To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley
of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where
the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the
summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that
everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric
times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast
to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the
irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had
an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim.
Who can say of a particular sea that it is old?
Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed
in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed,
the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the
people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces
were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather,
nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits.
With the exception of an aged highway, and a still
more aged barrow presently to be referred to—themselves
almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even
the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe,
plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches
of the last geological change.
The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels
of the heath, from one horizon to another. In
many portions of its course it overlaid an old vicinal
way, which branched from the great Western road of
the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard
by. On the evening under consideration it would
have been noticed that, though the gloom had increased
sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the
heath, the white surface of the road remained almost
as clear as ever.
II
Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with
Trouble
Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed
as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in
general aspect. He wore a glazed hat, an ancient
boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an
anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed
walking-stick, which he used as a veritable third leg,
perseveringly dotting the ground with its point at
every few inches’ interval. One would have
said that he had been, in his day, a naval officer
of some sort or other.
Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry,
empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath
on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface
like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing
and bending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to
gaze over the tract that he had yet to traverse.
At length he discerned, a long distance in front of
him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle,
and it proved to be going the same way as that in
which he himself was journeying. It was the single
atom of life that the scene contained, and it only
served to render the general loneliness more evident.
Its rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained
upon it sensibly.
