Devil's Tor (52 page)

"And that race should be identical with the earliest of the Eolithic cave-dwellers. They need not all have dwelt in caves, but the caves have endured, the forest huts of mud and wattle have vanished. An outpost of that great widespread European brown-eyed people may have become settled in this valley at our feet, in a time when it was supernatural and frightful with dark trees...

"And they would be the tomb-makers!" said Saltfleet.

"They have even been described. Yet few have noticed the accounts, for science has had its other more beloved fashions. The Icelandic sagas are full of such descriptions. … I don't know now if we shall ever enter into the discussion. Certainly there is no time now, at this minute. We have stayed here too long, Saltfleet."

"On the contrary, I regard it as so extraordinarily essential to get you proved right or wrong in
all,
that I'm prepared to stop here half an hour longer if necessary. For the same reason that I withheld my vision this morning from you, I want you, in advance of the next, to predict its elements by pure reason, logic, intuition—call it what you will. … For supposing you have this demoniacal nose for hidden things, the common measures of prevention may not be enough."

Arsinal turned a wrinkled glance on him.

"So that I could refuse to answer at all, and be well within my rights as a sensible man. But I shall neither blow up our quarrel again here, nor will I waste time over urging you forward before you are quite ready. Let us only finish quickly. …

"I said, the sagas. To persons acquainted with the sagas and reading with heedful mind, a singular racial circumstance everywhere outcrops in them. It is that throughout all these northern stories, the two distinct types of northern men persistently appear, frequently in the same generation of the same family. A single instance may stand for all. Skallagrim had two sons. Now Thorolf, the older of the pair, as a child 'grew to be tall and was fair of countenance,' while Egil, the younger, was 'ill-favoured like his father, with black hair'—and as the passage has always struck me as important, I can conclude it verbatim:

"'When but three years old he (Egil) was as tall and strong as other boys of six or seven. He was soon talkative and word-wise. Somewhat ill to manage was he when at play with other lads.'

"And Skallagrim himself resembled that son, whereas Thorolf the elder, the brother of Skallagrim and uncle of Thorolf the younger, entirely resembled that younger Thorolf in fairness and good looks and affability.

"That black, ill-featured type finds mention in a hundred chiefs, sea-rovers and
bondis
of the north. Doubtless it was as prevalent as the fair, golden, sun-like type, which yet was ever the more popular and remained the standard of perfection of the stock. Sigurd Fafnirsbane, Gunnar of Lithend, Kjartan Olafsson, were yellow-haired, blue-eyed, handsome, easy of speech and open of character, the favourites of all men, the beloved of all women. Skallagrim, Egil, Skarphedinn, Grettir, and numberless others, were either black or red-haired, ugly, quarrelsome, and often secret-natured. Sometimes they were credited with being descended from the stock of the 'hill-giants'. …

"But also this curious natural antithesis finds presentation in an essential and principal feature of the Norse cosmogony which hitherto has always baffled the commentators. In the last day the sons of Muspellheimr, that flaming world of the south, headed by Surtr—he who sits upon and guards its border, 'his sword outshining the sun itself—are to sally forth and destroy the gods and all mankind. These fiery golden beings, Saltfleet, may well stand for the archetype of the yellow-haired men of the north; and that last destruction of the old order should surely be the second coming of the power of the lith, raising those yellow-haired ones to new and sublimer and final splendours.

"Very awful and beautiful to me is this mysterious sudden shooting forth of the mythos into an inexplicable quarter, like a flashing of genius. Opposed to Muspellheimr is Niflheimr, the abode of freezing cold and gloom. The Edda says:

'"That part of Ginnungagap that lies towards the north was thus filled with heavy masses of gelid vapour and ice, and everywhere within were whirlwinds and fleeting mists. But that part that lies towards the south was lighted by the sparks and flakes that flew into it from Muspellheimr.' Those sparks and flakes, may not we at once call them the meteors of the sky, and may not the already ignorant reference be to the forgotten tradition of the fall to earth of one aerolith in particular? ... Niflheimr: that is, the dark primal world of savagery and gianthood. And the account proceeds. From the commingling of the fire generated by those sparks and that congealed vapour, arose to life the giant Ymir, with the cow Audhumla, who fed upon the salt and hoar frost of the stones round about and the milk of whose teats nourished Ymir. But from the stones thus licked by her sprang the father of Odin, endowed with beauty, agility and power. …

"Those licked stones, then, were the same dark half-giants of Niflheimr; and that cow was the allegorised figure of the Mother. The stones as well, however, were doubtless the fragments of the aerolith, shattered by its fall to ground, and here the myth must somehow have become corrupted. The father of Odin and his named wife (to omit an obviously falsely inserted generation) were the chosen individuals from a pre-existing barbarous tribal forest-folk. Odin himself was the resulting god-man.

"But one entity remains over—Ymir. He, the frost-giant, was not before the cow Audhumla, for her milk nourished him; yet his mention is before her, and so it is to be understood that their appearances in the world were simultaneous and inseparable. With Ymir, indeed, we find associated a whole new branch of naively grand fable, with which we have nothing to do, and which may probably represent another myth-system altogether, crudely welded to the first at a later date. His original shape and meaning, difficult to grasp, perhaps too soon became troublesome to immature intelligences untrained to abstractions, so that they fell to easier stories.

"I hazard that Ymir was united to that female visitant from another flaming sphere of pure spirit, as a sinister 'infra' force, for the automatic defence of her sacredness in a dismal blood-reeking underworld of crouching beasts and half-beasts. His strength and malignity were those of death itself. … Well may it be, Saltfleet, that this hill standing up against us was at one time 'Ymir's Tor.’ His carven image was erected yonder to continue his office after the most fearful of all burials. Drapier has fallen to his wrath. …

"And now I shall answer your question, or attempt to do so, after so long a digression. 'Who were those tomb-makers?' They were the infinitely-distant progenitors of the ill-favoured, blackhaired men of the sagas, the original stock of the European north-west, probably for the most part dwelling in rude hovels in the extensive dark, marshy forests of those days, who in after times became the fearsome giants of countless songs and stories. … For the bones of these so-numerous giants have till now not been recovered, and we are therefore to credit that this popular term 'giant' anciently described not the possessor of an exceptional stature, but of a wild bodily strength, rudeness and unsociableness beyond the later common. Never did the type disappear, but it came to mix its blood with that of its supernatural fair-haired conquerors, and so grew erect and alert, better-mannered, fonder of the light of day; yet always the fundamental distinction endured. … More than the other northerners, perhaps, the Celts may have retained their 'giant' characters. …"

Arsinal paused; whereupon Saltfleet asked him:

"But why should not that mystical translation to the highest have occurred among another race? Nor do I see any great worship of womanhood in these people, to prepare them for the bowing down before a Great Mother. That, I well remember, was a point of yours."

"Consider, Saltfleet. Isn't the cultivated rose, by nearly universal acclaim, the loveliest of flowers? Yet it is from the simple briar, that has no more beauty than the violet, primrose, bluebell, or a dozen other wayside blooms. Why then has the rose been victorious over all wild competitors? Because the briar always possessed the capability of holding in its sheath-to-come the multitudinous curving petals that constitute the glory of the garden rose. And equally, the grim-featured, black-haired savage of the ancient northern lands must have possessed potentially in his foreshadowed later brain the group of strange and noble characters whose interaction afterwards was bound to produce that
saltus
for mankind.

"Still you may object that other races have attained a comparable height by simple evolution, without a break and without unearthly intervention; but I reply, no! the height has never been comparable. The Chinese and Japanese have given us decorative forms of art that could not rise to sublimity. A few peoples have built magically for sky and land, not for heaven. No dark-skinned race has yet achieved a philosophy; for the Upanishads of India are from the Aryans. The Jews and Arabs have willed, rather than meditated, their sullen monotheistic systems, and these systems have remained barbaric, of blood and towards blood.

"All has been communal, non-individual; only in the European north and west has the genius of the individual soul been possible. Therefore, that slumbering, half-frozen stock, dreaming uneasily during some thousands of generations before the coming of the grand translation—it alone, of all the human peoples, was undergoing the impress of outward circumstance which could at last break it up into persons. The long black winter nights, the frightful brute creation, hunting as well as hunted, the impassable forests filled with imagined shapes of awe and panic terror, the bogs, rains, damps, chills and fogs, making of life one long misery and struggle, the splitting of the race into the smallest groups, wherefrom speech remained uncommon, concerted action unknown, and loneliness the rule—all was towards the formation of minds brought permanently face-to-face with reality... not the reality of practical things, but that of the whole of cosmic existence. But for untold ages the misery was escapeless and men sought no escape; hearts were being silently hammered to the beginning of agonised wonder, and there was as yet no thought in the north, but only a damming of the future thought that was to break through like a mighty flood. … Compare this, for example, Saltfleet, with the easy, eloquent tears and breast-beatings of the primitives of the Old Testament, the vocal distresses on account of the loss of possessions, whether human or material; and you will discover why the one people should already have swelled to maturity and run its short course, before the other had succeeded in establishing its foundations of dark majesty and sovereignty over all the latter nations of the planet. …

"But as for the worship of womanhood, that must spring from monogamie love, among the smallest isolated tribes or families, constantly threatened by the overwhelming perils of a terrible natural world. For when men begin to band together, and feel themselves strong at last to roam from place to place, then their protection of their womenfolk may in part be left to the community; but until then each man must defend his own, and such defence, from love, becomes reverence. And he who will not defend his wife will have lost the half of his life."

Saltfleet viewed him steadily.

"Then could not that people have progressed to its ultimate height without the accident of a divine interposition?"

"All things, perhaps, are possible. I can but say that it has probably not done so. The man I have described, he might well ultimately have attained to the mastery of the world by his own nature and exertions; and still that would not have been enough. The questions of his labouring heart were to be answered as well. He was to be a spirit. … A supernatural gardener was necessary."

There was a moment's silence.

"What is the world for, Arsinal? What is to be its last and most blessed state?"

"The world, I conceive, is for the understanding of heaven," replied Arsinal. … "And men, it may be, will have understood heaven as soon as they shall have realised that not they alone are in pain and in development. … Men now are angry and perplexed because they deem that their Creator has gratuitously set them in an abode of torment; but if ever they come to the wisdom that the Creator too is in torment, that the torments of the created are likewise the anguish of the Creator—and all to some high end... then I conceive that the angelic state may well be within grasp, even by suffering man. …"

Saltfleet wished now to get down quickly to the valley, and Arsinal was more than ready. "Where is the trial to take place?" he asked.

"I propose that we follow the stream up round the bend, and see what it is like there."

"You want it to be in the valley, and not on the Tor?

"Yes,"

"And that will bring us north-east or north of the Tor?"

"Yes."

He led the way along the upper path they were on, and Arsinal followed in silence. But as the curve swept round, Devil's Tor began to change shape. Then it seemed as though they could have thrown a stone to it, the valley sides were so brought together in abruptness, while their own slope mounted higher and higher above the track. The open country slipped from sight, the scene grew very wild, dark and desolate, the darkness being due to the shadowing of the gap by the intervening bulk of the Tor. The grey grass and rocks of the latter's north face slanted down nearly precipitously; the cut between the hills came to resemble a dismal dike. The sky, in being diminished, looked duller. Seemingly not far off, still further up the valley, an invisible peewit sounded at intervals its queer mournful cry.

And Saltfleet reflected that yonder tract of great broken boulders continuing to circle the base of the Tor must probably represent an appalling landslide of primitive cliffs, anciently a part of the height they were traversing. … Only, in that case, the level of the watercourse must have been much deeper down, since it must needs, the valley, have received unreckonable millions of tons of rock as that sudden gift. Thus the test to come was made still more dreamlike, for it was to be from beside a stream that once had been a roaring cataract, perhaps a hundred feet or more below the present bed, and he was somehow also expecting to be beside such a cataract. How this could be he did not know.