Читать книгу The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated - W. H. Hudson - Страница 25

Table of Contents

The rocky forelands—Delightful days—Colour of the sea—Wild-bird life—Montgomery's Pelican Island—Gulls and daws—We envy birds their wings—The sense of sublimity—Cormorants—Ravens and superstition—Gurnard's Head—A first visit—A siesta in a dangerous place—The hunter's vision.

IF "dark Bolerium" seemed best on tempestuous midwinter evenings because of the spirit of the place, the sentiment, it was not so with the numerous other forelands along this rude coast. I haunted them by day, and the finer the weather the better I liked them. It is true that they too have dark associations from which one cannot wholly escape. The huge masses of rock rising high above the cliff on many of these promontories have the appearance of gigantic castles by the sea, and that they served as castles to the ancient inhabitants of the land we know, as in many instances the primitive earthworks, the trench and embankment raised to cut them off from the land, remain to this day. Rut the thought of the "dreadful past" is not so insistent in these castles, which were my houses by the sea, as at the Land's End promontory, and would almost vanish in the brilliant sunshine and in view of the wide expanse of ocean flecked with dazzling foam.

I could hardly imagine a higher pleasure than was mine on many a bright day in winter and spring, when I had the whole coast pretty well to myself and spent long hours in rambling from point to point and in gazing out on the sea from my seat on some rocky pile that crowned one of the bolder headlands.

I had heard a good deal about the beautiful colour of the sea in these parts, yet was often surprised at the sight of it. I had seen no such blues and greens on any other part of the British coast; and no such purples in the shallower waters within the caves and near the cliffs where the rocks beneath were overgrown with seaweed. Where these great purple patches appeared on the pure brilliant green it was veritably a "wine-purple sea" and looked as if hundreds of hogsheads of claret or Burgundy had been emptied into it.

But the sea and its colour and the joy of a vast expanse would not have drawn me so often to the castled forelands nor held me so long but for the birds that haunted them, seeing that this visible world is to me but a sad and empty place without wonderful life and the varied forms of life, which are in harmony with it, and give it a meaning, and a grace and beauty and splendour not its own. If there be no visible wild life, then I am like that wandering being or spirit in Montgomery's Pelican Island, who was alone on the earth before life was, and had no knowledge or intimation of any intelligence but its own; who roamed over the seas that tumbled round the globe for thousands and thousands of years, flying ever from its own loneliness and vainly seeking comfort and happiness in loving and being the companion of wind and cloud and wave, and day and night, and sun and moon and stars, and all inanimate things.

Sitting on a rock on the edge of one of these headlands I could watch those glorious fishers in the sea, the gannets, by the hour; but this bird is so great, being now the greatest left to us in Cornwall, or rather in the seas that wash its shores, and its habits so interesting, that I must by and by devote an entire chapter to it. Gulls and daws were the common species, always to be seen floating and wheeling about the promontory, a black and white company, with sharp yelping voices and hoarse and laughter-like cries; never wholly free from anxiety when I was by, never fully convinced of my peaceful intentions. Their habits are well known: I was not expecting any new discovery about them, it was simply the delight of seeing them which kept me to the crags. Sturge Moore says in a poem on "Wings":

That man who wishes not for wings,

Must be the slave of care;

For birds that have them move so well

And softly through the air:

They venture far into the sky,

If not so far as thoughts and angels fly.

Feather from under feather springs;

All open like a fan;

Our eyes upon their beauty dwell

And marvel at the plan

By which things made for use so rare

Are powerful and delicate and fair.

In Calderon's celebrated drama, Life's a Dream, when Sigismund laments his miserable destiny, comparing it with that of the wild creatures which inhabited the forest where he is kept a prisoner, the contrast between his lot and theirs seems greatest when he considers the birds, perfect in form, lovely in colouring, graceful in their motions, and so wonderful in their faculty of flight; while he, a being with a higher nature, a greater, more aspiring soul, had no such liberty! We need not be so unhappy as the Polish prince to envy the birds their freedom. I watch and am never tired of watching their play. They rise and fall and circle, and swerve to this side and to that, and are like sportive flies in a room which has the wind-roughened ocean for a floor, and the granite cliffs for walls, and the vast void sky for ceiling. The air is their element: they float on it and are borne by it, abandoned to it, effortless, even as a ball of thistledown is borne; and then, merely by willing it, without any putting forth of strength, without a pulsation, to rise vertically a thousand feet, to dwell again and float upon an upper current, to survey the world from a greater altitude and rejoice in a vaster horizon. To fly like that! To do it all unconsciously, merely by bringing this or that set of ten thousand flight muscles into play, as we will to rise, to float, to fall, to go this way or that—to let the wind do it all for us, as it were, while the sight is occupied in seeing and the mind is wholly free! The balloons and other wretched machines to which men tie themselves to mount above the earth serve only to make the birds' lot more enviable. I would fly and live like them in the air, not merely for the pleasure of the aerial exercise, but also to experience in larger measure the sense of sublimity.

But this is a delusion, seeing that we possess such a sense only because we are bound to earth, because vast cliffs overhanging the sea and other altitudes are in some degree dangerous. At all events Nature says they are, and we are compelled to bow to her whether we know better or not. We cannot get over the instinct of the heavy mammalian that goes on the ground, whose inherited knowledge is that it is death or terrible injury to fall from a considerable height. Only so long as we are quite safe is this instinct a pleasurable one; but when we look over the edge of a sheer precipice, how often, in spite of reason, does the pleasure, the fearful joy, lose itself in apprehension! Could we know that it would not hurt us to drop off, purposely or by accident, that the air itself and a mysterious faculty in us would sustain us, that it would no more hurt us to be flung from the summit of a cliff than it would hurt a jackdaw, we should be as the bird is, without a sense of sublimity.

Daw and herring gull, the most abundant species, were but two of several kinds I was accustomed to see from the headlands, and some of the others were greater birds—the great black-backed gull, as big a gull as there is in the world, who had a rock to himself near the Land's End, where four or five couples could be seen congregated; and the shag, the cormorant which abounds most on this coast. They are heavy, ungainly flyers, and have an ugly reptilian look when fishing in the sea, but seen standing erect and motionless, airing their spread wings, they have a noble decorative appearance, like carved bird-figures on the wet black jagged rocks amid the green and white tumultuous sea. There, too, was the ancient raven, and he was the most irreconcilable of all. At one spot on the cliff close to where I was staying a solitary raven invariably turned up to shadow me. He would fly up and down, then alight on a rock a hundred yards away or more and watch me, occasionally emitting his deep hoarse human-like croak; but it failed to frighten me away or put me in a passion, as I was not a native. The Cornishman of the coast, when he hears that ominous sound, mocks the bird: "Corpse! corpse! you devil! If I had a gun I'd give you corpse!" It is not strange the raven views the human form divine with suspicion in these parts: he is much persecuted by the religious people hereabouts, and when they cannot climb up or down to his nest on a ledge of the cliff, they are sometimes able to destroy it by setting fire to a furze bush and dropping it upon the nest from above.