The High Missouri Read Online Free PDF Page B

way I put it, blood and breath mystics.”
    He fell silent for a moment, pondering. “It is as always that we lost this kingdom, there is truth it is. We men of Wales are visionaries, which is why we sing, write poetry, and hear songs in the empty air. We are adventurers. We are even soldiers, men of the bond of blood. But we are not conquerors, not empire builders. We leave that to the bloody British.”
    Dylan nearly quaked with fear. He felt drawn to this stranger, this countryman, this Druid. Yet the man held a terror for him, a terror he recognized, both old and familiar friend and malicious nemesis. He feared in this man what he feared most in himself. The man was mad. And it was a siren song madness, a call, a will-o’-the-wisp Dylan could not resist, and it would lead him to his doom.
    Dylan wanted to pull back. He wanted sanity. Order. Predictability. Safety. He asked, “What will you do to find these Welsh Indians?”
    The Druid smiled an easy and genial smile. “Why, I will look my whole life through, and discover them everywhere and nowhere, and come to know on my deathbed that what I sought was within me all along.”
    Dylan felt both relieved and obscurely disappointed. There would be no mad quest after all.
    “There is one particular place, by reputation most wild, most beautiful, most strange, that I especially want to search.”
    “Where?” asked Dylan breathlessly.
    “The High Missouri,” said the Druid.
    “Where is it?” asked Dylan eagerly. “What is it?”
    “Perhaps it is our blood’s country, and our heart’s pastureland,” answered Dru. “Would you care to hear a song I’ve written called “The High Missouri’?”
    Dru set the stage. This, Dylan must recognize, was the canu penillion , the ancient and honorable Welsh art of the singing of verses, the singer accompanying himself on the Welsh harp. They had no harp, of course, but then they were only poor wayfarers, far from Cymru and too late in the centuries, there is truth there is. Dylan would have to imagine the harp, its harmonies gentle but piquantly colored, and soft as the breeze. The language, of course, would be Yr Hen Iaith, the Old Language of the country. Dylan was to listen not with his ordinary ear, the one that treated words like mere signposts pointing to objects in simpleton fashion, but with his dreaming ear, the one attuned to mysteries, to the meanings within things.
    The Druid assumed an erect sitting pose, his fingers poised over emptiness, or on the strings of an imaginary harp on his knee, and lifted his voice into the air.
    Dylan couldn’t understand a word. He had not quite realized that the song would be in a foreign language. His mother’s tongue or not, it was alien to him. He could find no knowledge in it, and felt impatient.
    After a few stanzas, though, the song began to work on him in subtle ways. Perhaps it was the strong and elaborate meter that propelled the words. Perhaps it was impressions from the sheer sounds of the words, sounds that somehow meant rushing waters, winds among leaves, the cries of strange, strange birds, the lonely calls of wolf dogs, the murmurings of grasses. Surely he heard something—or was this just his imagination?
    He listened far into the music and the verses, and in his imagination traveled to the exotic world of the High Missouri, wherever that was, whatever it might be, a steppe, a plain, a mountain enlivened by a river. The name itself was all of the song he understood in the ordinary sense, the High Missouri, but it took on an allure for him, a romance beyond sense. And somehow, watching the Druid’s plucking fingers, by the end of the song he could hear the music of the Welsh harp, an interplay of tones, soft, sensual, many-colored, whispering, whirling gently like mists, ever-moving and yet motionless at its heart. It was as though beyond the mists of a Welsh dawn, impossible but visible to the dreaming eye, stood radiant, still, and gleaming, a rainbow of