Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 8

to
us when we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and
a few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and
foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but
how much more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not
only above other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a
golden zone like Apollo's![17]
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the
time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that
any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black
worm-eaten headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened
from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand
and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water,
and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone
disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed
itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge,
old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the
two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run
so high between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the
other as he stood in his own doorway. There is something in the

juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to
think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful counsel together
about the two hall-fires at night,[18] when the sea boomed against the
foundations and the wild winter wind was loose over the battlements.
And in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of
what life then was. Not so when we are there; when we are there such
thoughts come to us only to intensify a contrary impression, and
association is turned against itself.[19] I remember walking thither
three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary with being set against
the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I
found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. The wind, from
which I had escaped, "as from an enemy,"[20] was seemingly quite
local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that it
did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and ruinous
as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these by
something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that
the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.
It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I have
said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by previous
tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies
who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust
and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of
shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the
two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on,
unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the
memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something transitory
and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it
seems to have no root in the constitution of things; it must speedily
begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the
thought of the wind and the thought of human life came very near
together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments[21] in
the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that great
field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The
placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley
speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm,"[22] and in this place one
learned to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters

from the broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the
sunshine, it seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity;
and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the
surface, or the quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back
again (one could fancy) with relief.
On shore, too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
and still that the least particular struck in me