A TRYST AT AN ANCIENT EARTH WORK
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
gray, 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
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.
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 borne 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 attention 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 meagre 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
realized, nor his countenance, nor the tongue that he spoke, when he
set down his foot with a thud and said, 'Let it be here!'
Within the innermost enclosure, though it is so wide that at a
superficial glance the beholder has only a sense of standing on a
breezy down, the solitude is rendered yet more solitary by the
knowledge that between the benighted sojourner herein and all kindred
humanity are those three concentric walls of earth which no being
would think of scaling on such a night as this, even were he to hear
the most pathetic cries issuing hence that could be uttered by a
spectre-chased soul. I reach a central mound or platform--the crown
and axis of the whole structure. The view from here by day must be
of almost limitless extent. On this raised floor, dais, or rostrum,
harps have probably twanged more or less tuneful notes in celebration
of daring, strength, or cruelty; of worship, superstition, love,
birth, and death; of simple loving-kindness perhaps never. Many a
time must the king or leader have directed his keen eyes hence across
the open lands towards the ancient road, the Icening Way, still
visible in the distance, on the watch for armed companies approaching
either to succour or to attack.
I am startled by a voice pronouncing my name. Past and present have
become so confusedly mingled under the associations of the spot that
for a time it has escaped my memory that this mound was the place
agreed on for the aforesaid appointment. I turn and behold my
friend. He stands with a dark lantern in his hand and a spade and
light pickaxe over his shoulder. He expresses both delight and
surprise that I have come. I tell him I had set out before the bad
weather began.
He, to whom neither weather, darkness, nor difficulty seems to have
any relation or significance, so entirely is his soul wrapped up in
his own deep intentions, asks me to take the lantern and accompany
him. I take it and walk by his side. He is a man about sixty, small
in figure, with grey old-fashioned whiskers cut to the shape of a
pair of crumb-brushes. He is entirely in black broadcloth--or
rather, at present, black and brown, for he is bespattered with mud
from his heels to the crown of his low hat. He has no consciousness
of this--no sense of anything but his purpose, his ardour for which
causes his eyes to shine like those of a lynx, and gives his motions,
all the elasticity of an athlete's.
'Nobody to interrupt us at this time of night!' he chuckles with
fierce enjoyment.
We retreat a little way and find a sort of angle, an elevation in the
sod, a suggested squareness amid the mass of irregularities around.
Here, he tells me, if anywhere, the king's house stood. Three months
of measurement and calculation have confirmed him in this conclusion.
He requests me now to open the lantern, which I do, and the light
streams out upon the wet sod. At last divining his proceedings I say
that I had no idea, in keeping the tryst, that he was going to do
more at such an unusual time than meet me for a meditative ramble
through the stronghold. I ask him why, having a practicable object,
he should have minded interruptions and not have chosen the day? He
informs me, quietly pointing to his spade, that it was because his
purpose is to dig, then signifying with a grim nod the gaunt notice-
post against the sky beyond. I inquire why, as a professed and well-
known antiquary with capital letters at the tail of his name, he did
not obtain the necessary authority, considering the stringent
penalties for this sort of thing; and he chuckles fiercely again with
suppressed delight, and says, 'Because they wouldn't have given it!'
He at once begins cutting up the sod, and, as he takes the pickaxe to
follow on with, assures me that, penalty or no penalty, honest men or
marauders, he is sure of one thing, that we shall not be disturbed at
our work till after dawn.
I remember to have heard of men who, in their enthusiasm for some
special science, art, or hobby, have quite lost the moral sense which
would restrain them from indulging it illegitimately; and I
conjecture that here, at last, is an instance of such an one. He
probably guesses the way my thoughts travel, for he stands up and
solemnly asserts that he has a distinctly justifiable intention in
this matter; namely, to uncover, to search, to verify a theory or
displace it, and to cover up again. He means to take away nothing--
not a grain of sand. In this he says he sees no such monstrous sin.
I inquire if this is really a promise to me? He repeats that it is a
promise, and resumes digging. My contribution to the labour is that
of directing the light constantly upon the hole. When he has reached
something more than a foot deep he digs more cautiously, saying that,
be it much or little there, it will not lie far below the surface;
such things never are deep. A few minutes later the point of the
pickaxe clicks upon a stony substance. He draws the implement out as
feelingly as if it had entered a man's body. Taking up the spade he
shovels with care, and a surface, level as an altar, is presently
disclosed. His eyes flash anew; he pulls handfuls of grass and mops
the surface clean, finally rubbing it with his handkerchief.
Grasping the lantern from my hand he holds it close to the ground,
when the rays reveal a complete mosaic--a pavement of minute tesserae
of many colours, of intricate pattern, a work of much art, of much
time, and of much industry. He exclaims in a shout that he knew it
always--that it is not a Celtic stronghold exclusively, but also a
Roman; the former people having probably contributed little more than
the original framework which the latter took and adapted till it
became the present imposing structure.
I ask, What if it is Roman?
A great deal, according to him. That it proves all the world to be
wrong in this great argument, and himself alone to be right! Can I
wait while he digs further?
I agree--reluctantly; but he does not notice my reluctance. At an
adjoining spot he begins flourishing the tools anew with the skill of
a navvy, this venerable scholar with letters after his name.
Sometimes he falls on his knees, burrowing with his hands in the
manner of a hare, and where his old-fashioned broadcloth touches the
sides of the hole it gets plastered with the damp earth. He
continually murmurs to himself how important, how very important,
this discovery is! He draws out an object; we wash it in the same
primitive way by rubbing it with the wet grass, and it proves to be a
semi-transparent bottle of iridescent beauty, the sight of which
draws groans of luxurious sensibility from the digger. Further and
further search brings out a piece of a weapon. It is strange indeed
that by merely peeling off a wrapper of modern accumulations we have
lowered ourselves into an ancient world. Finally a skeleton is
uncovered, fairly perfect. He lays it out on the grass, bone to its
bone.
My friend says the man must have fallen fighting here, as this is no
place of burial. He turns again to the trench, scrapes, feels, till
from a corner he draws out a heavy lump--a small image four or five
inches high. We clean it as before. It is a statuette, apparently of
gold, or, more probably, of bronze-gilt--a figure of Mercury,
obviously, its head being surmounted with the petasus or winged hat,
the usual accessory of that deity. Further inspection reveals the
workmanship to be of good finish and detail, and, preserved by the
limy earth, to be as fresh in every line as on the day it left the
hands of its artificer.
We seem to be standing in the Roman Forum and not on a hill in
Wessex. Intent upon this truly valuable relic of the old empire of
which even this remote spot was a component part, we do not notice
what is going on in the present world till reminded of it by the
sudden renewal of the storm. Looking up I perceive that the wide
extinguisher of cloud has again settled down upon the fortress-town,
as if resting upon the edge of the inner rampart, and shutting out
the moon. I turn my back to the tempest, still directing the light
across the hole. My companion digs on unconcernedly; he is living
two thousand years ago, and despises things of the moment as dreams.
But at last he is fairly beaten, and standing up beside me looks
round on what he has done. The rays of the lantern pass over the
trench to the tall skeleton stretched upon the grass on the other
side. The beating rain has washed the bones clean and smooth, and
the forehead, cheek-bones, and two-and-thirty teeth of the skull
glisten in the candle-shine as they lie.
This storm, like the first, is of the nature of a squall, and it ends
as abruptly as the other. We dig no further. My friend says that it
is enough--he has proved his point. He turns to replace the bones in
the trench and covers them. But they fall to pieces under his touch:
the air has disintegrated them, and he can only sweep in the
fragments. The next act of his plan is more than difficult, but is
carried out. The treasures are inhumed again in their respective
holes: they are not ours. Each deposition seems to cost him a
twinge; and at one moment I fancied I saw him slip his hand into his
coat pocket.
'We must re-bury them ALL,' say I.
'O yes,' he answers with integrity. 'I was wiping my hand.'
The beauties of the tesselated floor of the governor's house are once
again consigned to darkness; the trench is filled up; the sod laid
smoothly down; he wipes the perspiration from his forehead with the
same handkerchief he had used to mop the skeleton and tesserae clean;
and we make for the eastern gate of the fortress.
Dawn bursts upon us suddenly as we reach the opening. It comes by
the lifting and thinning of the clouds that way till we are bathed in
a pink light. The direction of his homeward journey is not the same
as mine, and we part under the outer slope.
Walking along quickly to restore warmth I muse upon my eccentric
friend, and cannot help asking myself this question: Did he really
replace the gilded image of the god Mercurius with the rest of the
treasures? He seemed to do so; and yet I could not testify to the
fact. Probably, however, he was as good as his word.
* * *
It was thus I spoke to myself, and so the adventure ended. But one
thing remains to be told, and that is concerned with seven years
after. Among the effects of my friend, at that time just deceased,
was found, carefully preserved, a gilt statuette representing
Mercury, labelled 'Debased Roman.' No record was attached to explain
how it came into his possession. The figure was bequeathed to the
Casterbridge Museum.
Detroit Post,
March 1885.
