Ash had written to his wife, most days, if not every day, during this tour. The letters were in Cropper's edition; Maud and Roland had brought photocopies to their meeting.
My dearest Ellen,
I and my tall basketof specimenjars arrived in one piece in Robin Hood's Bay - though much bruised and dirtied from the shaking of the train and the continuous rain of smuts and live sparks from the engine, most particularly in the tunnels. The Pickering-Grosmont line travels through the Newtondale Gorge - a cleft formed during the Ice Age - where the engine produces, amongst romantically desolate moorland, a sublime volcanic eruption of its own, due to the steepnessof thegradient. It put me in mind of Milton 's Satan, winging his black way through the asphaltic fumes of Chaos - and ofLyell's solid, patient yet inspired work on the raising of the hills and the carving of the valleys by ice. I heard curlews, making their peremptory, desolate sound, and saw what I like to believe was an eagle, though it was probably no such thing - at all events, a hovering predator, floating on the invisible element. Strange narrow-chested sheep bound away, scattering stones, and swaying their woolly integument in the air like banks of weed in the sea-water - heavy and slow - They starefrom crags -I was about to write inhumanly- but thatgoes without saying - they have a look almost dae monic and inimical, for domesticated animals. You would be interested by their eyes - yellow with a black bar of a pupil - horizontal, not vertical - which gives them their odd look.
The train is a modern successor to a successful horse-drawn railway designed and built by George Stephenson himself. I should almost have preferred that more decorous conveyance to the snorting firedragon who ruined my travelling-shirt (no, I shall not send it home; my landlady, a Mrs Cammish, is an excellent laundress and starcher, I am assured).
Here everything seems primaeval - the formations of the rocks, the heaving and tossing of the full sea, the people with their fishing boats (called cobles in the local speech) which I imagine are not much changed from the primitive if versatile little craft of the early Viking invaders. Here on the shore of the German Ocean I feel thepresence of thoseNorthern Lands across its cold grey-green wastes - very different from the close civilised fields of France across the Channel - Even the air is somehow both ancient and fresh - -fresh with salt and heather and a kind of absolute biting cleanness, resembling the taste of the water here, which has bubbled deliciously from perforated limestone, and is more surprising than wine - after the turgid Thames.
But you will be thinking I have no regretfor my warm house and library and smoking-jacket and desk, andfor the company of my dear wife. I think of you steadily and with steady love - of which you need no assurance.Are you well? Are you able to go about and to read without headache?Write and tell me of all your doings. I shall write more, and you shall see that I am become a diligent anatomist of simple life-forms- a vocation more satisfying at the moment than the recording of human convulsions.
JUNE I 5
I have been diligently reading at Lyell in my long evenings, when I have done with my dissection, which I try to do whilst the light is good, between coming in from the walks and dining. I have abandoned the tall specimen-jars for a series of plain yellow pie dishes which sit about on all the available surfaces of my dining-room, containing Eolis pellucida, Doris billomellata, Aplysia and several varieties of polyps - Tubularian, Plumularian, Sertularian - exquisite little Aeolides and some compound Ascidians. It is hard indeed, Ellen, not to imagine that some Intelligence did not design and construct these perfectly lovely and marvellouslyfunctioning creatures - and yet it is hard also not to believe the weight of evidence for the Development Theory, for the changes wrought in all things, over unimaginable Time, by the gradual action of ordinary causes. Tell me, were you indeedable, or well enough, to hearProfessor Huxley's paper on "The Persistent Types of Animal Life"? He must argue, like Darwin, against repeated acts of Creation in the setting of a distinct species on the face of the earth - but rather for the gradual modification of existing species. Were you able to make any notes? They would be of the greatest value - in assuaging curiosity at least - to your enthusiastic amateur husband. Today I walked down the cliffs from Scarborough to see the awesome Flamborough Head, where so many have met terrible deaths, in the race of water and the powerful currents - which you can almost see and hear, chuckling beneath the slap of the high waves even on a good smiling day, as this was. The cliffs are chalky-white and carved andfaceted and sliced by the elements into fantastic shapes - which the superstitious might take for Divine sculptures, or petrified ancient giants. One stands out to sea - raising an impotent or menacing stump - like a bandaged member eaten by some white leprosy. There were two Rocks known as the King and Queen - of which the latter only is still standing. Lyell describes the whole of this coast as subject to gradual dilapidation and writes of the waste of Flamborough, which is being decomposed by the salt spray,theprocess, lower down the coast, being facilitated by the throwing out of many springs from the argillaceous beds.
It occurs to me to think - if salt water and fresh water may sopatiently - and with such inevitable blind causation - give form to these white marble caves and churches and inhuman Figures by sculpting with chisel, or by moulding with the pressure of the threads of water growing to a head in the spring, and cutting fine channels with droplets and the thrust of gravity -
If this mineralforce can createsuch forms as stalactites and stalagmites - why may not the channels of the ear or the vesicles of the heart - over millennia - respond to pressure and direction -?
How may what is born, is formed by gradual causes, transmit thisform to its offspring - transmit the type- tho the individual may fail? This if I mistake not, is not known. I may cut off a sprig of a tree - andgrow a whole tree - roots and crown and all from that - and how may that be? How does the twig-slip know to form root and branch?
We are a Faustian generation, my dear - we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.
Lyell tells us also of many villages on this coast which have been engulfed by the waters - such are Auburn, Hartburn and Hyde as well as Aldbrough, which has moved inland. I have not been able to find that there aremyths or legends connected with these melancholy vanished communities - as I believe there are, for instance, in Britanny - butfishermen have found relics of houses and churches out on sandbanks in the midstoj the sea… However, if there is no drowned city of Is to torment my nights with underwater bells calling, I havefound a homely English sprite, a Hob, who inhabits a Hole, called naturally a Hob Hole. This genial Hob cures the whooping cough (known in this part of the world as the kink-cough). This Hob Hole is a cave in the cliff near the village of Kettleness - whichfell into the sea, one dark December night in 182c, sliding downwards all of a smooth piece.
You will be beginning to think I am in danger of drowning, or being engulfed in brine and sand. A wave whipped away a net I had left carelessly by my side when feeling in a deep pool on Filey Brigg for a recalcitrant Polyp - but I am unscathed, apart from a few honourable scratches from barnacle-crusts and infantmussels. I shall be restored to you in two weeks' time - with all my dead wonders of the deep -