【英文文学】No man's land.docx

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1、【英文小说】No mans landI. The Shieling of FarawaIt was with a light heart and a pleasing consciousness of holiday that I set out from the inn at Allermuir to tramp my fifteen miles into the unknown. I walked slowly, for I carried my equipment on my back my basket, fly-books and rods, my plaid of Grant ta

2、rtan (for I boast myself a distant kinsman of that house), and my great staff, which had tried ere then the front of the steeper Alps. A small valise with books and some changes of linen clothing had been sent on ahead in the shepherds own hands. It was yet early April, and before me lay four weeks

3、of freedom twenty-eight blessed days in which to take fish and smoke the pipe of idleness. The Lent term had pulled me down, a week of modest enjoyment thereafter in town had finished the work; and I drank in the sharp moorish air like a thirsty man who has been forwandered among deserts.I am a man

4、of varied tastes and a score of interests. As an undergraduate I had been filled with the old mania for the complete life. I distinguished myself in the Schools, rowed in my college eight, and reached the distinction of practising for three weeks in the Trials. I had dabbled in a score of learned ac

5、tivities, and when the time came that I won the inevitable St. Chads fellowship on my chaotic acquirements, and I found myself compelled to select if I would pursue a scholars life, I had some toil in finding my vocation. In the end I resolved that the ancient life of the North, of the Celts and the

6、 Northmen and the unknown Pictish tribes, held for me the chief fascination. I had acquired a smattering of Gaelic, having been brought up as a boy in Lochaber, and now I set myself to increase my store of languages. I mastered Erse and Icelandic, and my first book a monograph on the probable Celtic

7、 elements in the Eddie songs brought me the praise of scholars and the deputy-professors chair of Northern Antiquities. So much for Oxford. My vacations had been spent mainly in the North in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isles, in Scandinavia and Iceland, once even in the far limits of Finland. I was a

8、 keen sportsman of a sort, an old-experienced fisher, a fair shot with gun and rifle, and in my hillcraft I might well stand comparison with most men. April has ever seemed to me the finest season of the year even in our cold northern altitudes, and the memory of many bright Aprils had brought me up

9、 from the South on the night before to Allerfoot, whence a dogcart had taken me up Glen Aller to the inn at Allermuir; and now the same desire had set me on the heather with my face to the cold brown hills.You are to picture a sort of plateau, benty and rock-strewn, running ridge-wise above a chain

10、of little peaty lochs and a vast tract of inexorable bog. In a mile the ridge ceased in a shoulder of hill, and over this lay the head of another glen, with the same doleful accompaniment of sunless lochs, mosses, and a shining and resolute water. East and west and north, in every direction save the

11、 south, rose walls of gashed and serrated hills. It was a grey day with blinks of sun, and when a ray chanced to fall on one of the great dark faces, lines of light and colour sprang into being which told of mica and granite. I was in high spirits, as on the eve of holiday; I had breakfasted excelle

12、ntly on eggs and salmon-steaks; I had no cares to speak of, and my prospects were not uninviting. But in spite of myself the landscape began to take me in thrall and crush me. The silent vanished peoples of the hills seemed to be stirring; dark primeval faces seemed to stare at me from behind boulde

13、rs and jags of rock. The place was so still, so free from the cheerful clamour of nesting birds, that it seemed a temenos sacred to some old-world god. At my feet the lochs lapped ceaselessly; but the waters were so dark that one could not see bottom a foot from the edge. On my right the links of gr

14、een told of snakelike mires waiting to crush the unwary wanderer. It seemed to me for the moment a land of death, where the tongues of the dead cried aloud for recognition.My whole mornings walk was full of such fancies. I lit a pipe to cheer me, but the things would not be got rid of. I thought of

15、the Gaels who had held those fastnesses; I thought of the Britons before them, who yielded to their advent. They were all strong peoples in their day, and now they had gone the way of the earth. They had left their mark on the levels of the glens and on the more habitable uplands, both in names and

16、in actual forts, and graves where men might still dig curios. But the hills that black stony amphitheatre before me it seemed strange that the hills bore no traces of them. And then with some uneasiness I reflected on that older and stranger race who were said to have held the hill-tops. The Picts,

17、the Picti what in the name of goodness were they? They had troubled me in all my studies, a sort of blank wall to put an end to speculation. We knew nothing of them save certain strange names which men called Pictish, the names of those hills in front of me the Muneraw, the Yirnie, the Calmarton. Th

18、ey were the corpus vile for learned experiment; but Heaven alone knew what dark abyss of savagery once yawned in the midst of the desert.And then I remembered the crazy theories of a pupil of mine at St. Chads, the son of a small landowner on the Aller, a young gentleman who had spent his substance

19、too freely at Oxford, and was now dreeing his weird in the Backwoods. He had been no scholar; but a certain imagination marked all his doings, and of a Sunday night he would come and talk to me of the North. The Picts were his special subject, and his ideas were mad. Listen to me, he would say, when

20、 I had mixed him toddy and given him one of my cigars; I believe there are traces ay, and more than traces of an old culture lurking in those hills and waiting to be discovered. We never hear of the Picts being driven from the hills. The Britons drove them from the lowlands, the Gaels from Ireland d

21、id the same for the Britons; but the hills were left unmolested. We hear of no one going near them except outlaws and tinklers. And in that very place you have the strangest mythology. Take the story of the Brownie. What is that but the story of a little swart man of uncommon strength and cleverness

22、, who does good and ill indiscriminately, and then disappears. There are many scholars, as you yourself confess, who think that the origin of the Brownie was in some mad belief in the old race of the Picts, which still survived somewhere in the hills. And do we not hear of the Brownie in authentic r

23、ecords right down to the year 1756? After that, when people grew more incredulous, it is natural that the belief should have begun to die out; but I do not see why stray traces should not have survived till late.Do you not see what that means? I had said in mock gravity. Those same hills are, if any

24、thing, less known now than they were a hundred years ago. Why should not your Picts or Brownies be living to this day?Why not, indeed? he had rejoined, in all seriousness.I laughed, and he went to his rooms and returned with a large leather-bound book. It was lettered, in the rococo style of a young

25、 mans taste, Glimpses of the Unknown, and some of the said glimpses he proceeded to impart to me. It was not pleasant reading; indeed, I had rarely heard anything so well fitted to shatter sensitive nerves. The early part consisted of folk-tales and folk-sayings, some of them wholly obscure, some of

26、 them with a glint of meaning, but all of them with some hint of a mystery in the hills. I heard the Brownie story in countless versions. Now the thing was a friendly little man, who wore grey breeches and lived on brose; now he was a twisted being, the sight of which made the ewes miscarry in the l

27、ambing-time. But the second part was the stranger, for it was made up of actual tales, most of them with date and place appended. It was a most Bedlamite catalogue of horrors, which, if true, made the wholesome moors a place instinct with tragedy. Some told of children carried away from villages, ev

28、en from towns, on the verge of the uplands. In almost every case they were girls, and the strange fact was their utter disappearance. Two little girls would be coming home from school, would be seen last by a neighbour just where the road crossed a patch of heath or entered a wood, and then no human

29、 eye ever saw them again. Childrens cries had startled outlying shepherds in the night, and when they had rushed to the door they could hear nothing but the night wind. The instances of such disappearances were not very common perhaps once in twenty years but they were confined to this one tract of

30、country, and came in a sort of fixed progression from the middle of last century, when the record began. But this was only one side of the history. The latter part was all devoted to a chronicle of crimes which had gone unpunished, seeing that no hand had ever been traced. The list was fuller in las

31、t century; in the earlier years of the present it had dwindled; then came a revival about the fifties; and now again in our own time it had sunk low. At the little cottage of Auchterbrean, on the roadside in Glen Aller, a labourers wife had been found pierced to the heart. It was thought to be a cas

32、e of a womans jealousy, and her neighbour was accused, convicted, and hanged. The woman, to be sure, denied the charge with her last breath; but circumstantial evidence seemed sufficiently strong against her. Yet some people in the glen believed her guiltless. In particular, the carrier who had foun

33、d the dead woman declared that the way in which her neighbour received the news was a sufficient proof of innocence; and the doctor who was first summoned professed himself unable to tell with what instrument the wound had been given. But this was all before the days of expert evidence, so the woman

34、 had been hanged without scruple. Then there had been another story of peculiar horror, telling of the death of an old man at some little lonely shieling called Carrickfey. But at this point I had risen in protest, and made to drive the young idiot from my room.It was my grandfather who collected mo

35、st of them, he said. He had theories,* but people called him mad, so he was wise enough to hold his tongue. My father declares the whole thing mania; but I rescued the book had it bound, and added to the collection. It is a queer hobby; but, as I say, I have theories, and there are more things in he

36、aven and earth But at this he heard a friends voice in the Quad., and dived out, leaving the banal quotation unfinished.* In the light of subsequent events I have jotted down the materials to which I refer. The last authentic record of the Brownie is in the narrative of the shepherd of Clachlands, t

37、aken down towards the close of last century by the Reverend Mr. Gillespie, minister of Allerkirk, and included by him in his Songs and Legends of Glen Aller.The authorities on the strange carrying-away of children are to be found in a series of articles in a local paper, the Allerfoot Advertiser, Se

38、ptember and October 1878, and a curious book published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1848, entitled The Weathergaw. The records of the unexplained murders in the same neighbourhood are all contained in Mr. Fordouns Theory of Expert Evidence, and an attack on the book in the Law Review for June 1881. T

39、he Carrickfey case has a pamphlet to itself now extremely rare a copy of which was recently obtained in a booksellers shop in Dumfries by a well-known antiquary, and presented to the library of the Supreme Court in Edinburgh.Strange though it may seem, this madness kept coming back to me as I crosse

40、d the last few miles of moor. I was now on a rough tableland, the watershed between two lochs, and beyond and above me rose the stony backs of the hills. The burns fell down in a chaos of granite boulders, and huge slabs of grey stone lay flat and tumbled in the heather. The full waters looked prosp

41、erously for my fishing, and I began to forget all fancies in anticipation of sport.Then suddenly in a hollow of land I came on a ruined cottage. It had been a very small place, but the walls were still half-erect, and the little moorland garden was outlined on the turf. A lonely apple-tree, twisted

42、and gnarled with winds, stood in the midst.From higher up on the hill I heard a loud roar, and I knew my excellent friend the shepherd of Farawa, who had come thus far to meet me. He greeted me with the boisterous embarrassment which was his way of prefacing hospitality. A grave reserved man at othe

43、r times, on such occasions he thought it proper to relapse into hilarity. I fell into step with him, and we set off for his dwelling. But first I had the curiosity to look back to the tumble-down cottage and ask him its name.A queer look came into his eyes. They ca the place Carrickfey, he said. Nae

44、body has daured to bide there this twenty year sin but I see ye ken the story. And, as if glad to leave the subject, he hastened to discourse on fishing.II. Tells of an Evenings TalkThe shepherd was a masterful man; tall, save for the stoop which belongs to all moorland folk, and active as a wild go

45、at. He was not a new importation, nor did he belong to the place; for his people had lived in the remote Borders, and he had come as a boy to this shieling of Farawa. He was unmarried, but an elderly sister lived with him and cooked his meals. He was reputed to be extraordinarily skilful in his trad

46、e; I know for a fact that he was in his way a keen sportsman; and his few neighbours gave him credit for a sincere piety. Doubtless this last report was due in part to his silence, for after his first greeting he was wont to relapse into a singular taciturnity. As we strode across the heather he gav

47、e me a short outline of his years lambing. Five pair o twins yestreen, twae this morn; that makes thirty-five yowes that hae lambed since the Sabbath. Ill dae weel if Gods willin. Then, as I looked towards the hill-tops whence the thin mist of morn was trailing, he followed my gaze. See, he said wit

48、h uplifted crook see that sicht. Is that no what is written of in the Bible when it says, “The mountains do smoke”. And with this piece of apologeties he finished his talk, and in a little we were at the cottage.It was a small enough dwelling in truth, and yet large for a moorland house, for it had

49、a garret below the thatch, which was given up to my sole enjoyment. Below was the wide kitchen with box-beds, and next to it the inevitable second room, also with its cupboard sleeping-places. The interior was very clean, and yet I remember to have been struck with the faint musty smell which is inseparable from moorland dwellings. The kitchen pleased me best, for there the great rafters were black with peat-reek, and the