The peculiar flavor of the scenery has
something to do with absence of evolution; it was better marked
in Egypt: it was felt wherever time-sequences became
interchangeable. One's instinct abhors time. As one lay on the
slope of the Edge, looking sleepily through the summer haze
towards Shrewsbury or Cader Idris or Caer Caradoc or Uriconium,
nothing suggested sequence. The Roman road was twin to the
railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury; Wenlock and
Buildwas were far superior to Bridgnorth. The shepherds of
Caractacus or Offa, or the monks of Buildwas, had they approached
where he lay in the grass, would have taken him only for another
and tamer variety of Welsh thief. They would have seen little to
surprise them in the modern landscape unless it were the steam of
a distant railway. One might mix up the terms of time as one
liked, or stuff the present anywhere into the past, measuring
time by Falstaff's Shrewsbury clock, without violent sense of
wrong, as one could do it on the Pacific Ocean; but the triumph
of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one's
earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the ganoid fish, whose
name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pteraspis, a cousin of
the sturgeon, and whose kingdom, according to Sir Roderick
Murchison, was called Siluria. Life began and ended there.
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