Gently Where the Roads Go [antikvár]

In the east country the air is sparkling, in the west countrythe air is tender, but in this place, in the middle of England, theair is asleep all the time. It isn't flat, it isn't hilly. It isn't beautiful,it isn't ugly. It isn't town on the one hand nor country, quite, on theother. It is the land of the Great Road, a subsection missed by thegeographers, a land moulded and informed by the great passagesof men. First the prehistoric tribes, sending their slinking scoutsbefore them, moving cautiously over the lowlands to unhuntedforest up-country; then the Celts, the horse tamers, chantingsongs of Bran and Gwydion; and the Romans, great marchers,paving the miles to Pictishland; followed Angle and Saxon, fiercequarrellers and kingdomers, the Danska, fiercer than them all, andhis French-speaking cousins; baron, pedlar, shuffling friar, tinker,soldier, murderer, thief, riding, treading, rolling the wheels of theirponderous slow carriage; Armada message, crop-haired troopers,levies northward to Culloden; po-shay, mail-coach and curriclealong with fret-chimneyed steamers; and the coughing, clankingupstart following its symbolical red flag, maturing quickly, multiplying, inheriting the Road in a generation. All these set theirstamp on the passive, silent land, making it like no other land: thatwhich bounded the Great Road. Having for meaning, southwardsto London, weary marches to the Tweed, the environs of an inn, theturn which concealed a highwayman. Nobody came there to lookat it, nobody saw it with pleasure. Ghosts tilled it, ghosts dwelt init, but North and South was its only significance. Day by day,century by century, traffic and souls crowded through it; sterilizingit by long denial into the rank of the semi-real. And still today nobody sees it, the anonymous fields and dusty hedgerows, the chaffyverges* the soiled copses, the ugly ribbons of unpainted houses;only the rubber-blackened road and the ever-rolling files of traffic,and the signs, fixing points in the long abstraction of North andSouth. Nobody sees it. Until one day a spotlight falls hard andsharp on a small section. When the semi-real becomes real. Butperhaps no more understandable.'Wanda.''You.'Teodowicz was sitting on her bed.