XVI. Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold XVII. Giles then, the soul of honour-there he stands What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Good-but the scene shifts-faugh! what hangman. hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. XVIII. Better this present than a past like that; I asked when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX. A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof-to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX. So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; The river which had done them all the wrong, XXI. Which, while I forded,-good saints, how I feared XXII. Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage XXIII. The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No foot-print leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work XXIV. And more than that—a furlong on-why, there! XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood Bog, clay, and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end. Nought in the distance but the evening, nought To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend, Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap-perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps ?—why, day XXXIII. Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met For one more picture! in a sheet of flame And blew " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." |