Till all be swallowed in the final Fire.
All father in her heat felt his own force.
He said: shall these trunks live? and saw the life
The vegetable life, that sang i' th' quick.
Bright Honir said: if these could move and feel
And see and hear, the lines of leaping light
Would speak to ears and eyes. The garden's fruits
Would render life to life. This lovely world
Would be both known and loved, and so would live
An endless life in theirs, and they should hear
And speak its beauties, then first beautiful
When known to be so.
Last he spoke, the dark
God of the hidden flames. He said, "Hot blood
I give them, to make bright their countenance,
To move in them the passionate motion
Which draws them to each other, as the iron
Springs to the lodestone always. I give blood-
A human warmth, red with a human fire
A stream of vital sparks, which if preserved
Speaks each to each divinely, but which spilt
Is mortal ruin till the end of Time
For they are mortal."
And so the laughing Gods, pleased with their work
Made man and woman of the senseless stumps
And called them Ask and Embla, for the ash
And alder of their woody origins.
Odin breathed in the soul, and bright Honir
Gave sense and understanding and the power
To stand and move. The quick-dark Loki last
Knitted the veins of circulating blood
And blew the spark of vital heat, as smiths
Stir fire with the bellows. So a sharp
And burning pain of apprehension
Stirred life in those who had been logs of peace
And thrilled along new channels, till it roared
In new-forged brain and ventricles of blood
And curling membranes of the ear and nose
And last, opened new eyes on a new world.
Now these first men were quite unmanned by light.
The first wet light, of the first days, that washed
Silver and gold the sand, gilded the sea
With liquid gold and silvered every crest
That crisped and curled and wrinkled into smooth.
What had lived by the whispering of the sap
Had feelingly discerned the shivering air
Known dark and light along the rugged bark
Or smoothest treeskin, kissed by warm and cool-
Now saw with eyes, waves of indifferent light
Pour on and over, arch and arch, a gold
And sunny wash, a rainbow fountain, shot
With glints of bright and streams of gleaming motes.
All this they more than saw and less than saw.
Then turning, saw those forms majestical
Wrought by the cunning of the watching gods,
White skins, blue-shadowed and blue-veined, with rose
And tawny gold inwoven, pearly-bright
Untouched unused, and breathing the bright air.
Those four eyes darkened by the burning Face
Of the bright lady of the sky, now saw
The milder circles of each other's gaze
Crowned with curls of glossy golden hair.
And as the steel-blue eyes of the first Man
Saw answering lights in Embla's lapis eyes
The red blood Loki set to spring in them
Flooded hot faces. Then he saw that she
Was like himself, yet other; then she saw
His smiling face, and by it, knew her own-
And so they stared and smiled, and the gods smiled
To see their goodly work, so fair begun
In recognition and in sympathy.
Then Ask stepped forward on the printless shore
And touched the woman's hand, who clasped fast his.
Speechless they walked away along the line
Of the sea's roaring, in their listening ears.
Behind them, first upon the level sand
A line of darkening prints, filling with salt,
First traces in the world, of life and time
And love, and mortal hope, and vanishing.
- RANDOLPH HENRY ASH, from Ragnarôk II. I et seq.
The Hoff Lunn Spout hotel had existed in 1859, though there was no mention of it in Ash's letters. He had stayed at The Cliff in Scarborough, now demolished, and had had lodgings in Filey. Maud had found the hotel in The Good Food Guide, where it was recommended for "Uncompromising fresh fish dishes, and unremitting if unsmiling good service." It was also cheap, and Maud was worried about Roland.
It stood at the edge of the moorland, on the road from Robin Hood's Bay to Whitby. It was long, low, and made of that grey stone which to a northerner signifies reality, and to southerners, used to warm bricks and a few curves and corners, can signify unfriendliness. It had a slate roof and one row of white-sashed windows. It stood in a car park, a largely empty expanse of asphalt. Mrs Gaskell, who visited Whitby in 1859 to plan Sylvia'sLovers, remarked that gardening was not a popular art in the North, and that no attempt was made to plant flowers even on the western or southern sides of the rough stone houses. In spring the dry stone walls are briefly bright with aubretia, but in general, at places like the Hoff Lunn Spout, this absence of vegetation still prevails.
Maud drove Roland up from Lincoln in the little green car; they arrived in time for dinner. The place was kept by a huge handsome Viking woman, who watched incuriously as they carried packets of books up the stairs between the Public Bar and the Restaurant.
The Restaurant had recently been fitted with a maze of high, dim-lit cubicles in dark-stained wood. Roland and Maud met there and ordered what seemed to be a light meaclass="underline" home-made vegetable soup, plaice with shrimps, and profiteroles. A younger Viking, substantial and serious, served them with all these things, which were good and hugely plentiful, the soup a thick casserole of roots and legumes, the fish an immense white sandwich of two plate-sized fillets containing a good half-pound of prawns between their solid flaps, the profiteroles the size of large tennis-balls, covered with a lake of bitter chocolate sauce. Maud and Roland exclaimed frequently about this gigantism; they were nervous of real conversation. They made a businesslike plan of action.