Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Still climbing, they passed along broad glades of turfy grass between the groups. More rapidly now, O’Malley says, went forward that inner change of being which accompanied the progress of their outer selves. So intimate henceforth was this subtle correspondence that the very landscape took the semblance of their feelings. They moved as “emanations” of the landscape. Each melted in the other, dividing lines all vanished.

  Their union with the Earth approached this strange and sweet fulfillment.

  And so it was that, though at this height the vestiges of bird and animal life were wholly gone, there grew more and more strongly the sense that, in their further depths and shadows, these ancient bushes screened Activities even more ancient than themselves. Life, only concealed because they had not reached its plane of being, pulsed everywhere about their pathway, immense in power, moving swiftly, very grand and very simple, and sometimes surging close, seeking to draw them in. More than once, as they moved through glade and clearing, the Irishman knew thrills of an intoxicating happiness, as this abundant, driving life brushed past him. It came so close, it glided before his eyes, yet still was viewless. It strode behind him and before, peered down through space upon him, lapped him about with the stir of mighty currents. The deep suction of its invitation caught his soul, urging the change within himself more quickly forward. Huge and delightful, he describes it, awful, yet bringing no alarm.

  He was always on the point of seeing. Surely the next turning would reveal; beyond the next dense, tangled group would come — disclosure; behind that clustered mass of purple blossoms, shaking there mysteriously in the wind, some half-veiled countenance of splendor watched and welcomed! Before his face passed swift, deific figures, tall, erect, compelling, charged with this ancient, golden life that could never wholly pass away. And only just beyond the fringe of vision. Vision already strained upon the edge. His consciousness stretched more and more to reach them, while They came crowding near to let him know inclusion.

  These projections of the Earth’s old consciousness moved thick and soft about them, eternal in their giant beauty. Soon he would know, perhaps, the very forms in which she had projected them — dear portions of her streaming life the earliest races half divined and worshipped, and never quite withdrawn. Worship could still entice them out. A single worshipper sufficed. For worship meant retreat into the heart where still they dwelt. And he had loved and worshipped all his life.

  And always with him, now at his side or now a little in advance, his leader moved in power, with vigorous, springing gestures like to dancing, singing that old tuneless song of the wind, happier even than himself.

  The splendor of the Urwelt closed about them. They drew nearer to the Gates of that old Garden, the first Time ever knew, whose frontiers were not less than the horizons of the entire world. For this lost Eden of a Golden Age when “first God dawned on chaos” still shone within the soul as in those days of innocence before the “Fall,” when men first separated themselves from their great Mother.

  A little before sunset they halted. A hundred yards above the rhododendron forest, in a clear wide space of turf that ran for leagues among grey boulders to the lips of the eternal snowfields, they waited. Through a gap of sky, with others but slightly lower than himself, the pyramid of Kasbek, grim and towering, stared down upon them, dreadfully close though really miles away. At their feet yawned the profound valley they had climbed. Halfway into it, unable to reach the depths, the sun’s last rays dropped shafts like rivers slanting. Already in soft troops the shadows crept downwards from the eastern-facing summits overhead.

  Out of these very shadows Night drew swiftly down about the world, building with her masses of silvery architecture a barrier that rose to heaven. These two lay down beside it. Beyond it spread that shining Garden…only the shadow-barrier between.

  With the rising of the moon this barrier softened marvelously, letting the starbeams in. It trembled like a line of wavering music in the wind of night. It settled downwards, shaking a little, toward the ground, while just above them came a curving inwards like a bay of darkness, with overhead two stately towers, their outline fringed with stars.

  “The Gateway…!” whispered something through the mountains.

  It may have been the leader’s voice; it may have been the Irishman’s own leaping thought; it may have been merely a murmur from the rhododendron leaves below. It came sifting gently through the shadows. O’Malley knew. He followed his leader higher. Just beneath this semblance of an old-world portal which Time could neither fashion nor destroy, they lay upon the earth — and waited. Beside them shone the world, dressed by the moon in silver. The wind stood still to watch. The peak of Kasbek from his cloudy distance listened too.

  For, floating upwards across the spaces came a sound of simple, old-time piping — the fluting music of a little reed. It drew near, stopped for a moment as though the player watched them; then, with a plunging swiftness, passed off through starry distance up among the darker mountains. The lost, forsaken Asian valley covered them. Nowhere were they extraneous to it. They slept. And while they slept, they moved across the frontiers of fulfillment.

  The moon-blanched Gate of horn and ivory swung open. The consciousness of the Earth possessed them. They passed within.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  “For of old the Sun, our sire,

  Came wooing the mother of men,

  Earth, that was virginal then,

  Vestal fire to his fire.

  Silent her bosom and coy,

  But the strong god sued and press’d;

  And born of their starry nuptial joy

  Are all that drink of her breast.

  “And the triumph of him that begot,

  And the travail of her that bore,

  Behold they are evermore

  As warp and weft in our lot.

  We are children of splendor and flame,

  Of shuddering, also, and tears.

  Magnificent out of the dust we came,

  And abject from the spheres.

  “O bright irresistible lord!

  We are fruit of Earth’s womb, each one,

  And fruit of thy loins, O Sun,

  Whence first was the seed outpour’d.

  To thee as our Father we bow,

  Forbidden thy Father to see,

  Who is older and greater than thou, as thou

  Art greater and older than we.”

  — WILLIAM WATSON, “Ode in May”

  Very slowly the dawn came. The sky blushed rose, trembled, flamed. A breath of wind stirred the vapors that far below sheeted the surface of the Black Sea. But it was still in that gentle twilight before the actual color comes that O’Malley found he was lying with his eyes wide open, watching the rhododendrons. He may have slept meanwhile, though “sleep,” he says, involving loss of consciousness, seemed no right description. A sense of interval there was at any rate, a “transition-blank,” — whatever that may mean — he phrased it in the writing.

  And, watching the rhododendron forest a hundred yards below, he saw it move. Through the dim light this movement passed and ran, here, there, and everywhere. A curious soft sound accompanied it that made him remember the Bible phrase of wind “going in the tops of the mulberry trees.” Hushed, swift, elusive murmur, it passed about him through the dusk. He caught it next behind him and, turning, noticed groups upon the slopes, — groups that he had not seen the night before. These groups seemed also now to move; the isolated scattered clusters came together, merged, ran to the parent forest below, or melted just beyond the line of vision above.

  The wind sprang up and rattled all the million leaves. That rattling filled the air, and with it came another, deeper sound like to a sound of tramping that seemed to shake the earth. Confusion caught him then completely, for it was as if the mountain-side awoke, rose up, and shook itself into a wild and multitudinous wave of life.

  At first he thought the wind had somehow torn the rhododendrons loose from their roots and w
as strewing them with that tramping sound about the slopes. But the groups passed too swiftly over the turf for that, swept completely from their fastenings, while the tramping grew to a roaring as of cries and voices. That roaring had the quality of the voice that reached him weeks ago across the Ægean Sea. A strange, keen odor, too, that was not wholly unfamiliar, moved upon the wind.

  And then he knew that what he had been watching all along were not rhododendrons at all, but living, splendid creatures. A host of others, moreover, large ones and small together, stood shadowy in the background, stamping their feet upon the turf, manes tossing in the early wind, in their entire mass awful as in their individual outline somehow noble.

  The light spread upwards from the east. With a fire of terrible joy and wonder in his heart, O’Malley held his breath and stared. The luster of their glorious bodies, golden bronze in the sunlight, dazed the sight. He saw the splendor of ten hundred velvet flanks in movement, with here and there the uprising whiteness of a female outline that flashed and broke above the general mass like foam upon a great wave’s crest — figures of incomparable grace and power; the sovereign, upright carriage; the rippling muscles upon massive limbs, and shoulders that held defiant strength and softness in exquisite combination. And then he heard huge murmurs of their voices that filled the dawn, aged by lost thousand years, and sonorous as the booming of the sea. A cry that was like singing escaped him. He saw them rise and sweep away. There was a rush of magnificence. They cantered — wonderfully. They were gone.

  The roar of their curious commotion traveled over the mountains, dying into distance very swiftly. The rhododendron forest that had concealed their approach resumed its normal aspect, but burning now with colors innumerable as the sunrise caught its thousand blossoms. And O’Malley understood that during “sleep” he had passed with his companion through the gates of ivory and horn, and stood now within the first Garden of the early world. All frontiers crossed, all barriers behind, he stood within the paradise of his heart’s desire. The Consciousness of the Earth included him. These were early forms of life she had projected — some of the living prototypes of legend, myth, and fable — embodiments of her first manifestations of consciousness, and eternal, accessible to every heart that holds a true and passionate worship. All his life this love of Nature, which was worship, had been his. It now fulfilled itself. Merged by love into the consciousness of the Being loved, he felt her thoughts, her powers, and manifestations of life as his own.

  In a flash, of course, this all passed clearly before him; but there was no time to dwell upon it. For the activity of his companion had likewise become suddenly tremendous. He had risen into complete revelation at last. His own had called him. He was off to join his kind.

  The transformation came upon both of them, it seems, at once, but in that moment of bewilderment, the Irishman only realized it first in his leader.

  For on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this Cosmic Being crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a man’s two limbs. His great sides quivered as he shook himself. A roar, similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth into the air. With head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly outlined, pushing the wind before him. The great brown eyes shone with the joy of freedom and escape — a superb and regal transformation.

  Urged by the audacity of his strange excitement, the Irishman obeyed an impulse that came he knew not whence. The single word sprang to his lips before he could guess its meaning, much less hold it back.

  “Lapithae…!” he cried aloud; “Lapithae…!”

  The stalwart figure turned with an awful spring as though it would trample him to the ground. A moment the brown eyes flamed with a light of battle. Then, with another roar, and a gesture that was somehow both huge and simple, he seemed to rise and paw the air. The next second this figure of the Urwelt, come once more into its own, bent down and forward, leaped wonderfully — then, cantering, raced away across the slopes to join his kind. He went like a shape of wind and cloud. The heritage of racial memory was his, and certain words remained still vividly evocative. That old battle with the Lapithae was but one item of the scenes of ancient splendor lying pigeon-holed in his mighty Mother’s consciousness. The instant he had called, the Irishman himself lay caught in lost memory’s tumultuous whirl. The lonely world about him seemed of a sudden magnificently peopled — sky, woods, and torrents.

  He watched a moment the fierce rapidity with which he sped toward the mountains, the sound of his feet already merged in that other, vaster tramping, and then he turned — to watch himself. For a similar transformation was going forward in himself, and with the happiness of wild amazement he saw it. Already, indeed, it was accomplished. All white and shining lay the sunlight over his own extended form. Power was in his limbs; he rose above the ground in some new way; the usual little stream of breath became a river of rushing air he drew into stronger, more capacious lungs; likewise his bust grew strangely deepened, pushed the wind before it; and the sunshine glowed on shaggy flanks agleam with dew that powerfully drove the ground behind him while he ran.

  He ran, yet only partly as a man runs; he found himself shot forwards through the air, upright, yet at the same time upon all fours brandishing his arms he flew with a free, unfettered motion, traversing the surface of the mother’s mind and body. Free of the entire Earth he was.

  And as he raced to join the others, there passed again across his memory faintly — it was like the little memory of some physical pain almost — the picture of the boy who swam so strangely in the sea, the picture of the parent’s curious emanations on the deck, and, lastly, of those flying shapes of cloud and wind his inner vision brought so often speeding over long, bare hills. This was the final fragment of the outer world that reached him….

  He tore along the mountains in the dawn, the awful speed at last explained. His going made a sound upon the wind, and like the wind he raced. Far beyond him in the distance, he saw the shadow of that disappearing host spreading upon the valleys like a mist. Faintly still he caught their sound of roaring; but it was his own feet now that made that trampling as of hoofs upon the turf. The landscape moved and opened, gathering him in….

  And, hardly had he gone, when there stole upon the place where he had stood, a sweet and simple sound of music — the little piping of a reed. It dropped down through the air, perhaps, or came from the forest edge, or possibly the sunrise brought it — this ancient little sound of fluting on those Pipes men call the Pipes of Pan….

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  “Here we but peak and dwindle

  The clank of chain and crane,

  The whirr of crank and spindle

  Bewilder heart and brain;

  The ends of our endeavor

  Are wealth and fame,

  Yet in the still Forever

  We’re one and all the same;

  “Yet beautiful and spacious

  The wise, old world appears.

  Yet frank and fair and gracious

  Outlaugh the jocund years.

  Our arguments disputing,

  The universal Pan

  Still wanders fluting — fluting —

  Fluting to maid and man.

  Our weary well-a-waying

  His music cannot still:

  Come! let us go a-maying,

  And pipe with him our fill.” — W.E. HENLEY

  In a detailed description, radiant with a wild loveliness of some forgotten beauty, and of necessity often incoherent, the Irishman conveyed to me, sitting in that dreary Soho restaurant, the passion of his vision. With an astonishing vitality and a wealth of deep conviction it all poured from his lips. There was no halting and no hesitation. Like a man in trance he talked, and like a man in trance he lived it over again while imparting it to me. None came to disturb us in our dingy corner. Indeed there is no
quieter place in all London town than the back room of these eating-houses of the French Quarter between the hours of lunch and dinner. The waiters vanish, the “patron” disappears; no customers come in. But I know surely that its burning splendor came not from the actual words he used, but was due to definite complete transference of the vision itself into my own heart. I caught the fire from his very thought. His heat inflamed my mind. Words, both in the uttered and the written version, dimmed it all distressingly.

  And the completeness of the transference is proved for me by the fact that I never once had need to ask a question. I saw and understood it all as he did. And hours must have passed during the strange recital, for toward the close people came in and took the vacant tables, the lights were up, and grimy waiters clattered noisily about with plates and knives and forks, thrusting an inky carte du jour beneath our very faces.

  Yet how to set it down I swear I know not. Nor he, indeed. The notebooks that I found in that old sack of Willesden canvas were a disgrace to any man who bid for sanity, — a disgrace to paper and pencil too!

  All memory of his former life, it seems, at first, had fallen utterly away; nothing survived to remind him of it; and thus he lost all standard of comparison. The state he moved in was too complete to admit of standards or of critical judgment. For these confine, imprison, and belittle, whereas he was free. His escape was unconditioned. From the thirty years of his previous living, no single fragment broke through. The absorption was absolute.

  “I really do believe and know myself,” he said to me across that spotted table-cloth, “that for the time I was merged into the being of another, a being immensely greater than myself. Perhaps old Stahl was right, perhaps old crazy Fechner; and it actually was the consciousness of the Earth. I can only tell you that the whole experience left no room in me for other memories; all I had previously known was gone, wiped clean away. Yet much of what came in its place is beyond me to describe; and for a curious reason. It’s not the size or splendor that prevent the telling, but rather the sublime simplicity of it all. I know no language today simple enough to utter it. Far behind words it lies, as difficult of full recovery as the dreams of deep sleep, as the ecstasy of the religious, elusive as the mystery of Kubla Khan or the Patmos visions of St. John. Full recapture, I am convinced, is not possible at all in words.