ith the common thing built much larger than the million
examples upon which we had based our petty security. It has been always
in the nature of worship that heroes, or the gods made manifest, should
be men, but larger than men. Not tall men or men grander, but men
transcendent: men only in their form; in their dimension so much
superior as to be lifted out of our world. An arch as old as Rome but
not yet ruined, found on the sands of Africa, arrests the traveller in
this fashion. In his modern cities he has seen greater things; but here
in Africa, where men build so squat and punily, cowering under the heat
upon the parched ground, so noble and so considerable a span, carved as
men can carve under sober and temperate skies, catches the mind and
clothes it with a sense of the strange. And of these emotions the
strongest, perhaps, is that which most of those who travel to-day go
seeking; the enchantment of mountains; the air by which we know them
for something utterly different from high hills. Accustomed to the
contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that
introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a
further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate
ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky;
men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us;
till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of
the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. Then
all our grasp of the wide view breaks down. We change. The valleys and
the tiny towns, the unseen mites of men, the gleams or thread of roads,
are prostrate, covering a little watching space before the shrine of
this dominant and towering presence.

It is as though humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar
illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how
unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though
the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the
showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the
soul--those ultimate places where things common become shadows and fail,
and the divine part in us, which adores and desires, breathes its own
air, and is at last alive.

* * * * *

This awful charm which attaches to the enormous envelops the Causse of
Mende; for its attributes are all of them pushed beyond the ordinar