Summon the Bright Water Read Online Free PDF

would swim deeper where they could. So I tried the deep pools where the main channel passes close to the shore. It didn’t work, but it was a great joy to rest on the bottom and watch the fish passing overhead when the water was clear enough to see the streak of silver.’
    ‘But why do you go out at night?’
    He hesitated, his enthusiasm gone. ‘Because I found that at night I could feel as a fish feels. In the light one is only a man swimming. That is your answer!’
    We were both silent for a moment; but then, apparently realising that he had been too abrupt, he asked, ‘What has been your experience underwater, Mr Colet?’
    My interest had not been in fish, but in the remains of historic ports where little remained to be seen on land – like Tyre, I said, reminding him of the quantity surveyor. Also I had accompanied a small party of pre-historians who maintained that if you wanted to study the palaeolithic you must not be content with cave dwellings by inland streams but must dive for caves now covered by the sea.
    I explained that in the last ice age when sea levels were lower than at present, river levels must also have been lower. For example, the mouth of the Severn must have been somewhere down the Bristol Channel between woods and marshes that were now shoals; and the wide valley, where the ebb and flow of the powerful tides now played merry hell with channels and the banks, then contained a clear river of fresh water fed by the glaciers of the Welsh mountains.
    ‘I have seen no such caves. Where would they be?’
    ‘Beneath the ledges where Severn cliffs once stood before they were eaten back.’
    ‘All crumbled away, Mr Colet, crumbled away to mud and sand, Severn has no cliffs underwater.’
    ‘I think that here and there you might find a clean edge scoured by the tide if you looked at the bottom of the ebb.’
    ‘Pardon me, Mr Colet, but you are wrong!’ he exclaimed. ‘No sheer cliff exists.’
    He reminded me of one of my old tutors who, when contradicted however politely, would lean towards me with chest thrust forward and head back, seeming to take up an S-curve like a snake about to strike. I assumed that Marrin had visualised package tours of pre-historians or geologists come to disturb his communings with the salmon. It was from that point, I am sure, that he began to wish that I had never called in at Broom Lodge with my awkward curiosity. It was not my fault, for he had encouraged me both to ask questions and to answer them. Ancient economies interested him from two different points of view: religious doom-watching and subsistence agriculture.
    Our conversation left me with a feeling that Marrin considered the Severn his private property from which trespassers must be warned off. Such jealousy was quite natural; the mystical side of his night dives could be enough to account for it. But the solvency of Broom Lodge continued to puzzle me. Somewhere there was deliberate deception. I had an impression – which I admitted might be due merely to his skeletons of sea creatures – that the thread of gold seemed to run out of the laboratory into the Severn and back again.
    At the next chance of a private talk with Elsa I asked if her uncle had made a serious study of alchemy.
    ‘From books, yes,’ she replied, ‘and I know he used to muck about with experiments in the old days. But of course he didn’t have a proper laboratory of his own till he could afford to build one here.’
    To my astonishment, Elsa, who was so scornful of the beliefs of Broom Lodge, had been impressed by the paraphernalia of alchemy and did not rule out the transmutation of metals. She was in good company. Isaac Newton had believed it possible and in later life suffered from fits of insanity, probably due to the ingestion of lead and mercury which he lavished on his experiments.
    ‘Then you don’t believe the football pools story?’
    ‘Do you?’
    ‘Well, it’s possible.’
    ‘That’s what I feel about the