eye, or with the aid of literature. A stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger, and yet with a knowledge of the language and the history of the language and the writing, I could find a special kind of past in what I saw; with a part of my mind I could admit fantasy.
I heard on the radio one morning that in the days of the Roman Empire geese could be walked to market all the way from the province of Gaul to Rome. After this, the high-headed, dung-dropping geese that strutted across the muddy, rutted way at the bottom of the valley and could be quite aggressive at times—Jack’s geese—developed a kind of historical life for me, something that went beyond the idea of medieval peasantry, old English country ways, and the drawings of geese in children’s books. And when one year, longing for Shakespeare, longing to be put in touch with the early language, I returned to King Lear for the first time for more than twenty years, and read in Kent’s railing speech, “Goose, if I had you upon Sarum Plain, I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot,” the words were quite clear to me. Sarum Plain, Salisbury Plain; Camelot, Winchester—just twenty miles away. And I felt that with the help of Jack’s geese—creatures with perhaps an antiquity in the droveway lands that Jack would not have guessed—I had arrived at an understanding of something in King Lear which, according to the editor of the text I read, commentators had found obscure.
The solitude of the walk, the emptiness of that stretch of the downs, enabled me to surrender to my way of looking, to indulge my linguistic or historical fantasies; and enabled me, at the same time, to shed the nerves of being a stranger in England. Accident—the shape of the fields, perhaps, the alignment of paths and modern roads, the needs of the military—had isolated this little region; and I had this historical part of England to myself when I went walking.
Daily I walked in the wide grassy way between the flint slopes, past chalk valleys rubbled white and looking sometimes like a Himalayan valley strewn in midsummer with old, gritted snow. Daily I saw the mounds that had been raised so many centuries before. The number of these mounds! They lay all around. From a certain height they were outlined against the sky and looked like pimples on the land. In the beginning I liked to tramp over the mounds that were more or less on my walk. The grass on these mounds was coarse; it was long-bladed, pale in color, and grew in ankle-turning tufts or clumps. The trees, where they existed, were wind-beaten and stunted.
I picked my way up and down and around each mound; I wanted in those early days to leave no accessible mound unlooked at, feeling that if I looked hard enough and long enough I might arrive, not at an understanding of the religious mystery, but at an appreciation of the labor.
Daily I walked in the wide grassy way—perhaps in the old days a processional way. Daily I climbed up from the bottom of the valley to the crest of the way and the view: the stone circles directly ahead, down below, but still far away: gray against green, and sometimes lit up by the sun. Going up the grassy way (and though willing to admit that the true processional path might have been elsewhere) I never ceased to imagine myself a man of those bygone times, climbing up to have this confirmation that all was well with the world.
There was a main road on either side of the Henge. On those two roads trucks and vans and cars were like toys. At the foot of the Henge there was the tourist crowd—not very noticeable, not as noticeable as one might imagine from the fairground atmosphere around the stones when you actually went to them. The tourist crowd, from this distance, was noticeable only because of the red dress or coat that some of the women wore. That color red among the visitors to Stonehenge was something that I never failed to see; always someone in red, among the little figures.
And in spite of that crowd, and the highways, and the artillery ranges (with their fluorescent or semi-luminous targets), my sense of antiquity, my feeling for the age of the earth and the oldness of man’s possession of it, was always with me. A vast sacred burial ground,