Except that it was near Chippenham, where the Danes gave up their
swords and were baptized, no one can pick out certainly the place
where you and I were saved from being savages for ever.
But the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the place
which is best reputed as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bare
and partly shaggy; like that savage and sacred spot in those great
imaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon.
The darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon,
the long fantastic shadows, actually created that sense of
monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape.
The bare grey slopes seemed to rush downhill like routed hosts;
the dark clouds drove across like riven banners; and the moon was
like a golden dragon, like the Golden Dragon of Wessex.
As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between
myself and the moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house.
The atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a pile
of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on the top of it.
Fortunately I was crossing these wastes with a friend who knew
more history than I; and he told me that this was a barrow older
than Alfred, older than the Romans, older perhaps than the Britons;
and no man knew whether it was a wall or a trophy or a tomb.
Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave me a queer emotion
to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with the torrents
of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may have lifted up
his head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of something
and yet suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as we did,
and understood it as little as we.
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