homeward curves unnecessarily fast, too fast for Marguerite, who complains, against the demons of depression and this ageless Welsh night, too dark even for shadows.
Dringo to Climb
In the morning it’s still raining. I find it troubling that all my indoor memories of Wales are in English – something I’ve so far done precious little to change. The landscape, however, remains open to translation. I want to be outside with old women and sticks. Indoors we’re willing prisoners of these miserable cats and dogs.
We hem, we haw, we hem and haw some more. Finally we decide to brave the inevitable mud and drive to the Brecon Beacons, one of Wales’s three national parks, then hike to a well-known beauty spot called Llyn y Fan Fach, or Place of the Little Lake. Beacons – a word I’ve had to look up in English, which makes a nice change – means ‘conspicuous hills’, and that’s precisely what they are. From our temporary vantage point, with the motor running on the side of a sheep field, the furrows on their bald, grey-brown flanks look like wrinkled elephant skin. By now the sky has cleared and everything in the treeless mid-distance is super-realist with intense sunshine, but the Beacons remain in shadow with fog boiling over their crests. If I were a fanciful person (which I’m not) I could mistake their northwestern ridge for the frontier between known lands and the Otherworld.
In ‘The Mabinogi’, a quadripartite collection of Welsh wondertales distilled from Celtic mythology, first written down around the year 1060, the Otherworld is known as Annwfyn. (These four stories are generally combined with other medieval tales in an anthology called The Mabinogion.) It’s the lot of Mabinogi heroes to journey to Annwfyn or to some far-off land, usually in search of a woman or a magic cauldron. My favourite cauldron is a doozy: toss in a dead warrior, brew, and the next day he’ll hop out alive, but voiceless.
While Norway and France may not seem very much like Annwfyn, Argentina, five months, half a globe and the better part of a language away, sure fits the bill. I point out to Marguerite that we are on the brink of just such a journey.
‘Sounds like someone already went there and brought you back,’ she says archly. Marguerite is getting tired of hearing what sounds like ashes in my voice.
It’s late, nearly five, by the time we leave the car at an arguable distance from a Dim Parcio sign and begin hiking to Llyn y Fan Fach. A well-trodden footpath slips between rising land that has already lost the tame, parcelled-out look of the pastures around Lampeter. Up ahead an immensity of hills displaces the sky not in craggy peaks but a series of long, oblique planes. As they fold in and out of one another the shadows they cast are the sole interruptions on the landscape: no trees, no shrubs, no bracken, no sheep. A few hikers bound past us on the way down, but we don’t bother to ask the distance to the lake.
From over our shoulders the low sun tosses our shadows ahead of us, mine longer and a little more substantial than Marguerite’s.
‘Did you know that the Etruscans believed their civilization had a beginning and an end?’ I ask. ‘When they thought the end was near – as it was – artists began to equate the human form with afternoon shadows. Figurative sculpture started out representational, but it got more and more attenuated as the Etruscans approached their social evening. How about that?’
Marguerite gives me a look. I’m famous for this kind of extranormal information.
‘Mae hi’n oer y bore ’ma,’ she replies instead. This is her only Welsh phrase, which means, ‘It’s cold this morning.’ She can also count to ten.
‘Wrong. Mae’n gynnes y pnawn ’ma. It’s warm this afternoon.’
‘Give me a Welsh lesson. Take my mind off my feet.’ On my advice Marguerite has worn Wellington boots, which are scant protection from the sharp gravel of the path and are fast turning her feet into well-beaten fillets of beef.
‘Do you want to hear about the mutation system or the alphabet?’
‘Are you kidding? Alphabet.’
‘You sure? No one’s really going to believe we talked about the alphabet.’
‘Speak!’
‘All right. Welsh has two extra vowels, “y” and “w”, and no “k”, “q”, “v” or “z”. But “ch”, “dd”, “ff”, “ng”, “ll”, “ph”, “rh” and “th” all count as individual letters, which makes it a big pain to use the dictionary. I always forget and look for “ch” words in with the “c”s, and they’re not there, and I have a fit, and rant about the dictionary leaving out a word. Then I find them after the “cy”s. It’s weird.’
‘If you say so.’
‘“Ch” is that throaty, German noise, like a deep whirlpool of spittle.’ She grimaces. ‘“Dd” is easy, like the “th” in the; “ff” is the English “f”. One “f” sounds like a “v”. Then there’s our old friend, the double “l”.’
She makes a noise like she’s trying to get water out of her nose.
‘Da iawn wir! Very good indeed! Sort of a “tlch” sound. Put your teeth together and blow it out the sides of your mouth. Since every other town in Wales starts with llan – which means something like sacred enclosure – you’ve got to get it right. Try saying “Llangollen”.’
We continue hiking and practising ‘Llangollen’, sounding like breathless gila-monsters on the prowl. A huge mound of a mountain lies straight ahead. Eventually we can make out vertical rents of red soil on its lower flank, like pleats in the earth. The lake is at its base, about a mile and a half straight up from where we started.
Though it’s an unremarkable lake green with the hills’ image, Llyn y Fan Fach has been famous longer than there’s been a place called Wales. The story goes that one day a shepherd was gazing at the surface, when to his astonishment a beautiful maiden rose out of the water. She teased him and pooh-poohed his offer of gifts, but eventually accepted his marriage proposal. There was, however, a hitch. In one version, if the shepherd struck her three times in the course of their life together, she’d have to return to the lake; in another, older account, the same disaster would befall if he touched her with iron. Naturally this comes to pass, and in a shower of bubbles she disappears beneath the surface of Llyn y Fan Fach with her herd of magic cattle in tow.
The maiden’s aversion to iron is the key to this story. Speculation runs that when the Iron Age Celts arrived in what is now Wales, wielding their iron swords and spears, the local Stone Age folk were terrified of the tough new technology. Many took to the desolate places and hid in caves, far up in the hills alongside glacial lakes. To the newcomers, no mean spinners of tales and fables, the native people disappeared as thoroughly as if they’d vanished underwater.
On this sunlit, bronze-coloured evening nothing disturbs the surface of the lake. Two mountain bikers appear trailing a healthy scent of sweat. Far below us, where we’ve left the car, some hills sharpened by the sun cast a tactile impression of boiled wool; others are already blurry with dusk. It’s a long, weary way down.
Colli to Lose
Several hours later, as we’re watching Ruthless People on television, it occurs to me that I am the water maiden’s worst nightmare. I may be on her side, but I and my kind come toting verbal iron. What the folktale of Llyn y Fan Fach fails to account for
