Chapter 2

The Bull

Yesterday at one o’clock in the afternoon.

About this time I was sitting on a damp sharp stone, looking about me
and seeing nothing. I had walked for a long while and gotten nowhere.
For there was persistent mist still in the uplands, and I had strayed
into the thick of it and was hopelessly befogged, hungry, and a trifle
anxious about the probable duration of my helplessness.

My thoughts just then were largely retrospect. I had set out
from—well, I have forgotten the spelling of the place, but it’s no
matter.¹ The names in Wales have fascinating orthography and, to one
not adept, rather unobvious pronunciations. I had set out from this
place which must be anonymous in order to search for something that
had not been seen for several centuries, the private oratory or shrine
or cell of St. Tarw, a rather unbelievable name, or, in the American
idiom, a bully one, whichever way you look at it, for a Welsh saint.
It’s one that anybody can say without arduous practice. The saint
himself was a rather incredible individual. It happens that I know
something of saints, they being a particular hobby of mine, and yet I
was uncertain at that moment whether St. Tarw was a man or was a
whisper on the faëry breeze of legend. But as it happened, in the
course of researches in London, I found hints that, man or whisper, he
had left or there had been left for him in what to-day is Radnorshire,
a monument of stone in which he did his devotions, or had been
believed to do them.

¹ Actually Llanbadarnfynydd, nine miles away, where I had put up
before. My landlord had given me a lift half-way down in his
Morris. (Author’s note.)

It was in the Book of Sylvan Armitage that I ran across the clue. The
Book is a chronicle of the diversions of a sixteenth-century
gentleman, and mine is a genuine first printing of 1598. It contains
an allusion which I am confident refers to a performance of the
“Merchant of Venice” at Blackfriars, which allusion would stagger the
erudite who prate glibly of the “order of Shakespeare’s plays,” if
they gave it a thought. But much more interesting to me is the
reference to the devotional seat of St. Tarw.

Sylvan Armitage, progressing through Wales in 1594, visited the house
of an Englishman residing in that lately war-distraught country. On
one of their “long gaddynges and peregrinations afoot,” for riding was
not feasible among these broken mountains, they came upon a humble
structure of “hewn stones, much dishevelled and marvellously coated by
moss,” says Sylvan Armitage. He adds that the “cella” had been built
under a bank, and that this very fact was then threatening its
existence. Small chance of success then for me.

So yesterday while I sat on my ungrateful seat with the mist wreathing
about me, I half-abandoned the search before it had properly begun.
For the dozenth time I took out the letter I had received the day
before from my dear old friends, Jack and Mary Bonnet of Bristol.
Their barque, recently returned from Australia, will leave the
dry-dock in a day or so and take the sea again from Bristol next
Monday. Would I join them in a “terror and pleasure” trip somewhere
around Africa or the Scandinavian coast? Of course, I reflected, it
would take me fully a week to wind up my affairs in preparation for
such an ocean journey. I must drop the saint business. I looked at the
fog, felt sick of saints, and almost decided I would go.

I had let down my burden, a soldier’s knapsack and a fairly
well-loaded one, to the grass beside my feet. I decided to eat my
luncheon. I tucked the Bonnet letter away and took out my
beef-sandwiches, milk in a thermos-flask, and walnut meats, a
substantial meal in small compass. My long morning’s tramp on the
uplands had made me very hungry. It was not only the tramp, but the
slipping and falling and crawling, for the yellow grass was long and
trodden flat by cattle, making the side slopes very toilsome, and, in
the mist, risky, for you sometimes did not know whether you might fall
ten feet or a thousand.

I had been exploring Aidenn Forest, but I had early left the lowland
area of trees. The uplands, miles of broad-topped hills in a range of
horseshoe shape, were given over largely to cattle-grazing. There were
long pastures of rolling and heaving slopes, like the gently-breathing
ocean of midsummer. My meal over, I unfolded my contour-map of the
Geographical Institute and pondered over it, trying by recollection
and inference to determine just where I was. But I had not the
remotest clue to slope or distance. I might have been at one extreme
of the horseshoe or the other, or any spot betwixt. It was two
o’clock.

Neither my literary nor my philosophic studies, which are supposed to
chasten the mind to resignation, comforted my thoughts in the least,
but suddenly I was aware of a change in the atmosphere. The mist
seemed suffused with silver, then with gold. Soon the phantoms of fog
had retracted far on either side in lofty, shifting, sun-rayed banks,
and the air became clear about me. But I remained in doubt about my
position.

For the mist had cleared only to the shoulders of the hills, and left
the rolling heights a-sparkle like early morning; but the valleys and
the great outer hills of Wales, girding Aidenn Forest, were blind to
me. From the declining sun I could tell which way was west, but
knowledge of that direction alone was no use. Was I on the western
curve of the horseshoe or the opposite? Nor did it help to recall that
my ascent of Aidenn Forest had been the north, where the two curves
meet, the open part of the horseshoe being to the south. I was as
confused as ever.

At least I could walk freely, keep to the smooth uplands without peril
of falling down some gap or gully. I strode on in the grandeur of the
sun, the mighty halo of mist extending a mile all around, a more
gorgeous glory than bully St. Tarw or any other of the blessed men of
earth ever wore. The towering wall of mist was warm with the light
that occasionally melted through and dazzled the ragged hill-slope
underneath; the cloud-caps wreathed and spired like golden smoke, and
I went on proudly and merrily in my enormous prison. I felt like a
god, exultant. I reached out my hands and lifted my face to the
heavens. My loneliness apotheosized me. I laughed. I shouted,
_ebriatus_. Never before have I experienced that sense of space and
power, that vigour beyond muscle and sense, that reckless rapture!

Nearly an hour passed. Grasshoppers leapt to either side of my path
with little soft comings to earth; the sound was like the first drops
of rain. Black-game and grouse twice or thrice scampered and scudded
from my feet, and suddenly out of the fog which had closed in on my
left swept a great bevy of unknown birds with a thunder of wings. I
judged then that I was not far from the brink of a steep pitch on the
edge of the uplands. The mist which had glorified me was beginning to
hem me more straitly and I bore away to the right, being wary of
pitfalls.

Gradually, while I moved up and down the placid slopes and crossed
wide expanses wherein I was an ephemeral topic for cows and shambling
tattered ponies, an inexpressible sense told me precisely where I was
on the lofty horseshoe of Aidenn Forest. Fragmentary half-submerged
memories of my contour-map, of the dip of the slopes where I trod, of
instructions proffered me by scraggy, wry-spoken yokels (with obligato
of a pig screaming at a gate), of the arc described by the sun, of the
bated breath of the breeze—all these united to fix my certainty. My
feet just at that moment were ascending on the flattened grass of a
small summit; Mynydd Tarw I knew it was, whose highest spot was
considerably above two thousand feet. Mynydd Tarw, on the verge of the
horseshoe’s eastern bend, was where I had concluded the oratory of St.
Tarw was most likely to be found.

I explored the hill and all about, but unfortunately it was creased
and gorged by channels, tiny valleys. Trees and rank underbrush grew
in these troughs, increasing in thickness down the declivity, and the
banners of mist were tangled in the trees. The trunks were clammy, the
fallen leaves dank, the earth too soft for good footing. My shoes sank
over the ankles in leaves and loam. Bereft of my halo, I had little
joy. And after an hour of climbing up and down, groping and grasping,
of peering for traces of foundered or buried walls, I realized, with a
shock that sickened me, that I was out of my reckoning in the lower
fog again, and that I could not trace my way back. I could not even
tell in which direction Mynydd Tarw lay.

I was almost frantic. It was now past mid-afternoon, less than two
hours before sunset, and had I known the bee-line to my hostel in the
difficultly-pronounced village, I could not have reached it before
darkness had long covered Wales.

The valleys, immersed in mist below me, were a wilderness, and broad
of expanse; once on the uplands again, however, I believed I could
find Mynydd Tarw, and thence strike on the true way home. As for
exploring the Vale of Aidenn Water itself, I had no reason to believe
that man had ever built a habitation there. To regain the uplands was
my anxious wish; but not even this was an easy feat. I was weary
already, from physical exertion and strain of mind, but it should have
been easy to keep my course upward, however slow my progress. Yet the
yellow grass and the heather was flat and long, and whether still dry
or drenched with fog, slippery and maddening to ascend upon. Moreover,
I would find myself in channels torn and scarred by water, now
streamless in summer season, but choked with thorny creepers and thick
spear-like stalks in malign barriers.

But I persevered, although I found the mist had grown thicker above as
day declined. Presently I recognized the sweet smell of new-cut hay in
fields above me, and soon afterward kneeing myself to the sharp edge
of a parapet of rock, I rejoiced to see the smoky round of the sun.
There was a line of wild apple-trees along the rim of the uplands at
this point. The crooked branches and straggling shoots of them made
them all like black hats of witches wreathed with tattered ribbons,
save for the one directly before me, through whose limbs
half-despoiled of leaves the sun sent a wicked leering shine that made
me singularly uneasy.

I had come into a region thickly populated with cattle. There were a
score on the hillock to my right, and when I had gone thence over a
bristling wire fence I found a hundred more filling the twilight plain
with their shadows. There was not a sound from the widespread throng,
but I had a feeling that each dispassionate bovine head was turned
toward me, and I advanced with something of the shyness of a child
crossing a drawing-room where he feels every eye cold and critical. A
little the uncanny sense gripped me that I had happened upon some land
undiscovered by Gulliver, where cows were people, and very superior
people. There had been so few of them visible all day, now so many; I
could not rid myself of the notion that I was an intruder. (Just then
the reasonable explanation did not occur to me that atmospheric
conditions had much to do with the migrations of the beasts from place
to place on the horseshoe.)

Across an unkempt stone wall which I whipped up laggard muscles to
leap—I was going rapidly—sweet-fleshed sheep, of orthodox tan, the
cross of Welsh mountain breed with black-faced “Shrops,” were nudging
one another in an anxious mass. I looked toward the sinking sun and
discerned a black rift perhaps a mile distant: the Vale of Aidenn
Water, with the prominences of the western arm of the horseshoe, Great
Rhos, Esgair Nantau, and Vron Hill, nosing up to the sky even another
mile beyond.

Then down on me came dark ruin with a rush.

I was aware appallingly of some vaster shadow blotting out the
gorgeous disc which lay on the western hills, a shadow blatant,
militant, perilous. A sting of fear in my breast goaded me to instant
flight; I was plunging away all in an instant, every part of me in
panic, without realization of what it was from which I fled.

Ten seconds of rushing flight, a frantic glance behind me, and my
returning faculties told me what that fell form was, horned and pawed,
with cavorting death-like head and eyes evilly a-gleam, the shape
rampaging, the feet tremendous on the shaken ground. I knew too well
those signs of the Hereford breed, the twining horns and the white
face so startlingly suggestive of the skull beneath. It was a bull,
the hugest bull on earth, insane with murderous passion.

Terror winged me in that course for life. Once I stumbled and rolled
down a slope littered with small stones, but my speed was scarcely
lessened. I must have regained my feet, for I drove myself through a
patch of merciless nettles and awful thorns, yet was hardly sensible
of being torn and stabbed. Not until long afterward did I feel the
heavy bruise, like the mark of an iron palm, which my hard and firmly
fastened pack had printed between my shoulder-blades, saving me a
worse blow. Now my due training for the mile at the University, not so
very long ago, and the desire for strict regimen then instilled in me,
and my frequent jaunts on foot through broad countrysides, were in
good stead. In the beginning of this breathless chase, I had had a
wide margin of advantage, and now I was all but holding my own, when
ahead of me I saw deliverance. For I had turned westward in flight
across the leveller hilltop, and the brink of the Vale of Aidenn
Water, with its slope looking a precipice all around and its hollow
now a mammoth bowl of impenetrable fog, was less than a furlong away
ahead.

Risk had to be taken to make safety sure. I chanced another ugly fall
by a quick twist of my neck. I led by twenty yards. Gradually,
therefore, I diminished my pace so that at the verge of the cliff only
ten feet might separate us—and just before I would have leaped out
into the turbid air, I used every remaining particle of strength in a
sidewise lunge downward to the grass, letting the bull flash with
unconquerable momentum over the edge.

But I myself was a vessel of momentum and could not by any frantic
clutching and clawing soever keep myself from sliding over the brink
and slipping from an abrupt decline to a sharper one, whence with
horrified mind I felt myself go over the verge of nothingness! While I
fell backward with eyes staring to the lurid sky, I saw the hulk of
the bull shoot out from the summit of the cliff. Never have I seen a
thing as black as the mass of the beast, with limbs winnowing in the
air and head and vast nose outstretched. The black body would have
crushed me to pulp had I not flung myself aside a moment before. I
know that I must have been still in the air when the bull struck a
thrust-out ledge far below the cliff—I had caught just an instant’s
glare of one eye, demoniac and hopeless—then the animal went bellowing
and thumping down through the fog into unseen depths until one final
crash and cry ended sound in ghastly silence.