Short Stories 1895-1926 (46 page)

Specks even more minute circling at ethereal altitudes above the vast crater of distant Ajubajao betokened the haunt of some species of vulture, though what meat nourished them more substantial than the air in which they circuited there was nothing to show.

Their towering vans commanded, however, an immense range of scene, and they long since must have descried from so dizzying a coign, a tiny erect shape scrambling toilsomely from out of the east towards the centre of this wild and hideous plateau. From crest to crest of the parched savanna of lava, now pausing to recover his breath and to survey what lay before him, now sliding and swaying into the yawning hollow beneath him; clam-bering to his feet when some unnoticed obstacle or more dangerous glissade had sent him sprawling; he pushed steadily on.

In his pertinacity, in the serene indomitableness of his age-raddled countenance he resembled no less a personage than the first Chinese patriarch, Bodhidharma, as – muffled in his mantle – he is depicted crossing the Yangtze river, his broad soles poised upon a reed.

For this very reason, maybe, the vultures of Ajubajao wheeled no nearer. Or it may be that a pilgrim or traveller who of his own free will, or at the promptings of a bizarre romance, or in service of some incalculable behest, dares the confines of a region as barren as this, quickly dissipates whatever pleasant juices his body may contain. Or it may be some inscrutable intuition in those carrion-fed brains had revealed that destiny had him in keeping beneath her brazen wing. Abject and futile creature though he appeared to be, he came undeviatingly on.

Its last filmy wreaths of sulphurous smoke had centuries before ceased to wreathe themselves from Ajubajao's enormous womb. Leagues distant though its cone must be, its jagged outlines were sharply discernible, cut clean against that southern horizon. The skies shallowly arching the plain of lava that flowed out annularly from its base in enormous undulations, league on league until its margin lay etched and fretted against the eastern heavens – this low-hung firmament was now of a greenish pallor. In its midst the noonday's sun burned raylessly like a sullen topaz set in jade.

But utterly lifeless though the plain appeared to be, minute susurrations were occasionally audible, caused apparently by scatterings of lava dust lifted from their hollows on heated draughts of air. These gathering in volume, raised at last their multitudinous voices into a prolonged hiss, a sustained shrill sibilation as if the silken fringes of an enormous robe were being dragged gently across this ink-black Sahara.

As they subsided once more, drifting softly to rest, a faint musical murmur followed their gigantic sigh, like that of far-distant drums and dulcimers from a secret and hidden borderland. Then this also ceased, and only the plaintive horns of the midges and the scurry of beetles scuttling beneath their shards to and fro in their haunts in the crevices of the lava broke the hush.

In a deep angular hollow of the nearest of these lava dunes, lay basking a serpent, flat of head and dull of eye, its slightly rufous skin mottled and barred in faintest patternings of slate and chocolate. So still she lay, her markings might appear to be but the vein of an alien stone or metal imbedded in the lava. But now and again, at the dictate of some inward whim, her blunted tail arched itself an inch or two above the floor of its black chamber, emitting a hollow and sinister rattling – as if in admonishment or endearment of the brood of her young that lay drowsing in an apparently inextricable knot of paler colouring nearby.

The hours of Kootoora's morning glided on, revealing little change except an ever increasing torridity, until the thin air fairly danced in ecstasy – like an exquisitely tenuous gas boiling in a pot – above every heat-laved arch and hollow. The skies assumed a yet paler green, resembling that of verdigris, and deepening towards the north to a dull mulberry. Strange tremors now shook the air, and thicker-crusted though its skin might be than any leviathan, a sinister insecurity haunted the plain. Here took its walks that spectre, danger, but more appallingly bedizened than in any other region of the earth.

Sluggish stirrings, the warning of some obscure instinct, in the serpent's blood now quickened her restlessness, though the lidless eyes set in that flat and obtuse head betrayed no glimmerings of intelligence or fear. She drew in closer to her brood and again and yet again her rattle drummed sullenly in the heat. A sound alien from any experience that had ever been hers in these familiar haunts had broken the silence. It was the footstep of approaching fear.

Writhing swiftly beneath and towards the face of the lava incline, wherein a black splash marked the crannied entrance of her secret chamber, she swept aside the fragments of dried skin which she had sloughed in bygone years. An increasing movement in the lively tangle behind her showed that her last insistent summons had been heeded. One by one her restless younglings disentangled their coils from the general knot, and slid noiselessly into cover. But a few yet remained, semi-torpid, and, as her inscrutable wits warned her, in imminent danger beneath the glare of the sun, when suddenly the presence and influence of a human shape struck down across the lava wall; and the diffused purple shadow cast by the rayless sun lay over its hollow.

The body that caused it was invisible to the serpent. But her rattle sounded unceasingly, as with groping coils she turned now this way, now that, in endeavour to repel this menace to her solitude and her young's safety. Rearing herself at last in a blind fury of terror and anguish, with blunt head and flickering tongue she struck again and again, not at the dreadful human gently surveying her out of his smiling yet anguished face, as draggled, parched, and half-fainting he watched her every movement, but merely at the insensitive shadow that overhung her lair.

The hollow desperate thumping of her slenderly boned head knocking its own knell grew fainter. But the last of her brood had made its way into safety before, bruised and bleeding, it drooped motionless in the dust. At this the old man scrambled down into the hollow. It had been an arduous journey for what might seem so trivial an errand, but there was no symptom of impatience in his gestures as, having moistened with spittle the ball of his thumb, he gently smeared the muzzle of his victim.

Then he too bent his head, heedless of the still feebly flickering tongue, and seemed to be whispering into the creature's sense some far-brought message of his own.

And, yet again, from across the parched precipitous flanks of Ajubajao, moved, as it were, a vast suspiration of wind, sulphurously hot, of a dense suffocating odour, bestirring in its course the hovering multitudes of the midges, and driving before it a thin cloud of lava dust, as the wind drives shadow across the flats of a sea. Yet again that insidious whispering filled the quiet; and the remote dulcimers tattooed their decoy.

The saint crouched low, hooding as best he could beneath his mantle his eyes, mouth, and nostrils against the smothering, skirring particles. A minute whirlpool of air came dancing like a host of dervishes into the sheserpent's hollow. Lifting the dried scaly fragments of her discarded skin, it dispersed them here, there, everywhere, in its minute headlong rout …

The Rest House at the mouth of the Seventh Valley was made of a supple withy woven together layer above layer, with a shell-shaped thatch roofing it in. Seen from a distance this smiling morning, perched amid the green undulations surrounding it, it had the appearance of a beehive. For these withies or osiers, as they dry in that temperate air, fade from their first willow grey-green into a gleaming bronze. Sprouting out of the thatch, too, bloomed and flourished whole families of minute plants, their round-budded clusters showing like the heads of some congregation of insects engaged in prayer.

It was the only dwelling completely within view, rising above the sward on which it stood some thirty yards within the mouth of the valley, the sides of which yawned smoothly wider and wider until they narrowed again towards the entry of the Sixth. Beyond that, yet again – further away than it looked in this translucent atmosphere – tapered into the stillness the summit of yet another Rest House. And so on and on, as it would seem, valley by valley, to the very gates themselves.

The shelving hollow of the nearer expanse was of a tranquil yet lively green. The close turf moulded itself over these verdant contours as delicately as the bloom on the cheek of a sleeping baby or a plum. Clumps, here and there, of a low blossoming tree, its fragrance rilling and wreathing into shallows of sweetness upon the still air, alone interrupted its surface. While in drifts of sapphire blue, over which now hovered and fluttered hosts of a narrow-winged silver butterfly, shimmered like a diapered carpet the myriads of yet another tiny-statured flower.

Winding their way between them, skirting always as near as possible each grove in turn, green paths, faintly patterning the darker green around them, converged like the outspread claws of a gigantic bird, towards the Rest House, the two westernmost of them dipping suddenly out of sight into azure space, as if here they plunged into an abyss of air.

Little traffic, it would appear, could occasion tracks so faint. Up and inward, beyond the Rest House indeed, the broader track was fainter yet; while, bordering it closely in a clean straight line, descended yet another, shallowly printed over with the gallopings of innumerable hoofs.

At a few paces distant from the Rest House, on a rough wooden seat sat the young man Cuspidor. ‘A humble office,' had smiled his old friend, ‘merits a humble name. Not all the saints, you will find, have endearing manners. The eager hunter has only his quarry in mind. He does not pause to examine every small chit-chat bird that scolds at him from a bush. Others of the saints, my son, discern only too keenly. The modest syllables of the name you now possess may therefore bring a trace of indulgence into their scrutiny. That of shoe-cleaner of the Seventh Valley may appear to be a humble occupation. It is an unworthy one, however, only if one pay regard not to the wearer but merely to the worn.'

Cuspidor, though little else than a mere mortal, had been fairly content with his new office. But he sometimes pined for more company and even for rather more work. Saints only of the First Hierarchy, he had been told, had occasion to traverse in turn each of the Seven Valleys. Of these by far the greater number made no stay in the Seventh, and had no need of his ministrations. And even of the First Hierarchy there were many Orders.

‘So, too, of the stars, my son,' St Dusman had explained. ‘Those which to our groping eyes appear the dimmest, may so appear not because they are of inferior splendour but because they are the more remote.'

Cuspidor indeed had little need to complain of undue courtesies. Wayfarers who were bound only for the nearer Valleys, to await such biddings as might reach them there, frequently passed on their way with downcast head as if lost in reverie, and without so much as lifting their eyes to glance at the shoe-cleaner and his hostel, or even at the galloping messengers that, like drifts of sunbeams in a forest, swept past them across the turf, bound on errands the goal and purpose of which even the farthest-travelling of the saints themselves seemed content to be ignorant.

Cuspidor had no clock. But he possessed a little wit, and had set up on end a switch of wood, and had cut out on the turf a circle round it, marked at intervals with a XII, a III, a VI and a IX. And though he had no clear notion of what exact quantity of time consisted his day, he had some clumsy notion of the number of the days themselves, as they glided like flowing water through the weeds of his consciousness.

Much else, apart from realization of those days, so glided. Even irrevocable dreams may leave behind them in the mind of the dreamer the empty shell of their being; and Cuspidor was as vaguely aware of events and experiences beyond his comprehension as a fish in the shallows of the ocean may be aware of the outskirts of the continents that fringe it in. His duties though menial were light. He kept watch upon the paths from dawn till twilight: and then no more. After nightfall – though in this region only a deep emerald dusk, thinning to a crystalline radiance above the remoter valleys, succeeded the placid glory of the day – after nightfall any belated traveller must knock, and Cuspidor must rise from his bed to bid him welcome, and to prepare the guest room. No visitor made a prolonged stay, and few, any.

Having come to where the shoe-cleaner stood awaiting him with downcast eyes beside his bench, the pilgrim would rest first one foot, then another, on the wooden block prepared for the purpose. And the young man, having unlatched them, would remove shoes or sandals, scrape off into the hollow beneath whatever foreign matter, dust or mud, still adhered to their under-surface, set them out of the sun, and have them ready when their owner next appeared, bent on his outward journey.

Some little practice had resulted in what was by now almost conspicuous evidence of Cuspidor's labours. A few paces behind the hostel, where stood his beehives and grew his grain and fruit, lay a heap of refuse. It was his little private record of the saints' wayfarings – as well as of his own industry. Even a casual eye might have fastened in amazement on the medley of elements represented there: minute stones of a lustre that must surely have once been precious to
some
discerning eye; fine-coloured sands unlike any Earth or her sister planets can afford; scraps of what resembled ivory, infinitesimals of an endless variety, objects far past their present owner's sagacity to give a name to, or even to recognize, lay scattered and buried in this heap.

While still unaccustomed to his duties and by means of a rough sieve which he had plaited out of fibre from the bark of his fruit trees, Cuspidor had spent his leisure hours in separating the coarser objects in this heap into kinds. The brighter these were in mere light and colour the more they charmed his eye, though of their origin and value he was entirely ignorant. Next, what was rare and strange delighted him. But here, too, he fumbled in ignorance. And he had at last wearied of the pursuit altogether, confining his attention solely to an ivory-coloured dust which, he discovered, if scraped together without any other admixture and kneaded with a little water or spittle, could be converted into a smooth, plastic clay. And this he had taught himself to model rudely into whatever shape chanced to take his fancy. If but a word or a smile were bestowed on his workmanship, it was ample reward. And as he made more progress he was as content with none.