The Return of the Native | Page 7

were distant, and stood in a
dense atmosphere, so that bundles of pale strawlike beams radiated
around them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near, glowing
scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide. Some were
Maenades, with winy faces and blown hair. These tinctured the silent
bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves,
which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as
many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of
the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the
figures themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality
of each fire by its angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery
could be viewed.
The first tall flame from Rainbarrow sprang into the sky, attracting all
eyes that had been fixed on the distant conflagrations back to their own
attempt in the same kind. The cheerful blaze streaked the inner surface
of the human circle--now increased by other stragglers, male and
female--with its own gold livery, and even overlaid the dark turf around
with a lively luminousness, which softened off into obscurity where the
barrow rounded downwards out of sight. It showed the barrow to be the
segment of a globe, as perfect as on the day when it was thrown up,
even the little ditch remaining from which the earth was dug. Not a
plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil. In the heath's
barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility to the historian. There had been
no obliteration, because there had been no tending.
It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper
story of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches
below. The heath down there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a

continuation of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the blaze,
could see nothing of the deeps beyond its influence. Occasionally, it is
true, a more vigorous flare than usual from their faggots sent darting
lights like aides-de-camp down the inclines to some distant bush, pool,
or patch of white sand, kindling these to replies of the same colour, till
all was lost in darkness again. Then the whole black phenomenon
beneath represented Limbo as viewed from the brink by the sublime
Florentine in his vision, and the muttered articulations of the wind in
the hollows were as complaints and petitions from the "souls of mighty
worth" suspended therein.
It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and
fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar
with this spot. The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from
that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread.
The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone down
upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and
Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day.
Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen
were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled
Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular
feeling about Gunpowder Plot.
Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when,
at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It
indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat
that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery
and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say,
Let there be light.
The brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled upon the skin and
clothes of the persons standing round caused their lineaments and
general contours to be drawn with Dureresque vigour and dash. Yet the
permanent moral expression of each face it was impossible to discover,
for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the
surrounding air, the blots of shade and flakes of light upon the
countenances of the group changed shape and position endlessly. All

was unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. Shadowy
eye-sockets, deep as those of a death's head, suddenly turned into pits
of lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining; wrinkles
were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated entirely by a changed ray.
Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings;
things with no particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects,
such as the tip of a furze-hook one of the men carried, were as glass;
eyeballs glowed like little lanterns. Those whom Nature had depicted
as merely quaint became grotesque, the grotesque became preternatural;
for all was in extremity.
Hence it may be that the face of an old man, who had