Devil's Tor (5 page)

"This memorial hasn't meant to you what it has to me, Hugh."

She fell again into abstraction. Now, the wind abruptly dropping and the rain diminishing to a vertical spotting shower, they were better able to discern the completeness of the wreck. A single pair of entire massive granite blocks, with some far smaller fragments of others, lay quiescent just within the extreme verge of the hill, where its steepness began; and that was all that visibly remained of the Devil's head. The whole of the upper twenty-five or thirty feet of the stack, ponderous segments of rock of different sizes and shapes, had necessarily been hurled down the hillside, to crash in huge bounds to the valley or be precariously halted on the way. Older by far than the Pyramids, a slowly dipping landmark to innumerable generations of men, the pile had tumbled at last; and the witnesses of its ruin were the girl who knew and loved it so well, and a man who had journeyed from the far ends of the earth but just in time for the spectacle.

Of those two blocks in view, the larger, a flattish rectangular slab, must clearly have been the base of the whole erection. Its narrow edge was in line with the torn cavity in the soil left by its upheaval, and the measurements appeared identical. It lay bottom-upwards. A tall man could stretch himself across its width, while its length might be half as much again. The other block, which was the nearer to the edge of the hill, was a big irregular cube. It should have stood the next upon its companion in destruction, as the lowest section of the Devil's neck. The imbedded slab must have been wrenched from the ground by its leverage.

And the stack's site itself lay before the cousins hollow and violated. All that left it recognisable was its grim interruption of the natural turf and weathered sunken rock-knobs of the plateau, outlined on the side furthest from them by the low parapet of that slab which until a few minutes since had filled it throughout an age unthinkable. Drapier, twisting an end of his moustache, reflected how excavation work would now be easier, supposing that this girl on his arm wished still to insist on her theory of a tomb. Such a feature of the destruction seemed not to have occurred to her yet; nor did he desire to hurry her processes, for come to it she must in a few more moments, and till then he had thoughts of his own.

So they continued fast where they had halted, a short dozen paces from the nearer rim of the depression, both appearing intent on silently absorbing what was already won of the catastrophe, before caring to investigate the rest. The rain was gentler still, but the driving mists grew denser, and the natural dusk perceptibly advanced. Drapier's face had acquired an expression of sternness and anxiety. Ingrid seemed in a kind of passive trance.

Presently she said:

"It is not incredible, of course, for nothing is incredible that can happen. But it is strange. It is strange that I should have been talking to you about a tomb here only a very short time before the tomb is opened for us by a miraculous intervention. That is what I have been thinking about."

"I wondered if it was so."

"Now let us go on to see, then."

"You receive it superstitiously?" he inquired, while they slowly advanced again.

"I know that in your heart you are not laughing at me for that, Hugh. I am not pretending to read your ideas, but I can see that you are taking a man's view of this affair."

"A man's view?"

"A serious view. For consider! How many hundreds or thousands of tons of solid rock have been thrown down?—and by one diminutive whirl of electricity. It is scarcely in nature, and I am up here when it happens, and you are up here too—in spite of your denials of knowledge of the hill, or interest in it. What have
you
been thinking about, Hugh?"

"Honestly, I never heard of the Tor before yesterday," he persisted.

Ingrid was troubled, but again might not contradict him in mind. The site of the destruction became once more veiled from them by the rolling white vapours that were the legacy of the storm, making of the hill-top a cauldron. Thunder still growled from the west, but there was now no lightning with it, and the rain had left off. The fair weather of weeks past seemed suddenly to have vanished, to make way for the more characteristic Dartmoor grey skies and mists. The breeze blew soft, moist, and at last cool, the moor all at once smelt sweet, inexhaustible supplies of damp-laden air must again be coming up from the Channel, ready for conversion to hill-vapour. The girl felt the familiar friendliness of it all, though her mood could not respond.

New to her disability and full of cares, she paused again before quite reaching the hollow, which at those few paces continued wholly curtained off. And at the identical instant her eyes, fastened straight ahead, became set and strange, for they had seen an extraordinary thing—or was the true explanation of her overtaking different?

During the rest of the evening and night she could never decide upon the character of that vision. It had come and gone with the swiftness of thought. Yet only its speed and its nature had been unreal, otherwise it had transcended everything that she understood by reality. Whether it were some intuition of hers taking visual shape, or absolute hallucination, or a hill-haunting, as a house might be haunted, or a personal apparition manifesting itself to her for a purpose, or a transformation by her faculties of some queer efflux from the Tor—she could not come to any peace or settlement about it.

Looking towards that cavity where the monument had stood, she thought she had seen—no, she
had
seen—a woman, or, to be more exact, the upper half of a woman, of marvellous height, since her unseen lower limbs must have stood in some depression still deeper than the evacuated bed, and her head was yet but little lower than Ingrid's own. She conceived that it had been a sudden rift in the white wreaths of fog which had opened and closed again that track of vision for her as far as the hollow, exhibiting the woman erect in its depth, facing her. And she had been clothed in dark-coloured clinging antique draperies, of no recognisable fashion, but the wonder had been her flesh—and her beauty altogether—the full beauty of a beautiful woman expressed in supernatural terms, which made something totally different of it. Her face, neck and arms alone had been bare, but the colour of these had resembled snow illuminated by moonlight, instead of the muddiness of human flesh. That face's beauty had been neither young nor old, living nor dead, but was set apart from all comparisons. It had been wise and tranquilly terrible like a celestial's.

Then, before Ingrid's amazement had had time to turn to the bristling horror that is the body's blind, ungovernable defence against all that comes suddenly upon it from an alien world, the phantom had been blotted from her sight by the thickening of the mists once more. Thereupon it had been, while she trembled, staggering, too late, that the lightning vision so wondrously impressed upon her retina had begun quietly to separate itself into the pictorial details that afterwards she was to recall as the actual optical contact.

Drapier, always supporting her arm, had become aware of its stiffening, then glancing round at her eyes he had seen their odd rigidity as well. Afterwards came her slight trembling and swaying. Yet nothing unusual, nothing at all, was distinguishable through the drifts ahead. He hoped her nerves were not giving under the evening's strain.

"What's wrong, Ingrid?"

She felt that that image might at any instant reappear. Her instinct was that she must not betray it to him—it was for her alone. His question told that he had not seen it. And so she unlinked her arm, to be in solitary readiness for the renewed ordeal; but Drapier courteously would not restrain her, although he knew her helplessness. Her pride returned, she now declared to herself that she must under all circumstances exercise control, and took his arm again. But to answer his query was indeed difficult.

"Did anything startle you?"

"I thought something was there, through a break in the mist," she explained, as evenly as she could.

"What kind of thing?"

"It could only have been fancy."

He accepted the statement. In fact, there was nothing else there that could have upset her.

"I ought to understand these alarms. Vapour at a certain altitude is a very living thing—and may, for instance, permanently stamp the soul of a whole people; such as the mountain Scottish. It's the constant anxiety of eye and ear not to be caught unawares..."

He broke off. A new advance had at length brought them to the very edge of the wrecked bed, and Ingrid was plainly not listening to him; but in any case he must have ceased.

"And so there
is
a grave."

The words were hers, uttered in a quiet, sharp voice. Drapier looked on without reply.

The hollow, like the slab which had filled and fitted it, was an oblong. Its floor was no more than a couple of feet below the Tor's surface. In the middle of this floor was another smaller oblong; but it was of nothingness. Thus the true floor was but a narrow ledge or shelf running round the four sides of the bed, with a hole in the centre.

The granite of the ledge was jagged and unfinished. Its material was hidden by an accumulation of disintegrated dirt. The oblong hole inside was dark, but not of a uniform darkness. The length of the whole bed was from south to north, the upheaved slab was on its east side (the way they had come up), and the downlooking two were on its west. The hole was lighter at the south end, darker at the north. Drapier stepped down on to the ledge.

Yes, there could be no doubt about the artificial character of this inside oblong at his feet. It had been done by tools; primitive tools, of course, and the shelf's sharp edges had crumbled with age, but still the opening was human workmanship. The discernible actual stairs, however, leading down to the unseen depths put the fact beyond question. He saw two rude granite stair-treads, each with a drop of a yard from above, and below that the remaining third of the seven-foot length of the hole was occupied by blackness. The width of the treads was a yard, and the whole descent looked frightfully archaic. The black section indubitably represented the invisible continuation of the stairway previous to passing underground, beneath the north arch of the ledge. How far down into the belly of the hill it all led he was of course no antiquarian to conjecture.

What he could see of the granite walls was rough and bossy. It was impossible to conceive that prehistoric workmen with quite inadequate tools could so have carved a way down into the earth through solid rock. Nearly certainly, advantage must have been taken of some pre-existing natural fissure; wrought, it might be, in another geological age by earthquake. The fissure could have been trimmed to these steps without any great miracle. But in that case they must lead down to a cave, also natural, which would be the tomb.

He determined to make the descent; only not now. The air must first be suffered to purify itself a bit, and it was also unjustifiable to run risks, with Ingrid waiting for him above in her present lamed condition. He could come up alone before breakfast to-morrow, with a torch.

So, springing to the upper ground again, he said to his cousin, who never looked at him, even when he spoke:

"It certainly is a grave, and after this I shall respect your inspirations. But we had still better not stop now—you're wet through and hurt, it's growing dark, and your mother will be anxious. I'll explore it before breakfast in the morning, and report to you. No one can possibly anticipate us to-night."

She heard him with a part of her thoughts only, and returned no reply. She was meditating that the apparition had been standing in a deep hollow, for only the upper half of her form had shown above ground. The feet, therefore, must have been on yonder first stair-tread, far down—which would make her
so
tall. … And she must have been ascending, not descending, for she was to appear. … And thus this ancient stairway explained the vision, which must otherwise entirely have baffled her understanding; while the vision surely explained this stairway leading to a tomb she had always
felt.
It was the woman's tomb. It would need a being of such spiritual importance to radiate her influence through the ages. But were there women ever so near to heaven, and so inexpressibly lovely and awful? ...

Drapier offered her his arm again.

"I don't wish to interrupt a flight, but it is getting late, and there's this painful trudge in front of us."

"Yes, we must go, Hugh."

She accepted the arm, and they started round the wreck towards the edge of the hill.

"I think I am now entitled to the whole of your intuition," said Drapier gravely. "I may be able to confirm its accuracy in the morning, but I should know what I am looking for."

"There is little else of it. Only I have always somehow felt that if there were a tomb here, it must be a woman's."

"Why?"

"I've always felt it."

Her thoughts were never away from that vision. It was the truth that her intuitions had always spoken of a woman's grave; and now this was she. She had been of high birth and power, to be buried here, under so grand a monument. A queen of those days. Although, indeed, she had been more like an angel or goddess—but perhaps that was the transfiguration of her death. … Was it foolish to fancy that she had willed to be received, upon her grave's reopening, by a girl of seriousness and noble birth? For men, even, that tomb might be sinister. The fiend's portrait would be the symbol of such an interdiction. Probably she ought not to allow Hugh to go down...

From the hill's verge they saw other fragments of the shattering, but still most of the ruin was veiled from them by the clinging white mists and the deeper twilight of the valley. Drapier chose another way down, to give a wide berth to any temporarily-arrested boulders that might start again without warning. From a safe distance they glimpsed a few such. He took a mental note to advise the setting-up of a danger-board. Another proof that the stack had been artificial was that its component stones must have been cemented together. They were easily separable, yet, had they been quite loose, the top ones must have whizzed off without levering up the underneath.