The Giant’s Causeway — Coleraine — Portrush.
The traveller no sooner issues from the inn by a back door, which he is informed will lead him straight to the Causeway than the guides pounces upon him, with a dozen rough boatmen who are likewise lying in wait; and a crew of shrill beggar-boys with boxes of spars, ready to tear him and each other to pieces seemingly, and bawl incessantly round him. “I’m the guide Miss Henry recommends,” shouts one. “I’m Mr Macdonald’s guide,” pushes in another. “This way” roars a third, and drags his prey down a precipice; the rest of them clambering and quarrelling after. I had no friends, I was perfectly helpless. I wanted to walk down to the shore by myself, but they would not let me, and I had nothing for it but to yield myself into the hands of the guide who had seized me, who hurried me down the steep to a little wild bay flanked on each side by rugged cliffs and rocks, against which the waters came tumbling, frothing, and roaring furiously. Upon some of these black rocks two or three boats were lying: four men seized a boat, pushed it shouting into the water, and ravished me into it. We had slid between two rocks, where the channel came gurgling in: we were up one swelling wave that came in a huge advancing body 10 feet above us and were plunging madly down another, (the descent causes a sensation in the lower regions of the stomach which it is not necessary here to describe,) before I had leisure to ask myself why the deuce I was in that boat, with four rowers hurrooing and bounding madly from one huge liquid mountain to another — four rowers whom I was bound to pay. I say, the query came qualmishly across me why the devil I was there, and why not walking calmly on the shore.
The guide began pouring his professional jargon into my ears. “Every one of them bays,” says he, “has a name (take my place and the spray won’t come over you): that is Port Noffer, and the next Port na Gauge; them rocks is the Stookawns (for every rock has its name as well as every bay); and yonder — give way, my boys, — hurray, we’re over it now: has it wet you much, sir? — that’s the little cave: it goes five hundred feet under ground, and the boats goes into it easy of a calm day.”
“Is it a fine day or a rough one now?” said I; the internal disturbance going on with more severity than ever.
“It’s betwixt and between; or, I may say, neither one nor the other. Sit up, sir. Look at the entrance of the cave. Don’t be afraid, sir: never has an accident happened in any one of these boats, and the most delicate ladies has rode in them on rougher days than this. Now, boys, pull to the big cave. That, sir, is 660 yards in length, though some says it goes for miles inland, where the people sleeping in their houses hear the waters roaring under them.”
The water was tossing and tumbling into the mouth of the little cave. I looked, — for the guide would not let me alone till I did, — and saw what might he expected: a black hole of some 40 feet high, into which it was no more possible to see than into a mill-stone. “For heaven’s sake, sir,” says I, “ if you’ve no particular wish to see the mouth of the big cave, put about and let us see the Causeway and get ashore.” This was done, the guide meanwhile telling some story of a ship of the Spanish Armada having fired her guns at two peaks of rock, then visible, which the crew mistook for chimney-pots — what benighted fools these Spanish Armadilloes must have been: it is easier to see a rock than a chimney-pot; it is easy to know that chimney-pots do not grow on rocks. — “But where, if you please, is the Causeway?”
“That’s the Causeway before you,” says the guide.
“Which?
“That pier which you see jutting out into the bay, right a-head.”
“Mon Dieu! and have I travelled a hundred and fifty miles to see that!”
I declare upon my conscience, the barge moored at Hungerfood market is a more majestic object, and seems to occupy as much space. As for telling a man that the Causeway is merely a part of the sight; that he is there for the purpose of examining the surrounding scenery; that if he looks to the westward he will see Portrush and Donegal Head before him; that the cliffs immediately in his front are green in some places, black in others, interspersed with blotches of brown and streaks of verdure; — what is all this to a lonely individual lying sick in a boat, between two immense waves that only give him momentary glimpses of the land in question, to show that it is frightfully near, and yet you are an hour from it? They won’t let you go away — that cursed guide will tell out his stock of legends and stories. The boatmen insist upon your looking at boxes of “specimens”; even the dirty lad who pulls number three, and is not allowed by his comrades to speak, put in his oar, and hands you over a piece of Irish diamond (it looks like half-sucked alicompayne), and scorns you. “Hurray, lads, now for it, give way!” how the oars do hurtle in the rowlocks as the boat goes up an aqueous mountain, and then down into one of those cursed maritime valleys where there is no rest as on shore!
At last, after they had pulled me enough about, and sold me all the boxes of specimens, I was permitted to land at the spot whence we set out, and whence, though we had been rowing for an hour, we had never been above 500 yards distant. Let all Cockneys take warning from this; let the solitary one caught issuing from the back door of the hotel, shout at once to the boatmen to be gone-that he will have none of them. Let him, at any rate, go first down to the water to determine whether it be smooth enough to allow him to take any decent pleasure by riding on its surface. For after all it must be remembered that it is pleasure we come for — that we are not obliged to take those boats. — well well! I paid ten shillings for mine, and ten minutes before before would cheerfully have paid five pounds to be allowed to quit it: it was no hard bargain after all. As for the boxes of spar and specimens, I at once, being on terra firma, broke my promise, and said I would see them all — first. It is wrong to swear, I know; but sometimes it relieves one so much.
The first act on shore was to make a sacrifice to Sanctissima Tellus; offering up to her a neat and becoming Taglioni coat bought for a guinea in Covent Garden only three months back. I sprawled on my back on the smoothest of rocks that is, and tore the elbows to pieces: the guide picked me up; the boatmen did not stir, for they had had their will of me; the guide alone picked me up; I say, and bade me follow him. We went across a boggy ground in one of the little bays, round which rise the green walls of the cliff, terminated on either side by a black crag, and the line of the shore washed by the polupthloisboiotic, nay, the poluphloisboiotatotic sea. Two beggars stepped over the bog after us howling for money, and each holding up a cursed box of specimens. No oaths, threats, entreaties, would drive these vermin away; for some time the whole scene had been spoilt by the incessant and abominable jargon of them, the boatmen, and the guides. I was obliged to give them money to be left in quiet, and if, as no doubt will be the case, the Giant’s Causeway shall be a still greater resort of travellers than ever, the country must put policemen on the rocks to keep the beggars away, or fling them in the water when they appear.
And now, by force of money, having got rid of the sea and land beggars, you are at liberty to examine at your leisure the wonders of the place. There is not the least need for a guide to attend the stranger, unless the latter have a mind to listen to a parcel of legends, which may be well from the mouth of a wild simple peasant who believes in his tales, but are odious from a dullard who narrates them at the rate of sixpence a lie. Fee him and the other beggars, and at last you are left tranquil to look at the strange scene with your own eyes, and enjoy your own thoughts at leisure.
That is, if the thoughts awakened by such a scene may be called enjoyment; but for me, I confess, they are too near akin to fear to be pleasant; and I don’t know that I would desire to change that sensation of awe and terror which the hour’s walk occasioned, for a greater familiarity with this wild, sad, lonely place. The solitude is awful. I can’t understand how those chattering guides dare to lift up their voices here, and cry for money.
It looks like the beginning of the world, somehow: the sea looks older than in other places, the hills and rocks strange, and formed differently from other rocks and hills-as those vast dubious monsters were formed who possessed the earth before man. The hill-tops are shattered into a thousand cragged fantastical shapes; the water comes swelling into scores of little strange creeks, or goes off with a leap, roaring into those mysterious caves yonder, which penetrate who knows how far into our common world?
The savage rock-sides are painted of a hundred colours. Does the sun ever shine here? Was the world was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos this must have been the bit over — a remnant of chaos? Think of that! — it is a tailor’s simile. Well, I am a Cockney: I wish I were in Pall Mall! Yonder is a kelp-burner: a lurid smoke from his burning kelp rises up to the leaden sky, and he looks as naked and fierce as Cain. Bubbling up out of the rocks at the very brim of the sea rises a little crystal spring: how comes it there? and there is an old grey hag beside, who has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years and there sits and sells whiskey at the extremity of creation! How do you dare to sell whiskey there, old woman? Did you serve old Saturn with a glass when he lay along the Causeway here? In reply she says, she has no change for a shilling: she never has; but her whiskey is good.
This is not a description of the Giant’s Causeway (as some clever critic will remark), but of a Londoner there who is by no means so interesting an object as the natural curiosity in question. That single hint is sufficient; I have not a word more to say. “If,” says he, “you cannot describe the scene lying before us — if you cannot state from your personal observation that the number of basaltic pillars composing the Causeway has been computed at about forty thousand which vary in diameter, their surface presenting the appearance of a tesselated pavement of polygonal stones — that each pillar is formed of several distinct joints, the convex end of the one being accurately fitted in the concave of the next, and the length of the joints varying from five feet to four inches — that although the pillars are polygonal, there is but one of three sides in the whole forty thousand (thiink of that!), but three of nine sides and that it may be safely computed that ninety nine out of one hundred pillars have either five, six, or seven sides if you cannot state something useful, you had much better, sir, retire and get your dinner
Never was summons more gladly obeyed The dinner must be ready by this time, so, remain you, and look on at the awful scene, and copy it down in words if you can. If at the end of the trial you are dissatisfied with your skill as a painter and find that the biggest of your words cannot render the hues and vastness of that tremendous swelling sea — of those lean solitary crags standing rigid along the shore, where they have been watching the ocean ever since it was made — of those grey towers of Dunluce standing upon a leaden rock and looking as if some old, old princess, of old, old fairy times, were dragon-guarded within — of yon flat stretches of sand where the Scotch and Irish mermaids hold conference — come away too, and prate no more afloat the scene! There is that in nature, dear Jenkins, which passes even our powers. We can feel the beauty of a magnificent landscape, perhaps: but we can describe a leg of mutton and turnips better. Come, then, this scene is for our betters to depict. If Mr. Tennyson were to come hither for a month, and brood over the place, he might in some of those lofty heroic lines which the author of the “Morte d’Arthur” knows how to pile up, convey to the reader a sense of this gigantic desolate scene. What! you, too, are a poet? Well, then, Jenkins, stay! but believe me, you had best take my advice, and come off.
* * * *
The worthy landlady made her appearance with the politest of bows and an apology, — for what does the reader think a lady should apologise in the most lonely rude spot in the world? — because a plain servant-woman was about to bring in the dinner, the waiter being absent on leave at Coleraine! O heaven and earth! where will the genteel end? I replied philosophically that I did not care twopence for the plainness or beauty of the waiter, but that it was the dinner I looked to, the frying whereof made a great noise in the huge lonely house; and it must be said, that though the lady was plain, the repast was exceedingly good. “I have expended my little all,” says the landlady, stepping in with a speech after dinner, “in the building of this establishment and though to a man its profits may appear small, to such a being as I am it will bring, I trust, a su............