominates the world; for down below one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the mountains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see unexpectedly beneath you the approach from France into Spain. The gulf at its narrowest is tremendous; but, more than that, when the floor of the valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away down and down by runs and by cascades towards the very distant plains of the north, upon which the funnel debouches. Moreover, it was up this gulf, and from the north, that the armies came; it was this vision of a precipice that seized them when their leaders had determined to invade the Peninsula. This also was what, for so many generations, so many wanderers must have seen who came to wonder at the place where the rearguard of Charlemagne had been destroyed.

The whole of the slope is covered with an ancient wood, and this wood is so steep that it would be impossible or dangerous to venture down it. The old Carolingian road skirts the mountain-side with difficulty, clinging well up upon its flank; the great modern road, which is excellent and made for artillery, has to go even nearer the summit; below them there falls away a slant or edge to which the huge beech trees cling almost parallel to the steep earth, running their perpendicular lines so high and close against the hill that they look like pines. As you peer down in among the trunks, you see the darkness increasing until the eye can penetrate no more, and dead, enormous trees that have lived their centuries, and have fallen perhaps for decades, lie across the aisles of the wood, propped up against their living fellows; for, by one of those political accidents which are common throughout the whole length of the Pyrenees, both sides of the watershed belong to Spain, so that no Government or modern energy has come to disturb the silence. One would swear that the last to order this wood were the Romans.

I had thought to find so famous a valley peopled, or at least visited. I found it utterly alone, and even free from travellers, as though the wealthier part of Europe had forgotten the most famous of Christian epics. I saw no motor-cars, nor any women--only at last, in the very depths of the valley, a boy cutting grass in a tiny patch of open land. And it was hereabouts, so far as I could make out, that the Peers were killed.

The song, of course, makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the hills. And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy's side of the hills. But that is not the place where Roland really died. The place where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was here in the very recess of the Northern Valley. It was here only that rocks could have been rolled down upon an army, and here is that narrow, strangling gorge where the line of march could most easily have been cut in two by the fury of the mountaineers. Also Eginhard says very clearly that they had already passed the hills and seen France, and that is final. It was from these cliffs, then, that such an echo was made by the horn of Roland, and it was down that funnel of a valley that the noise grew until it filled Christendom; and it was up that gorge that there came, as it says in the song--

The host in a tide returning: Charles the King and his Barony.

This was the place. And any man who may yet believe (I know such a discussion is pedantry)--any man who may yet believe the song of Roland to have been a Northern legend had better come to this place and drink the mountains in. For whoever to-day

High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud, Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud,

had certainly himself stood in the silence and majesty of this valley.