CHAPTER VIII

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*ON THE EDGE OF LYONNESSE*

We had meant, when Helen's mother should come from Paris, to go back to Glastonbury and begin our journey again where we had left off. But when she came we thought better of it. We decided that, since we were going to the Southwest of England again, we might as well go all the way and see the Land's End. Then, we thought, we could go to Glastonbury just as well on the way back.

So it happened that when Helen's mother was with us again, we took the longest railway ride that we had taken yet, and at the end of it we found ourselves in Penzance. Penzance is the place where the pirates were, you know. We had always supposed that that was a made-up story and that there never were really any pirates of Penzance. But we found that the pirates were there still. Only now they do not scuttle ships any more, if they ever did; they keep hotels. But that is an unpleasant subject.

We set off the next morning for a long drive--which was to be partly a walk--to the Land's End. There were many things that were worth seeing before we got to the Land's End, or anywhere near it. First there was the harbor of Penzance, one of the prettiest that I ever looked out upon. And over on the other side of it, stately and beautiful against the summer morning sky, stood St. Michael's Mount. St. Michael's Mount is a cone-shaped hill, rising high out of the water, with a castle on the top of it. It is one of those things that are so picturesque that they surprise you when you see them in a real scene, because they look too perfect to belong outside a painted picture.

"And who do you suppose used to live on the top of that hill?" I said. "Why, the old giant Cormoran, the one whom Jack the Giant-Killer knocked on the head with his pickaxe, the very first giant whom he killed. Of course I should not think of telling you that story, at your time of life; I only tell you that there is the place. But I might tell you about another giant, and let you try to straighten out his story, if you like, better than I can. Over across the channel from here, in France, there is another St. Michael's Mount. I have never seen it, but the picture of it looks as much like this one as if it were its own brother. I think that I have told you before that the people of old days used to think that high hills belonged somehow to St. Michael. Well, over there on the other St. Michael's Mount lived another giant with whom King Arthur himself once had a little tussle. The giant's name was Ryence, and he had a mantle trimmed with kings' beards. You remember something, perhaps, that I told you once about a King named Ryence, who had a mantle trimmed with kings' beards. It is rather curious that there should be two of them.

"It was when King Arthur went over to France on his way to fight the Emperor of Rome that he heard of this giant. He was a terror to the whole country, for he killed hundreds of people and spoiled crops, and his favorite food was little boys. I don't know why he liked little boys so much better than little girls, but I suppose he knew more about which were the better to eat than I do.

"When Arthur heard about the giant he took Sir Kay and Sir Bedivere with him and went to the foot of the hill. There he told them to wait for him, and went up the hill alone. He found the giant sitting before a fire cooking a man for his supper. Arthur got close to him and wounded him with his sword before the giant knew that he was there. Then he sprang up and caught hold of Arthur, and they both fell and rolled over and over each other clear to the bottom of the hill, and Arthur managed to give the giant two or three more wounds on the way. Kay and Bedivere ran to see if the King was killed, and they found that he was scarcely hurt at all and that the giant was dead.

"I don't say that there is anything so very remarkable about that. It is just a plain sort of every-day giant story. But here are the strange points, I think. Here were two hills looking wonderfully alike and with the same name, and a giant lived and was killed on each of them. And here were two giants, both named Ryence, for King Ryence was a giant, too, and they both had mantles trimmed with kings' beards, and Arthur killed one and beat the other. It looks to me as if two stories, at least, had got a little mixed, or else one story twisted in two. How does it look to you?"

There is no reason, that I can see, why I should try to tell you all about the way from Penzance to the Land's End. It will not do you much good to know that it was grand and beautiful, as long as you were not there to see its grandeur and its beauty. We stopped at St. Buryan, and a very old woman showed us the church. It is a curious old place, and it has some fine carvings. But the old woman, who showed us everything and explained it to us, could not understand what there was about it that we found interesting. She had been showing this church to people, she said, for more than fifty years, and she had never been able to make out yet why they wanted to see it.

Then we went on to see the Logan Rock, and got a guide to find it for us. We could never have found it for ourselves, because it is so mixed up with so many other rocks. It is a huge rocking stone. It weighs I don't know how many tons, but a strong man can move it a little, if he knows just how and where to take hold of it and push. The guide rocked it for us, and he said that we did it ourselves when we tried, but I think he flattered us. He helped us to climb on the top of it--not an easy thing to do at all--and then he rocked it with us sitting on it. As he led the way back he took us through a narrow passage between two great rocks and told us that we must each of us make a wish as we passed through and never tell what it was, and then it would come true. "But we don't need to ask what the young ladies wish," he said, "they all wish the same thing." We wondered how many years he had been making that same joke over and over again. No doubt he must have got some pretty tips by it, when there were young women and young men both in the party.

We were going to walk from here to the Land's End, five miles, for it was one of the places where we had been told that we must walk, so as to see the scenery. We had already told the driver to go on to the Land's End and wait there for us. The guide showed us how to go and offered to go with us, but we thought that we did not need him. "You won't be able to see the Scillys to-day," he said. "Sometimes you can see them from the Land's End, but it isn't clear enough to-day. But you can be sure of a fine day to-morrow. When it is clear enough to see the Scillys it almost always rains the next day."

So we felt cheered at missing a sight that we had hoped to see, and went on our way. All the way the walk was up headlands and down ravines, with many grand and beautiful pictures--great crags and domes and pinnacles of rock and deep valleys and gorges and caves, and the sea always crashing and roaring down below us.

And when we came to the Land's End, of course that was the best of all. For there the sea seemed rougher than anywhere else, though it was not a rough day. It was no new thing for us to stand on a point of rock, with all the land behind us and nothing but boundless ocean before us. We did not need to come to the Land's End or to England for that. But there was something awful and solemn about these towers of stone that stood here to keep the sea from washing England away, and about the sea that was working at them while we looked, dashing up against them and slipping back and dashing up again, as it had been doing for thousands of years before we had come to look, and as it would do for thousands of years after we were gone. And after all these ages of work and struggle the waves seemed to be still angry, still fierce and full of wrath that the land should resist them so long. "Old rocks," they seemed to say, "you think that you are firm and steady and strong. But wait--and wait--there is much time before both of us still. Stand against us as you will; we shall still clash and beat upon you, and at last, in spite of all your firmness, we shall wear and wash you away, and we shall cover you sometime as we covered old Lyonnesse."

Lyonnesse! That, after all, I believe, is the wonderful thing to think of at the Land's End. "Yes, now," I said, "we are looking straight out over Lyonnesse--Tristram's country, the country that is lost. This is where it began, and it stretched away out there where there is nothing now but ocean, away out to the Scilly Islands, which we are not to see to-day. For thirty miles old Lyonnesse reached out from here, and even now, they say, for all that way, the bottom of the ocean lies at an even depth, and not like the bottom in other places. And they say, too, that when the water had covered Lyonnesse for so long that people had almost forgotten that there ever was any land there, the fishermen used to think of it again, because they sometimes drew up their hooks with pieces of doors and windows caught upon them. And nothing more than these ever came back of a country that had its towns and its fields and its forests and its people, which were all lost under the water together.

"And I remember an old book which says that more than Lyonnesse was taken away from Cornwall by the sea. For the old book says that St. Michael's Mount, which we saw this morning, used to have another name, that meant 'the rock in the wood.' And from this it was thought that St. Michael's Mount stood in a forest once, and not in the sea, as it does now. And the book, which was written about three hundred years ago, says that even then, when the tides were low around St. Michael's Mount, the stumps and roots of great trees were sometimes seen half buried in the sand."

Perhaps this is all nothing but old fable, but the land of Cornwall and the sea of Cornwall look as if it were true. How could these terrible waves and tempests tear and beat and surge upon this country, even with its walls of rock, without taking something away? You can laugh at the old wives' tales--if it is your way to laugh at such things--it is not ours--while you are at home, but when you stand at the Land's End and look out to sea, if you have a bit of the love of a story in you, you must and you will believe in Lyonnesse.

[Illustration: The Land's End]

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