A HIGHLAND DAWNING.
ABOISTEROUS day of shouting breezes and sun- chequered sea had passed into a silent evening cur- tained with quiet cloud, and westward in a halo of white radiance the sun had gone to rest beyond depths of inter- lacing hills. That whiteness is a rarer and a greater thing than the pomp of a gold and crimson setting, but a white West quickly dims to grey, and to-night the darkness came driving fast out of the eastward and followed hard after the sun. Never through all the autumn had been so short a twilight. The little' sandy headlands that step northwards from where the links end, and the long hills that run beyond them up the coast to fence back the sea, one after another gave up their being into the greyness ; and the green of the links, which lingers often when all colour else in the world has fled, passed to-day into the shadows while the pines still struck blue into the grey West. Soon they too gave up the struggle, and the white mass of the hotel alone stood up un- conquered bulking palely out of the darkness, until it too was swallowed up, and the blackness of a heavy Highland night drew down and in upon the world.
The tide was coming in, and as it crept up the flat sand the rustle of the waves grew nearer and louder, until when the last landward sounds were quieted the beat and hiss of the water filled all the night, and through the long black hours the swing and rhythm 'of that sound seemed to point and measure out the darkness. Eastward the light on Tarbatt Ness, prisoned and released as the shutter passed, pricked the night with a yellow needle-point of fire and sank again to blackness. Inland the last yellow splashes where the hotel windows had stared out vanished one by one and the darkness lay heavy on links and sea.
And so the hours passed. Once in the fields inland a restless sheep bad blundered against a fence, and the twang of the wire stung the black air, heard even above the hoarse voice of the sea; and once from far below, where the Old Course and the heather fiats beyond move forward into the narrowing Firth, the harsh wail of a gull came up on the darkness rasping. All else was silent save the unsleep- ing sea, and it might have been that life was gone from the world. And then was wrought that miracle, which is the first and -greatest of the day. The darkness, sea-beaten, lay still unbroken, and there was no sound of stirring life, yet the miracle was performed and the world was awake. A faint breeze that smelt of the morning came out of the black East, and as it passed over the sand hillocks that edge the long sixth hole the stiff mill-grass stirred like an uneasy sleeper and the rustle of it made the air alive. The scent of that breeze and the cool clean breath of it seemed to find passage into- forgotten deeps of old experience, and in those who had watched through the night awoke a great exuberance of ancient animal joy in life. This strange moment comes before every dawn, when for all who are awake
and abroad to share in it a great wave of new vigour seems to pass over the world, quickening all things into life before the day is brought to birth. Till that is come no need to look for the morning. But now already there is a. change. The darkness has become a canopy and not an obsession. There is no light as yet ; not a shape can be traced in the blackness, but there is a void between heaven and earth, which were as one before ; there is a sense of freedom, of spaciousness that is new, and it seems as if room. had been made for the light that is to come. And then suddenly to the eastward between sky and sea there is a break, a line of grey, clean-drawn and shimmering every moment into whiter brilliancy, and soon further up the sky the new day finds rifts in the canopy of cloud and marks them out in grey. The space between heaven and earth is slowly flooded with the light that pours in from the East, and where the falling tide still frets and hisses below the links a faint line of quivering white is growing out of the darkness. A huge sleeper-built bunker looms out to the right in shadowy silhouette, and in the landward distance the dim outline of the pine-tops is being pencilled out faintly grey. Everywhere are whites and greys and blacks, but on the westward hills the painter has set up his palette of hung mists where the colours of the new day will be first laid, and already through the eastern rifts the light is pouring in stained to a thick hot red. Tarbatt Ness is become a tiny point of silver, and soon it is gone, but the long black arm of land whereon it is set is flung across the glow, cutting fiery sky from fiery sea. Westward the fire of the dawning is caught on the mists, ruby and gold and indigo and suddenly upon all the world colour is come again, as it comes to the dusty pebbles when the first of the tide has lapped them. North and south the dimness is driven back till the morning has trembled far out into every distance, and given to the heather its brown again, and radiant life to the grey, dead mists. For there is nothing in all the world like the clear, cool brilliancy of the early light that goes out before the sun. Every hollow where the shadows are still crouching every black spot guarded by tree or hillock from the East, has yet a dark wealth of colour in its heart like the shadowed deeps of a still pool, and there is something too that is like clear water in the splendid softness of deep colour and dim outline that is everywhere. The dark green of the gorse and the blue of the heavy pines, the brown stain of the southward heather and the red of the trooping rocks,—all these are deep rich, radiant, as in full day they dare not be ; but the pines do not stab the sky clear and hard as when the sun is up, nor do the rocks stand jagging out of the yellow sand, rrgg.ed and sharp. For these moments of the dawning are moments of mystery, of strange, soft, unreal things, splendid and passing like the marvels of an Eastern tale.
And still it was the time of the dawning and the day was not come; still there was silence save only for the sea. At last from the folded mists to the southward a faint hard rustle like the rustle of dry reeds came up, and soon the air was filled with the voices of innumerable crows, trailing like a long black scarf across the sky. The sound of them was like the voice of an awakened world, rasping with the hard joy of morning energy, and as they streamed away into the East the sun came up out of the sea. J. F. R.
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