Sir Gibbie Ch 12 Featured Book Tale Teller Kids Reading Age 15 #greatbooks #classics #teens

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter twelve of Sir Gibby. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Sir

(00:26):
Gibby by George McDonald, Chapter twelve, Glashgar. Up and up
the hill went Gibbie. The path ceased altogether. But when

(00:48):
up is the word in one's mind, and up had
grown almost a fixed idea. With Gibby, he can seldom
be in doubt whether he is going right, even where
there is no track. Indeed, in all more arduous ways,

(01:10):
men leave no track behind them, no finger posts. There
is always but the steepness. He climbed and climbed. The
mountain grew steeper and barer as he went, and he
became absorbed in his climbing. All at once he discovered

(01:35):
that he had lost the stream. Where or when he
could not tell. All below and around him was red
granite rock, scattered over with the chips and splinters, detached
by air and wind, water and stream, light and heat
and cold. Glashgar was only about three thousand feet in height,

(01:56):
but it was the steepest of its group, a huge
that even in the midst of masses suggested solidity. Not
once while he ascended had the idea come to him
that by and by he should be able to climb
no farther. For Aught, he knew there were oatcakes and milk,

(02:20):
and sheep and collie dogs, ever higher and higher. Still,
not until he actually stood upon the peak did he
know that there was the earthly hitherto the final obstacle
of unobstinacy, the everywhere which, from excess of perviousness, was

(02:42):
to human foot impervious. The sun was about two hours
toward the west when Ghibbee, his little legs almost as
active as ever, surmounted the final slope, running up like
a child towards scale heaven. He stood on the bare

(03:03):
round the head of the mountain and saw, with an
invading shock of amazement and at first of disappointment, that
there was no going higher. In every direction the slope
was downward. He had never been on the top of
anything before, He had always been in the hollows of things.

(03:23):
Now the whole world lay beneath him. It was cold.
In some of the shadows lay snow, weary exile from
both the sky and the sea, and the ways of
them captive in the fetters of the cold, prisoner to
the mountain top. But Gibby felt no cold, in a

(03:46):
glow with the climb, which at the last had been hard,
his lungs filled with the heavenly air, and his soul
with the feeling that he was above everything that was
uplifted on the very crown of the earth. He stood
in his rags, a fluttering scarecrow, the conqueror of height,
the discoverer of immensity, the monarch of space. Nobody knew

(04:12):
of such marvel but him. Gibbee had never even heard
the word poetry. But none the less was he the
very stuff out of which poems grow. And now all
the latent poetry in him were set as swaying and heaving,
an ocean inarticulate because unobstructed, a mite that could make

(04:33):
no music, no thunder of waves, because it had no shore,
no rocks of thought against which to break in speech.
He sat down on the topmost point, and slowly, in
the silence and the loneliness from the unknown fountains of
the eternal consciousness, the heart of the child filled above him,

(04:58):
towered infinitue, immensity, potent on his mind through shape to
his eye in a soaring dome of blue, the one
visible symbol informed and in sould of the eternal to
reveal itself thereby in it center and life lrdered the

(05:25):
great sun beginning to cast shadows to the south and east.
From the endless heaps of the world that lifted themselves
in all directions down their sides, ran the streams down, busily,
hasting away through every valley to the dark which bore

(05:49):
them back to the ocean heart, through woods and meadows,
park and waste rocks and willowy marsh. Behind the valley
rose mountains, and behind the mountains other mountains, more and more,
each swathed in its own mystery, and beyond all hung

(06:13):
the curtained depth of the sky. Girl Gibbey sat and gazed,
and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that had been
to him the universe was dropped and lost, like a
thing that was now nobody's in far indistinguishable distance, and
he who had lost it had climbed upon the throne

(06:36):
of the world. The air was still when a breath
awoke it, but touched his cheek like the down of
a feather, and the stillness was there again. The stillness
grew great and slowly descended upon him. It deepened and deepened.

(07:00):
Surely it would deepen to a voice. It was about
to speed. It was as if a great single thought
was the substance of the silence, and was all over
and around him, and closer to him than his clothes,
than his body, than his hands. I am describing the indescribable,
and compelled to make it too definite for belief. In

(07:21):
colder speech, an experience had come to the child. A
link in the chain of his development glided over the
windless of his uplifting. A change passed upon him in
after years, when Gibbey had the idea of God, when
he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence,

(07:44):
to believe that a will of love enveloped his will
as the brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs.
As often as the thought of God came to him,
it came in the shape of the silence on top
of flash Gar. As he sat with his eyes on

(08:06):
the peak he had just chosen from the rust as
the loftiest of all within his sight, he saw a
cloud begin to grow upon it. The cloud grew and
gathered and descended, covering its sides as it went until
the hole was hidden. Then swiftly, as he gazed, the

(08:27):
cloud opened, as it were, a round window in the
heart of it, and through that he saw the peak again.
The next moment, a flash of blue lightning darted across
the opening, and whether Gibbeerili sawwhat follows, he never could
be sure. But always after, as often as the vision
returned in the flash, he saw a rock rolling down

(08:48):
the peak. The cloud swept together, and the window closed.
The next thing, which in after years he remembered, was
that the earth, mountains, meadows, and streams had banished. Everything
was gone from his sight except a few yards around
him of the rock upon which he sat, and the

(09:08):
cloud that hid whirled and heaven then again burst forth
the lightning. He saw no flash, but an intense cloud illumination,
accompanied by the deafening crack, and followed by the appalling
roar and roll of the thunder. Nor was it noise
alone that surrounded him, for as if he were in

(09:29):
the heartened nest of the storm, the very wind waves
that made the thunder rushed in, driven, bellowing over him,
and had nearly swept him away. He clung to the
rock with hands and feet. The cloud writhed and roared,
and billowed and headed with all the shapes of the wind,

(09:50):
and seemed itself to be the furnace womb in which
the thunder was created. Was this then the voice into
which the silence had been all the time deepening? Had
the presence thus taken form and declared itself. Gibbey had
yet to learn that there was a deeper voice still
into which such a silence may grow, and the silence

(10:14):
not be broken. He was not dismayed. He had no
conscience of wrong and scarcely new fear. It was an
awful delight that filled his spirit. Mount Sinai was not
to him a terror. To him, there was no wrath
in the thunder any more than in the greeting of

(10:34):
the dog that found him in his kennel.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
To him, there was no being in the sky so
righteous as to be more displeased than pitiful over the
wrongness of the children whom he had not yet got
taught their childhood. Gibbee sat calm, awful, but I imagine,
with a clear forehead and smile haunted mouth. While the

(10:58):
storm roared and beat, heate and flashed and.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
Ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempests.
From the bare crest of the mountain. The water poured
down its sides, as if its springs were in the
rock itself, and not in the bosom of the cloud above.
The tumult at last seized Gibbey like an intoxication. He
jumped to his feet and danced and flung his arms about,

(11:24):
as if he himself were the storm. But the uproar
did not last long. Almost suddenly it was gone, as
if like a bird that had been flapping the ground
in agony, it had at last recovered itself and taken
to its great wings and flown. The sun shone out clear,
and in all the blue abyss, not a cloud was

(11:44):
to be seen, except far away to leeward, where one
was spread like a banner in the lonely air, fleeting
away the ensign of the charging storm bearing for its
device a segment of the many colored bow. And now

(12:05):
that its fierceness was over, the jubilation in the softer
voices of the storm became audible, as the soul gives
thanks for the sufferings that are overpassed, offering the love
and faith and hope which the pain has stung into
fresh life. So from the sides of the mountain ascended

(12:27):
the noise of the waters the cloud had left behind.
The sun had kept on his journey. The storm had
been no disaster to him, and now he was a
long way down the west, and twilight in her gray cloak,
would soon be tracking him from the east like sorrow

(12:47):
dogging delight, Gibby, wet and cold, began to think of
the cottage where he had been so kindly received, of
the friendly face of its mistress, and her care of
the lamb. It was not that he wanted to eat,
He did not even imagine more eating. But never in

(13:08):
his life had he eaten twice of the same charity
in the same day. What he wanted was to find
some dry hole in the mountain and sleep as near
the cottage as he could. So he rose and set out,
But he lost his way, came upon one precipice after another,
down which only a creeping thing could have gone, was

(13:30):
repeatedly turned aside by torrents and swampy places, And when
the twilight came, was still wandering upon the mountain at Lante,
bound as he thought the burn along whose bank he
had ascended in the morning, and followed it towards the valley,
looking out for the friendly cottage. But the first indication

(13:53):
of abode he saw was the wall of the grounds
of the house, through whose gait he had looked in
the morning. He was then a long way from the cottage,
and not far from the farm, and the best thing
he could do was to find again the barn where
he had slept so well the night before. This was

(14:15):
not very difficult, even in the dusky night. He skirted
the wall, came to his first guide found, and crossed
the valley stream and descended it until he thought he
recognized the slope of clover down which he had run
in the morning. He ran up the bray, and there
were the solemn cones of the corn wrecks between him

(14:38):
and the sky. A minute more and he had crept
through the cat hole and was feeling about in the
dark barn. Happily, the heap of straw was not yet removed.
Gibbey shut into it like a mole and burrowed to
the very center. There, coiled himself up and imagined himself

(14:59):
lying in the heart of the rock on which he
sat during the storm, and listening to the thunder winds
over his head, the fancy enticed the sleep which before
was ready enough to come, and he was soon far
stiller than Aeriel in the cloven pine of Cicarets, end

(15:25):
of Chapter twelve,