GLASHGAR.
Up and up the hill went Gibbie.The path ceased altogether; but when up is the word in one's mind--and up had grown almost a fixed idea with Gibbie--he can seldom be in doubt whether he is going right, even where there is no track.Indeed in all more arduous ways, men leave no track behind them, no finger-post--there is always but the steepness.He climbed and climbed.The mountain grew steeper and barer as he went, and he became absorbed in his climbing.All at once he discovered that he had lost the stream, where or when he could not tell.All below and around him was red granite rock, scattered over with the chips and splinters detached by air and wind, water and stream, light and heat and cold.
Glashgar was only about three thousand feet in height, but it was the steepest of its group--a huge rock that, even in the midst of masses, suggested solidity.
Not once while he ascended had the idea come to him that by and by he should be able to climb no farther.For aught he knew there were oat-cakes and milk and sheep and collie dogs ever higher and higher still.Not until he actually stood upon the peak did he know that there was the earthly hitherto--the final obstacle of unobstancy, the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was to human foot impervious.The sun was about two hours towards the west, when Gibbie, his little legs almost as active as ever, surmounted the final slope.Running up like a child that would scale heaven he stood on the bare round, the head of the mountain, and saw, with an invading shock of amazement, and at first of disappointment, that there was no going higher: in every direction the slope was downward.He had never been on the top of anything before.He had always been in the hollows of things.Now the whole world lay beneath him.It was cold; in some of the shadows lay snow--weary exile from both the sky and the sea and the ways of them--captive in the fetters of the cold--prisoner to the mountain top; but Gibbie felt no cold.In a glow with the climb, which at the last had been hard, his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul with the feeling that he was above everything that was, uplifted on the very crown of the earth, he stood in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height, the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of space.Nobody knew of such marvel but him! Gibbie had never even heard the word poetry, but none the less was he the very stuff out of which poems grow, and now all the latent poetry in him was set a swaying and heaving--an ocean inarticulate because unobstructed--a might that could make no music, no thunder of waves, because it had no shore, no rocks of thought against which to break in speech.He sat down on the topmost point; and slowly, in the silence and the loneliness, from the unknown fountains of the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled.Above him towered infinitude, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to his eye in a soaring dome of blue--the one visible symbol informed and insouled of the eternal, to reveal itself thereby.In it, centre and life, lorded the great sun, beginning to cast shadows to the south and east from the endless heaps of the world, that lifted themselves in all directions.Down their sides ran the streams, down busily, hasting away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back to the ocean-heart--through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks and willowy marsh.Behind the valleys rose mountains; and behind the mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf.
Gibbie sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed.The mighty city that had been to him the universe, was dropped and lost, like a thing that was now nobody's, in far indistinguishable distance; and he who had lost it had climbed upon the throne of the world.The air was still; when a breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down of a feather, and the stillness was there again.The stillness grew great, and slowly descended upon him.It deepened and deepened.
Surely it would deepen to a voice!--it was about to speak! It was as if a great single thought was the substance of the silence, and was all over and around him, and closer to him than his clothes, than his body, than his hands.I am describing the indescribable, and compelled to make it too definite for belief.In colder speech, an experience had come to the child; a link in the chain of his development glided over the windlass of his uplifting; a change passed upon him.In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs--as often as the thought of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of Glashgar.