ILLUSION.
FIVE roads lie round about the mines on the hilltop, but none of them leads in amongst the quarries themselves. High green hedges enclose the wheel-tracks all their red length, and shut them off from the " reddings " on the other side like the paths of a maze. You see the shafts and cuttings through the hedge and over the gates, but you do not arrive at them though the lanes wind never so. There is a road that will take you there, only that road begins far away in the middle of Greatatone Lane, where nobody ever goes except miners and one farmer who lives beyond. It has neither name nor end, that road; it leads straight into the reddings and stops short at the foot of a quarry, as if with an ironical suggestion that the traveller should go further on still into the heart of the earth, deep underground in the track of rivers that plunge down primeval fissures in Mendip hills to follow who blows what hidden path in the darkness.
The crossways look rather like a great gnarled band stretching out knotted fingers to grip the hilltop in a sinister clutch. The high road goes straight down across the valley to Mendip beyond, but that is a modern contrivance, for the older roads turn off short some fifty yards beyond the cross, after the fashion of Somerset lanes, where you seldom see far ahead. They are a proper "puny," these narrow, unmade ways, and primroses grow in myriads along the hedges, and white violets crowd each other to cover up the sinister red earth with a luxuriance of grace and sweetness. But the red- ness will keep showing again and again, and the wholesome green cannot hide its uncanny suggestion of threat and trickery, as if some strange thing might just be going to happen at the end of the deep red cart-ruts. On a dark night darkness lies like a pall on these five lanes. At the crossways there is a moment's feeling of space where the open sky spreads above, and after that the hedges shut you in with a blind oppression, and the night closes overhead like deep The horses know the short way to the mines as well as the miners know it —that is, just beyond the turn, through a gap in the hedge, fenced across by a clumsy bar ever since the night when poor Eli Baker went over the edge of the quarry, horse and cart and all, and was picked up the nest morning with a broken neck. Many of the quarries are disused now, silted up in part with rubbish and wind-drift, and all overrun with golden furze and brambles with huge, thorny stems drooping into the grass, making an impregnable refuge for rabbits and blackbirds and the small wild tribes of the wilder- ness. There are a few wind-bent ash-trees and a wonderful wide space of sky, and the hollow land below that parts Mendip and these hills is full of changeful reflections and shifting lights; and the hills beyond are sometimes deep purple with coming rain, and look so near that you might throw a pebble at them, and sometimes they are faint and far off like the mountains of Beulah or the hills of the Delectable Land seen in a vision.
The mines cease at the edge of the hill, and long meadows slope away and away to the valley, green field after green field all smooth and peaceful, and there is no red earth any more. At the bottom stands a little house, stone-walled and grey- thatched, with moss on the broad chimneys, whence a thin blue curl of wood-smoke rises straight up under the shelter of the hill. There is no other house in sight, and the fields are wonderfully silent except for the voice of birds who cry and twitter there all day long. A footpath leads from the house to the mines above, winding zig-zag through a meadow where the autumn crocus grows, lying like a faint shadow of purple on the face of the meadow, here in a deeper splendour of massed blossoms, there paler with straggling single flowers. The wind hardly bends these low things ; they stand np straight and always very still, like pale immortal flowers in the Elysian fields, and it seems as if those who lived near them should be peaceful and shadowy too. They are poisonous to cattle, these delicate crocus plants, and in the empty meadow where they grow their shadowy still beauty is like the peace of death.
The mines above are often deserted too ; on some days you may find a dozen men at work, on others never a single miner. And in disused. cuttings the floor of the quarry becomes quickly overgrown with a carpet of broad, flat oolts- foot leaves. April brings a crowd of stiff golden-headed flowers ; but the leaves come later, heavy and thick-ribbed, covered underneath with dense white down, so that when they are tossed up by a wind running low along the ground before rain, they become suddenly dun colour, as if death had come into the world hurrying before the storm-clouds that turn the very sunlight wan.
There was something fluttering above the blown coltsfoot leaves in the quarry, something that seemed to drift fitfully before the rain-wind that bent all the stiff spikes of blossom- ing furze sideways in a long dying wave. The fluttering thing was a woman's dress, a young woman, though she moved very slowly and went with her head bent down, as if she were seeking something among the stones and coltsfoot leaves. She moved with a fitful, aimless motion, like a shrivelled leaf caught in an eddy, and as if the force of will within her were quenched by some greater force of grievous despondency, stronger than the helpless life it swamped with such a piteous weight. It was Eli's wife coming to look for her husband, as she had come years ago, after the miners had carried him into the little hut, where she found him lying vary still beneath a sheet. The horse was still at the quarry bottom, poor beast, with a broken neck like its master. The man had missed the main road in the darkness and the horse, who knew the way to the quarries, had taken its master on the wrong track, and both went over the edge in the black night. It was ten years ago, when they had been three months married, and still when the fit came on the poor thing she would go back to the place to look for him, and come home again across the meadow where the crocus grows, weeping quietly with her head bent down.
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