The Snake's Pass

The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker

Arthur Severn, a young Englishman recently come into his inheritance from his eccentric Great Aunt, travels through the west of Ireland on his way to visit friends in Clare. Riding with the loquacious driver Andy Sullivan, he is caught in a violent storm near the mountain Knockcalltecrore and takes shelter at Widow Kelligan's sheebeen at Glennashaughlin. There the local people tell him the legends of the place: how the King of the Snakes once ruled from the mountain's summit lake before St. Patrick banished the snakes, hiding his golden crown in the hill and giving it the name Knockcalltecrore, the "Hill of the Lost Golden Crown," and how the gap called Shleenanaher, the Snake's Pass, got its name; and how French gold, lost after Humbert's failed invasion, is rumored to be buried in the same mountain. Old Moynahan and others also speak darkly of Murtagh Murdock, the local gombeen man (usurer), who is said to be held to the hill by his greed for the hidden treasure. During the storm, Phelim Joyce arrives, injured and desperate, having ridden through terrible weather to repay a loan to Murdock. Murdock himself soon appears and reveals that he has already had Joyce's fine farm sold out from under him by the sheriff, forcing Joyce to take Murdock's poorer holding in exchange. Joyce, provoked past endurance, strikes Murdock across the face with his riding switch. Murdock vows revenge, and the parish priest, Father Peter Ryan, rebukes him with the story of Naboth's vineyard before he storms out. Joyce explains to the gathered company how he borrowed money from Murdock to send his son Eugene to study engineering, signing papers he did not fully understand, and how, despite securing the funds from a Galway bank just in time, Murdock had already had the land sold. Andy then drives Joyce home, where Arthur, unable to see in the darkness, hears the voice of Joyce's daughter Norah for the first time and is deeply struck by it. Weeks later, having finished his other visits, Arthur returns to Carnaclif, ostensibly to see the curious "shifting bog" phenomenon but really drawn back by the memory of the voice in the dark. He re-engages Andy and meets by chance his old schoolfellow Dick Sutherland, an engineer hired by Murdock to search Knockcalltecrore magnetically for buried iron (and, it becomes clear, ultimately for the lost treasure), while secretly studying the geology of the shifting bog. Sutherland explains at length his theories of how underground springs, clay banks, and limestone erosion cause bogs to migrate and become treacherously unstable, citing the mountain's own history as evidence. While assisting Sutherland and Murdock in their survey work, Arthur climbs a neighboring hill, Knocknacar, and there secretly observes and then meets a strikingly beautiful peasant girl who has been weeping and singing alone. Neither gives a name, but Arthur falls immediately in love. That night he learns from Dick that Dick, too, has fallen in love with Norah Joyce, whom he has seen near Murdock's farm but never spoken to. Believing his own unknown girl to be someone else entirely, Arthur assures Dick they are not rivals. Arthur returns repeatedly to Knocknacar hoping to meet her again, enduring days of anxious waiting while Andy teases him constantly about "bogs" and about Norah, and even a suspicious policeman questions him about his nighttime wanderings. Hoping to secretly help Dick's prospects with Norah, Arthur arranges through a Galway solicitor, Mr. Caicy, to purchase Murdock's newly acquired Knockcalltecrore land outright, intending later to pass it to Dick. Murdock, worried by Sutherland's warning that the house may lie in the path of the shifting bog, agrees to sell. Meanwhile Dick's cutting of the bog at Knocknacar succeeds, draining it as his theories predicted, and he and Joyce reconcile after Arthur vouches for Dick's honesty, provoking another furious, threatening outburst from Murdock. At last, wandering onto the Cliff Fields, part of Norah's own inherited land below Knockcalltecrore, Arthur discovers that the girl of Knocknacar and Norah Joyce are one and the same. He declares his love; she is joyful but overcome, and asks for time before giving an answer, revealing that she had assumed he already knew who she was. Tormented by the fear that Dick may have already spoken to her first, and unwilling to risk hurting his friend, Arthur avoids confiding in him and slips away to Roundwood for a night before returning to meet Norah again as arranged. At their second meeting on the Cliff Fields she tells him her name fully, Norah Joyce, and begins to explain that her father's claim upon her, alone now that her mother is dead and her brother gone, weighs upon her choice.

By Bram Stoker · First published 1900 · Genre: Adventure, Romance, Fantasy · 18 chapters · 111,904 words

First lines

Between two great mountains of grey and green, as the rock cropped out between the tufts of emerald verdure, the valley, almost as narrow as a gorge, ran due west towards the sea. There was just room for the roadway, half cut in the rock, beside the narrow strip of dark lake of seemingly unfathomable depth that lay far below between perpendicular walls of frowning rock. As the valley opened, the land dipped steeply, and the lake became a foam-fringed torrent, widening out into pools and miniature lakes as it reached the lower ground. In the wide terrace-like steps of the shelving mountain there were occasional glimpses of civilization emerging from the almost primal desolation which immediately surrounded us-clumps of trees, cottages, and the irregular outlines of stone-walled fields, with black stacks of turf for winter firing piled here and there. Far beyond was the sea-the great Atlantic-with a wildly irregular coast-line studded with a myriad of clustering rocky islands.

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gothic · horror · supernatural · vampire · transylvania · castle · mystery · thriller · darkness · shadows · night · forest

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