Unknown (172 page)

What was he thinking about now? Not of Glastonbury; nor of Death. He was lying in the green spring grass of the Park at Montacute; and an incarnate Sweetness that was his daughter and yet not his daughter was running to meet him with outstretched arms.

Tri&t it was in his power lo rise up and meet .this figure and feel as he embraced her that he was embracing the very Life of Life was doubtless the result of what he had seen—the Grail under its fifth shape—upon the top of Gwyn-ap-Nud's hill.

Unlike the experience of his patron and friend, the Rector of Northwold, the consciousness of Bloody Johnny's soul suffered a complete suspension after his body was dead. Whether this suspension outlasted his burial in the Wells Road Cemetery, which happened immediately after the flood, and whether it will outlast the life of this planet, and of all other such bubbles of material substance that the torrent of Life throws up, is unknown to the writer of this book.

It is certain however that Mr. Geard was not mistaken when he decided that to plunge into the bitterness of death in order to gain more life was an action that at least would destroy what he had found so hampering to his spirit in the infirmities of his flesh. Gone now forever, gone like his own breath, were the bubbles that had floated rejoicing across the place where he had sunk.

Over the fragments of Philip's bridge, over that old Lake Village Mound, with the figures of the crouching old man and the frightened animal, over the great mass of swirling waters, drifted, floated, faded, dissolved, the dying visions of the drowned man.

Above the mounting flood rose still the broken tower arch of the ruined Abbey, rose still the tower of the Baptist, rose still the tower of the Archangel. These remain; enduring this deluge, as they had endured others; but the doomsday of these also must finally come. Towers are they, like those of Rome and Jerusalem, built to storm the Infinite, to besiege the Absolute, but subject like those others to the shocks of time and of chance.

For the great goddess Cybele, whose forehead is crowned with the Turrets of the Impossible, moves through the generations from one twilight to another; and of her long journeying from cult to cult, from shrine to shrine, from revelation to revelation, there is no end. Mountains have rolled down upon many of her temples. The depths of the Atlantic and Pacific have gathered others into their dim silt and monstrous slime at the bottom of the world. The obliterating sand storms of the desert have buried not a few. Some are lost in the untraversed forests of the new hemisphere. The days of the years of men's lives are like leaves upon the wind and like ripples upon the water; but wherever the Tower-bearing Goddess moves, journeying from one madness of Faith to another, these pinnacles of desperation mount up again.

The builders of Stonehenge have perished; but there are those who worship its stones still The builders of Glastonbury have perished; but there are people, yet living among us, whose eyes have seen the Grail. The ribs of our ancient earth are riddled with desperate pieties; her hollow caves are scooped out with frantic asseverations; and the end is not yet.

The Towers of Cybele still move in the darkness from cult to cult, from revelation to revelation. Made of a stuff more lasting than granite, older than basalt, harder than marble, and yet as insubstantial as the airiest mystery of thought, these Towers of the journeying Mother still trouble the dreams of men with their tremulous up-rising. Bowed beneath the desolation of futility, eaten by the worm of despair, these tragic Towers still rise from our olanet's surface, still sway disconsolately in the wind of its *orbit/still gleam cold and white under its recurrent moons.

The Philip Crows of this world build their new roads and their *X*& bridges; but She, the ancient Tower-Bearer, neither follows }-kj!, We, nor crosses the other. By different paths she moves than ' ;>s$3 made for the engines of traffic. The ships of the air turn ' :%\ft& as they approach her. The inventions of men touch her ;'uot. |Vbout her turreted head blows the breath of what is beyond life (and beyond death; and none, but such as are covenanted sn

The powers of reason and science gather in the strong light of th»»pSun to beat her down. But evermore she rises again, moving f; in the] mists of dawn to the mists of twilight, passing through the nooni-day like the shadow of an eclipse and through the midnight like an unblown trumpet, until she finds the land that has called her and the people whose heart she alone can fill.

For the turrets upon the head of Cybele are made of those strange second thoughts of all the twice-born in the world; the liberated thoughts of men as they return from their labour and the brooding thoughts of women as they pause in the midst of their work. The powers of reason may number the JSvMiea'of Stonehenge and guess at the origin of the Grail of Gksi'iijbury; but they cannot explain the mystery of the one, nor ask the required magic question of the other.

No man has seen Our Lady of the Turrets as She mo^w over the land, from tw; ght to twilight; but those "topless loMr^.of hers are the birth r s of occult generation, raised up iinfolianc* of Matter, in de,,' ! Fate, and in defiance of cruel knowledge and despairing .jl

Men may det > them, deny them, tear them down. They may drive their engines tlrough the ruins of Glaslonbury and then airplanes over the ? ies of Stonehenge.

Still in the strength of the Unknown Dimension the secret uf these places is carried forward to the unborn, their oracles to our children's children.

For She whom the ancients mmed Cybele is in reality ihat' beautiful and terrible Force by which the Lies of great cnalive Nature give birth to Truth that is to be.

Out of the Timeless she came down into tinto, (Vjt of Vv Un-named she came down into our human symbok

Through all the stammerings of strange tongues $tqA mniwja^' ings of obscure invocations she still upholds her cause; the c,vy;,';' of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the of that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and is not-

Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever Never or Always.

THE END