THROUGHOUT the long glaring days of July pitiful cries quiver in the heat; the sheep are dying of thirst. Even some of the hill-springs are now mere trickles.
This north coast of Devon is mocked by the vision of the bluest of seas, calm and shining under the summer sun. The fields stretching down to the sands are parched and brown, the grasses mere ghosts, dry and sapless. Even the sea-breeze has little of refreshment in its motion; it is merely heated air.
Many of the sheep are dead. Jackdaws, gulls, carrion crows, and rooks are feasting on the bloated carcases which remain; the shimmering hum of flies innumerable gives to our English midsummer a tropical semblance. Nor are there any swallows to decimate these pests. I have seen about four pairs this year—the first pair, which arrived on the last day of March, was taken by the peregrine falcons. Swifts and house-martins are not scarce, but they keep to the inland villages.
The prolonged drought seems to have brought to life several rare butterflies, but even the interest that one may find in these is small. Even the blue sky and the blue sea produce an intolerable weariness. Wherever I go there sound those pitiful cries of the sheep; there is the slippery grass, and the glare of the sun on the sward. The wheat is yellow in the flag, dried and rustling; the poppies are sickly, though usually the fiercer the sun the more sultry their bloom.
A brook runs through sandhills on the other side of the headland, and at one place the red cattle stand in cool water to their dewlaps, gazing tranquilly about them. Here is the great meeting-place of the birds, and at any time of the day, from dawn to sunset, its pebbly shallow is thronged with finches, pippits, doves, warblers, and cuckoos. How the goldfinches love the water! With sweet, reedy twitterings a flock will come from orchard haunts and bathe in the running water, the yellow-barred wings aflutter and crimson faces dipped again and again. Copper finches follow, with perhaps those minute travellers the Golden-Crowned Knights, as the country folk so beautifully term the smallest British bird.
Other creatures know of this avian meeting-place. The weasel comes, and a great sombre pair of ravens; and the sparrowhawk dashes sometimes in the midst, seizing one of the bathers. To me this is a place of pilgrimage, where all things come down to the life-giving waters. Even here, however, there is heard in the heated air those sad cries from the hills.
A village girl showed me some verses she had written on the drought. She was singing by the waterside, a little maid in a print dress. With shy eyes she tendered the poem. I remember the last verse:—
God of Pity, I beseech Thee,
Send us rain in healing shower,
For the fields I see around me
Death and Ruin hold in power.
But from the west comes no cloud; only the fiery sun burns in a pitiless sky.