GOING WESTWARD 227 



were with him arrived at the city or came in sight of it, 

 and God obh'terated the traces of the road that led to it; 

 but the city remaineth as it was in its place until the 

 hour of the judgment." . . . 



Beyond the gateway the Downland and the corn 

 begins, and with it the rain, so that the great yellow- 

 banded bee hangs long pensive on the lilac flower of the 

 scabious. Hereby is a farm with a wise look in its 

 narrow window on either side of the white door under 

 the porch; the walls of the garden and the farmyard 

 are topped with thatch; opposite rises up a medlar tree, 

 russet- fruited : and those two eyes of the little farm peep 

 out at the stranger. From the next hill-top the land 

 spreads out suddenly — an immense grey hedgeless land 

 of pasture and ploughland and stubble with broadcast 

 shadows of clouds and lines, and clumps of dark-blue 

 trees a league apart. These woods are of pine and thorn 

 and elder and beam, and some yew and juniper, haunted 

 by the hare and the kestrel, by white butterflies going in 

 and out, by the dandelion's down. Sometimes under the 

 pines a tumulus whispers a gentle sisle viator and the 

 robin sings beside. Far away, white rounds of cloud 

 bursting with sunlight are lifted up out of the ground; 

 born of earth they pause a little upon the ridge and then 

 take flight into the blue profound, their trains of shadow 

 moving over the corn sheaves, over the ploughs working 

 along brown bands of soil, the furzy spaces, the deeply 

 cloven grassy undulations, the lines of yews and of corn- 

 stacks. Slowly a spire like a lance-head is thrust up 

 through the Downs into the sky. 



Beyond the spire a huge woody mound rises up from 

 the low flowing land, huge and carved all round by an 

 Q 2 



