A story of hope

Emerging from the shadows

Stephen Gregory finds more than a glimmer of hope thanks to a rare Brocken spectre in the Snowdonia mountains…

In these difficult and challenging times, especially now in

the darkest months of the winter, we’re all looking forward to lighter, brighter days… when the restrictions might be eased, when the pandemic is controlled… or simply the coming of spring.

One of the commonest metaphors bandied about over the past couple of years is the idea of ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, a glimmer of hope. A pessimist might say it’s a train hurtling horribly towards us, and our hopes will be dashed into an even greater disaster. But I’m an optimist. For me, and millions of like-minded people, the idea of striving forwards and upwards towards the light has a literally life-giving importance.

It was a grey and misty Sunday afternoon. Deep midwinter, when sunset was supposed to be around four o’clock, a dreary prospect of dusk and twilight. And we were driving through Nantlle, under the looming masses of the abandoned and derelict slate quarries. The mist clung like cobwebs, dirty and dark, to the scrubby forests of rowan and alder which had somehow managed to colonise the heaps of spoil. It was a place of long-forgotten ghosts.

We drove onwards and upwards, me and my wife in the front of the car, and Alix in the back. She was a thirteen-year-old French girl, funny and fey and flippant, who had come to

stay with us for a few weeks and improve her English and take in something of the history and culture of Wales. Despite the gathering gloom, she was inexhaustibly upbeat, a force of youthful energy whose company we were enjoying. She was talking and talking, in softly whispered French, not to herself but to the little dog she’d brought with her, a terrier called Fitou.

A dismal afternoon. My wife, who’d been a rock climber in Snowdonia and in the Alps for many years and knew the odd colloquialisms of life in the mountains, said it was ‘claggy’. And indeed it was a claggy afternoon, a Sunday smothered in mist and drizzle, as we nosed through the narrowness of Drws y Coed and up the steep road towards Llyn Dwyarchen at the higher end of the pass.

And yes, the sky was a little bit lighter. Up and up, towards a lightening in the grey sky… as though we might defy the darkening day and break into sunlight before the sun itself might slip below the horizon. As though we might dare to race the sun, and win something of its light and energy before it set…

We pulled into Rhyd-ddu, and parked at the little station of the mountain railway. Ours was the only car. Nobody with an ounce of gumption would be walking on the Snowdon track on a day like this one. It was an afternoon for hot soup in the Cwellyn Arms, or tea and scones in Beddgelert. But Alix and Fitou bounced out the car and started up the path before we could stop them, and so we followed, for their energy and youth were somehow magnetic, a force which pulled us up and up, away from the darkness and towards a strangely glimmering light in the sky above us…

A strange light – what was it? As we hurried to keep up with the girl and her scurrying dog, the mist seemed to cleave in from of us, as though the heat of our bodies and breath was turning it aside and melting it away.

And so we broke into a world of gloriously golden light. Nobody but us – we were the only people in the whole world who had pushed upwards and upwards and found this heavenly place of softly golden light.

We climbed even further, and it felt as though we had pushed the time backwards and our late Sunday afternoon had become a bright, fresh morning. The only humans, yes, because all the others were huddling over their soup and their pots of tea in dimly fire-lit restaurants…

But we weren’t the only living creatures to have emerged into this magical world. The sky was whirling with gulls. They soared and shimmered, silvery white. And by our feet, moving like a mouse in the thickets of gorse and heather, there was a wren, a tiny trog who belied his name by seeking out this giddying upland… where time had stood still since the morning and the sun was bright and warm. And a special phenomenon…

Alix was calling to us and waving for us to hurry and join her higher up. She was windmilling her arms in a strange and dazzling dance, and as we arrived breathlessly beside her we saw her face lit up by joy and the excitement of a strange magic.

The shadow of her body was cast onto the clouds above us, a kind of spectre of herself. We saw our own shapes thrown into looming dark shadows… suffused with a halo of golden light, projected onto the sky.

It was the phenomenon of the Brocken spectre. My wife had seen it before, in the Alps and in Snowdonia, when a walker or a climber sees his own shadow larger than life and faraway, thrown onto cloud or mist.

The three of us, we waved our arms and posed. We were shape-shifters in a magical world. Until the sunlight started to fade behind us, and we made our way down and down into the gloom…

So we found ourselves burrowing back into the darkness of a wintry Sunday afternoon. It was claggy, through Drws y Coed and into Nantlle, where the ghosts were sleeping in their graves of slate… and back to the town of Caernarfon, as black as night and only six o’clock in the evening.

But me and my wife and Alix and Fitou, we were alive with the energy of the ascent we had made. Up and up, into the light… tugged upwards by the unquenchable energy of youth and lured into the sunshine by a miraculous spectre. The Brocken spectre – a phenomenon of the high mountains – which we had shared with the gulls and a wren, defiantly alive in the

deep midwinter.

Real, and yet a metaphor for the hope of life and light which is always up there – within our reach. n

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.

A collection of beautiful home accessories & gifts.

Colwyn Bay, Conwy, Wales, United Kingdom admin@stanleyandlottie.com

You can also find us on Facebook: facebook.com/Stanley & Lottie Instagram: @stanley_and_lottie

www.stanleyandlottie.com

WILDHORSEBREWING.CO.UK