The path was very steep, and, owing to the rain, exceedingly slippery. For some way it led through a grove of dwarf oaks, by grasping the branches of which I was enabled to support myself tolerably well; nearly at the bottom, however, where the path was most precipitous, the trees ceased altogether. Fearing to trust my legs, I determined to slide down, and put my resolution in practice, arriving at a little shelf close by the bridge without any accident. The man, accustomed to the path, went down in the usual manner. The bridge consisted of a couple of planks and a pole flung over a chasm about ten feet wide, on the farther side of which was a precipice with a path at least quite as steep as the one down which I had come, and without any trees or shrubs by which those who used it might support themselves. The torrent rolled about nine feet below the bridge; its channel was tortuous; on the south-east side of the bridge was a cauldron, like that on which Ihad looked down from the bridge over the river of the monks. The man passed over the bridge and I followed him; on the other side we stopped and turned round. The river was rushing and surging, the pot was boiling and roaring, and everything looked wild and savage;but the locality, for awfulness and mysterious gloom, could not compare with that on the east side of the Devil's Bridge, nor for sublimity and grandeur with that on the west.
"Here you see, sir," said the man, "the Bridge of the Offeiriad, called so, it is said, because the popes used to pass over it in the old time; and here you have the Rheidol, which, though not so smooth nor so well off for banks as the Hafren and the Gwy, gets to the sea before either of them, and, as the pennill says, is quite as much entitled to honour:-"'Hafren a Wy yn hyfryd eu wedd A Rheidol vawr ei anrhydedd.'
Good rhyme, sir, that. I wish you would put it into Saesneg.""I am afraid I shall make a poor hand of it," said I; "however, Iwill do my best:-
"'Oh pleasantly do glide along the Severn and the Wye;But Rheidol's rough, and yet he's held by all in honour high.'
"Very good rhyme that, sir! though not so good as the pennill Cymraeg. Ha, I do see that you know the two languages and are one poet. And now, sir, I must leave you, and go to the hills to my sheep, who I am afraid will be suffering in this dreadful weather.
However, before I go, I should wish to see you safe over the bridge."I shook him by the hand, and retracing my steps over the bridge, began clambering up the bank on my knees.
"You will spoil your trousers, sir!" cried the man from the other side.
"I don't care if I do," said I, "provided I save my legs, which are in some danger in this place, as well as my neck, which is of less consequence."I hurried back amidst rain and wind to my friendly hospice, where, after drying my wet clothes as well as I could, I made an excellent dinner on fowl and bacon. Dinner over, I took up a newspaper which was brought me, and read an article about the Russian war, which did not seem to be going on much to the advantage of the allies.
Soon flinging the paper aside, I stuck my feet on the stove, one on each side of the turf fire, and listened to the noises without.
The bellowing of the wind down the mountain passes and the roaring of the Rheidol fall at the north side of the valley, and the rushing of the five cascades of the river Mynach, were truly awful.
Perhaps I ought not to have said the five cascades of the Mynach, but the Mynach cascade, for now its five cascades had become one, extending from the chasm over which hung the bridge of Satan to the bottom of the valley.
After a time I fell into a fit of musing. I thought of the Plant de Bat; I thought of the spitties or hospitals connected with the great monastery of Ystrad Flur or Strata Florida; I thought of the remarkable bridge close by, built by a clever monk of that place to facilitate the coming of pilgrims with their votive offerings from the north to his convent; I thought of the convent built in the time of our Henry the Second by Ryce ab Gruffyd, prince of South Wales; and lastly, I thought of a wonderful man who was buried in its precincts, the greatest genius which Wales, and perhaps Britain, ever produced, on whose account, and not because of old it had been a magnificent building, and the most celebrated place of popish pilgrimage in Wales, I had long ago determined to visit it on my journey, a man of whose life and works the following is a brief account.