Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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Название: Hollow Places
Автор: Christopher Hadley
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Природа и животные
isbn: 9780008319519
isbn:
‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk. Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.
She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard of another tree in another place.
A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.
Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning, if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm, an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.
I have often wondered what was made of the yew. If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.
Saint Augustine saith, that Dragons doe abide in deep Caves and hollow places of the earth, and the some-times when they perceive moistnes in the ayre, they come out of theyr holes, and beating the ayre with their wings, as it were with the strokes of Oares, they forsake the earth and flie aloft
—Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents, 1608
In the rocks of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, rest the last bones of the dragon that Perseus slew to save Andromeda. The skulls of similar monsters litter the Sivalik hills in Northern India, and on Turkey’s Aegean coast the remains of fabulous creatures, which stalked the myths of Heracles, weather from the cliffs to astonish passing travellers.
Heracles’ victory against the Monster of Troy is depicted most dramatically on an ancient Greek krater, or vase, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here is the beast peppered with arrows by the hero as he rescues the Trojan princess Hesione. It is a very peculiar monster: just a head, white and skeletal, but to the modern eye it is impossible to mistake what we are looking at – a fossilised skull of a prehistoric creature projecting from a rocky outcrop; it is a two-and-a-half thousand-year-old black-figure masterpiece of palaeontology.
The vase appears on the cover of Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, a compelling account of fossil finds in antiquity, which argues that dragons, griffins, cyclops and many other nightmares from the ancient world were inspired by the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. Mayor amasses accounts and archaeological evidence of encounters with giant bones in antiquity, alongside known fossil sites today, which dovetail neatly with the places where the legends of particular monsters first appeared.
In the first century CE, Apollonius of Tyana claimed to have seen dragon skulls in India where today we know the skulls of prehistoric giraffes, elephants and crocodiles are found in the famous Sivalik fossil beds. The Roman naturalist Aelian recorded the discovery of giant bones on the island of Chios following a forest fire and noted that the locals decided they must be the bones of a dragon: ‘From these gigantic bones the villagers were able to observe how immense and awful the monster was when it was alive.’ As for the dragons at Jaffa, biblical Joppa, a story from Ancient Rome tells how the consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus held victory celebrations during which he paraded an immense skeleton found at Joppa, where tradition said the Greek hero Perseus rescued Andromeda from the dragon. One version of that myth even says that Perseus turned the monster to stone – petrified it, fossilised it perhaps?
W. B. Gerish entertained similar ideas about the origin of the Shonks’ legend. Had those rustics in the Pelhams found some dinosaur fossils under the yew tree? He wrote to the Geological Survey enquiring about a dinosaur find and asked Herbert Andrews, the son of his friend and collaborator Robert Andrews, to walk across the road from his desk at the V&A to find out about the Cetiosaurus on display at the Natural History Museum. The younger Andrews kindly wrote back describing the dinosaur, which had been pulled from the Oxford Clay near Peterborough, but at the end of the letter cautioned, ‘I don’t think it is possible to see in him the Herts dragon.’
But Gerish wasn’t to be put off; he had been collecting cuttings about fossil finds. One about an Ichthyosaurus found in Peterborough reveals what he was thinking: ‘The preying habits of this hungry flesh-eater, with its wide mouth and long jaws so well armed with serviceable teeth, bring to mind the fabled dragons of the ancients and may well be possibly the origin of these myths.’
Was Shonks’ dragon a Cetiosaurus, an Ichthyosaurus, or something else entirely, wondered Gerish. He wasn’t alone in conflating dragons with dinosaurs. In one of his box files there is a tiny newspaper advertisement for a book with a humdinger of a title: The Book of the Great Sea Dragons: Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth. The author, Thomas Hawkins, was an unpopular and eccentric collector, amassing fossils in Devon at about the same time the dragon’s СКАЧАТЬ