In a flash it had become the nave of a
cathedral, immense, solitary. Sombre and straight and tall, the walls
rose up to where the swaying roof sobered the mellow sunshine and only
let it pass dim and so, sacred. The wanton breeze, caught in the maze of
tufted pinnacles, filtered its chastened way, a pensive organist,
learned to draw grave litanies from the boughs and reverently voice the
air of sanctity. The fresh familiar scent hung for a smokeless incense,
breathing high ritual and redolent of pious mystery. No circumstance of
worship was unobserved. With one consent birds, beasts and insects made
not a sound. The precious pall of silence lay like a phantom cloud,
unruffled. Nature was on her knees.
The car fled on.
Out of the priestless sanctuary, up over the crest of the rise, into the
kiss of the sunlight we sailed, and so on to a blue-brown moor, all
splashed and dappled with the brilliant yellow of the gorse in bloom and
rolling away into the hazy distance like an untroubled sea. So for a
mile it flowed, a lazy pomp of purple, gold-flecked and glowing. Then
came soft cliffs of swelling woodland, rising to stay its course with
gentle dignity--walls that uplifted eyes found but the dwindled edge of
a far mightier flood that stretched and tossed, a leafy waste of
billows, flaunting more living shades of green than painters dream of,
laced here and there with gold and, once in a long while, shot with
crimson, rising and falling with Atlantic grandeur, till the eye
faltered, and the proud rich waves seemed to be breaking on the rosy
sky.
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