Sauron Defeated (36 page)

'Won't you describe what you saw there?' said Frankley.

'I once tried to describe a Saturnian landscape myself,*(61) and I should like to know if you support me.'

'I do, more or less,' said Ramer. 'I thought so at once when I landed there, and I wondered if you had been there too, or had heard some reliable news - though you may not remember it when awake. But it is getting late. I am tired, and I am sure you all are.'

'Well, something to wind up with!' Jeremy begged. 'You haven't really told us very much news yourself yet.'

'I'll try,' said Ramer. 'Give me another drink, and I'll do my best. As I haven't had time, when awake, either to name or to translate half of the shapes and sensations, it is impossible for me to do more than suggest the thing. But I'll try and tell you about one adventure among my deep dreams: or high ones, for this occurred on one of the longest journeys I have ever had the opportunity or the courage for. It illustrates several curious things about this sort of venture.

'Remember that dream-sequences dealing with astronomical exploration or space-travel are not very frequent in my collection. Nor in any one's, I should think. The chances of making such voyages are not frequent; and they're... well, they take a bit of daring. I should guess that most people never get the chance and never dare. It is related in some way to desire, no (* In The Cronic Star. This appeared in his volume Feet of Lead (1980). One of the critics said that this title, taken with the author's name, said all that was necessary. N.G.)

doubt; though which comes first, chance or wish, is hard to say

- if there's any real question of priority in such matters. I mean: my ancient attraction to waking stories about space-travel, was it a sign that I was really already engaged on exploration, or a cause of it?

'In any case I have only made a few journeys, as far as I yet know; few, that is, compared with other activities. My mind

"adream" is perhaps not daring enough to fit waking desire; or perhaps the interests I'm most conscious of awake are not really fundamentally so dominant. My mind actually seems fonder of mythical romances, its own and others'. I could tell you a great deal about Atlantis, for instance; though that is not its name to me.'

'What is its name?' asked Lowdham sharply, leaning forward with a curious eagerness; but Ramer did not answer the question.

'It's connected with that Fluted Wave,'(62) he said., 'and with another symbol: the Great Door, shaped like a Greek TT with sloping sides.(63) And I've seen the En-keladim, my En-keladim, playing one of their Keladian plays: the Drama of the Silver Tree:(64) sitting round in a circle and singing in that strange, long, long, but never-wearying, uncloying music, endlessly unfolding out of itself, while the song takes visible life among them. The Green Sea flowers in foam, and the Isle rises and opens like a rose in the midst of it. There the Tree opens the starred turf like a silver spear, and grows, and there is a New Light; and the leaves unfold and there is Full Light; and the leaves fall and there is a Rain of Light. Then the Door opens - but no! I have no words for that Fear.'

He stopped suddenly. 'That's the only thing I've ever seen,' he said, 'that I'm not sure whether it's invented or not.(65) I expect it's a composition - out of desire, fancy, waking experience, and

"reading" (asleep and awake). But there is another ingredient.

Somewhere, in some place or places, something like it really happens, and I have seen it, far off perhaps or faintly.

'My En-keladim I see in humane forms of surpassing and marvellously varied beauty. But I guess that their true types, if such there be, are invisible, unless they embody themselves by their own will, entering into their own works because of their love for them. That is, they are elvish. But very different from Men's garbled tales of them; for they are not lofty indeed, yet they are not fallen.' i

'But wouldn't you reckon them as hnau?' asked Jeremy.

'Don't they have language?'

'Yes, I suppose so. Many tongues,' said Ramer. 'I had forgotten them. But they are not hnau; they are not bound to a given body, but make their own, or take their own, or walk silent and unclad without sense of nakedness. And their languages shift and change as light on the water or wind in the trees. But yes, perhaps Ellor Eshurizel - its meaning I cannot seize, so swift and fleeting is it - perhaps that is an echo of their voices. Yes, I think Ellor is one of their worlds: where the governance, the making and ordering, is wholly in the charge of minds, relatively small, that are not embodied in it, but are devoted to what we call matter, and especially to its beauty.

Even here on Earth they may have had, may have still, some habitation and some work to do.

'But I'm still wandering. I must go back to the adventure that I promised to tell. Among my few travel-sequences I recall one that seemed to be a long inspection (on several occasions) of a different solar system. So there does appear to be at least one other star with attendant planets.(66) I thought that as I wandered there I came to a little world, of our Earth's size more or less -

though, as you'll see, size is very difficult to judge; and it was lit by a sun, rather larger than ours, but dimmed. The stars too were faint, but they seemed to be quite differently arranged; and there was a cloud or white whorl in the sky with small stars in its folds: a nebula perhaps, but much larger than the one we can see in Andromeda. Tekel-Mirim (67) it was, a land of crystals.

'Whether the crystals were really of such great size - the greatest were like the Egyptian pyramids - it is hard to say.

Once away from Earth it is not easy to judge such things without at least your body to refer to. For there is no scale; and what you do, I suppose, is to focus your attention, up or down, according to what aspect you wish to note. And so it is with speed. Anyway, there on Tekel-Mirim it was the inanimate matter, as we should say, that was moving and growing: into countless crystalline formations. Whether what I took for the air of the planet was really air, or water, or some other liquid, I am not able to say; though perhaps the dimming of sun and stars suggests that it was not air. I may have been on the floor of a wide shallow sea, cool and still. And there I could observe what was going on: to me absorbingly interesting.

'Pyramids and polyhedrons of manifold forms and symmetries were growing like ... like geometric mushrooms, and growing from simplicity to complexity; from single beauty amalgamating into architectural harmonies of countless facets and reflected lights. And the speed of growth seemed very swift.

On the summit of some tower of conjoined solids a great steeple, like a spike of greenish ice, would shoot out: it was not there and then it was there; and hardly was it set before it was encrusted with spikelets in bristling lines of many pale colours.

In places forms were achieved like snowflakes under a micro-scope, but enormously larger: tall as trees some were. In other places there were forms severe, majestic, vast and simple.

'For a time I could not count I watched the "matter" on 'j Tekel-Mirim working out its harmonies of inherent design with speed and precision, spreading, interlocking, towering, on facet and angle building frets and arabesques and frosted laces, jewels on which arrows of pale fire glanced and splintered. But there was a limit to growth, to building and annexation. Suddenly disintegration would set in - no, not that, but reversal: it was not ugly or regrettable. A whole epic of construction would recede, going back through shapeliness, by stages as beautiful as those through which it had grown, but wholly different, till it ceased. Indeed it was difficult to choose whether to fix one's attention on some marvellous evolution, or some graceful devolving into - nothing visible.

'Only part of the matter on Tekel-Mirim was doing these things (for "doing" seems our only word for it): the matter that was specially endowed; a scientist would say (I suppose) that was of a certain chemical nature and condition. There were floors, and walls, and mighty circles of smooth cliff, valleys and vast abysses, that did not change their shape nor move. Time stood still for them, and for the crystals waxed and waned.

'I don't know why I visited this strange scene, for awake I have never studied crystallography, not even though the vision of Tekel-Mirim has often suggested that I should. Whether things go in Tekel-Mirim exactly as they do here, I cannot say.

All the same I wonder still what on earth or in the universe can be meant by saying, as was said a hundred years ago (by Huxley, I believe) that a crystal is a "symmetrical solid shape assumed spontaneously by lifeless matter".(68) The free will of the lifeless is a dark saying. But it may have some meaning: who can tell? For we have little understanding of either term. I leave it there. I merely record, or try to record, the events I saw, and they were too marvellous while I could see them in far Tekel-Mirim for speculation. I'm afraid I've given you no glimpse of them.

'It was on one occasion, returning - or should I say "back-dreaming"? - from Tekel-Mirim, that I had the adventure that I'll close with. Speed, as I said, like size is very difficult to judge with no measure but vague memories of earth-events far away.

Maybe I had been speeding up, that is moving quickly down Time in Tekel-Mirim, so as to get as long a story or sequence as I could. In Tekel-Mirim I must have been not only far away in Space but in a time somewhat before my earth-time, or I should have overrun the point for my withdrawal. For I had to withdraw on that visit earlier than my body usually summons me. A determination of my own will, set before I went to sleep, had fixed a time of waking, for an appointment. And the hour was coming near.

'It is no good harking back, when you do not want to repeat but to see on; and so I withdrew, with my mind still so filled with the wonder of Tekel-Mirim that I could not even adream, and still less awake, recall the transitions or the modes of travelling, until my attention was loosened from my recollections and I found that I was looking at a twinkling sphere. I knew that I had seen it, or something like it, on one of my other journeys; and I was tempted to examine it again. But time was running on, and dimly, like a remote shred of a dream (to one awake) I was aware of my body beginning to stir unwillingly, feeling the returning will. So there and then I "harked back"

suddenly with as great an effort as I could manage; and at the same time I closed in to look for a while at this strange ball.

'I found a horrible disorderly shifting scene: a shocking contrast to Tekel-Mirim, and after Emberu and Ellor intolerable. Dark and light flickered to and fro over it. Winds were whirling and eddying, and vapours were rising, gathering, flashing by and vanishing too quick for anything to be discerned but a general ragged swirl. The land, if that is what it was, was shifting too, like sands in a tide, crumbling and expanding, as the sea galloped in and out among the unsteady edges of the coast. There were wild growths, woods you could hardly say; trees springing up like mushrooms, and crashing and dying before you could determine their shapes. Everything was in an abominable flux.

'I came still closer. The effort to attend carefully seemed to steady things. The flicker of light and dark became much slower; and I saw something that was definitely a small river, though it waggled a little, and broadened and narrowed as I looked at it. The trees and woods in its valley held their shapes now for some time. Then "Hnau at last!" I said to myself; for in the vale, down by the river among the trees I saw shapes, unmistakable shapes of houses. At first I had thought that they were some kind of quick-growing fungus, until I looked more steadily. But now I saw that they were buildings, but still fungus-buildings, appearing and then falling to pieces; and yet their agglomeration was spreading.

'I was still rather high above it all, higher than a man in a very tall tower; but I could see that the place was crawling or rather boiling with hnau of some sort - if they were not very large ant-creatures, endowed with amazing speed: darting about, alone or in bunches, bewilderingly; always more and more of them. Often they went shooting in or out like bullets along the tracks that led to the horrible, crumbling, outgrowing sore of house-shapes.

' "This really is frightful!" I thought. "Is this a diseased world, or is it a planet really inhabited by may-fly men in a sort of tumultuous mess? What's come to the land? It's losing most of its hair, going bald, and the house-ringworm goes on spreading, and starting up in fresh patches. There's no design, or reason, or pattern in it." And yet, even as I said this, I began to see, as I looked still more carefully, that there were in fact some shapes that did suggest crude design, and a few now held together for quite a long while.