Out here is the true smell of the sea, very salt and liquid, like cold salt water flooding the nostrils with sudden fear. The wind is chlorine-coloured; it shines, it shines with speed. The boat dives forward through mouths of glittering foam. The sail cracks like a whip upon the wind. The shore recedes, the cliffsinks down, the land narrows to a thin grey splinter. The raised jaw of a speedboat passes, swallowing water. There is a pale haze in the centre of the western sky, where the wind is rising. The sail is like a white fin curving from the foam. To the south, the blue light bends inland, arching over the dim inland towns. Summer is hidden, an ark of leaves now sinking deep in time. It shrinks small, till it is like a green star glimmering through dark shadows.
The boat turns, and the sail swings over. The cold viridian mass of the sea rises up through the hurling spray. The sun dazzles. We surge towards the shore. A large bird, like a gull, is gliding low above the water. It tilts and sways as it glides, shearing the waves with the tips of its wings. Its long wings beat quickly; then it glides again, holding them stiffly out in a straight and level line. They are marked with grey and white. The short, thick-set body is mostly pure white. It has a prominent, rather duck-like bill, a short thick neck, and a very short tail. Its wing-beat is lighter, faster, and more flexible, than a gull’s. It is strong and effortless, propelling the bird forward at great speed. Now we are closer, I can see that it is a fulmar. Its wings simply flex and straighten, yet it moves as fast as a mallard. It seems to hiss through the air. The long yellow bill, thick and ornate, protrudes from the high white forehead and the stout neck. The face, the mask, has a dolphin expression, placid and serene in profile, grim and forbidding from in front. The fulmar flies to the north, never checking or pausing, gliding and beating away with no slackening of speed or alteration of rhythm. It seems as powerful and tireless in motion as the sea itself.
The huge and glittering headlands of slate rise slowly from the sea, like defaced idols. The rocks of the shore appear, with the white waves towering above them. A falcon dashes away from the rocks, hurling low across the surface of the sea. It is a merlin, an adult male, shining blue in the sunlight. Far above him, and a hundred yards in front, a flock of ringed plover is flying, like a net of gleaming stars. The merlin dips and sways above the water, light and swift as the tongue of a snake. He whips away great spans of air with sharp wings that quiver up and down like flickering spokes. He flies faster, springing and leaping forward, his wings shimmering as though they were beneath the surface of the water. I can see only the glitter of their vibration. The narrow, attenuated stem of the hawk’s body darts violently from side to side. He draws level with the ringed plover, but keeps low. Then he rises, curving up through the bright air as though thrown up on the curve of a great wheel. He shines upward in a sudden crescent of light, passes between the plover, and tilts over, and down, and back to the waves that rise to meet him. Again he sweeps upward, piercing the flock. He is below them, among them, through them, above them, through them, beneath them. They scatter like sparks. He rises beyond them, but does not strike again. His wings wither away in flashes of blue light. They shrink into stillness as he disappears to the south. He becomes a shining star that quickly dims into the salt air. The day resumes its warmth. The ringed plover go back to feed upon the shore. The merlin has flown into a different sky.
A cormorant passes overhead, gaunt and ragged, like a burnt gannet. A buzzard circles high to the south, above the hidden wood. Little terns are hunting off-shore, flying to and fro above the shallows. The first bird to see a fish calls excitedly before hovering and plunging down between the rocks. It drops with a tremendous splash into water just deep enough to cover it. Other little terns fly up in response to the call, and they also hover and dive for fish. The first bird is successful sometimes, the other never.
The land comes steadily forward. The headlands move apart, and a small bay is revealed. The boat rides through into calmer water, and the shuddering sail subsides. I step up on to the stone of the harbour wall, heavy with hot sunlight, dazed by the colours of the sea.
It seems strange that it should still be morning, with the untouched inland day rising above me. I climb the steep path to the top, sleepy in the warm air of the cliff. A whitethroat sings in the dry brambles. Slowly the sea sinks down. The fierce green and grey of the swell is smoothed away, reaching out to the horizon in a level haze of pure cobalt blue, edged with a narrow ermine of white foam, deepening to purple where the long cloud-shadows move steadily eastward. It is impossible to believe now in the alien power and pounding hostility of the sea. It basks down there in the sun, looking as calm as the breeze-ruffled surface of a lake on which innumerable dark blue petals are floating.
I rest at the top of the cliff. Gulls call and glide above. The dry, metallic song of a rock pipit drifts slowly down to the beach. A kestrel hangs high and motionless above the shining yellow and white flowers that almost hide the green grass of the meadow. The path leads down the slope of a valley to a lane that ends suddenly a hundred yards from the edge of the cliff. Deep in the valley there is a small church, very quiet and still beneath its plume of noisy jackdaws.
From the hill above the church I can look across the combes and uplands to the grey line of the moor. It rises into the southern sky like a perpetual winter, remote in both time and distance. It has its own light and climate, its own clouds, mist, sun, and rain. It is like the ultimate reality, the ruin of the earth, the sea risen inland.
The road to the moor winds between tall hedges, through deep valleys, and over low, undulating hills. The gorse is bright with blossom, there is a smell of hay and honeysuckle, bees drone in the flowers, and many birds sing. Gradually the trees thin out, there are fewer farms and cottages, the road rises and does not descend again.
A corn bunting sings from the last leaning boundary wall. The white farmhouse moves slowly back and down, becoming a white speck upon a green plain. The air changes. It is colder, sharper now. The wind hisses softly through the dry grass. Small brown streams ripple over grey stones. Many skylarks sing. But in the brief pauses between their songs, the unbroken silence seems to move around me with an immense and primitive power. This is the moor, the rejected land of granite, the green desert of the plutonic rock.
There are no trees or bushes here. Only the weathered grey stones of the tors rise above the undulating olive surface of the grass and heather. The brilliant emerald green of the sphagnum moss, and the white tassels of the cotton-grass, shine in the boggy places. Much of the moor is wet to walk upon, the hidden water glinting through the green. There are fewer skylarks now, but many meadow pipits are singing. Their slanting cadences, quieter and more musical than the song of the rock pipit, descend like countless threads of shining gossamer.
The sudden declarative call of a buzzard rings through the desolate air. It is a loud ‘pee-oo’, emphatic and intimidating. The bird is circling high above, sailing easily round, searching for rabbits. It gleams golden-brown in the sun, broad-winged, and dense with feathers. A raven flies towards the buzzard, uttering its deep uvular croak, a dark and resonant vibration. It has the small-eyed menacing look of a black bull. The shaggy dewlap of its throat still quivers. It dives at the buzzard, drives it downward, and chases it beyond the skyline.
The afternoon sun is warm, but summer is banished by the unrelenting wind. The moorland air is never mellowed by any change of season. Here on the higher slopes there are few birds. Nothing moves but the grass, the dry blades bending over into a thin yellow haze. Far below me a curlew calls. Large grey-lichened stones litter the slopes, like the droppings of some great animal. The skull of a sheep shines in the sun. Clouds move endlessly across the sky, but the sun is seldom lost. There is a smell of peat, of the acid water of the boggy ground. A distant rock, a small white dot against the sky, is hidden for a moment by the tawny shadow of a fox. Nothing changes. The silence is complete. The world beyond is dead.
At the highest point of the moor there is a small grey stone that seems to flutter in the wind. When I move closer, I can see that the wings of a snipe are moving on the stone. A merlin ate the snipe there earlier in the day, leaving the wings and feathers of his kill. The stone is dark with bloodstains. It is like a place of sacrifice. The merlins must have been carrying their prey to this stone for many years. There are other kills. The feathers of skylarks and meadow pipits move softly in the wind.
The male merlin is the size of a mistle thrush; the female is larger, almost as big as a kestrel. In level flight a merlin appears to move faster than any other hawk. This may be an illusion created by the remarkably rapid wing-beat, by the small size of the bird, and by its habit of flying just above the ground where it is difficult to see. But the apparent speed is astonishing. The male can almost vanish into a film of flickering wings. He twists and turns as abruptly as a swallow, very light and buoyant, but he seldom glides. It is as though his wings must be used constantly to keep him close to the ground, as though he were in danger of lifting suddenly up into the sky, of escaping completely from the power of the air.
Time drifts steadily away in the wind, the arc of the sun burns slowly down to the west. I am lost in the meditation of endless movement, in the flowing away of the clouds, in the drifting of the seeds of grass, in the sinking of hidden water towards the fulfilment of the sea. I am at the mercy of motion, tethered by the stones of the moor but ready to depart, to dive into the waiting sky.
Far down the green slope to the south there is a sudden agitation of the grass. Now it is closer, a dark occlusion of the dazzling sphagnum. Twenty yards away a tufted mound of white cotton-grass turns to misty blue. It is the male merlin, silent, alert, watching me with large brown eyes that shine and dim with the opal reflections of the passing clouds. The blue of his back seems to darken as he perches, slowly declining to dull grey. His chest is rust-coloured, yellowish, flecked with black, blending with the wind-bent blades of the withering grass. There is a faint tremor of wings, a brief pricking of primaries against the sky, a declining undulation of blue light. He had gone.
The sun is low now, and there is no warmth. The silence here is like a slow dusk spreading out upon the moor. The sun still shines, but the cold night air is descending. I leave the high places, and go down through the long shadows of the hills. The last lark sings, curlew and lapwing call in the valleys of the lost streams. The silence of night moves over me. The moor sinks slowly down, into the Cambrian darkness.