Devil's Tor (53 page)

Then the divided heights fell apart again, the floor of the valley rebroadened, and at once a rain-gully offered itself by which the men could conveniently clamber down. At the foot, Saltfleet leapt the water to Devil's Tor. He stopped where he had landed, waiting for Arsinal, who joined him and halted too.

"Is this the spot?"

"It will do," said Saltfleet.

He appeared to hesitate.

"We must settle how we are to manage, Arsinal. Miss Fleming, having her flint in her hand, saw something; I, sitting near, saw something else, as I think. Her apparition, assuming that it was brought about by her holding of the flint, should have been the principal, and yet mine was so remarkable that I would be well content to repeat and pursue it; which is why I have fixed on the valley. Against this is the possibility that in some mysterious fashion her vision may have included, while transcending, mine, though I can't believe it has been so. Then let me hear your wishes as to which of us shall hold the stone."

Arsinal turned away to consider the difficulty, straightening his shoulders while he did so. Then he came back.

"
I
will hold it. … The point, however, may be less material than you conceive. The phenomenon's character, which, according to your showing, should be correspondent to its degree of vividness, can still hardly depend upon the physical contact, which would be making it too mechanical a business. I should be sorry to imagine, for instance, that an unrelated person, holding one of the flints, could be shown more than an attuned instrument sitting by. It would be to destroy all the fate, all the meaning, of these happenings. … Nevertheless, to leave nothing to chance, since I
may
be wrong here, and seeing that the affair is in every sense, and first and last, mine, not yours, I must insist on the active part in this essay."

"I was nearly sure that you would claim it, and you must have your own way."

He looked at Arsinal. "Did you study the stone's image again this morning while I was out?"

"Yes, for a long time."

"It's a night sky, and they are true stars?"

"That must be," replied Arsinal.

"But what are those stars? Are they of our universe?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps they are of no three-dimensional sky at all?"

"You would suggest... "

"Of a heavenly sky?"

Arsinal quietly wondered at the unwonted simplicity of tone of all these interrogations. It occurred to him as extraordinary that he could have been so intimately in Saltfleet's society during many months without ever having suspected the existence in him of this second, or indeed third, nature. Besides being a tempered man of the world, then, and so lately that man of irresponsible levity, he now could be as a child, asking his strange questions in limpid earnestness. … But still he felt that behind it all was the strength of contempt—that none but a true scorner could so dare to expose his innocence to the scoffing thoughts of another. And it seemed to Arsinal that the straggle between them, like a disease working underground, was suddenly renewed when he had believed it arrested, and that it had become deadlier and all at once was seriously threatening his designs, since Saltfleet too could thus adopt the manner of subdued selfless tranquillity, yet quiet groping, of one called to the service of the invisible. … It was as if he had conjured to his side and support a phantom attendant, who now refused to be dismissed, but who was growing and growing in presence, and significance, and equality, and even fearfulness. …

He could still answer, however, with a dignity of simplicity not less than that of the man who questioned him:

"Between heaven and earth there may be many skies, and this indeed may be one of them. But, rather, I would credit that it is a book which we are enabled to read only in translation. Our own stars are an alphabet of twenty-six letters, and all the words that we can form for our imperfect understanding must be composed of those twenty-six letters, or not at all. Such matters are not to be discussed, Saltfleet. The brain of man has been evolved to empower him to hold his own on earth. It is the rudest structure, and if I have said that the world is for the knowledge of heaven, I have certainly never meant that knowledge to come through intellectual sharpness. But let us now finish with talking, and get to work. …"

Saltfleet glanced about him, then mounted the slope of the Tor to a large discoloured boulder not more than a few yards above the level of the stream. He sat down facing the opposite height, which was north, and carelessly signalled to Arsinal to come up too. He complied. Perching himself on an adjacent stump of rock, he took out the flint from his pocket.

"Are you ready, Saltfleet, and shall we begin? What exactly am I to do?"

"I would grip it, in case it falls when you lose touch. … Then wait simply. We should not have long to wait. Say no more. …"

Saltfleet's last words were scarcely uttered when he saw between himself and the stream below, only some half-dozen paces down from where he sat, the vaporous shape of a woman of astonishing height, clad in seemingly ancient dark stone-coloured draperies that met the ground. She stood there like a pillar, without increasing or moving, facing him. Through her moonlike substance he could still behold the rising hill beyond the water, though very obscurely, as if gauze intervened—her attire, though it should seem opaque, was yet preventing no more than her flesh. He stumbled to his feet. Despite the circumstance that she was shown as lower down the Tor's slope than he, he felt shortened by her incomprehensible stature, as well as animalised by her ghostly grace. At the same time, an instinctive shuddering tried to wrest from his will the rule of his faculties.

He brutally stopped that. And when, with the same access of violence, he further dared to seek the phantom's eyes, in order to fight the whole awfulness at once, he became aware that by this act of boldness the luminosity of her skin was intensified for him and the substantiality of her dress increased, so that the hillside beyond was now nearly hidden by her.

Then he was meeting those eyes, and any antagonism he had expected proved imaginary, for a wonderful sense of peace and amity was flowing from the contact. Nevertheless, his bodily horror persisted, causing his state to be all confused and self-contradictory; he was at a loss how to adjust himself towards her. … But the first solution was that anger swelled up within him. He was disgusted with his own fear of another circumscribed individual, apparition though she might be, and his wrath was that she should be expecting to so daunt him. Yet the arisen heat never dispelled his other feeling of being in some manner united to a constant spring of friendly mildness. The two motions acted upon him together, so that his indignation could not remain such, but became metamorphosed to pride without hostility.

Her menace, he now felt, was not for
him,
not for his ancient, aristocratic, unkillable spirit, that was at least her equal, but for his animal blood, curdling at an unknown ghastliness; and
it
was but in him to be despised and commanded. No need to yield to anger because an illusory bugbear was terrifying his automatic part. Even, she might be standing here to prognosticate his death, as perhaps she had prognosticated Drapier's; and still there was no threat. His body had never been immortal. He was not to turn as pale as she because he was at once to die, the announcement was not to enrage him... nor did he require the alleviation of the mystic message of those mild, infinitely wise eyes, filling rather than encountering his. Such an encouragement was a misinterpretation of his temper, and so the communication between them was imperfect; this wraith stood not for an intelligent envoy of another world, but for a shape trying to impose its nature upon a man too austere. …

But next he seemed to understand that this exaggeration of his pride of self was no more than the easiest form of a new influx of life from her presence that was flooding all his being. His pride was his deepest and widest and most used channel, so it was the most notably filled. The influx of energy was preternatural, for neither did it hearten him, nor were his senses roused, but life, energy, it was, since with the passing instants he was conscious, not of the change itself, but of its effects. The entire level of his mind was uplifted, until his memory of the common things of existence was fainter and less; men, women, his mountain journeys, business, pleasure, sport, seemed to lose definition for him, just as familiar scenes to a man leaving them for a far distant place. And he identified the change with this ghostly statue before him, by reason of the fact that all his thoughts were coming to him from her by way of her eyes, whose colour and shape he never grasped, but only that those eyes resembled the debouching twin-ends of a living river from the invisible, springing across yards of air to enter himself. …

Soon he was believing that, besides being an entity, she was a personification of some task about to be demanded of him, some labour of Hercules that was nothing new, but always had been the reason for his birth and existence. Only, since the task had to to be, she could not be announcing it; her apparition must be the actual initiation of its pains. She appeared as a woman, doubtless, that the horror might be softened for him. He conceived that there was no true relation between them. The womanly sweetness and grandeur contradicting and at the same time augmenting her awfulness, they were the
unseen
itself, there was no person here at all, but his eyes were inventing her shape. …

Then, precisely at the moment of her vanishing, overtook him the strangest experience of all his life hitherto. Her eyes, her whole face, made some swift movement of vital change, which, he had the positive assurance, should have taught him all the rest, but that he was just too slow to catch it. And yet the fault had not been his, since he was also certain that it was that very transformation that he had throughout been expecting.

He failed to see it, but still a part of its impression remained with him, to torture him for all that day, and longer. It had not been towards a further humanising of their impossible connection. The change had been to something of the nature of
savagery
and
absolutism. …
It could not be for his alarming, but for the arousing of his deepest earnestness. …

He retained his self-control, yet, after vainly seeking everywhere with his eyes for the phantom, it needed still a minute or two before he could grow used to the emptiness of the scene.

Simultaneously, Arsinal had dropped straight into night, as a stone to the ground.

A great rushing river tumbled and bounded past him like a beautiful monster, its flecks of wet startling his face, and its hoarse roar overpowering his hearing. He was in the company of others, on a broad strip of heath beginning from its very edge. Stunted unfamiliar trees grew scattered among the huge boulders that were the lowest of a mountain walling the waste on its landward side.

A mighty blaze of piled branches and logs in the middle space crimsoned the waves of the swollen black waters, and illuminated the rough precipices beyond, that went up out of sight into the night. Where men or trees or rocks were near enough to the fire to cast heavy shadows, these were perpetually changing grotesque shape and seeming to pursue each other. Arsinal himself was too far out to feel anything of the heat. In the upper sky were stars. The night air was windless, yet sharp.

Closer than the blaze to him, midway between it and the foot of the mountain, an irregular crescent of those man-like creatures was ranged before a bewildering spectacle, consisting in an upright shaft, nine or ten feet high, of dimly luminous white mist. The firelight should have overpowered it but for that shield of intervening beings; who perhaps were rather apes than men, with their anthropoid physique, brutish crouch (in some cases assisted by the actual resting of hairy fingers on the ground, while the knees could stay unbent), and then the unshaped body-skin or fur exposing all four limbs, and the bestial big-jowled physiognomies, catching the red in occasionally turning, that were neither bearded nor smooth, but displayed an outlandish hideousness of partial plucking of hairs in diverse styles of eccentricity. The hair of their heads, however, black or flaming, flowed in all cases past their shoulders, except that some, seeming to be women, had plaited theirs and adorned it with glittering ornaments. Otherwise, in that deep shade, he could not well distinguish between the sexes; a female bosom showed, or a face looked smooth, but all was indistinct and his eyes were seeking elsewhere. Male or female, each that he noticed wore heavy beads and armlets, and carried some sort of rude weapon.

The pillar of mist issued from a spherical knob of brighter light, motionless on the ground. Manifestly the phenomenon was a wonder and an excitement to that straining halfring of witnesses, greedy, it appeared, to touch and seize, were it not for the strange danger. None conversed with neighbour; but, from time to time, one would twist his head round as if towards a certain black quarter of the red-lit mountain base, where probably it was pierced by some ravine or cavern. Accordingly, a person or an interruption should be expected from there.

Meanwhile the incarnadined inky torrent, riding everlastingly over that brief reach between a spectral unknown source and destination, not only continued to unman him by its incessant thunder, but so synchronised in its recurring spells of highest dreadfulness of approach with the trembling of the ground beneath his feet, that at each new oncoming he feared the entire tract must give. And yet he had no will to move back to more assured safety, his thoughts were so little upon himself.

Suddenly a monstrous undefined form leapt through the air from out of night, to crush with its sheer weight one of the creatures whose back was turned. The rest jumped round with quick cries and screams, lifting aloft their spears, axes and clubs, of wood and stone. The cruel face of a black leopard appeared for a single moment lighted by the crimson and yellow of the fire. In its mouth was the man's arm, completely torn off from the shoulder. A woman shrieked high above the clamour, darting towards the victim. But as he gyrated to the ground, where he stayed lying face-downwards, a newcomer rushed into the circle of light from the outer blackness.