Letters from England/"Binnorie, O Binnorie"

by Karel Čapek

“Binnorie, O Binnorie”

 

BEAR me, O Lake Queen, along the keen grey and blue surface of Loch Tay, between the unfrequented domes of the hills beneath skies which regale me with rain and sun; bear me, trim vessel, along the glistening silk of Lake Tay.

Bear me, red post-chaise, through the greenest of green valleys, through a valley of gnarled trees, through a valley with a foaming river, through a valley of shaggy sheep, through a glen of Nordic abundance. Wait, silvery aspen, move not, wavy oak-tree standing astraddle, black pine-thicket and lush alder; wait, wild-eyed maiden.

But no; bear me, hissing train, northward, northward, among those dark mountains. Blue and dark mountains above green domes; valleys of russet cows, light and dark green, I glistening lakelets and Nordic beauty of birch-trees; endless the bare and trim roundness of hills and valleys, wooded glens and slopes russet with heather, northern beauty of meadows, birch-coppices in the north, in the north the surface of the sea gleams like a steel layer.

Inverness, a small town containing trout and Highlanders, is built entirely of pink granite. And the cottages are fashioned of such beautifully hewn ashlars that I have drawn them for you. And the eaves above the doorways are to be found only in Inverness.

And now to the mountains, to the interior of the country, to the region of the Gaelic language. Heavens above! never have I seen such a forlorn and sinister region; still the bare hills, but higher and direr; nothing but stunted birch-trees, and then not even those, but yellow gorse and heather, and then not even that, but oozing black peat, and on it only wisps of bog-cotton, which we call St. Ivan’s beard, and then not even that, but stones, stones, sheer stones with tough reedstems.

Clouds drag their way across the grey baldness of the hills, there is a spatter of cold rain, mists rise above the black rocks, and a dark glen is revealed, mournful as the howling of a dog. For miles and miles neither dwelling nor man; and when a cottage does fly past it is as grey and stony as the rocks, and all by itself, nothing else for miles around. A lake without a fisherman, streams without a miller, pastures without a shepherd, road without a wayfarer. Only in the more fertile valleys graze the shaggy Scottish steers; they stand in the rain and lie down in the damp; perhaps that is why they are so overgrown with prickly tufts, as I have drawn them for you.

And the Scottish sheep have whole Havelocks of wool, and black masks on their faces; nobody tends them, only a small stone wall along the bare slopes indicates the presence of man; as far as this wall is my pasture.

And now the place is so deserted that there is neither flock nor property, only a ruined cottage and a tumbledown mound on the brown undulation of the mossy slope. The end of life, here nothing has changed for at least ten thousand years; people have only made roads and built railways, but the earth has not changed; nowhere a tree or a shrub; only cold lakes, whins and ferns, unending brown gorse-land, endless black stones, ink tinted mountain summits slit by silvery threads of torrents, black marshes of peat, cloudily smoking glens between the bald ridges of mountain-tops, and again a lake with dark reeds, its surface without birds, a region without people, disquiet without cause, a road without a goal, I do not know what I am seeking, but this anyhow is solitude; drink your fill of this unbounded sadness, before you return to the haunts of men, batten on solitude, unappeased soul; for you have seen nothing greater than this desolation.

And now I am driven along into the valley; by the roadside yellow sparks of gorse gush forth, dwarf pines crouch, stunted birch-trees have clutched at granite rubble; a black torrent leaps through the valley, here are now the pine-woods, the purple bloom of rhododendra and crimson digitalis; birch-trees, sumach, oaks and alders, Nordic wildness, ferns waist-high, and a dense forest of junipers; the sun pierces the clouds, and below glistens the deep strip of a new sea among the mountain peaks.