SUSSEX 101 



The road now divides to go round the base of the 

 Downs, but a farm track sets out to climb them. There, 

 at the corner, is a church, on the very edge of the flat 

 vale and its elms and ashes in the midst of meadows; a 

 plain towered church, but with a rough churchyard, half 

 graveyard and half orchard, its grass and parsley and nettle 

 uncut under the knotty apple trees, splashed with silver 

 and dull gold-green, dotted by silver buds among yellow- 

 lichened branches that are matted densely as a magpie's 

 nest. The dust from the high road powders the nettles 

 and perfects the arresting melancholy of the desolation, 

 so quiet, so austere, and withal as airy as a dream remem- 

 bered. But above are the Downs, green and sweet with 

 uplifting grass, and beyond them the sea, darkly gleaming 

 under lustrous white cliffs and abrupt ledges of turf, in 

 the south; in the south-east a procession of tufted trees 

 going uphill in single file; in the south-west the dazzling 

 slate roofs of a distant town, two straight sea walls and 

 two steamers and their white wakes; northward the most 

 beautiful minor range in all the downland, isolated by a 

 river valley at the edge of which it ends in a gulf of 

 white quarry, while on the other side it heaves and flows 

 down almost to the plain, but rises again into a lesser hill 

 with woods, and then slowly subsides. Within a few 

 square miles it collects every beauty of the chalk hill; 

 its central height is a dome of flawless grass only too 

 tender to be majestic; and that is supported by lesser 

 rounds and wavering lines of approach in concavity and 

 convexity, playgrounds for the godlike shadows and lights, 

 that prolong the descent of the spent wave of earth into 

 the plain. 



An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The 



