Moor, now carried on their lofty crowns the flames of rejoicing.  Bonfires of varying size, according to the energy and importance of the communities responsible for them, dotted the circumference of the lonely region in a vast, irregular figure, but thinned and ceased towards the unpeopled heart of the waste.  On Wattern, at Cranmere, upon Fur Tor, and under the hoary, haunted woods of Wistman, no glad beacons blazed or voices rang.  There Nature, ignorant of epochs and heeding neither olympiad nor lustrum, cycle nor century, ruled alone; there, all self-centred, self-contained, unwitting of conscious existence and its little joys, her perfection above praise and more enduring than any chronicle of it, asking for no earthborn acclamations of her eternal reign, demanding only obedience from all on penalty of death, the Mother swayed her sceptre unseen.  Seed and stone, blade and berry, hot blood and cold, did her bidding and slept or stirred at her ordinance.  A nightjar harshly whirred beneath her footstool; wan tongues of flame rose and fell upon her quaking altars; a mountain fox, pattering quick-footed to the rabbit warren, caught light from those exhalations in his round, green eyes and barked.

Humanity thronged and made merry around numberless crackling piles of fire.  Men and women, boys and girls, most noisily rejoiced, and from each flaming centre of festivity a thin sound of human shouting and laughter streamed starward with the smoke.

Removed by brief distance in space, the onlooker, without overmuch strain or imagination, might stride a pace or two backward in time and conceive himself for a moment as in the presence of those who similarly tended beacons on these granite heights of old.  Then, truly, the object and occasion were widely different; then, perchance, in answer to evil rumour moving zigzag on black bat-wings through nights of fear, many a bale-fire had shot upwards, upon the keystone of Cosdon’s solemn arch, beckoned like a bloody hand towards north and south, and cried danger to a thousand British warriors lurking in moor, and fen, and forest.  Answering flames had leapt from Hay Tor, from Buckland Beacon, from Great Mis Tor in the west; and their warning, caught up elsewhere, would quickly penetrate to the heart of the South Hams, to the outlying ramparts of the Cornish wastes, to Exmoor and the coast-line of the north.  But no laughter echoed about those old-time fires.  Their lurid light smeared wolfskins, splashed on metal and untanned hide, illumined barbaric adornments, fierce faces, wild locks, and savage eyes.  Anxious Celtic mothers and maidens stood beside their men, while fear and rage leapt along from woman’s face to woman’s face, as some gasping wretch, with twoscore miles of wilderness behind him, told of high-beaked monsters moving under banks of oars, of dire peril, of death and ruin, suddenly sprung in a night from behind the rim of the sea.

Since then the peaks of the Moor have smiled or scowled under countless human fires, have flashed glad tidings or flamed ill news to many generations.  And now, perched upon one enormous mass of stone, there towered upward a beacon of blazing furze and pine.  In its heart were tar barrels and the monster bred heat enough to remind the granite beneath it of those fires that first moulded its elvan ingredients to a concrete whole and hurled them hither.