The Pendragon Legend Read Free Page B

come to play such an extraordinary part in my life.
    From a collection of North Wales folklore I learnt that the legend of Asaph Pendragon began soon after his death. It speaks of him as a midnight horseman, never leaving the castle by day, setting out only at night, with a carefully chosen band of followers, to gather plants with magical properties by the light of the moon. But such prosaic purposes were not enough to satisfy popular imagination, and the story grew that the terrifying night horseman had been out dispensing justice, an attribute he retained even after his death.
    By night he would catch robbers sharing out their booty in secret dens, and next morning, to their utter amazement, the victims would find their treasures returned. The felons had been so astonished by the apparition that they kept every one of the undertakings extracted by him, and died soon after.
    The most gruesome of these histories concerns three murderers . The volume I held in my hands tells it rather well.
    Once, in a Welsh mountain inn, three young noblemen killed and robbed a Jewish doctor on his way to join the Earl in his castle. The court, which in those times might well be suspected of anti-Semitism, acquitted the men, and they set sail for France. That night some peasants watched with awe as the night rider and his retinue turned to the south, galloped up the rocky slopes of nearby Moel-Sych and soared into the sky in a southerly direction . The next day the three noblemen were found in the castle moat, their limbs crushed and their necks broken. The Earl had meted out the justice due to his intending visitor.
     
    At eleven I went for a coffee. My neighbour tagged along.
    “Jolly good read,” he said of Kim : “amazing book. Chap who wrote it must have been there. Really knows the place.”
    “You’ve been to India yourself?”
    “Of course. There as a kid. Grew up there. And in Burma. Then South Africa and Rhodesia. Not a bad place, Rhodesia.”
    Once again I felt that deep sense of awe I always experience when I come up against the British Empire. These people nip over to Burma the way we do to Eger. Only, they’re less curious about it. They know that wherever they go in the world they will be among exactly the same sort of people as themselves.
    “Actually, my old man was a major in an Irish regiment,” he continued. “Stationed all over the place. That’s why I missed out a bit on my education. Things to do with books and so forth. But it’s also why I did so well in the tropics.”
    “You were a soldier too?”
    “No. I never quite made it into the army. I have this bad habit of failing exams. Some of them I must have had five goes at … But I never got lucky. But forget about that. What’s done is done. We Irish live for the future. I didn’t become a soldier; not everyone can be a soldier. I just loafed around wherever I wanted in the Empire. Not a bad place to be. Have you heard of the East African Uwinda expedition?”
    “Yes, as I recall … ” I said, scrambling to salvage my self-respect .
    “I was in it. We were over nine thousand feet up. Fantastic climbing. There was one mountain, I tell you, with sides like glass. You moved up three feet and slid back five. We slithered around for two whole days and got nowhere. I said to the Colonel:
    ‘Look here, sir, are we from Connemara, or are we not?’ Because you know, that’s where I’m from,” he explained, with deep reverence . Then he continued:
    ‘True,’ says the Colonel (a typical patronising Englishman): ‘we’ve even had one or two chaps from there who were sane.’
    ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll show you who’s sane.’ I fitted one of those lightweight climbing ropes on to the camp cat, round its waist. I fixed the doctor’s surgical clamps tight on its tail, made the blacks stand in a ring around the base of the slope, and the cat shot off, all the way up to the top. Amazingly good at that sort of thing, cats.
    Up at the top,