The Hill of Dreams
One afternoon on the hill. A lifetime trying to write it.
On a hot August afternoon, Lucian Taylor climbs into the Roman fort above his Welsh village, lies down in the fern, and comes down changed.
What he carries away he will spend the rest of his life trying to set down – first among the tea tables of Caermaen, which despise him, then in a grey London room, where the city he dreams grows more beautiful as everything around him grows worse.
Written in the 1890s and published only in 1907, Arthur Machen’s novel of the doomed artist finds its decadence not in Paris but underfoot, in a Roman town buried in the Welsh hills.
Machen’s text, not the modern one. This Squire Press edition is set from the 1907 E. Grant Richards first edition, read page by page from a complete scan and collated word by word against two other witnesses. The transcription behind most modern reprints Americanizes some two hundred spellings and alters Machen’s wording – his Roman nettle, urtica pilulifera, survives there as “arctic pilulifera”. Here his British spelling and his wording are restored.
- A new editor’s introduction to Machen and the novel
- Seventy-four original endnotes on the Roman archaeology and Welsh topography behind Caermaen, the Latin and liturgical quotations, and the literary quarrels of the 1890s – gathered at the back, out of the story’s way
- A Note on This Edition setting out the source text and the editorial approach
- About the Author, By the Same Author and Further Reading sections for readers who want to go on
Look Inside
There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.
But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in fairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone out resolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he had never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted after heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been moulded of lead. No breeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dry leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January woods.
The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise like a scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together with a dismal grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the earth and all upon it glowed, even the grey winter fields and the bare hillsides crimsoned, the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and the very road glittered. He was wonder-struck, almost aghast, before the scarlet magic of the afterglow. The old Roman fort was invested with fire; flames from heaven were smitten about its walls, and above there was a dark floating cloud, like a fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing tree showed as black as midnight against the blast of the furnace.
