Testimonies: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian Read Free Book Online Page A

ridge, and all from a higher, more detached and god-like standpoint. It is good for one’s self-esteem to be high up.
    At the cleft, a dramatically narrow and decisive entrance to the unknown high country, I turned for a last look down the length of Cwm Bugail: my cottage was there, distinct because of its whitewash, absurdly small, smaller than a matchbox, and the whole vast extent of the air was lit with the sun. Past the corner, through the black rocks of the cleft and at once it was another world, a sunless chasm with a silent lake. Chasm is not the right word; one thinks of a chasm from above, an enormous crack going down , essentially down. In this narrow, deep valley I was at the bottom, looking up. On my left hand the side was sheer, nearly the whole length of it; a precipitous scree here and there, and sometimes a little heather, but mostly naked rock going straight up to the top of the Saeth: the bed of the valley was a tarn, black, shining water with an abrupt and barren edge—no reeds, no mud, nothing green at all; it changed harshly from naked water to naked rock. On the right the land rose in a steep slope, a shapeless, tormented moorland with bare rock showing, neither so high nor so sheer as the wall on the left, but still reaching halfway up the sky. There was no breath of wind to stir the top of the water, and in all the length of the valley I could see no thing alive, nor in the air above it.
    From the run of the valley and the disposition of the soaring black cliff on its southern side the sun could never come into it at any time. At first, panting from my climb, I found the coolness agreeable, but after a little while I began to feel cold, and buttoned my jacket.
    A sheep track ran along before me, and I decided that I would try to walk round the lake before having my sandwiches: it seemed pointless to carry them too (they were bulky in my pocket and had galled me all the way up the green path) so I put them on a convenient rock, with the intention of coming back to sit there and eat them after I had been round the lake. Before I left I looked around in order to be sure that I should find them again, and my eye was caught by a shape on the skyline—a skyline that I had to lean back to see at all. Right up there on the edge of the black precipice there was this thing, perched like a gargoyle peering down. I could not tell why it had caught my eye: there were hundreds of jutting, strangely-shaped rocks all along that weathered salient, and none had fixed my attention. However, it did catch my eye, and held it. I could not see what it was: a sheep, perhaps? These agile mountain sheep did take up the most extraordinary attitudes, poised on an overhanging rock with a handful of grass in its crevices. Or conceivably one of those wild goats that I had heard about? It was a strange way for a sheep to stand, hooked there.
    I suppose, from the comparisons I made at the time with a sheep or a goat, that the thing was lighter in color than the surrounding rock: I do not remember now. What I do recall, and most clearly, is the air that it had of crouching there, poised over the valley. It was, of course, merely fanciful to suppose a malignance in it, a sort of evil domination of all that it looked down upon. It was fanciful, of course, and outside that sterile place it seems even absurd; but those were the ideas that came to me.
    In the end I said that whether it was a sheep or a rock or a goat it did not greatly matter, and set off along the track. From the far end of the valley (Cwm Erchyll was its name) I had over-simplified its construction; here and there I found a bay with a little sad gray beach of pebbles, and at the end there was a bog with a living stream flowing through it to fill the lake. Here a small bird like a snipe got up at my feet and stopped my heart dead still; it winged low over the water, a white flash in its flight and the saddest heartbroken cry in the world.
    Where the bog and the lake