第50章 ALICIA'S DIARY(25)

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 south-west 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 I 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 riband-like 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 elsewhither,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 to-night.The slope that I so laboriously 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 dead heads 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 by 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 re-commence 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 are 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.