Testimonies - Patrick O’Brian

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but not related.

      I could have made it all perfectly clear by asking one of them, but that would not have been possible. Apart from their polite questions on how I liked their country they had not, even by implication, asked me anything about myself. That was a remarkable point of breeding, I thought, recalling it, they did not obviously avoid questions; it was that they showed no curiosity. I had not volunteered anything about myself, and as I was going to bed it occurred to me that it was a pity that I had not said anything about my acquaintance with their language. No natural opportunity had arisen, and it would have been absurd to drag in my little smattering all by itself, like a dormouse on a haywain. I wished that I had, because it was obvious that they would have spoken to one another in Welsh before me thinking their words to be private. It is true that, as far as my understanding went, they were; still, the principle remained, and I resolved to set things right at the first occasion that offered.

      I did find it a little mortifying, I must admit, to see that I had hardly understood anything at all of the Welsh that I had heard spoken. Two or three words, no more, although for the last few weeks I had been turning over my old notebooks. The book language and the spoken Welsh, spoken rapidly, indistinctly and with innumerable contractions and elisions, were hardly recognizable as the same tongue: it was worse for me, because my friend Annwyl had come from Bro Morgannwg, the southernmost limit of the language, and it is well known that there is a great difference between the dialects of the north and the south.

      The next day I was busy pottering about, finding where things were and putting my belongings away. I did get out once, to go to Pentref, the village, for tobacco: I had not intended to do this, because I meant to give up smoking, but somehow the arguments in favour of tobacco presented themselves so strongly that I said I would just go down and see whether there was any good brand in the shop.

      I had hardly seen anything of the valley when I arrived and although from the time I had woken up I had been looking out of the window and stepping into the garden to stare at my surroundings the low cloud had prevented me from forming any clear impression: so I was not prepared for the splendour that stood high all round when I came out for my walk. The cloud had gone and there was the soaring mass of the Saeth sweeping up into the clear sky. It was a mountain as a child draws a mountain, a sharp, stabbing triangle. I had studied the maps, but the contours and figures, particularly the figures, had deceived me; I had expected hills, little more, and here was a mountain. Its height in figures meant nothing: there was the majesty, the serene isolation, that you expect (if Switzerland is your criterion) only from ten thousand feet and more. Indeed, I have seen many quite well-known peaks, high above the snow-line, without a tenth part of the Saeth’s nobility.

      There was no snow on the Saeth, of course, but there was something very nearly as striking – great runs of shale, beds of it tilted up to ferocious slopes, and the lines of its fall.

      This strong impression of grandeur never faded; the more I saw the mountain the finer I thought it. It was incredibly changeable: on some days it would be a savage, menacing dark mountain, a sombre weight – I had almost said a threat – in the sky. Then in the evening, some evenings, when each rock on the skyline was etched hard and distinct against the sky, the Saeth took on a quality of remoteness, almost of unreality. The Saeth in moonlight, like something out of El Greco’s mind; the Saeth with snow; the hard triangular peak of the Saeth ripping through the tearing driven clouds from the sea – with a mountain like that outside your window, you are not lonely.

      The rest of the valley was in proportion. It lay deep, wide and smooth between its long enclosing ridges and the stream wound through the brilliant green of the water meadows. There was the bottom of the valley, green, and with a narrow long strip of fields; then the lower gentle slopes, still green but with more brown mixed in the colour; a long, horizontal wall and then the slopes rose faster, more and more barren, to boulders, shale and at last to the barbarity of naked rock. Everywhere there were walls, dry-stone walls criss-crossing, walls of enormous length, running up impossible slopes. The whitish spots that I saw on the far slope, peppered the length and breadth of it, right up to the top, were sheep; they could be heard, if one stopped to listen, and their voices came from every quarter, drifting on the wind.

      There were the farms, with neat squares of wall by them and a few trees: the one I had been to last night was just under me – absurd to have mistaken the way. They had dove-grey roofs that blended with the outcropping rock; one at least I stared at for several minutes before I saw it at all.

      Then there was the huge extent of air. I do not know how it is, but this feeling of the air as a thing with dimensions is peculiar to mountainous countries. Between me and the dark curved ridge that closed the top of the valley there was perhaps three miles of air, perfectly clear, but somehow evident. It was keen, fine air, a pleasure to breathe.

      I stepped out briskly for the village, fairly glowing with satisfaction. As I went down the road the other mountain, the mountain in whose side Hafod was wedged, began to loom up behind me. Before, I had been too near to see it, too much under the first slopes. It was not until I was right at the village itself that the head of Penmawr rose up. It was a great high-shouldered mountain, with three ragged peaks; higher by a head and shoulders than the Saeth; imposing in its way, but lacking unity, and for dramatic beauty not to compare.

      The long quarry road ran up to its lower side and vanished round a shoulder, to reappear much higher and farther away. My little white box showed just under the road; the sun caught the panes of the two front windows.

      I did not see the village until I was almost on top of it. It was in a sheltered corry, hidden from our part of the valley by an overgrown series of hillocks that I took to be a glacial moraine. Below this place the identity of the valley changed; it was savage and rocky, but somehow less satisfactory. There was a crossroads; I turned to the right and there was the village a hundred yards from me, across the stream.

      It was a shock. I had not expected anything like it. It was a hard, rectilinear pattern, almost a cross, set on the rising slope of the Saeth ridge. The upright of the cross was the shiny macadam road on which I was walking, the cross-piece a lane running about thirty yards each way. In the lower left-hand space in the cross there was an official-looking building in a bald yard, obviously the school. The chapel stood in the right-hand top space. At the intersection I saw the bright red of the post-office.

      As I walked into the village, I saw that all the houses were exactly the same. They were built of slate, thick pieces either cut or left ragged, almost black. The windows were edged with yellow brick. The paint on the woodwork was everywhere a dark, purplish chocolate. There were no gardens at all: the houses rose straight from the earth.

      Those were my first impressions: they were mistaken. After I had been to the post-office (they had no tobacco; and in a way I was glad, because I was already ashamed of the weakness of my resolution) I walked about a little more and saw that there were four houses out of the pattern; they had front-door steps and railings. I had not noticed them before because they were overwhelmed by the monstrous chapel, which, like them, was covered with yellow stucco. It was a shocking piece of work: I got used to it, in time, but at first it made me gasp. I can hardly describe it; there is not much point, anyhow. It made a few bows in the direction of English church architecture (English church architecture of the ’80s) and a few more at each of the classical orders in turn.

      The post-office was the only shop; and it did not appear to have much in it – it was not the general store that I had expected.

      I wondered what the devil the village was doing there, what was its raison d’être. It looked like the outburst of a malignant building lunatic. I was still staring at the chapel when a gentle rain began to fall. At once the grey roofs turned black and the slate walls grew even darker.

      I hurried back to avoid a ducking, and as I came to the crossroads I looked at the village again. It was a monstrous thing and it should never have been called a village; but it was not without beauty if you considered the hard lines (harder still now in the rain) and mechanical pattern of stark rectangles and cubes against the unbounded sweep of dissolving mountainside. Still, I was not sorry that it was invisible from Hafod, and that our upper valley was shut clean away from any influence of that kind whatever.

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