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GLASHGAR.
Up and up the hill went Gibbie. The path ceased altogether; but
when up is the word in one's mind -- and up had grown almost a fixed
idea with Gibbie -- he can seldom be in doubt whether he is going
right, even where there is no track. Indeed in all more arduous
ways, men leave no track behind them, no finger-post -- there is
always but the steepness. He climbed and climbed. The mountain
grew steeper and barer as he went, and he became absorbed in his
climbing. All at once he discovered that he had lost the stream,
where or when he could not tell. All below and around him was red
granite rock, scattered over with the chips and splinters detached
by air and wind, water and stream, light and heat and cold.
Glashgar was only about three thousand feet in height, but it was
the steepest of its group -- a huge rock that, even in the midst of
masses, suggested solidity.
Not once while he ascended had the idea come to him that by and by
he should be able to climb no farther. For aught he knew there were
oat-cakes and milk and sheep and collie dogs ever higher and higher
still. Not until he actually stood upon the peak did he know that
there was the earthly hitherto -- the final obstacle of unobstancy,
the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was to human foot
impervious. The sun was about two hours towards the west, when
Gibbie, his little legs almost as active as ever, surmounted the
final slope. Running up like a child that would scale heaven he
stood on the bare round, the head of the mountain, and saw, with an
invading shock of amazement, and at first of disappointment, that
there was no going higher: in every direction the slope was
downward. He had never been on the top of anything before. He had
always been in the hollows of things. Now the whole world lay
beneath him. It was cold; in some of the shadows lay snow -- weary
exile from both the sky and the sea and the ways of them -- captive in
the fetters of the cold -- prisoner to the mountain top; but Gibbie
felt no cold. In a glow with the climb, which at the last had been
hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul with the
feeling that he was above everything that was, uplifted on the very
crown of the earth, he stood in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow,
the conqueror of height, the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of
space. Nobody knew of such marvel but him! Gibbie had never even
heard the word poetry, but none the less was he the very stuff out
of which poems grow, and now all the latent poetry in him was set a
swaying and heaving -- an ocean inarticulate because unobstructed -- a
might that could make no music, no thunder of waves, because it had
no shore, no rocks of thought against which to break in speech. He
sat down on the topmost point; and slowly, in the silence and the
loneliness, from the unknown fountains of the eternal consciousness,
the heart of the child filled. Above him towered infinitude,
immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his eye in a soaring
dome of blue -- the one visible symbol informed and insouled of the
eternal, to reveal itself thereby. In it, centre and life, lorded
the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south and east from
the endless heaps of the world, that lifted themselves in all
directions. Down their sides ran the streams, down busily, hasting
away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back to the
ocean-heart -- through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks and
willowy marsh. Behind the valleys rose mountains; and behind the
mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own
mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf.
Gibbie sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that
had been to him the universe, was dropped and lost, like a thing
that was now nobody's, in far indistinguishable distance; and he who
had lost it had climbed upon the throne of the world. The air was
still; when a breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down
of a feather, and the stillness was there again. The stillness grew
great, and slowly descended upon him. It deepened and deepened.
Surely it would deepen to a voice! -- it was about to speak! It was
as if a great single thought was the substance of the silence, and
was all over and around him, and closer to him than his clothes,
than his body, than his hands. I am describing the indescribable,
and compelled to make it too definite for belief. In colder speech,
an experience had come to the child; a link in the chain of his
development glided over the windlass of his uplifting; a change
passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God,
when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to
believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen
spreads her wings over her eggs -- as often as the thought of God came
to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of Glashgar.
As he sat, with his eyes on the peak he had just chosen from the
rest as the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a cloud begin
to grow upon it. The cloud grew, and gathered, and descended,
covering its sides as it went, until the whole was hidden. Then
swiftly, as he gazed, the cloud opened as it were a round window in
the heart of it, and through that he saw the peak again. The next
moment a flash of blue lightning darted across the opening, and
whether Gibbie really saw what follows, he never could be sure, but
always after, as often as the vision returned, in the flash he saw a
rock rolling down the peak. The clouds swept together, and the
window closed. The next thing which in after years he remembered
was, that the earth, mountains, meadows, and streams, had vanished;
everything was gone from his sight, except a few yards around him of
the rock upon which he sat, and the cloud that hid world and heaven.
Then again burst forth the lightning. He saw no flash, but an
intense cloud-illumination, accompanied by the deafening crack, and
followed by the appalling roar and roll of the thunder. Nor was it
noise alone that surrounded him, for, as if he were in the heart and
nest of the storm, the very wind-waves that made the thunder rushed
in driven bellowing over him, and had nearly swept him away. He
clung to the rock with hands and feet. The cloud writhed and
wrought and billowed and eddied, with all the shapes of the wind,
and seemed itself to be the furnace-womb in which the thunder was
created. Was this then the voice into which the silence had been
all the time deepening? -- had the Presence thus taken form and
declared itself? Gibbie had yet to learn that there is a deeper
voice still into which such a silence may grow -- and the silence not
be broken. He was not dismayed. He had no conscience of wrong, and
scarcely knew fear. It was an awful delight that filled his spirit.
Mount Sinai was not to him a terror. To him there was no wrath in
the thunder any more than in the greeting of the dog that found him
in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky so righteous as
to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness of the
children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood. Gibbie sat
calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and
smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and
ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare
crest of the mountain the water poured down its sides, as if its
springs were in the rock itself, and not in the bosom of the cloud
above. The tumult at last seized Gibbie like an intoxication; he
jumped to his feet, and danced and flung his arms about, as if he
himself were the storm. But the uproar did not last long. Almost
suddenly it was gone, as if, like a bird that had been flapping the
ground in agony, it had at last recovered itself, and taken to its
great wings and flown. The sun shone out clear, and in all the blue
abyss not a cloud was to be seen, except far away to leeward, where
one was spread like a banner in the lonely air, fleeting away, the
ensign of the charging storm -- bearing for its device a segment of
the many-coloured bow.
And now that its fierceness was over, the jubilation in the softer
voices of the storm became audible. As the soul gives thanks for
the sufferings that are overpast, offering the love and faith and
hope which the pain has stung into fresh life, so from the sides of
the mountain ascended the noise of the waters the cloud had left
behind. The sun had kept on his journey; the storm had been no
disaster to him; and now he was a long way down the west, and
Twilight, in her grey cloak, would soon be tracking him from the
east, like sorrow dogging delight. Gibbie, wet and cold, began to
think of the cottage where he had been so kindly received, of the
friendly face of its mistress, and her care of the lamb. It was not
that he wanted to eat. He did not even imagine more eating, for
never in his life had he eaten twice of the same charity in the same
day. What he wanted was to find some dry hole in the mountain, and
sleep as near the cottage as he could. So he rose and set out. But
he lost his way; came upon one precipice after another, down which
only a creeping thing could have gone; was repeatedly turned aside
by torrents and swampy places; and when the twilight came, was still
wandering upon the mountain. At length he found, as he thought, the
burn along whose bank he had ascended in the morning, and followed
it towards the valley, looking out for the friendly cottage. But
the first indication of abode he saw, was the wall of the grounds of
the house through whose gate he had looked in the morning. He was
then a long way from the cottage, and not far from the farm; and the
best thing he could do was to find again the barn where he had slept
so well the night before. This was not very difficult even in the
dusky night. He skirted the wall, came to his first guide, found
and crossed the valley-stream, and descended it until he thought he
recognized the slope of clover down which he had run in the morning.
He ran up the brae, and there were the solemn cones of the
corn-ricks between him and the sky! A minute more and he had crept
through the cat-hole, and was feeling about in the dark barn.
Happily the heap of straw was not yet removed. Gibbie shot into it
like a mole, and burrowed to the very centre, there coiled himself
up, and imagined himself lying in the heart of the rock on which he
sat during the storm, and listening to the thunder winds over his
head. The fancy enticed the sleep which before was ready enough to
come, and he was soon far stiller than Ariel in the cloven pine of
Sycorax.
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