I was
not frightened at all, though nurse was, and I never forgot about it,
because when I shut my eyes and it was quite quiet, and I was all alone,
I could see them again, very faint and far away, but very splendid; and
little bits of the song they sang came into my head, but I couldn't sing
it. I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure,
so strange that the day on which it happened is always called the White
Day. My mother had been dead for more than a year, and in the morning I
had lessons, but they let me go out for walks in the afternoon. And this
afternoon I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new
country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult
places, as the way was through many bushes, and beneath the low branches
of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark woods full of
creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed as if I was
going on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like a tunnel
where a brook must have been, but all the water had dried up, and the
floor was rocky, and the bushes had grown overhead till they met, so
that it was quite dark. And I went on and on through that dark place; it
was a long, long way. And I came to a hill that I never saw before. I
was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore me as I
went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all over, and
then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long way, till
at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of
a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on
the grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree came out
from under a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a
long way. I never saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the
earth some of them, and some looked as if they had been rolled to where
they were, and they went on and on as far as I could see, a long, long
way. I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was strange. It
was winter time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the
hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung with black
curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from any I
had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods there were
other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them; it
all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all so still
and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked
voorish dome in Deep Dendo. I went on into the dreadful rocks. There
were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men;
I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the stone,
and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that
I should always be there. And there were other rocks that were like
animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and
others were like words that I could not say, and others like dead people
lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and
my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to
make faces and twist myself about in the way they did, and I went on and
on a long way till at last I liked the rocks, and they didn't frighten
me any more. I sang the songs I thought of; songs full of words that
must not be spoken or written down. Then I made faces like the faces on
the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay
down flat on the ground like the dead ones, and I went up to one that
was grinning, and put my arms round him and hugged him. And so I went on
and on through the rocks till I came to a round mound in the middle of
them. It was higher than a mound, it was nearly as high as our house,
and it was like a great basin turned upside down, all smooth and round
and green, with one stone, like a post, sticking up at the top. I
climbed up the sides, but they were so steep I had to stop or I should
have rolled all the way down again, and I should have knocked against
the stones at the bottom, and perhaps been killed. But I wanted to get
up to the very top of the big round mound, so I lay down flat on my
face, and took hold of the grass with my hands and drew myself up, bit
by bit, till I was at the top. Then I sat down on the stone in the
middle, and looked all round about. I felt I had come such a long, long
way, just as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other
country, or in one of the strange places I had read about in the 'Tales
of the Genie' and the 'Arabian Nights,' or as if I had gone across the
sea, far away, for years and I had found another world that nobody had
ever seen or heard of before, or as if I had somehow flown through the
sky and fallen on one of the stars I had read about where everything is
dead and cold and grey, and there is no air, and the wind doesn't blow. I sat on the stone and looked all round and down and round about me. It
was just as if I was sitting on a tower in the middle of a great empty
town, because I could see nothing all around but the grey rocks on the
ground. I couldn't make out their shapes any more, but I could see them
on and on for a long way, and I looked at them, and they seemed as if
they had been arranged into patterns, and shapes, and figures. I knew
they couldn't be, because I had seen a lot of them coming right out of
the earth, joined to the deep rocks below, so I looked again, but still
I saw nothing but circles, and small circles inside big ones, and
pyramids, and domes, and spires, and they seemed all to go round and
round the place where I was sitting, and the more I looked, the more I
saw great big rings of rocks, getting bigger and bigger, and I stared so
long that it felt as if they were all moving and turning, like a great
wheel, and I was turning, too, in the middle. I got quite dizzy and
queer in the head, and everything began to be hazy and not clear, and I
saw little sparks of blue light, and the stones looked as if they were
springing and dancing and twisting as they went round and round and
round. I was frightened again, and I cried out loud, and jumped up from
the stone I was sitting on, and fell down. When I got up I was so glad
they all looked still, and I sat down on the top and slid down the
mound, and went on again. I danced as I went in the peculiar way the
rocks had danced when I got giddy, and I was so glad I could do it quite
well, and I danced and danced along, and sang extraordinary songs that
came into my head. At last I came to the edge of that great flat hill,
and there were no more rocks, and the way went again through a dark
thicket in a hollow. It was just as bad as the other one I went through
climbing up, but I didn't mind this one, because I was so glad I had
seen those singular dances and could imitate them.