strength – a direct and powerful influence. This was something quite different: from my very first days in the valley it struck me that men, here, were no longer in the majority; it was the untamed land. It is possible that I exaggerated this because of my urban background, but making all allowances, it still seemed to me that it was neither fanciful nor weak to feel that the ancient order was hardly disturbed here. (If this was the case, and I am sure it was, a man’s natural reaction would be to become more virile.)
The ancient order was hardly disturbed, particularly at night. I remember standing just under the black precipice that rushes up to the top of the Saeth looking down at the three or four handkerchiefs of fields down in the bottom of the valley and comparing their extent with the prodigious sweep of untouched mountain; the night was touching on the barren land, making it vaster and more powerful, while the little fields dwindled and vanished.
There was no longer that great buffer of civilization between a man and his remote origins: I felt it strongly; and in an attempt to convey something of what I mean I have written the two following pieces, although they break the run of my narrative.
I was walking along the road in the morning of a beautiful gentle day when I met Emyr Vaughan going the round of his sheep. We were well acquainted and friendly by this time and he often used to take me part of the way with him to show me things and explain them. It was still the lambing season, and twice every day he went clean round the lower mountain. He was having trouble this year with weak ewes who could not feed their lambs, and with foxes. As we walked he showed me here and there a patch of skin with the close-curled wool of a new lamb on it, and once the hoof, or the foot, of a lamb with the shank still uneaten. He slackened his pace for me, but it was still an effort to keep up, and I did not always hear or understand what he said; however, I remember being struck again by the extraordinary way he recognized individual sheep. ‘That ewe there, she is the daughter of the one by the wall. She had twins, but she could not feed both of them, and I put one to that ewe we passed by the road, the one I said had the maggot very bad last year – her lamb had the brait.’ It was obvious that he was not talking for effect: he had hundreds of sheep there, and he knew each one, with its maternal ancestry. I do not think that any of them had names except those few who had been hand-reared at the farm, brought up with a bottle, and I meant to ask him how he identified each, whether he said inwardly, ‘There is that sheep with the drooping ears and brown legs, the daughter of the one who got caught in the trap the autumn before the bad winter.’
We were coming down again to the road a little way above my cottage when we found the body of a lamb, dragged between two rocks. Its head was eaten off.
‘Diwch annwyl!’ he said. It was a fine well-grown lamb. He said that he thought he had seen the mother earlier in the day, much farther up. It was a fox of course, he said, and when he had thought for some time he said, ‘I will put some poison to it tonight.’ He spoke with an air of caution – a hushed cunning, as if it were something illegal. He said he was sure I would not tell anybody. It was when he spoke like this that he lost his amiability entirely; all the idiot sharpness of the peasant came into his face; it was as if his eyes diminished and went red round the edges.
I left him shortly after this and went home to make myself a pot of coffee and to cut some sandwiches for my lunch; the day was so fine that I decided to explore the Diffwys, the land that lay up above the end of the valley on the northern side.
If I have managed to give a clear impression of Cwm Bugail it will be remembered that on the left-hand side is a green path that runs across the face of the Saeth and up toward a high cleft at the junction of the mountain’s shoulder and the hemicycle of rock that closes the top of the valley. A stream comes down from this cleft in a series of falls – a magnificent spectacle after a few days of rain – and the cleft itself is the beginning of the country that I wanted to explore. The green path – it soon stopped being green and turned to shale, but all that I saw from my window was green, and I always thought of it as the green path – took me longer than I had expected, with the sun on my back and my heavy coat too hot. With pauses I do not suppose that I spent less than two hours reaching the top. It was worth pausing often; every time I turned there was more of the world spread below under me, and more visible over the Penmawr ridge, and all from a higher, more detached and god-like standpoint. It is good for one’s self-esteem to be high up.
At the cleft, a dramatically narrow and decisive entrance to the unknown high country, I turned for a last look down the length of Cwm Bugail: my cottage was there, distinct because of its whitewash, absurdly small, smaller than a matchbox, and the whole vast extent of the air was lit with the sun. Past the corner, through the black rocks of the cleft and at once it was another world, a sunless chasm with a silent lake. Chasm is not the right word; one thinks of a chasm from above, an enormous crack going down, essentially down. In this narrow, deep valley I was at the bottom, looking up. On my left hand the side was sheer, nearly the whole length of it; a precipitous scree here and there, and sometimes a little heather, but mostly naked rock going straight up to the top of the Saeth: the bed of the valley was a tarn, black, shining water with an abrupt and barren edge – no reeds, no mud, nothing green at all; it changed harshly from naked water to naked rock. On the right the land rose in a steep slope, a shapeless, tormented moorland with bare rock showing, neither so high nor so sheer as the wall on the left, but still reaching halfway up the sky. There was no breath of wind to stir the top of the water, and in all the length of the valley I could see no thing alive, nor in the air above it.
From the run of the valley and the disposition of the soaring black cliff on its southern side the sun could never come into it at any time. At first, panting from my climb, I found the coolness agreeable, but after a little while I began to feel cold, and buttoned my jacket.
A sheep track ran along before me, and I decided that I would try to walk round the lake before having my sandwiches: it seemed pointless to carry them too (they were bulky in my pocket and had galled me all the way up the green path) so I put them on a convenient rock, with the intention of coming back to sit there and eat them after I had been round the lake. Before I left I looked around in order to be sure that I should find them again, and my eye was caught by a shape on the skyline – a skyline that I had to lean back to see at all. Right up there on the edge of the black precipice there was this thing, perched like a gargoyle peering down. I could not tell why it had caught my eye: there were hundreds of jutting, strangely-shaped rocks all along that weathered salient, and none had fixed my attention. However, it did catch my eye, and held it. I could not see what it was: a sheep, perhaps? These agile mountain sheep did take up the most extraordinary attitudes, poised on an overhanging rock with a handful of grass in its crevices. Or conceivably one of those wild goats that I had heard about? It was a strange way for a sheep to stand, hooked there.
I suppose, from the comparisons I made at the time with a sheep or a goat, that the thing was lighter in colour than the surrounding rock: I do not remember now. What I do recall, and most clearly, is the air that it had of crouching there, poised over the valley. It was, of course, merely fanciful to suppose a malignance in it, a sort of evil domination of all that it looked down upon. It was fanciful, of course, and outside that sterile place it seems even absurd; but those were the ideas that came to me.
In the end I said that whether it was a sheep or a rock or a goat it did not greatly matter, and set off along the track. From the far end of the valley (Cwm Erchyll was its name) I had over-simplified its construction; here and there I found a bay with a little sad grey beach of pebbles, and at the end there was a bog with a living stream flowing through it to fill the lake. Here a small bird like a snipe got up at my feet and stopped my heart dead still; it winged low over the water, a white flash in its flight and the saddest heartbroken cry in the world.
Where the bog and the lake merged the shore was black and there were rushes: the stream ran cutting deep between banks of a spongy black substance, and in some places I could hear the sound of invisible tributaries that ran underground. On the shore itself the firm black mud showed a line of footprints; they
