May 27
From above, the pool looked like any little innocent sheet of water. But down in the hollow itself it grew sinister. The villagers used to say and to believe that it had no bottom and certainly a very great depth in it could be felt if not accurately gauged as one stood at the water’s edge. A long time ago, it was a great limestone quarry, but today the large mounds of rubble on one side of it are covered with grass and planted with mazzard trees, grown to quite a large girth. On the other side one is confronted by a tall sheet of black, carboniferous rock, rising sheer out of the inky water—a bare sombre surface on which no mosses even—“tender creatures of pity,” Ruskin calls them—have taken compassion by softening the jagged edges of the strata or nestling in the scars. It is an excellent example of “Contortion” as Geologists say, for the beds are bent into a quite regular geometrical pattern—syncline and anticline in waves—by deep-seated plutonic force that makes the mind quake in the effort to imagine it.
On the top of this rock and overhanging the water—a gaunt, haggard-looking Fir tree impends, as it seems in a perilous balance, while down below, the pool, sleek and shiny, quietly waits with a catlike patience.
In summer time, successive rows of Foxgloves one behind the other in barbaric splendour are ranged around the grassy rubble slopes like spectators in an amphitheatre awaiting the spectacle. Fire-bellied Efts slip here and there lazily through the water. Occasionally a Grass-snake would swim across the pool and once I caught one and on opening his stomach found a large fire-bellied Eft inside. The sun beats fiercely into this deep hollow and makes the water tepid. On the surface grows a glairy Alga, which was once all green but now festers in yellow patches and causes a horrible stench. Everything is absolutely still, air and water are stagnant. A large Dytiscus beetle rises to the surface to breathe and every now and then large bubbles of marsh gas come sailing majestically up from the depth and explode quietly into the fetid air. The horrificness of this place impressed me even when I was intent only on fishing there for bugs and efts. Now, seen in retrospect, it haunts me.