"Do you know when the women and children went?"
"I gather they left a few days before I came. This fellow here--he's the son of the old man who used to live here, who died many years ago--is such a fool that he never knows anything. He just looks vague if you question him. But he's competent, in his own way. He'll give you food, and find bedding for you, and the little chap is bright enough."
Victor closed his eyes, and I hoped that he might sleep. I thought I knew why the women and children had left the village. It was since the girl from the valley had disappeared. They had been warned that trouble might come to Monte Verita. I did not dare tell Victor this. I wished I could persuade him to be carried down into the valley.
By this time it was quite dark, and I was hungry. I went through a sort of recess to the back. There was no one there but the boy. I asked him for something to eat and drink, and he understood. He brought me bread, and meat, and cheese, and I ate it in the living room, with the boy watching me. Victor's eyes were still closed and I believed he slept.
"Will he get better?" asked the boy. He did not speak in patois.
"I think so," I answered, "if I can get help to carry him to a doctor in the valley."
"I will help you," said the boy, "and two of my companions. We should go tomorrow. After that, it will be difficult."
"Why?"
"There will be coming and going the day after. Men from the valley, much excitement, and my companions and I will join them."
"What is going to happen?" He hesitated. He looked at me with quick bright eyes.
"I do not know," he said. He slipped away, back to the recess.
Victor's voice came from the trestle bed.
"What did the boy say?" he asked. "Who is coming from the valley?"
"I don't know," I said casually, "some expedition, perhaps. But he has offered to help take you down the mountain tomorrow."
"No expeditions ever come here," said Victor, "there must be some mistake." He called to the boy, and when the lad reappeared spoke to him in the patois. The boy was ill at ease, and diffident; he seemed reluctant now to answer questions. Several times I heard the words Monte Verita repeated, both by him and Victor. Presently he went back to the inner room and left us alone.
"Did you understand any of that?" asked Victor.
"No," I replied.
"I don't like it," he said, "there's something queer. I've felt it, since I've lain here these last few days. The men look furtive, odd. He tells me there's been some disturbance in the valley, and the people there are very angry. Did you hear anything about it?"
I did not know what to say. He was watching me closely.
"The fellow in the inn was not very forthcoming," I said, "but he did advise against coming to Monte Verita."
"What reason did he give?"
"No particular reason. He just said there might be trouble."
Victor was silent. I could feel him thinking there beside me.
"Have any of the women disappeared from the valley?" he said.
It was useless to lie. "I heard something about a missing girl," I told him, "but I don't know if it's true."
"It will be true. That is it, then."
He said nothing for a long while, and I could not see his face--it was in shadow. The room was lit by a single lamp, giving a pallid glow.
"You must climb tomorrow and warn Anna at Monte Verita," he said at last.
I think I had expected this. I asked him how it could be done.
"I can sketch the track for you," he said, "you can't go wrong. It's straight up the old watercourse, heading south all the while. The rains haven't made it impassable yet. If you leave before dawn you'll have all day before you."
"What happens when I get there?"
"You must leave a letter, as I do, and then come away. They won't fetch it while you are there. I will write, also. I shall tell Anna that I am ill here, and that you've suddenly appeared, after nearly twenty years. You know, I was thinking, just now, while you were talking to the boy, it's like a miracle. I have a strange sort of feeling Anna brought you here."
His eyes were shining with that old boyish faith that I remembered.
"Perhaps," I said. "Either Anna, or what you used to call my mountain fever."
"Isn't that the same thing?" he said to me.
We looked at one another in the silence of that small dark room, and then I turned away and called the boy to bring me bedding and a pillow. I would sleep the night on the floor by Victor's bed.
He was restless in the night, and breathed with difficulty. Several times I got up to him and gave him more aspirin and water. He sweated much, which might be a good thing or a bad, I did not know. The night seemed endless, and for myself, I barely slept at all. We were both awake when the first darkness paled.
"You should start now," he said, and going to him I saw with apprehension that his skin had gone clammy cold. He was worse, I was certain, and much weaker.
"Tell Anna," he said, "that if the valley people come she and the others will be in great danger. I am sure of it."
"I will write all that," I said.
"She knows how much I love her. I tell her that always in my letters, but you could say so, once again. Wait in the gully. You may have to wait two hours, or even three, or longer still. Then go back to the wall and look for the answer on the slab of stone. It will be there."
I touched his cold hand and went out into the chill morning air. Then, as I looked about me, I had my first misgiving. There was cloud everywhere. Not only beneath me, masking the track from the valley where I had come the night before, but here in the silent village, wreathing in mist the roofs of the huts, and also above me, where the path wound through scrub and disappeared upon the mountainside.
Softly, silently, the clouds touched my face and drifted past, never dissolving, never clearing. The moisture clung to my hair and to my hands, and I could taste it on my tongue. I looked this way and that, in the half light, wondering what I should do. All the old instinct of self-preservation told me to return. To set forth, in breaking weather, was madness, to my remembered mountain lore. Yet to stay there, in the village, with Victor's eyes upon me, hopeful, patient, was more than I could stand. He was dying, we both knew it. And I carried in my breast pocket his last letter to his wife.
I turned to the south, and still the clouds came traveling past, slowly, relentlessly, down from the summit of Monte Verita.
I began to climb...
Victor had told me that I should reach the summit in two hours. Less than that, with the rising sun behind me. I had also a guide, the rough sketch map that he had drawn.
In the first hour after leaving the village I realized my error. I should never see the sun that day. The clouds drove past me, vapor in my face, clammy and cold. They hid the winding watercourse up which I had climbed five minutes since, down which already came the mountain springs, loosening the earth and stones.
By the time the contour changed, and I was free of roots and scrub and feeling my way upon bare rock, it was past midday. I was defeated. Worse still, I was lost. I turned back and could not find the watercourse that had brought me so far. I approached another, but it ran northeast and had already broken for the season; a torrent of water washed away down the mountainside. One false move, and the current would have borne me away, tearing my hands to pieces as I sought for a grip among the stones,
Gone was my exultation of the day before. I was no longer in the thrall of mountain fever but held instead by the equally well-remembered sense of fear. It had happened in the past, many a time, the coming of cloud. Nothing renders a man so helpless, unless he can recognize every inch of the way by which he has come, and so descend. But I had been young in those days, trained, and climbing fit. Now I was a middle-aged city dweller, alone on a mountain I had never climbed before, and I was scared.
I sat down under the lee of a great boulder, away from the drifting cloud, and ate my lunch--the remainder of sandwiches pack
ed at the valley inn--and waited. Then, still waiting, I got up and stamped about for warmth. The air was not penetrating yet but seeping cold, the moist chill cold that always comes with cloud.
I had this one hope, that with the coming of darkness, and with a fall in temperature, the cloud would lift. I remembered it would be full moon, a great point to my advantage, for cloud rarely lingers at these times, but tends to break up and dissolve. I welcomed, therefore, the coming of a sharper cold into the atmosphere. The air was perceptibly keener, and looking out towards the south, from which direction the cloud had drifted all the day, I could now see some ten feet ahead. Below me it was still as thick as ever. A wall of impenetrable mist hid the descent. I went on waiting. Above me, always to the south, the distance that I could see increased from a dozen feet to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty. The cloud was cloud no longer, but vapor only, thin, and vanishing; and suddenly the whole contour of the mountain came into view, not the summit as yet, but the great jutting shoulder, leaning south, and beyond it my first glimpse of the sky.
I looked at my watch again. It was a quarter to six. Night had fallen on Monte Verita.
Vapor came again, obscuring that clear patch of sky that I had seen, and then it drifted, and the sky was there once more. I left my place of shelter where I had been all day. For the second time I was faced with a decision. To climb, or to descend. Above me, the way was clear. There was the shoulder of the mountain, described by Victor; I could even see the ridge along it running to the south, which was the way I should have taken twelve hours before. In two or three hours the moon would have risen and would give me all the light I needed to reach the rock face of Monte Verita. I looked east, to the descent. The whole of it was hidden in the same wall of cloud. Until the cloud dissolved I should still be in the same position I had been all day, uncertain of direction, helpless in visibility that was never more than three feet.
I decided to go on, and to climb to the summit of the mountain with my message.
Now the cloud was beneath me my spirits revived. I studied the rough map drawn by Victor, and set out towards the southern shoulder. I was hungry, and would have given much to have back the sandwiches I had eaten at midday. A roll of bread was all that remained to me. That, and a packet of cigarettes. Cigarettes were not helpful to the wind, but at least they staved off the desire for food.
Now I could see the twin peaks themselves, clear and stark against the sky. And a new excitement came to me, as I looked up at them, for I knew that when I had rounded the shoulder and had come to the southern face of the mountain, I should have reached my journey's end.
I went on climbing; and I saw how the ridge narrowed and how the rock steepened, becoming more sheer as the southern slopes opened up to view, and then, over my shoulder, rose the first tip of the moon's great face, out of the misty vapor to the east. The sight of it stirred me to a new sense of isolation. It was as though I walked alone on the earth's rim, the universe below me and above. No one trod this empty discus but myself, and it spun its way through space to ultimate darkness.
As the moon rose, the man that climbed with it shrank to insignificance. I was no longer aware of personal identity. This shell, in which I had my being, moved forward without feeling, drawn to the summit of the mountain by some nameless force which seemed to hold suction from the moon itself. I was impelled, like the flow and ebb of tide upon water. I could not disobey the law that urged me on, any more than I could cease to breathe. This was not mountain fever in my blood, but mountain magic. It was not nervous energy that drove me, but the tug of the full moon.
The rock narrowed and closed above my head, making an arch, a gully, so that I had to stoop and feel my way; then I emerged from darkness into light, and there before me, silver-white, were the twin peaks and the rock face of Monte Verita.
For the first time in my life I looked on beauty bare. My mission was forgotten, my anxiety for Victor, my own fear of cloud that had clamped me through the day. This indeed was journey's end. This was fulfillment. Time did not matter. I had no thought of it. I stood there staring at the rock face under the moon.
How long I remained motionless I do not know, nor do I remember when the change came to the tower and the walls; but suddenly the figures were there, that had not been before. They stood one behind the other on the walls, silhouetted against the sky, and they might have been stone images, carved from the rock itself, so still they were, so motionless.
I was too distant from them to see their faces or their shape. One stood alone, within the open tower; this one alone was shrouded, in a garment reaching from head to foot. Suddenly there came to my mind old tales of ancient days, of Druids, of slaughter, and of sacrifice. These people worshipped the moon, and the moon was full. Some victim was going to be flung to the depths below, and I would witness the act.
I had known fear in my life before, but never terror. Now it came upon me in full measure. I knelt down, in the shadow of the gully, for surely they must see me standing there, in the moon's path. I saw them raise their arms above their heads, and slowly a murmur came from them, low and indistinct at first, then swelling louder, breaking upon the silence that hitherto had been profound. The sound echoed from the rock face, rose and fell upon the air, and I saw them one and all turn to the full moon. There was no sacrifice. No act of slaughter. This was their song of praise.
I hid there, in the shadows, with all the ignorance and shame of one who stumbles into a place of worship alien to his knowledge, while the chanting rang in my ears, unearthly, terrifying, yet beautiful in a way impossible to bear. I clasped my hands over my head, I shut my eyes, I bent low until my forehead touched the ground.
Then slowly, very slowly, the great hymn of praise faded in strength. It sank lower to a murmur, to a sigh. It hushed and died away. Silence came back to Monte Verita.
Still I dared not move. My hands covered my head. My face was to the ground. I am not ashamed of my terror. I was lost between two worlds. My own was gone, and I was not of theirs. I longed for the sanctuary of the drifting clouds again.
I waited, still upon my knees. Then furtive, creeping, I lifted up my head and looked towards the rock face. The walls and the tower were bare. The figures had vanished. And a cloud, dark and ragged, hid the moon.
I stood up, but I did not move. I kept my eyes fixed upon the tower and the walls. Nothing stirred, now that the moon was masked. They might never have been, the figures and the chanting. Perhaps my own fear and imagination had created them.
I waited until the cloud that hid the moon's face passed away. Then I took courage and felt for the letters in my pocket. I do not know what Victor had written, but my own ran thus:
Dear Anna,
Some strange providence brought me to the village on Monte Verita. I found Victor there. He is desperately ill, and I think dying. If you have a message to send him, leave it beneath the wall. I will carry it to him. I must warn you also that I believe your community to be in danger. The people from the valley are frightened and angry because one of their women has disappeared. They are likely to come to Monte Verita, and do damage.
In parting, I want to tell you that Victor has never stopped loving you and thinking about you.
And I signed my name at the bottom of the page.
I started walking towards the wall. As I drew close I could see the slit windows, described to me long ago by Victor, and it came to me that there might be eyes behind them, watching, that beyond each narrow opening there could be a figure, waiting.
I stooped and put the letters on the ground beneath the wall. As I did so, the wall before me swung back suddenly and opened. Arms stretched forth from the yawning gap and seized me, and I was flung to the ground, with hands about my throat.
The last thing I heard, before losing consciousness, was the sound of a boy, laughing.
I awoke with violence, jerked back into reality from some great depth of slumber, and I knew that a moment before I had not been alone. Someone had
been beside me, kneeling, peering down into my sleeping face.
I sat up and looked about me, cold and numb. I was in a cell about ten foot long, and the daylight, ghostly pale, filtered through the narrow slit in the stone wall. I glanced at my watch. The hands pointed to a quarter to five. I must have lain unconscious for a little over four hours, and this was the false light that comes before dawn.
My first feeling now, on waking, was one of anger. I had been fooled. The people in the village below Monte Verita had lied to me, and to Victor too. The rough hands that had seized me, and the boy's laugh that I heard, these had belonged to the villagers themselves. That man, and his son, had preceded me up the mountain track, and had lain in wait for me. They knew a way of entry through the walls. They had fooled Victor through the years, and thought to fool me too. God alone knew their motive. It could not be robbery. We neither of us had anything but the clothes we wore. This cell into which they had thrust me was quite bare. No sign of human habitation, not even a board on which to lie. A strange thing, though--they had not bound me. And there was no door to the cell. The entry was open, a long slit, like the window, but large enough to permit the passage of a single form.
I sat waiting for the light to strengthen and for the feeling, too, to come back to my shoulders, arms and legs. My sense of caution told me this was wise. If I ventured through the opening now, I might in the dim light stumble, and fall, and be lost in some labyrinth of passageway or stair.
My anger grew with the daylight, yet with it also a feeling of despair. I longed more than anything to get hold of the fellow and his son, threaten them both, fight them if necessary--I would not be thrown to the ground a second time unawares. But what if they had gone away and left me in this place, without means of exit? Supposing this, then, was the trick they played on strangers, and had done so through countless years, the old man before them, and others before him, luring the women from the valley too, and once inside these walls leaving the victims to starvation and death? The uneasiness mounting in me would turn to panic if I thought too far ahead, and to calm myself I felt in my pocket for my cigarette case. The first few puffs steadied me, the smell and the taste of the smoke belonged to the world I knew.
The Birds and Other Stories Page 11