The Roots of the Mountains

Roots of the Mountains, The

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Title: The Roots of the Mountains
Author: William Morris
Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6050] [Yes, we are more than one
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
ROOTS OF THE MOUNTAINS ***

Transcribed from the 1896 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

THE ROOTS OF THE MOUNTAINS WHEREIN IS TOLD
SOMEWHAT OF THE LIVES OF THE MEN OF BURGDALE
THEIR FRIENDS THEIR NEIGHBOURS THEIR FOEMEN AND
THEIR FELLOWS IN ARMS BY WILLIAM MORRIS

Whiles carried o'er the iron road, We hurry by some fair abode; The
garden bright amidst the hay, The yellow wain upon the way, The
dining men, the wind that sweeps Light locks from off the sun-sweet
heaps - The gable grey, the hoary roof, Here now--and now so far aloof.
How sorely then we long to stay And midst its sweetness wear the day,
And 'neath its changing shadows sit, And feel ourselves a part of it.
Such rest, such stay, I strove to win With these same leaves that lie
herein.
CHAPTER I.
OF BURGSTEAD AND ITS FOLK AND ITS NEIGHBOURS

Once upon a time amidst the mountains and hills and falling streams of
a fair land there was a town or thorp in a certain valley. This was

well-nigh encompassed by a wall of sheer cliffs; toward the East and
the great mountains they drew together till they went near to meet, and
left but a narrow path on either side of a stony stream that came rattling
down into the Dale: toward the river at that end the hills lowered
somewhat, though they still ended in sheer rocks; but up from it, and
more especially on the north side, they swelled into great shoulders of
land, then dipped a little, and rose again into the sides of huge fells clad
with pine-woods, and cleft here and there by deep ghylls: thence again
they rose higher and steeper, and ever higher till they drew dark and
naked out of the woods to meet the snow-fields and ice-rivers of the
high mountains. But that was far away from the pass by the little river
into the valley; and the said river was no drain from the snow-fields
white and thick with the grinding of the ice, but clear and bright were
its waters that came from wells amidst the bare rocky heaths.
The upper end of the valley, where it first began to open out from the
pass, was rugged and broken by rocks and ridges of water-borne stones,
but presently it smoothed itself into mere grassy swellings and knolls,
and at last into a fair and fertile plain swelling up into a green wave, as
it were, against the rock-wall which encompassed it on all sides save
where the river came gushing out of the strait pass at the east end, and
where at the west end it poured itself out of the Dale toward the
lowlands and the plain of the great river.
Now the valley was some ten miles of our measure from that place of
the rocks and the stone-ridges, to where the faces of the hills drew
somewhat anigh to the river again at the west, and then fell aback along
the edge of the great plain; like as when ye fare a-sailing past two
nesses of a river-mouth, and the main-sea lieth open before you.
Besides the river afore-mentioned, which men called the Weltering
Water, there were other waters in the Dale. Near the eastern pass,
entangled in the rocky ground was a deep tarn full of cold springs and
about two acres in measure, and therefrom ran a stream which