FAIRY GOLD FAIRY GOLD
I was standing looking at a hole in the side of a mountain, partly obscured by bushes and blocked by old timber, when a man came up the track through the larches and stopped. 'Lead was got there once,' he said. I had gathered as much from the quartz and waste. 'There's copper in places, too,' he went on, 'but not just here, and there's gold, of course.' 1 raised an eyebrow at this and then remembered a famous ring of Welsh gold. 'But there's more gold than made the ring! Lots more in the rocks. You sometimes get a glint of it....' I didn't smile, for I recalled, long ago, finding 'gold' for myself, streaks of yellow in stones and little golden crystals embedded in crags. One twilight I convinced myself 1 had found gold while digging out a rabbit, but there is gold that flares in the lapping tide and gold in all sorts of places. Crystal, phosphorus, pyrites are poor names for a magic substance that belongs in legend and fairy talc, the secret gold of the remote mountain—fairy gold, in fact.
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