54 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



he disappears, no longer even the ghost of an ancient 

 memory. 



As I came down the gorge I saw something which 

 for grandeur and awe outpaced even the ravens. A 

 few daws were sporting and soaring and dashing head- 

 long Uke tumbler pigeons among the cliffs, when a great 

 company of them suddenly rose into sight from the 

 hills opposite me in a compact body — fully half a 

 thousand of them — ringing out their crisp, detonating 

 cries in loud unison. Then, with nothing visible or 

 audible to accoimt for it, they formed into a thick 

 column so quickly that the eye could not follow the 

 change of position, and hurled themselves obliquely 

 across the ravine with such speed that the roar of their 

 wings was that of huge breakers in a lofty sea-cavern. 

 The experience was so extraordinary — the uniformity 

 and precision of this precipitate flight, its incredible 

 velocity, the tornado of cries from five hundred throats, 

 the rush of five hundred black bodies across the sky, 

 and the mighty thundering of the wings — that a 

 botanist I was walking with, filled with the divine fire 

 of having viewed a pink {Dianthus ccesius) which grew 

 in the gorge and nowhere else in Great Britain, shouted 

 with the excitement of it and talked of nothing 

 else for the rest of the way. Nothing but violent 

 terror, or a rapture so intense as to demand a furious 

 expression of it, could have caused so strange an 

 upheaval. 



So back from the surge and thunder of the daws' 

 Odyssey to the rustic bridge, the white pagoda and the 

 ginger-beer bottles. It seems a queer thing that we 

 should have to pass through the one to reach the other — 

 that for the human mind to grasp the value and wonder 

 of creation, its power and intensity and abundance, 

 its manifoldness in uniformity, its intricacy in coherence, 

 its flux and diversity in persistence and continuity, it 

 must penetrate every ugliness and folly. But so it is, 

 and such is the meaning of the progress whose tangle 

 confuses us to deny it. We cannot know our gain until 

 we have tasted the full bitterness of its loss. 



