Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales

THE NYMPH STILL LIVES

Most of the ancient thought-forms which have crossed my path from the ever-living mind of the Past in the course of my antiquarian studies have been unpleasant; but there is one at least that stands out in the memory as a thing of sweetness despite the eerie sense of unreality that surrounds the experience.

If anyone with a taste for ancient majesty and noble scenery wishes to take an unusual holiday, I can thoroughly recommend tramping the Roman Wall of Hadrian—and I mean tramping, not just taking a car along the Newcastle-Carlisle road south of it and making occasional walks to the “star” spots on the Wall.

The only way to see it in its splendour, to feel the might and majesty of old Rome, is to start from Newcastle and, as did the great Dr. Collingwood Bruce some 90 years ago, follow the Wall itself with grim determination, up hill and down dale, with his published guide-book, till you gaze on its ending: a long mole flung, almost with a gesture of defiance, out into the Solway from Bowness.

Even for one with very little archæological knowledge, the Wall can be full of interest. At Housesteads, the ancient Borcovicus, the fears and upsets of the third-century panic come back to us with vivid force as we see how the garrison reduced to half-width the ancient gates, where we can still observe the deep ruts worn by the chariots.

In the great ditch on the north side, which the Roman engineers dug with relentless perseverance even along the impregnable heights above the lowlands, clean through the hard basalt rock, we can see lying to this day one colossal block with the dowel-holes still remaining, the only block that defied even Roman ingenuity to move after it had been quarried.

At Gilsland, on the border of Northumberland and Cumberland, there still lies by Tyne the Popping Stone where Sir Walter Scott proposed to his bride; and if you are lucky enough to run across the aged Lowland shepherd who looks after the site of Borcovicus, he will tell you weird tales of how Arthur and his Knights still sleep beneath the crags called the Nine Nicks o’ Thirlwall, ready to awake to England’s need when the Chosen One shall find the cavern and blow the hunting horn.

It was at Borcovicus that I aroused the superstitious horror of this good old man when, a few summers ago, I decided after many years to tramp the Wall again. My friend and colleague Alan Granville, also in need of a change after the months of close research work we had been doing together, had gone off to Italy, so I was alone.

These “star turns” of the Wall, fortresses like Borcovicus, all seem to be miles from any civilised accommodation; and as I flatly declined to drag my legs another five miles to find a village, I casually told the old shepherd that I thought the cave just outside the fort, known to have been a temple of the oriental sun-god Mithras, would be an ideal place to sleep, with my knapsack as a pillow. The old fellow was terrified, and swore I should not come out alive next morning—for a dim memory of the old gods yet lives in this wild countryside.

Awake I did, however, with the dawn next day, after an excellent night’s rest, and made an early start, as I wanted to retrace my steps a few miles to the adjacent “station” of Procolitia, and devote a day to it, since I had passed it rather late in the afternoon.

My chief interest here lay in that extraordinary deity, the purely local goddess or nymph known as Coventina, to whom unique inscribed altars have been found here; and these, with an extraordinary collection of objects from her well-spring, are all to be seen in the beautiful little museum three miles away, founded by that great antiquary John Clayton at his house, Chesters, itself on the site of a Roman station.

Nowhere else in all the Roman Empire is a site of the cult of this happy sprite known. Here, into her well—which has been excavated, and includes a great underground chamber—the rough soldiery threw their hard-earned denarii in grateful recognition of some granted boon; women safely delivered of a child—or perhaps safely escaped from having one—threw their pin; and at least one man cured of an affliction to his right hand threw in a beautifully-modelled bronze hand, a pagan custom that has persisted to this day at shrines of healing saints in southern Europe.

I had spent all the morning in a highly technical examination of the site, making notes, measurements and drawings, and enjoyed an ample if rough, lunch from my knapsack. It was a boiling hot July day, and the heat seemed to radiate even from the Roman masonry about me.

Idly I stood over the well-site, wishing the water still ran in it, that I might quaff the waters of the happy nymph instead of having to trudge to the stream at the other end of the site. Some whimsy prompted me to throw down the well a perfectly good French ten-franc piece that I had received in change (to my disgust when I discovered it) from a wily Newcastle tobacconist, and which, unfortunately, refused to fit several cigarette-machines—I tried it on about half a dozen the night before I left Newcastle on this tramp.

“Ah, well!” I thought fancifully, “it’s no good to me, but here’s an offering to you, Coventina—a coin as of old, if only in gratitude to all the gods for this glorious day and countryside.”

Suddenly I felt very, very lazy. “Oh, blow refilling my water-flask,” I thought, “a doze is indicated.”

I sank down on that springy, mossy turf one finds all along the Wall country, with my back to the structure of the well, and, I suppose, must have been asleep in a few seconds.

I say must have been because, possessing a scientific mind, I cannot believe that what happened was anything but a dream—and yet I am not so sure.

I was awakened by a tap on the shoulder, and a light, cool hand on my brow, to behold to my astonishment a young woman bending over me dressed only in a completely transparent, flowing gown, girdled at the waist with flowers, and with a fillet of flowers in her hair. She spoke, in melodious Latin:

Noli timere. Loci dea Coventina sum, amica tua, quia meae aquae obolum dedisti. Felix sum.

(Fear not! I am Coventina, goddess of this place, thy friend since to my waters thou hast made an offering. Happy am I!)

She straightened up, swung a garland of wildflowers in her hand, and on the mead in front of me began a most graceful dance, the dance of sheer joy of nature. Watching her with mixed feelings of astonishment and desire—I, a bachelor scholar forty years of age, confess that I felt the latter almost for the first time in my life—I suddenly noticed that I could see not only right through her robe, but through her body, could see the distant plain to the south quite plainly as though she were not in my line of vision; and as she danced, there came from somewhere a strange, primeval music of Pan’s pipes. She sang to herself a wild, bubbling song, in a language I could not identify. It certainly was not Latin; it sounded vaguely like Welsh!

Abruptly the pipes ceased in a sharp top-note wail, and with startling suddenness the nymph vanished from my sight.

I was conscious all at once that I was sitting there alone and wide awake, and an educated voice broke upon my dazed senses:—

“Well, he certainly looks a treat! Had one over the eight an’ gone all classical by the looks of him!”

I looked up. Regarding me with amusement was a bronzed young fellow whose whole appearance spelt Undergraduate, wearing a pair of disreputable shorts, a khaki shirt, and a Balliol muffler; and with him, a young woman clad in a plaid skirt and a tight jumper; both were burdened with hikers’ knapsacks.

Some instinct made me put my hand up to my head, and I fished from it a garland of wild-flowers, skilfully twined—which I am ready to swear I did not make, and which most positively did not adorn my person when I sank peacefully down on the sward. I felt something hard in my left hand, and opening the palm, found myself grasping tightly a sestertius, the coin of the second-century soldier’s daily pay, which, with equal certainty, I had not acquired in my exploration of the site—the archæologist John Clayton cleared it pretty thoroughly.

I must have looked an awful fool. I blinked and rose to my feet, grinning sheepishly.

“You didn’t by any chance decorate me with this, did you?” I asked, holding out the garland.

“No fear,” replied the undergraduate, “we’ve been watching you for the last five minutes, ever since we came up. You had the bridal garland parked on your top-knot and were beating the air, apparently in time to some music you were dreaming. Then you clutched the air violently with your left hand and closed it over something.”

Somehow I felt it wisest not to exhibit the Roman coin.

“Anyway,” I smiled, “as you can see. I’m not ‘one over the eight’ and I expect some other hiker put the garland on me for a joke.”

“Well, we’ve seen nobody else for miles around—and you can see pretty far ahead, too,” said the girl.

We let it go at that. I unobtrusively put the circlet beside my knapsack, and got into normal conversation with my new acquaintances, who proved to be from Balliol and Lady Margaret Hall respectively, both reading for a degree in Classics and possessing a good grasp of Romano-British antiquities. By the time evening grew late, we had become quite well acquainted.

The couple both obtained their degree, I heard afterwards, with first-class honours. They are married now, and they spent a week-end of their honeymoon at our Midland manor-house a few months ago.

Only then did I tell them the real story of how I came by the garland, and revealed my possession of the coin.

The garland still hangs on the wall of my study, faded but intact. The only thing that puzzled my Balliol friend about the whole affair was the fact that the nymph Coventina appeared to be singing in Welsh.

“All I can suggest,” he said, before turning in with his bride, “is that these ancient, kindly spirits always have lived in the wilds, and still do—and that Coventina, who you remember was a purely local goddess, was singing in ancient Keltic.”

I think so too—but then why the devil did she address me in Classical Latin?