Beautiful Wales by Edward Thomas

Author:Edward Thomas [Thomas, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

SNOWDON FROM LLANBERIS LAKE

The custom was old; the village was new, and it stood on the edge of a strange new land. Having passed it, the road dipped among sublime black hills of refuse from furnace and pit. The streams were rich with yellow water, purple water. Here and there were dim, shining, poisonous heaps of green and blue, like precious stones. There were railway lines everywhere, and on them trucks, full of scraps of metal, like sheaves of scimitars and other cruel weapons—still cruel, but hacked, often rusty, and expressing something more horrible than mere sharpness and ferocity. There were furnaces, crimson and gold; and beyond all, a white-clouded sky which said that it was over the sea.

In the early afternoon a grey mist invested all things, so that even when I was close to them, they seemed about to pass away, and I was tempted to walk regardless and straight ahead as the harper did in the tale.

It is told that a harper was asked to play and sing at a wedding. It was a fine day, and on his way he sometimes played over the melodies he most liked; and as he went, the fairies followed him, their little feet going fast and sharp like drumsticks. When he reached the house, the fairies were still behind him. They followed him in, and presently, since he again tuned his harp, the company began to dance, and the fairies with them; the house, which was a little one, did not impede them; and in no long time they all went dancing out of the house. The fairies, it is said, were not to be distinguished from the bridal party. They went on across well-known country, regardless and straight ahead, through a barn where men were threshing, through a hall where men were dining. Coming at last to a place he did not know, the harper ceased and became separated from the rest, and slept. When he awoke, he found himself in a pleasant place among very little people, and all that was asked of him was that he should play on the harp every night. Then one day he got leave to go out of the land of the fairies; but he left his harp there and could never get back again. He found that the others had returned. He could say nothing of the wedding day, except that he had never before harped so well.

And well did the mist harp. It was the one real credible thing among those furnaces, which were but as gaps in it, or as landscapes seen rapidly from small windows in a lofty house upon a hill.

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