I end this little book with an experience of my own, or rather a series of experiences, and will leave conclusions to a final chapter. I don't say that I have no others which could have found a place—indeed, there are many others. But they were fitful, momentary things, unaccountable and unrelated to each other, without the main clue which in itself is too intimate a thing to be revealed just yet, and I am afraid of compiling a catalogue. I have travelled far and wide across Europe in my day, not without spiritual experiences. If at some future time these co-ordinate into a body of doctrine I will take care to clothe that body in the vesture of print and paper. Here, meantime, is something of recent years.

My house at Broad Chalke stands in a narrow valley, which a little stream waters more than enough. This valley is barely a mile broad throughout its length, and in my village scarcely half so much. I can be in the hills in a quarter of an hour, and in five-and-twenty minutes find myself deeply involved, out of sight of man or his contrivances. The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved. Beautiful, with quiet and a solemn peacefulness of their own, they always are. They endure enormously, in sÆcula sÆculorum. Storms drive over them, mists and rains blot them out; rarely they are shrouded in a fleece of snow. In spring the clouds and the light hold races up their flanks; in summer they seem to drowse like weary monsters in the still and fervent heat. They are never profoundly affected by such changes of Nature's face; grow not awful, sharing her wrath, nor dangerously fair when she woos them with kisses to love. They are the quiet and sober spokesmen of earth, clad in Quaker greys and drabs. They show no crimson at sunset, no gilded livery at dawn. The grey deepens to cool purple, the brown glows to russet at such festal times. Early in the spring they may drape themselves in tender green, or show their sides dappled with the white of sheep. Flowers they bear, but secretly; little curious orchids, bodied like bees, eyed like spiders, flecked with the blood-drops of Attis or Adonis or some murdered shepherd-boy; pale scabious, pale cowslip, thyme that breathes sharp fragrance, "aromatic pain," as you crush it, potentilla, lady's slipper, cloudy blue milkwort, toad-flax that shows silver to the wind. Such as these they flaunt not, but wear for choiceness. You would not see them unless you knew them there. For denizens they have the hare, the fox, and the badger. Redwings, wheatears, peewits, and airy kestrels are the people of their skies.

I love above all the solitude they keep, and to feel the pulsing of the untenanted air. The shepherd and his sheep, the limping hare, lagging fox, wheeling, wailing plover; such will be your company: you may dip deeply into valleys where no others will be by, hear the sound of your own heart, or the shrilling of the wind in the upland bents. I have heard, indeed, half a mile above me, the singing of the great harps of wire which stretch from Sarum to Shaftesbury along the highest ridge; but such a music is no disturbance of the peace; rather, it assures you of solitude, for you wouldn't hear it were you not ensphered with it alone. There's a valley in particular, lying just under Chesilbury, where I choose most to be. Chesilbury, a huge grass encampment, three hundred yards square, with fosse and rampart still sharp, with a dozen gateways and three mist-pools within its ambit, which stands upon the ancient road and dominates two valleys. Below that, coming up from the south, is my charmed valley. There, I know, the beings whom I call Oreads, for want of a homelier word, haunt and are to be seen now and then. I know, because I myself have seen them.

I must describe this Oread-Valley more particularly, I believe. East and west, above it, runs the old road we call the Race-Plain—the highest ground hereabouts, rising from Harnham by Salisbury to end at Shaftesbury in Dorset. North of this ridge is Chesilbury Camp; immediately south of that is the valley. Here the falling flood as it drained away must have sucked the soil out sharply at two neighbouring points, for this valley has two heads, and between them stands a grass-grown bluff. The western vale-head is quite round but very steep. It faces due south and has been found grateful by thorns, elders, bracken and even heather. But the eastern head is sharper, begins almost in a point. From that it sweeps out in a huge demi-lune of cliff, the outer cord being the east, the inner hugging the bluff. Facing north from the valley, facing these two heads, you see the eastern of them like a great amphitheatre, its steep embayed side so smooth as to seem the work of men's hands. It is too steep for turf; it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not. No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her people more than once. And the first sign I had of them was this.

I

I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew. About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at all—and that was fitful—came from a fern-owl which, from a thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with the night.

The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt, the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short course and died. You never feel lonely when you have the stars; yet they do not pry upon you. You can hide nothing from them, and need not seek to hide. If they have foreknowledge, they nurse no after-thought.

Now, to-night, as I looked and wondered at their beauty, I became aware of a phenomenon untold before. Yet so quietly did it come, and so naturally, that it gave me no disturbance, nor forced itself upon me. A luminous ring, a ring of pale fire, in shape a long, narrow, and fluctuating oval, became discernible in the sky south of my stand-point, midway (I thought) between me and the south.

It was diaphanous, or diaphanous to strong light behind it. At one time I saw the great beacon of the south-west (Saturn, I think) burning through it; not within the ring, but from behind the litten vapour of which the ring was made. Lesser fires than his were put out by it. It varied very much in shape as it spread or drew out, as a smoker's blue rings are varied by puffs of wind. Now it was a perfect round, now so long as to be less a hoop than a fine oblong. Sometimes it was pear-shaped, sometimes amorphous; bulbous here, hollow there. And there seemed movement; I thought now and again that it was spiral as well as circular, that it might, under some stress of speed, writhe upward like dust in a whirlwind. It wavered, certainly, in elevation, lifting, sinking, wafted one way or another with the ease of a cloud of gnats. It was extraordinarily beautiful and exciting. I watched it for an hour.

At times I seemed to be conscious of more than appearance. I cannot speak more definitely than that. Music was assuredly in my head, very shrill, piercing, continuous music. No air, no melody, but the expectancy of an air, preparation for it, a prelude to melodious issues. You may say the overture to some vast aerial symphony; I know not what else to call it. I was never more than alive to it, never certain of it. It was as furtive, secret, and tremulous as the dawn itself. Now, just as under that shivering and tentative opening of great music you are conscious of the fierce energy of violins, so was I aware, in this surmise of music, of wild forces which made it. I thought not of voices but of wings. I was sure that this ring of flame whirled as well as floated in the air; the motion and the sound, alike indecipherable, were one and the same to me.

I watched it, I say, for an hour: it may have been for two hours. By-and-by it came nearer, gradually very near. It was now dazzling, not to be looked at full; but its rate of approach was inappreciable, and as it came on I was able to peer into it and see nothing but its beauty. There was a core of intensity, intolerably bright; about that, lambency but no flame, in which I saw leaves and straws and fronds of fern flickering, spiring, heeling over and over. That it whirled as well as floated was now clear, for a strong wind blew before and after it as it rushed by. This happened as I sat there. Blinding but not burning, heralded by a keen wind, it came by me and passed; a swift wind followed it as it went. It swept out toward the hollow of the eastern valley-head, seemed to strike upon that and glance upward; thence it swept gladly up, streaming to the zenith, grew thin, fine and filmy, and seemed to melt into the utmost stars. I had seen wonders and went home full of thought.

II

I first saw an Oread in this place in a snow-storm which, driven by a north-westerly gale, did havoc to the lowlands, but not to the folded hills. I had pushed up the valley in the teeth of the storm to see it under the white stress. It was hard work for me and my dog; I had to wade knee-deep, and he to jump, like a cat in long grass, through the drifts. But we reached our haven and found shelter from the weather. High above us where we stood the snow-flakes tossed and rioted, but before they fell upon us being out of the wind, they drifted idly down, come ... in Alpe senza vento. The whole valley was purely white, its outlines blurred by the slant-driving snow. There was not a living creature to be seen, and my dog, a little sharp-nosed black beast, shivered as he looked about, with wide eyes and quick-set ears, for a friendly sight, and held one paw tentatively in the air, as if he feared the cold.

Suddenly he yelped once, and ran, limping on three legs or scuttling on all four, over the snow toward the great eastern escarpment, but midway stopped and looked with all his might into its smoothed hollow. His jet-black ears stood sharp as a hare's; through the white scud I was conscious that he trembled. He gazed into the sweep of the curving hill, and following the direction he gave me, all my senses quick, I gazed also, but for a while saw nothing.

Very gradually, without alarm on my part, a blur of colour seemed to form itself and centre in one spot, half-way up the concave of the down; very pale yellow, a soft, lemon colour. At first scarcely more than a warm tinge to the snow, it took shape as I watched it, and then body also. It was now opaque within semi-transparency; one could trace an outline, a form. Then I made out of it a woman dressed in yellow; a slim woman, tawny-haired, in a thin smock of lemon-yellow which flacked and bellied in the gale. Her hair blew out to it in snaky streamers, sideways. Her head was bent to meet the cold, her bare white arms were crossed, and hugged her shoulders, as if to keep her bosom warm. From mid-thigh downward she was bare and very white, yet distinct upon the snow. That was the white of chilled flesh I could see. Though she wore but a single garment, and that of the thinnest and shortest, though she suffered cold, hugged herself and shivered, she was not of our nature, to die of such exposure. Her eyes, as I could guess, were long-enduring and steadfast. Her lips were not blue, though her teeth seemed to chatter; she was not rigid with the stiffening that precedes frozen death. Drawing near her by degrees, coming within fifteen yards of where she stood and passioned, though she saw me, waited for me, in a way expected me, she showed neither fear nor embarrassment, nor appealed by looks for shelter. She was, rather, like a bird made tame by winter, that finds the lesser fear swallowed up in a greater. For myself, as when one finds one's self before a new thing, one stands and gazes, so was I before this being of the wild. I would go no nearer, speak I could not. But I had no fear. She was new to me not strange. I felt that she and I belonged to worlds apart; that as soon might I hope to be familiar with fox or marten as with her. My little black dog was of the same mind. He was glad when I joined him, and wagged his little body—tail he has none—to say so. But he had no eyes for me, nor I for him. We stood together for company, and filled our eyes with the tenant of the waste. How long we watched her I have no notion, but the day fell swiftly in and found us there.

She was, I take it, quite young, she was slim and of ordinary proportions. When I say that I mean that she had nothing inhuman about her stature, was neither giant nor pygmy. Whether she was what we call good-looking or not I find it impossible to determine, for when strangeness is so added to beauty as to absorb and transform it, our standards are upset and balances thrown out. She was pale to the lips, had large, fixed and patient eyes. Her arms and legs showed greyish in the white storm, but where the smock was cut off the shadows it made upon her were faintly warm. One of her knees was bent, the foot supported only by the toes. The other was firm upon the ground: she looked, to the casual eye, to be standing on one leg. Her eyes in a stare covered me, but were not concerned to see me so near. They had the undiscerning look of one whose mind is numbed, as hers might well be. Shelter—a barn, a hayrick—lay within a mile of her; and yet she chose to suffer the cold, and was able to endure it. She knew it, I supposed, for a thing not to be avoided; she took it as it came—as she would have taken the warmth and pleasure of the sun. We humankind with our wits for ever turned inward to ourselves, grieve or exult as we bid ourselves: she, like all other creatures else, was not in that self-relation; her parts were closer-knit, and could not separate to envisage each other. So, at least, I read her—that she lived as she could and as she must, neither looked back with regret nor forward with longing. Time present, the flashing moment, was all her being. That state will never be ours again.

I discovered before nightfall what she waited for there alone in the cruel weather. A moving thing emerged from the heart of the white fury, came up the valley along the shelving down: a shape like hers, free-moving, thinly clad, suffering yet not paralysed by the storm. It shaped as a man, a young man, and her mate. Taller, darker, stoutlier made, his hardy legs were browner, and so were his arms—crossed like hers over his breast and clasping his shoulders. His head was bare, dark and crisply covered with short hair. His smock whipped about him before, as the wind drove it; behind him it flacked and fluttered like a flag. Patiently forging his way, bowing his head to the gale, he came into range; and she, aware of him, waited.

He came directly to her. They greeted by touchings. He stretched out his hands to her, touched her shoulders and sides. He touched both her cheeks, her chin, the top of her head, all with the flat of the palm. He stroked her wet and streaming hair. He held her by the shoulders and peered into her face, then put both arms about her and drew her to him. She, who had so far made no motions of her own, now uncrossed her arms and daintily touched him in turn. She put both her palms flat upon his breast; next on his thighs, next, being within the circle of his arms, she put up her hands and cupped his face. Then, with a gesture like a sigh, she let them fall to his waist, fastened them about him and let her head lie on his bosom. She shut her eyes, seemed contented and appeased. He clasped her, with a fine, protecting air upon him, looking down tenderly at her resting head. So they stood together in the dusk, while the wind tore at their thin covering, and the snow, lying, made a broad patch of white upon his shoulder.

Breathless I looked at them, and my dog forgot to be cold. High on his haunches, with lifted forepaw and sharp-cocked ears, he watched, trembled and whined.

After a while, impatient as it appeared of the ravaging storm, the male drew the female to the ground. They used no language, as we understand it, and made no sign that I could see, but rather sank together to get the shelter of the drift. He lay upon the snow, upon the weather side, she close beside him. They crouched like two birds in a storm, and hid their heads under their interlacing arms. He gave the weather his back, and raised himself on his elbow, the better to shield her. Within his arm she lay and cuddled to him snugly. I can describe his action no more closely than by saying that he covered her as a hen her chick. As a partridge grouts with her wings in a dusty furrow, so he worked in the powdered snow to make her a nest. When the night fell upon them, with its promise of bitter frost in the unrelenting wind, she lay screened against its rigours by the shelter of him. They were very still. Their heads were together, their cheeks touched. I believe that they slept.

III

In the autumn, in harvest-time, I saw her with a little one. She was lying now, deeply at ease, in the copse wood of the valley-head, within a nest of brake-fern, and her colouring was richer, more in tune with the glory of the hour. She had a burnt glow in her cheeks; her hair showed the hue of the corn which, not a mile away, our people were reaping afield. From where we were, she and I, one could hear the rattle of the machine as it swept down the tall and serried wheat. It was the top of noon when I found her; the sun high in heaven, but so fierce in his power that you saw him through a mist of his own making, and the sky all about him white as a sea-fog. The Oread's body was sanguine brown, only her breast, which I saw half-revealed through a slit in her smock, was snowy white. It was the breast of a maiden, not of a mother with a young child.

She leaned over it and watched it asleep. Once or twice she touched its head in affection; then presently looked up and saw me. If I had had no surprise coming upon her, neither now had she. Her eyes took me in, as mine might take in a tree not noticed before, or a flowering bush, or a finger-post. Such things might well be there, and might well not be; I had no particular interest for her, and gave her no alarm. Nothing assures me so certainly of her remoteness from myself, and of my kinship with her too, as this absence of shock.

She allowed me to come nearer, and nearer still, to stand close over her and examine the child. She did not lift her head, but I knew that she was aware of me; for her eyelids lifted and fell quickly, and showed me once or twice her watchful eyes. She was indeed a beautiful creature, exquisite in make and finish. Her skin shone like the petals of certain flowers. There is one especially, called Sisyrinchium, whose common name of Satin-flower describes a surface almost metallic in its lustre. I thought of that immediately: her skin drank in and exhaled light. I could not hit upon the stuff of which her shift was made. It looked like coarse silk, had a web, had fibres or threads. It may have been flax, but that it was much too sinuous. It seemed to stick to the body where it touched, even to seek the flesh where it did not touch, that it might cling like gossamer with invisible tentacles. In colour it was very pale yellow, not worn nor stained. It was perfectly simple, sleeveless, and stopped half-way between the hip and the knee. I looked for, but could not discover, either hem or seam. Her feet and hands were very lovely, the toes and fingers long and narrow, rosy-brown. I had full sight of her eyes for one throbbing moment. Extraordinarily bright, quick and pulsing, waxing and waning in intensity (as if an inner light beat in them), of the grey colour of a chipped flint stone. The lashes were long, curving and very dark; they were what you might call smut-colour and gave a blurred effect to the eyes which was strange. This, among other things, was what set her apart from us, this and the patient yet palpitating stare of her regard. She looked at me suddenly, widely and full, taking in much more than me, yet making me the centre of her vision. It gave me the idea that she was surprised at my nearness and ready for any attack, but did not seek to avoid it. There I was overstanding her and her offspring; and what was must be.

Of the little one I could not see much. It was on its side in the fern, fast asleep. Its arms were stretched up the slope, its face was between them. Its knees were bent and a little foot tucked up to touch its body. Quite naked, brown all over, it was as plump and smooth and tender as a little pig. But it was not pink; it was very brown.

All nature seemed at the top of perfection that wonderful day. A hawk soared high in the blue, bees murmured all about, the distance quivered. I could see under the leaves of a great mullein the bright eyes, then the round body of a mouse. Afar off the corn-cutter rattled and whirred, and above us on the ridgeway some workmen sat at their dinner under the telegraph wires. Men were all about us at their affairs with Nature's face; and here stood I, a man of themselves, and at my feet the Oread lay at ease and watched her young. There was food for wonder in all this, but none for doubt. Who knows what his neighbour sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks secret from the others; every species of us the centre of his universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at times one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no more, perhaps the best thing we win from that is the conviction that we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything. Here, now, was I, common, blundering, trampling, make-shift man, peering upon my Oread—fairy of the hill, whatever she was—and tempted to gauge her by my man-taught balances of right and wrong, and use and wont. Was that young male who had sheltered her in the snow her mate in truth, the father of her young one? Or what sort of mating had been hers? What wild love? What mysteries of the night? And where was he now? And was he one, or were they many, who companioned this beautiful thing? And would he come if I waited for him? And would he share her watch, her quiet content, her still rapture?

Idle, man-made questions, custom-taught! I did wait. I sat by her waiting. But he did not come.

IV

A month later, in October, I saw a great assembling of Oreads, by which I was able to connect more than one experience. I could now understand the phenomenon of the luminous ring.

I reached the valley by about six o'clock in the evening. It was twilight, not yet dusk. The sun was off the hollow, which lay in blue mist, but above the level of the surrounding hills the air was bathed in the sunset glow. The hush of evening was over all, the great cup of the down absolutely desert; there were no birds, nor voices of birds; not a twig snapped, not a leaf rustled. Imperceptibly the shadows lengthened, faded with the light; and again behind the silence I guessed at, rather than discerned, a preparatory, gathering music. So finally, by twos and threes, they came to their assembling.

Once more I never saw them come. Out of the mist they drifted together. There had been a moment when they were not there; there was a moment when I saw them. I saw three of them together, two females and a male. They formed a circle, facing inwards, their arms intertwined. The pale colour of their garments, the grey tones in their flesh were so perfectly in tune with the hazy light, that it would have been impossible, I am certain, to have seen them at all at a hundred yards' distance. I could not determine whether they were conversing or not: if they were, it was without speech. I have never heard an articulate sound from any one of them, and have no provable reason for connecting the unvoiced music I have sometimes discerned with any act of theirs. It has accompanied them, and may have proceeded from them—but I don't know that. Of these three linked together I remember that one of them threw back her head till she faced the sky. She did not laugh, or seem to be laughing: there was no sound. It was rather as if she was bathing her face in the light. She threw her head back so far that I could see the gleam in her wild eyes; her hair streamed downward, straight as a fall of water. The other two regarded her, and the male presently withdrew one of his arms from the circle and laid his hand upon her. She let it be so; seemed not to notice.

Imperceptibly others had come about these three. If I took my eyes off a group for a moment they were attracted to other groups or single shapes. Some lay at ease on the sward, resting on elbow; some prone, on both elbows; some seemed asleep, their heads on molehill pillows; some sat huddling together, with their chins upon their knees; some knelt face to face and held each other fondly; some were teasing, some chasing others, winding in and out of the scattered groups. But everything was doing in complete silence.

Now and again one, flying from another, would rise in the air, the pursuer following. They skimmed, soared, glided like swallows, in long sweeping curves—there was no noise in their flight. They were quite without reticence in their intercourse; desired or avoided, loved or hated as the moment urged them; strove to win, struggled to escape, achieved or surrendered without remark from their companions. They were like children or animals. Desire was reason good; and if love was soon over, hate lasted no longer. One passion or the other set them scuffling: when it was spent they had no after-thought.

One pretty sight I saw. A hare came lolloping over the valley bottom, quite at his ease. In the midst of the assembly he stopped to nibble, then reared himself up and cleaned his face. He saw them and they him without concern on either side.

The valley filled up; I could not count the shifting, crossing, restless shapes I saw down there. Presently, without call or signal, as if by one consent, the Oreads joined hands and enclosed the whole circuit in their ring. The effect in the dusk was of a pale glow, as of the softest fire, defining the contour of the valley; and soon they were moving, circling round and round. Shriller and louder swelled the hidden music, and faster span the ring. It whirled and wavered, lifted and fell, but so smoothly, with such inherent power of motion, that it was less like motion visible than motion heard. Nothing was distinguishable but the belt of pale fire. That which I had seen before they had now become—a ring of flame intensely swift. As if sucked upward by a centripetal force it rose in the air. Wheeling still with a sound incredibly shrill it rose to my level, swept by me heralded by a keen wind, and was followed by a draught which caught leaves and straws of grass and took them swirling along. Round and up, and ever up it went, narrowing and spiring to the zenith. There, looking long after it, I saw it diminish in size and brightness till it became filmy as a cloud, then melted into the company of the stars.