Chapter: <CHAPTER>
1--A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression


A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,
and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned
itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud
shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its
floor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with
the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly
marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment
of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was
come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood
distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been
inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to
finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the
firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in
matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an
hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,
anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the
opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into
darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and
nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at
such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,
its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding
hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true
tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be
perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and
hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the
heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.
And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed
together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and
listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it
had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises
of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last
crisis--the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it
with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a
thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic
in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which
frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is
found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a
sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are
utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas,
if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of
a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of
surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and
scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which
responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty
is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a
gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and
closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to
our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually
arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods
of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest
tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle
gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden
be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes of
Scheveningen.

The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to
wander on Egdon--he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgence
when he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colours and
beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all. Only in
summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety.
Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of
the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at
during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to
reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend.
Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the
hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which
are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight
and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by
scenes like this.

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neither
ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame;
but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and
mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long
lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a
lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.
Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
wilderness--"Bruaria." Then follows the length and breadth in leagues;
and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this
ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of
Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. "Turbaria
Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relating
to the district. "Overgrown with heth and mosse," says Leland of the
same dark sweep of country.

Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape--far-reaching
proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish
thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy;
and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the
same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the
particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of
satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of
modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to
want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the
earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars
overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the
irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence
which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is
old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a
year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the
rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those
surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so
flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of
an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred
to--themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long
continuance--even the trifling irregularities were not caused by
pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of
the last geological change.

The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,
from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaid
an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the
Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the evening
under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom
had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath,
the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.

</CHAPTER>

 We open our tale on a Saturday afternoon in November in a place called Egdon Heath. If you're wondering what the heck Egdon Heath is, don't worry. Hardy proceeds to tell us all about it. In lots of detail. Think Victorian National Geographic. The sun is setting and the heath is getting dark and gloomy. And look, the"face" from the chapter title comes into play: "The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening, it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden the noon, anticipate the frowning of storms intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight " . Hardy describes the heath throughout the remainder of this chapter, which ends up acting a bit like a prologue. The action comes later. The heath is dark and muted and lonely and tragic. It's likened to some sort of prehistoric entity. And still, there's more. Hardy really, really loves his nature descriptions, that's for sure. He really should have been a park ranger on the side. Hardy continues to wax rhapsodic about the heath. So what have we learned about the heath, aside from what it looks like? Well, we learn this: "The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained" .

