Moor

“ In the five Northumbrian counties you will scarcely find so bleak, ugly, and yet, in a savage way, so picturesque a moor as Dardale Moss. The moor itself spreads north, south, east, and west, a great undulating sea of black peat and heath.
What we may term its shores are wooded wildly with birch, hazel, and dwarf-oak. No towering mountains surround it, but here and there you have a rocky knoll rising among the trees, and many a wooded promontory of the same pretty, because utterly wild, forest, running out into its dark level. ”

“ Look boys what the Moor's rock looks like from afar. You'd say a man! said Matthias.
They turned round to look at the Moor's rock which blackened in the dusk. At the summit one could really make out a head, a forehead, a big nose, a mouth and two thick lips.
From close up these stones evoked nothing. From far away however they formed a face, like the Moor's face. That's why the old people believed that a Moor lived up there!
It's not the only rock like that. Many stones from far away look like human faces; an old woman can take them for ghosts; a child can even be afraid of them. ”

“ Shorn of much of its beauty by the disastrous burning of 1908, the great moor has still the charm of space, of long lines of distance only hemmed in by the blue hills above the Needles, and of an infinite play of colour. The average lover of the picturesque fancies a moor is brown all over alike. ”

“ Plaintive and eerie the moor-birds protested against this invasion of their haunts. The moon came slowly up over the eastern end of the moor, flinging a silver radiance abroad, and softening the shadows cast by the hills. A strange, dank smell rose from the mossy ground—the scent of rotting heather and withered grass, mixed with the beautiful perfume from beds of wild thyme.
A low call came from a brooding curlew, a faint sigh from a plover, and the wild rasping cry of a lapwing greeted them overhead. ”

“ And Holmes had expressly said that I should study the neighbours upon the moor. I accepted Stapleton’s invitation, and we turned together down the path.
“It is a wonderful place, the moor,” said he, looking round over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges. “You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.” ”

“ The moor itself was park and garden in one, and the heather and gorse grew right up to the wide terrace walk upon which the south windows of the little house opened. A plantation of pine and fir behind gave protection from the winter winds, and shade from the summer sun; but save for this little wood—an oasis in a blooming desert—the moor stretched away in its wild freedom on every hand, the white road alone, glimpses of which could be seen here and there, seeming to connect it with the great world beyond. ”

“ In about an hour I came to a wild moor; the moor extended for miles and miles. It was bounded on the east and south by immense hills and moels. On I walked at a round pace, the sun scorching me sore, along a dusty, hilly road, now up, now down. Nothing could be conceived more cheerless than the scenery around. The ground on each side of the road was mossy and rushy—no houses—instead of them were peat stacks, here and there, standing in their blackness. Nothing living to be seen except a few miserable sheep picking the wretched herbage, or lying panting on the shady side of the peat clumps. ”

“ Away to the north the road crosses the desolate country like a pale-green ribbon. It passes over Lockton High Moor, climbs to 700 feet at Tom Cross Rigg, and then disappears into the valley of Eller Beck, on Goathland Moor, coming into view again as it climbs steadily up to Sleights Moor, nearly 1,000 feet above the sea. An enormous stretch of moorland spreads itself out towards the west. ”

“ But the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places. White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. ”

“ And when we, who have long been dreaming of a visit to the Moor's metropolis, actually behold it, though it first appears as only a faint line of walls and towers, almost undiscernible through the rough sea of heated air-waves that surge between us and the city, now that Fez at last has risen from this endless plain over which we have been toiling southward for eleven days, we feel that we must draw rein, and for a few minutes indulge in the enjoyment of that creeping thrill. There are so few of them in life ”

“ The hall of their triumph is waste and desolate. The bat flits about its twilight vault, and the owl hoots from the neighboring Tower of Comares.
Entering the Court of the Lions a few evenings since, I was almost startled at beholding a turbaned Moor quietly seated near the fountain. For a moment one of the fictions of the place seemed realized: an enchanted Moor had broken the spell of centuries, and become visible. He proved, however, to be a mere ordinary mortal: a native of Tetuan in Barbary, who had a shop in the Zacatin of Granada, where he sold rhubarb, trinkets, and perfumes. ”

“ In the centre stood a great chest, secured with seven bands of steel, at each end of which sat an enchanted Moor in armor, but motionless as a statue, being controlled by the power of the incantation. ”

“ She was a woman, young and full of life, and the moor was wide and dark, great-bosomed, and beside her there ran a man who held her firmly and tightened, ever and again, his grasp of her slipping fingers. Soon it was no effort not to think and to feel recklessly was to escape. Their going made a wind to fan their faces; there was a smell of damp earth and dusty heather, of Halkett's tweeds and his tobacco; the wind had a faint smell of frost; there was one star in a greenish sky.
She stopped when she could go no further, and she heard his hurried breathing and her own. ”

“ As the road sweeps round it the Moor is everywhere about us, an endless series of rounded hills, with the line of their curved shoulders broken here and there by jagged tors. Everywhere the rim of the landscape is blue beyond all experience. When green has [62] melted into grey, and grey has deepened into an indigo so strong that it seems no colour can be bluer, there is still beyond it a line of hills as purely, piercingly blue as the sky in June. ”

“ THE HOOTING CARN One of the grimmest yet most fascinating tracts of moorland in the West is that wild, boulder-strewn district behind St. Just in Penwith, near the Land's End. Here, amid a scene of savage beauty, wind-swept by the great gales from the Atlantic, is a stretch of treeless moor the richest in all Cornwall in remains of prehistoric man. ”

“ But it will so happen that sometimes an enchanted Moor, with more cunning than [18] honesty, will get through one of the windows on the birth of a child, and will brand the infant with the crescent on his shoulder or arm, in which case it is well known that the child, on certain nights, will be changed into a wolf.
The enchanted Moors have their castles and palaces under the ground or beneath the rivers, and they wander about the earth, seeing but not seen; for they died unbaptized, and have, therefore, no rest in the grave. ”

“ Courage was requisite in one who ventured to the Moor at night, and made a way to the iron-stone block, over tracts of spongy morass, among lines of stagnant ooze, through coppices of water-loving willows and straggling brier. ”

“ They do not flame, but they glow, and diffuse an aroma that fills the lungs with balm. The turf-cutting is one of the annual labours on the moor. Every farm has its peat-bog, and in the proper season a sufficiency of fuel is cut, then carried and stacked for winter use. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that cooking done over a peat fire surpasses cooking at the best club in London. But it may be that on the moor one relishes a meal in a manner impossible elsewhere.
Widdecombe-in-the-Moor is a village in a valley walled off from the world by high ridges on the east and on the west. ”

“ His skin did not seem dark until you saw his eyes, which were such a light gray that they startled you, almost as if the eye sockets had been without eyeballs. His eyebrows were fine and black and tremendously slanted in the opposite angle from the Chinese slant. The curve of his nostrils suggested the Moor. He was slender, active, alive. ”

“ The honest heart of the little water-carrier was touched with compassion at the appeal of the stranger. “God forbid,” said he, “that I should ask fee or reward for doing a common act of humanity.” He accordingly helped the Moor on his donkey, and set off slowly for Granada, the poor Moslem being so weak that it was necessary to hold him on the animal to keep him from falling to the earth.
When they entered the city, the water-carrier demanded whither he should conduct him. “Alas!” said the Moor, faintly, “I have neither home nor habitation, I am a stranger in the land. ”

“ The two partners in good luck divided their spoil amicably and fairly, except that the Moor, who had a little taste for trinketry, made out to get into his heap the most of the pearls and precious stones and other baubles, but then he always gave the water-carrier in lieu magnificent jewels of massy gold, of five times the size, with which the latter was heartily content. They took care not to linger within reach of accidents, but made off to enjoy their wealth undisturbed in other countries. ”

“ Though the preparations for this cavalcade had occupied but little time, yet the rumour of its approach had already spread through the city, and the people, who were as curious to behold the beautiful Moor as to know what could be her business at the palace, were collected in crowds in the streets through which she must of necessity pass. She was dressed in a most magnificent Moorish habit, and had neglected nothing that could add to her beauty on so important an occasion. ”

“ You have no trees, nor camels, nor sheep, nor sand, nor goats,” continued he; “nor are your women made like ours. You do not inhabit the earth, but are born, live, and die in your houses that float on the sea.”
The greatest luxury of a Moor is to see his wives and daughters richly dressed, and on them he exhibits all his opulence by ornamenting their ears, arms, and legs with rings of gold and silver.
They have no knowledge of the arts and trade, though they make in a rude manner, pikes, knives, and even kettles, from the native iron which is furnished to them by the Negroes. ”

“ Mists and clouds from the Atlantic were apt to sweep suddenly over the Moor and trap unwary travellers, so that many persons had perished in the bogs from time to time; and the clouds striking against the rocky tors caused the rainfall to be so heavy that the Moor had been named the "Land of Streams." One of the bogs near the centre of the Moor was never dry, and formed a kind of shallow lake out of which rose five rivers, the Ockment or Okement, the Taw, the Tavy, the Teign, and the Dart, the last named and most important having given its name to the Moor. ”

“ Moor, fell, common, are well-known terms. Anglo-Saxon mor is waste-land, a moor, a heath; Danish mor is a moor, or morass; we have Killhope, Burnhope, and Wellhope Moors. Fell is Old Norse. All the Weardale moorlands are called fells. Chapel Fell is 2,294 feet above sea-level; A common is a tract of unenclosed pasture or outside land on which the tenantry of the inlands have a common right, or right of common for their sheep. ”

“ Their little hearts beat wildly, like a hare's.
They don't want to move forward. They walk with difficulty. At each instant, they expect to see a stone slowly straightening up.
When they arrived nearer and met up at the point, there was nothing. The stones here were stones like all the others. They looked at them carefully, they listened to them, but they remained just stones.
Then where's the Moor?
Instead of seeing the Moor, the children saw from up high a breath-taking scene.
Right down at the bottom, very, very far away, the vast wide sea waited for the sun, Phanis's sun. ”

“ A Moor at Tangier, who speaks a little English, said to me, pointing to shot-marks, “French got guns so big—Moors so big (making a circle with both arms, and then a small hole with his forefinger and thumb) and then fire away. Shame! shame!”
The word Moor is a very awkward one. I do not like to use it, and know not what to substitute for it. There is no race so named. Barbary is inhabited by Arabs and Breber. ”

“ The Moor’s tongue was shrunk to half the natural size, and it appeared evident he could not speak a word.
“He is worth his weight in silver,” Hilo said, looking at him narrowly. “I have heard the count had a mute slave, and I remember once seeing this man with him in the Portuguese camp. Let’s carry the fellow higher up the mountain and compel him to show us where his master is.”
The Moor’s turban served to bind his arms, and the three reascending the mountain a space, halted on the farther side of Angra, which town they passed so close as to hear the sound of trumpets from the market-place. ”

“ The moment the Mueddin is heard, every Moor, far and near, wherever he may happen to be when the sound first strikes his ear, or however engaged at the time, throws himself prostrate on the ground, it may be in his chamber, in his shop, in the bazaar, in the street, or on the housetop; it may be when alone, or when engaged in conversation with his friends and family; it matters not how or where engaged, at the solemn summons every face is instantaneously turned to the east, the head is bowed to the dust, and the incense of prayer is offered to the one God. ”