The Return of the Native | Page 7

satisfy him, and he musingly
surveyed the scene, as if considering the next step that he should take.
To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed, to be a
duty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour, for there was that in
the condition of the heath itself which resembled protracted and halting
dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene.
This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of
incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life so nearly resembling
the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the
inertness of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers
akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those
who thought of it the attentiveness usually engendered by
understatement and reserve.
The scene before the reddleman's eyes was a gradual series of ascents
from the level of the road backward into the heart of the heath. It
embraced hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other, till all
was finished by a high hill cutting against the still light sky. The

traveller's eye hovered about these things for a time, and finally settled
upon one noteworthy object up there. It was a barrow. This bossy
projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground
of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale
it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great.
It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.
As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its
summit, hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was
surmounted by something higher. It rose from the semiglobular mound
like a spike from a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative stranger
might have been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts who built
the barrow, so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the scene. It
seemed a sort of last man among them, musing for a moment before
dropping into eternal night with the rest of his race.
There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plain
rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose
the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped
elsewhere than on a celestial globe.
Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give to the
dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious justification of
their outline. Without it, there was the dome without the lantern; with it
the architectural demands of the mass were satisfied. The scene was
strangely homogeneous, in that the vale, the upland, the barrow, and
the figure above it amounted only to unity. Looking at this or that
member of the group was not observing a complete thing, but a fraction
of a thing.
The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionless
structure that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a
strange phenomenon. Immobility being the chief characteristic of that
whole which the person formed portion of, the discontinuance of
immobility in any quarter suggested confusion.
Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave up its fixity,
shifted a step or two, and turned round. As if alarmed, it descended on

the right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water-drop down a bud,
and then vanished. The movement had been sufficient to show more
clearly the characteristics of the figure, and that it was a woman's.
The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared. With her
dropping out of sight on the right side, a newcomer, bearing a burden,
protruded into the sky on the left side, ascended the tumulus, and
deposited the burden on the top. A second followed, then a third, a
fourth, a fifth, and ultimately the whole barrow was peopled with
burdened figures.
The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime of
silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms who had
taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thither
for another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clung by
preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something more
interesting, more important, more likely to have a history worth
knowing than these newcomers, and unconsciously regarded them as
intruders. But they remained, and established themselves; and the
lonely person who hitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at
present seem likely to return.

3 - The Custom of the Country
Had a looker-on been posted in the immediate vicinity of the barrow,
he would have learned that these