Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Rostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time apparently praying. Not once did he touch the weapons that lay ready to hand upon the folded burka … and when at last the dawn came, pale and yellow, through the trees, showing the outlines of the individual box and azalea bushes, he got up earlier than usual and began to make the fire for coffee. In the fuller light which soon poured swiftly over the eastern summits and dropped gold and silver into the tremendous valley at their feet, the men made a systematic search of the immediate surroundings, and then of the clearings and more open stretches beyond. In silence they made it. They found, however, no traces of another camping-party. And it was clear from the way they went about the search that neither expected to find anything. The ground was unbroken, the bushes undisturbed.

  Yet still, both knew. That “something” which the night had brought and kept concealed, still hovered close about them.

  And it was at this scattered hamlet, consisting of little more than a farm of sorts and a few shepherds’ huts of stone, where they stopped two hours later for provisions, that O’Malley looked up thus suddenly and recognized the figure of his friend. He stood among the trees a hundred yards away. At first the other thought he was a tree — his stalwart form the stem, his hair and beard the branches — so big and motionless he stood between the other trunks. O’Malley saw him for a full minute before he understood. The man seemed so absolutely a part of the landscape, a giant detail in keeping with the rest — a detail that had suddenly emerged.

  The same moment a great draught of wind, rising from depths of the valley below, swept overhead with a roaring sound, shaking the beech and box trees and setting all the golden azalea heads in a sudden agitation. It passed as swiftly as it came. The peace of the June morning again descended on the mountains.

  It was broken by a wild, half-smothered cry, — a cry of genuine terror.

  For O’Malley had turned to Rostom with some word that here, in this figure, lay the explanation of the animal’s excitement in the night, when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same direction as himself. The next instant he was on his knees, bowing and scraping toward Mecca, groaning, hiding his eyes with both hands. The sack he held had toppled over; the cheese and flour rolled upon the ground; and from the horse came that long-drawn whinnying of the night.

  There was a momentary impression — entirely in the Irishman’s mind, of course, — that the whole landscape veiled a giant, rushing movement that passed across it like a wave. The surface of the earth, it seemed, ran softly quivering, as though that wind had stirred response together with the trembling of the million leaves … before it settled back again to stillness. It passed in the flash of an eyelid. The earth lay tranquil in repose.

  But, though the suddenness of the stranger’s arrival might conceivably have startled the ignorant peasant, with nerves already overwrought from the occurrence of the night, O’Malley was not prepared for the violence of the man’s terror as shown by the immediate sequel. For after several moments’ prayer and prostration, with groans half smothered against the very ground, he sprang impetuously to his feet again, turned to his employer with eyes that gleamed wildly in that face of chalk, cried out — the voice thick with the confusion of his fear— “It is the Wind! They come; from the mountains they come! Older than the stones they are. Save yourself…. Hide your eyes … fly…!” — and was gone. Like a deer he went. He waited neither for food nor payment, but flung the great black burka round his face — and ran.

  And to O’Malley, bereft of all power of movement as he watched in complete bewilderment, one thing seemed clear: the man went in this extraordinary fashion because he was afraid of something he had felt, not seen. For as he ran with wild and leaping strides, he did not run away from the figure. He took the direction straight toward the spot where the stranger still stood motionless as a tree. So close he passed him that he must almost have brushed his very shoulder. He did not see him.

  The last thing the Irishman noted was that in his violence the man had dropped the yellow bashlik from his head. O’Malley saw him stoop with a flying rush to pick it up. He seemed to catch it as it fell.

  And then the big figure moved. He came slowly forward from among the trees, his hands outstretched in greeting, on his great visage a shining smile of welcome that seemed to share the sunrise. In that moment for the Irishman all was forgotten as though unknown, unseen, save the feelings of extraordinary happiness that filled him to the brim.

  CHAPTER XXX

  “The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, ‘Those who are free throughout the world.’ They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism.” — EMERSON

  To criticize, deny, perhaps to sneer, is no very difficult or uncommon function of the mind, and the story as I first heard him tell it, lying there in the grass beyond the Serpentine that summer evening, roused in me, I must confess, all of these very ordinary faculties. Yet, as I listened to his voice that mingled with the rustle of the poplars overhead, and watched his eager face and gestures, it came to me dimly that a man’s mistakes may be due to his attempting bigger things than his little critic ever dreamed perhaps. And gradually I shared the vision that this unrhyming poet by my side had somehow lived out in action.

  Inner experience for him was ever the reality — not the mere forms or deeds that clothe it in partial physical expression.

  There was no question, of course, that he had actually met this big, inarticulate Russian on the steamer; that Stahl’s part in the account was unvarnished; that the boy had fallen on the deck from heart disease; and that, after an interval, chance had brought O’Malley and the father together again in this valley of the Central Caucasus. All that was as literal as the superstitious terror of the Georgian peasant. Further, that the Russian possessed precisely those qualities of powerful sympathy with the other’s hidden longings which the subtle-minded Celt had been so quick to appropriate — this, too, was literal enough. Here, doubtless, was the springboard whence he leaped into the stream of this quasi-spiritual adventure with an eagerness of fine, whole-hearted belief which must make this dull world a very wonderful place indeed to those who know it; for it is the visioned faculty of correlating the commonest event with the procession of august Powers that pass ever to and fro behind life’s swaying curtain, and of divining in the most ordinary of yellow buttercups the golden fires of a dropped star.

  Again, for Terence O’Malley there seemed no definite line that marked off one state of consciousness from another, just as there seems no given instant when a man passes actually from sleep to waking, from pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. There is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. In this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his passionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. To have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his existence. While a part of my mind may have labeled it all as creative imagination, another part recognized it as plainly true — because his being lived it out without the least denial.

  He, at any rate, was not inventing; nor ever knew an instant’s doubt. He simply told me what had happened. The discrepancies — the omissions in his written account especially — were simply due, I feel, to the fact that hi
s skill in words was not equal to the depth and brilliance of the emotions that he experienced. But the fact remains: he did experience them. His fairy tale convinced.

  His faith had made him whole — one with the Earth. The sense of disunion between his outer and his inner self was gone.

  And now, as these two began their journey together into the wilder region of these stupendous mountains, O’Malley says he realized clearly that the change he had dreaded as an “inner catastrophe” simply would mean the complete and final transfer of his consciousness from the “without” to the “within.” It would involve the loss only of what constituted him a person among the external activities of the world today. He would lose his life to find it. The deeper self thus quickened by the stranger must finally assert its authority over the rest. To join these Urwelt beings and share their eternal life of beauty close to the Earth herself, he must shift the center. Only thus could he enter the state before the “Fall” — that ancient Garden of the World-Soul, walled-in so close behind his daily life — and know deliverance from the discontent of modern conditions that so distressed him.

  To do this temporarily, perhaps, had long been possible to him — in dream, in reverie, in those imaginative trances when he almost seemed to leave his body altogether; but to achieve it permanently was something more than any such passing disablement of the normal self. It involved, he now saw clearly, that which he had already witnessed in the boy: the final release of his Double in so-called death.

  Thus, as they made their way northwards, nominally toward the mighty Elbruz and the borders of Swanetia, the Irishman knew in his heart that they in reality came nearer to the Garden long desired, and to those lofty Gates of horn and ivory that hitherto he had never found — because he feared to let himself go. Often he had camped beneath the walls, had smelt the flowers, heard the songs, and even caught glimpses of the life that moved so gorgeously within. But the Gates themselves had never shone for him, even against the sky of dream, because his vision had been clouded by alarm. They swung, it had seemed to him before, in only one direction — for those who enter: he had always hesitated, lost his way, returned…. And many, like him, make the same mistake. Once in, there need be no return, for in reality the walls spread outwards and — enclose the entire world.

  Civilization and Humanity, the man of smaller vision had called out to him as passwords to safety. Simplicity and Love, he now discovered, were the truer clues. His big friend in silence taught him. Now he knew.

  For in that little hamlet their meeting had taken place — in silence. No actual speech had passed. “You go — so?” the Russian conveyed by a look and by a movement of his whole figure, indicating the direction; and to the Irishman’s assenting inclination of the head he made an answering gesture that merely signified compliance with a plan already known to both. “We go, together then.” And, there and then, they started, side by side.

  The suddenness of this concerted departure only seemed strange afterwards when O’Malley looked back upon it, for at the time it seemed as inevitable as being obliged to swim once the dive is taken. He stood upon a pinnacle whence lesser details were invisible; he knew a kind of exaltation — of loftier vision. Small facts that ordinarily might fill the day with trouble sank below the horizon then. He did not even notice that they went without food, horse, or blankets. It was reckless, unrestrained, and utterly unhindered, this free setting-forth together. Thus might he have gone upon a journey with the wind, the sunshine, or the rain. Departure with a thought, a dream, a fancy could not have been less unhampered.

  The only detail of his outer world that lingered — and that, already sinking out of sight like a stone into deep water — was the image of the running peasant. For a moment he recalled the picture. He saw the man in the act of stooping after the fallen bashlik. He saw him seize it, lift it to his head again. But the picture was small — already very far away. Before the bashlik actually reached the head, the detail dipped into mist and vanished….

  CHAPTER XXXI

  It was spring — and the flutes of Pan played everywhere. The radiance of the world’s first morning shone undimmed. Life flowed and sang and danced, abundant and untamed. It bathed the mountains and that sky of stainless blue. It bathed him too. Dipped, washed, and shining in it, he walked the Earth as she lay radiant in her early youth. The crystal presence of her everlasting Spring flew laughing through a world of light and flowers — flowers that none could ever pluck to die, light that could never fade to darkness within walls and roofs.

  All day they wound easily, as though on winged feet, through the steep belt of box and beech woods, and in sparkling brilliant heat across open spaces where the azaleas shone; a cooling wind, fresh as the dawn, seemed ever to urge them forwards. The country, for all its huge scale and wildness, was park-like; the giant, bushy trees wore an air of being tended by the big winds that ran with rustling music among their waving foliage. Between the rhododendrons were avenues of turf, broad-gladed pathways, yet older than the moon, from which a thousand gardeners of wind and dew had gone but a moment before to care for others further on. Over all brimmed up some primal, old-world beauty of a simple life — some immemorial soft glory of the dawn.

  Closer and closer, deeper and deeper, ever swifter, ever more direct, O’Malley passed down toward the heart of his mother’s being. Along the tenderest pathways of his inner being, so wee, so soft, so simple that for most men they lie ignored or overgrown, he slipped with joy a little nearer — one stage perhaps — toward Reality.

  Pan “blew in power” across these Caucasian heights and valleys.

  Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

  Piercing sweet by the river!

  Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

  The sun on the hill forgot to die,

  And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

  Came back to dream on the river

  In front his big leader, no longer blundering clumsily as on that toy steamer with the awkward and lesser motion known to men, pressed forward with a kind of giant sure supremacy along paths he knew, or rather over a trackless, pathless world which the great planet had charted lovingly for his splendid feet. That wind, blowing from the depths of valleys left long since behind, accompanied them wisely. They heard, not the faint horns of Elfland faintly blowing, but the blasts of the Urwelt trumpets growing out of the still distance, nearer, ever nearer. For leagues below the beech woods poured over the enormous slopes in a sea of soft green foam, and through the meadow spaces they saw the sweet nakedness of running water, and listened to its song. At noon they rested in the greater heat, sleeping beneath the shadow of big rocks; and sometimes traveled late into the night, when the stars guided them and they knew the pointing of the winds. The very moonlight then, that washed this lonely world with silver, sheeting the heights of snow beyond, was friendly, half divine … and it seemed to O’Malley that while they slept they were watched and cared for — as though Others who awaited had already come halfway out to meet them.

  And ever, more and more, the passion of his happiness increased; he knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. It was as though his Self were passing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming countless as the sand. He was everywhere; in everything; shining, singing, dancing…. With the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering summit to the Sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense, untrodden slopes. About him lay this whole spread being of the flowered Caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. But it lay also within himself, for his expanding consciousness included and contained it. Through it — this early potent Mood of Nature — he passed toward the Soul of the Earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of winning tenderness in its mother, passes closer to the heart that gave it birth. Some central love enwrapped him. He knew the surrounding power of everlasting arms.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  “Inward, ay, deeper far than love o
r scorn,

  Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,

  Rend thou the veil and pass alone within,

  Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn.

  Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born?

  Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in?

  Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin.

  With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.

  The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal;

  The endless goal is one with the endless way;

  From every gulf the tides of Being roll,

  From every zenith burns the indwelling day,

  And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul;

  And these are God and thou thyself art they.”

  — F.W.H. MYERS. From “A Cosmic Outlook”

  The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment all alone.

  If O’Malley’s written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done.

  Climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and space, and I caught myself dreaming too. “A thousand years in His sight” — I understood the old words as refreshingly new — might be a day. Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed while he listened to the singing of a little bird.