Hills and the Sea - Hilaire Belloc

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who is hairy by nature and a lurking fellow afraid of others, was reconciled to their easy comradeship, and would accompany them into the mountains when they were remote from mankind. Upon these occasions he revealed to them the life of trees and the spirits that haunt the cataracts, so that they heard voices calling where no one else had ever heard them, and that they saw stones turned into animals and men.

      Many things came to them in common. Once in the Hills, a thousand miles from home, when they had not seen men for a very long time, Dalua touched them with his wing, and they went mad for the space of thirty hours. It was by a stream in a profound gorge at evening and under a fretful moon. The next morning they lustrated themselves with water, and immediately they were healed.

      At another time they took a rotten old leaky boat they were poor and could afford no other—they took, I say, a rotten old leaky boat whose tiller was loose and whose sails mouldy, and whose blocks were jammed and creaking, and whose rigging frayed, and they boldly set out together into the great North Sea.

      It blew a capful, it blew half a gale, it blew a gale: little they cared, these sons of Ares, these cousins of the broad daylight! There mere no men on earth save these two who would not have got her under a trysail and a rag of a storm-jib with fifteen reefs and another: not so the heroes. Not a stitch would they take in. They carried all her canvas, and cried out to the north-east wind: "We know her better than you! She'll carry away before she capsizes, and she'll burst long before she'll carry away." So they ran before it largely till the bows were pressed right under, and it was no human poser that saved the gybe. They went tearing and foaming before it, singing a Saga as befitted the place and time. For it was their habit to sing in every place its proper song—in Italy a Ritornella, in Spain a Segeduilla, in Provence a Pastourou, in Sussex a Glee, but an the great North Sea a Saga. And they rolled at last into Orford Haven on the very tiptop of the highest tide that ever has run since the Noachic Deluge; and even so, as they crossed the bar they heard the grating of the keel. That night they sacrificed oysters to Poseidon.

      And when they slept the Sea Lady, the silver-footed one, came up through the waves and kissed them in their sleep; for she had seen no such men since Achilles. Then she went back through the waves with all her Nereids around her to where her throne is, beside her old father in the depths of the sea.

      In their errantry they did great good. It was they that rescued Andromeda, though she lied, as a woman will, and gave the praise to her lover. It was they, also, who slew the Tarasque on his second appearance, when he came in a thunderstorm across the broad bridge of Beaucaire, all scaled in crimson and gold, forty foot long and twenty foot high, galloping like an angry dog and belching forth flames and smoke. They also hunted down the Bactrian Bear, who had claws like the horns of a cow, and of whom it is written in the Sacred Books of the East that:

      A Bear out of Bactria came,

       And he wandered all over the world,

       And his eyes were aglint and aflame,

       And the tip of his caudal was curled.

      Oh! they hunted him down and they cut him up, and they cured one of his hams and ate it, thereby acquiring something of his mighty spirit. … And they it was who caught the great Devil of Dax and tied him up and swinged him with an ash-plant till he swore that he would haunt the woods no more.

      And here it is that you ask me for their names. Their names! Their names? Why, they gave themselves a hundred names: now this, now that, but always names of power. Thus upon that great march of theirs from Gascony into Navarre, one, on the crest of the mountains, cut himself a huge staff and cried loudly:

      "My name is URSUS, and this is my staff DREADNOUGHT: let the people in the Valley be afraid!"

      Whereat the other cut himself a yet huger staff, and cried out in a yet louder voice:

      "My name is TAURUS, and this is my staff CRACK-SKULL: let them tremble who live in the Dales!"

      And when they had said this they strode shouting down the mountain-side and conquered the town of Elizondo, where they are worshipped as gods to this day. Their names? They gave themselves a hundred names!

      "Well, well," you say to me then, "no matter about the names: what are names? The men themselves concern me! … Tell me," you go on, "tell me where I am to find them in the flesh, and converse with them. I am in haste to see them with my own eyes."

      It is useless to ask. They are dead. They will never again be heard upon the heaths at morning singing their happy songs: they will never more drink with their peers in the deep ingle-nooks of home. They are perished. They have disappeared. Alas! The valiant fellows!

      But lest some list of their proud deeds and notable excursions should be lost on earth, and turn perhaps into legend, or what is worse, fade away unrecorded, this book has been got together; in which will be found now a sight they saw together, and now a sight one saw by himself, and now a sight seen only by the other. As also certain thoughts and admirations which the second or the first enjoyed, or both together: and indeed many other towns, seas, places, mountains, rivers, and men—whatever could be crammed between the covers.

      And there is an end of it.

      Many of these pages have appeared in the "Speaker,"

       the "Pilot," the "Morning Post," the "Daily News."

       the "Pall Mall Magazine," the "Evening Standard,"

       the "Morning Leader," and the "Westminster Gazette."

       Table of Contents

      It was on or about a Tuesday (I speak without boasting) that my companion and I crept in by darkness to the unpleasant harbour of Lowestoft. And I say "unpleasant" because, however charming for the large Colonial yacht, it is the very devil for the little English craft that tries to lie there. Great boats are moored in the Southern Basin, each with two head ropes to a buoy, so that the front of them makes a kind of entanglement such as is used to defend the front of a position in warfare. Through this entanglement you are told to creep as best you can, and if you cannot (who could?) a man comes off in a boat and moors you, not head and stern, but, as it were, criss-cross, or slant-ways, so that you are really foul of the next berth alongside, and that in our case was a little steamer.

      Then when you protest that there may be a collision at midnight, the man in the boat says merrily, "Oh, the wind will keep you off," as though winds never changed or dropped.

      I should like to see moorings done that way, at Cowes, say, or in Southampton Water. I should like to see a lot of craft laid head and tail to the wind with a yard between each, and, when Lord Isaacs protested, I should like to hear the harbour man say in a distant voice, "Sic volo, sic jubeo" (a classical quotation misquoted, as in the South-country way), "the wind never changes here."

      Such as it was, there it was, and trusting in the wind and God's providence we lay criss-cross in Lowestoft South Basin. The Great Bear shuffled round the pole and streaks of wispy clouds lay out in heaven.

      The next morning there was a jolly great breeze from the East, and my companion said, "Let us put out to sea." But before I go further, let me explain to you and to the whole world what vast courage and meaning underlay these simple words. In what were we to put to sea?

      This little boat was but twenty-five feet over all. She had lived since 1864 in inland waters, mousing about rivers, and lying comfortably in mudbanks. She had a sprit seventeen foot outboard, and I appeal to the Trinity Brothers to explain what that means; a sprit dangerous and horrible where there are waves; a sprit that will catch every sea and wet the foot of your jib in the best of weathers; a sprit that weighs down already overweighted bows and buries them with every plunge. Quid dicam? A Sprit of Erebus. And why had the boat such a sprit? Because her mast was so far aft, her forefoot so deep and narrow, her helm so insufficient, that but for this gigantic sprit she would never come round, and even as it was she hung in stays and had to have her weather jib-sheet hauled in for about five minutes

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