Chapter VI

It was the longest day of the year,--so said the penny almanac in the Mahntooroch Hotel. So, with richer certainty, did we ourselves asseverate before nightfall. Before 9 A.M. the Tommies and their lop-sided burdens had been launched on their twelve miles’ journey to Beddgelert; and we, something depressed in spirit by the farewell warnings of our friend the roasted tourist, were hardening our hearts to the ascent of Snowdon.

We rode up through the Plas Oakley Woods, along the ramparts of the glens, and reaching higher levels, came on a vision of a mountain lake dreaming in the early sun. Three or four coots beat a silver path across it with their black wings, in alarm that testified to the rarity of the June tourist, and the pine-woods round it still held the purple shadows of morning. Out on the bare hills beyond it the heather was in bloom, and the wind’s freshness was softened by the scent of it. The Tommies crawled along with well-considered sluggishness. They had by this time a complete mastery of our characters. In the mornings they found that we were too light-hearted to resent their laziness, and in the evenings too humane. This, and the fact that Miss O’Flannigan made from Tom’s back a sketch of nothing in particular, may account for our having taken five hours over the twelve miles. However, it may be conceded that they were hilly miles, and were withal as circuitous in their approach of a given point as an Irishman in getting to the focal point of a bargain. Indeed, one turn of the road looked as if it might have

supplied the Irishman himself, when it led us past a dreary cabin whose ambition to be rectangularly frightful yielded to the prior necessity of being crooked in a manner that we thought to be achievable only by the Irish cottage architect. With squalid, squinting eyes it leered aside upon its cabbage-garden and the pigs that rooted therein, and outwards to the sea down a bare valley. We were sensible then, for the first time, of a greyness that was blunting the sunshine, and the cabin with its malign, dirty face seemed responsible for it.

The extremes of landscape met where tumbled heaps of grey rock slanted down from the sky to the flat boggy plain that runs out to Port Madoc. That the road should be protected from these suspended avalanches by a single strand of wire-fencing is a fact that no doubt admits of explanation, but at a cursory view of things its object was not apparent. The loneliness was absolute, whether we looked inland to crags and oak-woods, or seaward along the marshes, but by this time we did not expect anything except loneliness. Coventry on a memorable occasion was not more straitly penned behind its shutters than was Wales as we rode through it. The wayside villages seemed asleep, the farmhouse doors were shut, and the silence of the roads was comparable only to that supremest of earth’s silences when one is thrown out of a run, and hounds, riders, and runners have seemingly passed away into eternity.

Turning inland again among the low oak-woods, the country was rich and flowery, and always silent, and we ourselves were hot and speechless under the hot, grey sky. A discovery that one of the girths was rubbing off the skin behind Tom’s foreleg occasioned a delay fraught with gloom, difficulty, and the tongues of buckles. Miss O’Flannigan mounted a rock, and fell to sketching the unsketchable--a habit with her in moments of inglorious crisis, her sole contribution to the difficulty being a stout square of chamois leather which she wore on her chest in memory of a departed cold. With this interesting relic I padded the girth, and we proceeded in despondency. It was one of the junctures when the Tommies, and riding-tours generally, became intolerable, and we were on the dangerous verge of admitting as much, when our attention became concentrated on six black objects advancing towards us in single file along the barren perspective of road. They were a walking party, evidently engaged in record-breaking, and as with purple, streaming faces they swung past us, we accepted the object-lesson, and thanked heaven for the Tommies.

Following on this was a mile of solitude and sinuous advance through craggy places; then, suddenly, the Pass of Aberglaslyn, and the tourist by companies--especially the clerical tourist. There were four long black coats, and as many soft black felt hats, on or about Aberglaslyn bridge, each with a remarkable proportion of female adherents, to whom, guide-book in hand, or with the unaided gush of inspiration, they defined the beauties of the Pass. We are naturally modest, but we cannot refrain from mentioning that from the moment we came in sight we usurped the position of the beauties of the Pass. The adherents of the clergy turned with ecstasy from the contemplation of nature to feast their eyes upon us, our sun-burned straw hats, our equally sun-burned noses, and our bulging wallets.

We are disposed to deal leniently with an unsuccessful rival, and inured though Aberglaslyn must now be to picturesque description, we will spare it further adjectives. There was a poor woman once in the county of Cork who was shown a dazzling array of wedding-presents. Speech first failed her, and then she said: “Mother of God! it’s like a circus.” Thus, and with such a humble reverence, do we say of Aberglaslyn Pass, that it is like a circus.

There is something at once gallant and touching about the way in which the English tourist places his hand in that of convention, and is led by her, uncomplaining, through very arid places. This elderly generalisation does not, by so much as a backward glance, include Aberglaslyn, with its cliffs and fir-trees, and mountain-sides flushed with blossoming heather; it is for the moment concentrated upon the grave of Gelert, its railings and

little stone pillars, erected possibly by the Town Commissioners to supply a want long felt by tourists of an object for a short walk. The selectors of the site have been carried away by a sense of fitness probably adhering since the days when they buried their pet rabbits in the back-garden, and, with guileless convention, they have erected the tomb of Gelert under a tree, a healthy one in the prime of life, standing discreetly and yet conveniently in a roadside field. The sentiment of the back-garden has been added at a touch by the railing, and the result suffices to the tourist. Forth to it, in duteous pilgrimage, go the brides and bridegrooms, seeking in the long vague forenoons of holiday for some occupation that shall savour of the compulsory, and at all events make them glad to get home again for luncheon. The mile of road between Gelert’s grave and his village was punctuated with the newly married; and, even at the risk of supporting another conventionality, it must be recorded that the distance that separated each bride from her groom was noticeable, and seemed to indicate a desire to economise conversation.

Do the brides and bridegrooms support the venerable fraud who sits outside the Goat Hotel in full Welsh costume, selling rag-doll replicas of herself? It would seem so, for she apparently prospers, and we cannot believe that the hotel-keepers, who form the balance of the population, can buy many rag dolls.

The sky had grown grey, the air chilly, the weather was turning nasty, the saddles had perceptibly turned and were extremely nasty. These things may perhaps extenuate our bad taste in finding Beddgelert a trifle disappointing. It seemed to lack a central point; even the guide-books have to admit that its lions are not on the spot, although it seductively adds that they are within an “easy walk.” Snowdon was also included among the objects of interest within an easy walk, but a brief colloquy with the manageress of the Prince Llewellyn Hotel stamped the statement as a vicious flight of fancy.

“It’s a good four miles,” said that intelligent woman, regarding us compassionately; “but there _is_ ladies that think nothing of that.”

We hastened to assure her that we were not of such, and a few moments of confidential discussion at the bar sufficed for a programme superior to any that the guide-books had to suggest. It is in such affairs as these that the landlady and the coffee-room-maid show qualities not to be found in the landlord, or even the ostler. They can rise above convention; they have an instinctive perception of what the tourist, in his bewildered heart, prefers, but fears to acknowledge; and they are capable of giving advice with a sound disregard for the logic of precedent. Therefore it befell that our bones are not now bleaching on the “Beddgelert ascent” of Snowdon, and that, after a large cold lunch, which included a delicious but embarrassingly stony cherry-pie, we found ourselves riding slowly towards the village of Rhyddu.

This was the scheme of the manageress. We were to ride on to Rhyddu, leave the ponies at the Quellyn Arms, get a guide, and having ascended Snowdon by the shortest route, sleep on top, see the sun rise, and be back at Rhyddu for breakfast. It was almost alarming in its simplicity, and in the way in which it degraded the ascent of the highest mountain in England and Wales into a mere episode of the late afternoon. But, with a barometrical future so uncertain that, as Miss O’Flannigan’s cook is in the habit of saying, “you couldn’t tell a day from an hour,” its merit was too obvious to be disregarded.

Low as we had sunk in the social scale, we yet retained just enough self-respect to preserve us from asking the rare passer-by which of the misty bulks that confronted us was Snowdon; but none the less, we should have liked to know. Snowdon had been to our minds a lonely autocrat, unmistakable as Vesuvius or Fuji-yama; but here were four or five round-shouldered monsters, all of about the same height, and none quite as monstrous as we had expected. We settled on several, and tried successively to make the best of them, and to experience the sensations of awe which the guide-book assured us were inevitable under the circumstances; but the telegraph wire that had been given as our clue still led us onwards, and the village of Rhyddu seemed, like all our destinations, to have pitched its moving tent a mile beyond our estimate.

At length a line of unlovely grey houses stood by the roadside on a broad green ridge, the telegraph wire sent a feeler down into one of these, and a modest signboard presently introduced to us the Quellyn Arms. It was a very small hotel indeed, but it contained a smell of fried bacon that would have filled St Paul’s, and an ignorance of the English language that was almost equally stupendous. We were at this moment on a flank of Snowdon, as we stretched our stiff legs along the horse-hair chairs; the terminus of the Snowdon Railway was above us, within a stone’s-throw, and a toy train was curling incredibly round corners and down into a green valley that was dovetailed in among the great roots of the mountain. Outside the parlour window a thick-set figure with a long stick waited immovably--as immovably as Snowdon, or as the misty

cloud in which its horns were plunged. As we momently grew stiffer, the probability that the sun would rise next morning seemed slighter than usual, and we tried to persuade the thick-set man to regard the position from our point of view. But a Snowdon guide has an optimism about sunrises, and a conviction in the matter of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.

This, we were assured, was the longest day in the year. It would be light all night. There was a very good hotel on the top to which he, Griffith Roberts, had guided forty people the night before, all of whom had seen Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man at sunrise.

Miss Jones, the landlady’s daughter, interpreted these things to us, and we recognised compassion in her eye as she did so. Our craven hearts sank low; but we realised that, as Mark Twain has sufficingly expressed, we must “crowd through or bust.”