THE MAKING OF RIME 37 



exeunt in mysterium : how should not the phrase tumble 

 into the mind when you see a bird overhead or, for 

 that matter, a cow in the meadow loom for a moment 

 big beyond truth and then fade into soft gloom. The 

 trees are like giants walking, endowed with the motion 

 of the passer-by. Sight and sound are more than 

 muffled : they are changed. The rumble of a distant 

 car suggests a rushing of wings, and the call of a scat 

 tered covey is almost a human wail. 



London often suffers from a roof of fog, a pall between 

 earth and heaven. The best of the country mists of late 

 have been on the ground and from it, thinning in quick, 

 if regular, gradation towards the upper air, so that the 

 sunshine was visible in a green and silver sky, while the 

 groundlings groped and fumbled in a confused and 

 colourless medium. Some of the effects were very 

 strange. You could see clearly the tops of the trees, the 

 delicate fan of the tracery was spread out against the 

 dancing light while the solid column of the trunk was 

 clean invisible. I have seen the sails of a windmill so 

 appear, like a wheel flying on its own wings, in the Fen 

 country the effects are yet stranger on the sea. Return 

 ing from America with a large convoy of ships in 1918, 

 some of the American soldiers who had never seen the 

 sea before were both terrified and amazed by the spectacle 

 of all the other ships of the convoy save their own slowly 

 and steadily sinking into the Atlantic : the hulls vanished, 

 then the decks, then the masts. The company of Scottish 

 church-goers who stopped on the hillside and watched 

 the impossible spectacle of all the great ships settling into 

 the waters of Scapa Flow were not more astonished. 

 The Atlantic illusion was due, of course, solely to the 

 sudden cooling of the successive layers of air over the 

 surface of the sea, and they tose high enough to swallow 



