Ancient Sorceries And Other Weird Stories

by Algernon Blackwood

  9 On his moose-hunting trip AB encountered just such a mysterious entity at one point: “Some great animal was moving through the long stretch of forest on the opposite shores. . . . Every now and then came a louder report, as some young tree was snapped off short, and then followed a period of silence again. . . . The beast never deigned to answer our cry, nor to hasten his step, yet he was certainly coming nearer and nearer” (“Moose,” p. 67). It proved to be a moose, which AB then shot and killed.

  10 AB found exactly such tracks (made by a moose) on his hunting expedition: “For half a mile through the woods we followed the tracks. Soon they began to get longer and wider apart. . . . The tracks got wider and wider apart, till finally they reached a big tree lying on the ground, with its branches sticking out like the spokes of a wheel in the air. There they seemed to come to a full stop. But the woodsman soon found their continuation—on the other side of the tree. ‘That’s whar she jumped—see!’ he explained. And, measuring it as accurately as we could, it came to 18 feet. A very fair jump, I thought, for a cow moose” (“Moose,” pp. 65-66).

  11 AB was himself briefly addicted to morphine in the early 1890s when he was given doses of it by Dr. Otto Huebner (EBT 203-8).

  12 AB’s hostility to science and materialism can be found from the beginning to the end of his career. “The natural bias, which everywhere, and on every occasion, this materialistic age exercises over all minds, against the absolute existence of force and spirit in its thousand forms as opposed to matter, has to be slowly undermined before it can be hurled over and finally swept away. . . . The modern scientist is so blinded by a certain proficiency obtained by investigations into minute superficialities of matter that he is utterly incapable of entering into harmony with the whole. He cannot see beyond his own horizon, and what is more, he does not wish to.” “Notes on Theosophy,” Lucifer no. 43 (March 15, 1891): 64, 66.

  13 Jack London had popularized this expression in his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), set in the Klondike.

  14 This sentiment was at the center of AB’s own temperament: “A rolling-stone sees life, of course, but collects little, if any, fruit; though I made no determined efforts to escape my conditions at this time, a new adventure ever had attractions for me. Having once tasted the essence of a particular experience, I found myself weary of it and longing for a new one. This vagabondage in the blood has strengthened with the years” (EBT 331).

  15 “There is a decided note of grimness in these northern woods of Canada,—almost as if the shadow of the cruel winter hung somewhere in the air, even in summer, and held up a warning finger: ‘This is sacred to the life of the forest. You may venture here in the warm months, but never let yourselves be caught here when the frost comes, and the snow on the wings of the north wind’ ” (“Moose,” p. 60).

  16 An echo of several passages from the Bible, e.g., “we went through all that great and terrible wilderness” (Deuteronomy 1:19), “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace” (Romans 10:15).

  17 The conflict of primitivism and civilization is another significant element in AB’s thought, and his preferences were generally on the side of primitivism, with its closeness to Nature. Cf. O’Malley in The Centaur , who states: “Civilization . . . had blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision. . . . I’ll save the world by bringing it again to simple things!” (C 9, 228).

  THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW

  “The Glamour of the Snow” first appeared in Pall Mall Magazine (December 1911) and was collected in PG. It was written in Champéry, a tiny resort town at the far western end of the canton of Valais, in southwestern Switzerland, and powerfully depicts AB’s mingled fascination and terror of the Swiss Alps, where he spent much time between 1908 and 1914. AB wrote numerous articles on skiing and on the Alps generally; aside from those cited in the notes, these include “Spring Days in the Oberland” (Westminster Gazette, May 29, 1909), “Clouds and Mountains” (Country Life, June 5, 1909), “From the Swiss Lakes” (Country Life, March 19, 1910), “Winter Alps” (Country Life, December 24, 1910; reprinted in TMS), “Before the Season” (Country Life, December 27, 1913), “Why Ski-ers Ski” (Time and Tide, February 8, 1924), and “Spring in Switzerland” (Spectator, April 2, 1927). A number of AB’s tales are set in Switzerland, including “The Man Who Played upon the Leaf” (in LV), “The Occupant of the Room” (in DNS), “The South Wind” (in PG), “Perspective” (in LV),

  “Special Delivery” (in PG), “The Lost Valley” (in LV), “The Attic” (in PG), and three stories in IE: “Wayfarers,” “The Sacrifice,” and “The Regeneration of Lord Ernie.”

  1 The Valais Alps are the range of the Alps in the canton of Valais. Cf. “The Poetry of Ski-Running,” Country Life no. 686 (February 26, 1910): 293: “As I was ski-ing the other day on the high ridges of the Valais Alps, parallel to the frontier of Savoy, the tints [of the snow] seemed to me as varied and exquisite as those of the sea. . . .”

  2 “For all snow is not snow to ski upon. First must come the heavy fall— two or three days of it, if possible, and without wind, so that it lies even—and then a day for this loose mass to settle down to at least half its original depth. A hard frost on the top, turning the flakes into slippery crystals, and lo! The mountain slopes are in perfect condition. At the slightest gradient the ski begin to glide like skates on ice.” “The Ski Season,” Country Life no. 778 (December 2, 1911): 826.

  3 Cf. “The Poetry of Ski-Running”: “The analogy of flying . . . seems to me a far truer one than that of the dipping and rising of a boat; for there is no sign of a jerk, no sudden bumping as when the keel drops sharply from a wave-crest and smacks the surface of the water. The motion is even, undulating, sinuous; and the effect of taking a new slope suddenly must be surely akin to what a bird feels when its stretched wings know the pressure of a new air-current from below” (p. 293).

  THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED

  This tale first appeared in the London Magazine (March 1912) and was collected in PG. It is set in the New Forest, an area of some 93,000 acres in the southwest corner of Hampshire, between Southampton Water and the Avon. It was formally established in 1079 by William the Conqueror as a royal forest for the king’s hunting. AB notes that the story was written in Holmesly, a small village in the New Forest, but most of it was actually written at the house of W. Graham Robertson at Sandhills, Witley. It is one of AB’s most exquisitely modulated tales of the awe and wonder of Nature; in this story of trees slowly and gradually “amalgamating” the spirit of a human being, Bittacy, who longs to be with them, fear has no place. The orthodox religiosity of Mrs. Bittacy is perhaps a reflection of AB’s evangelical upbringing, which he himself countered by appeals to Nature and Eastern mysticism. The character of the artist Sanderson is clearly based upon that of W. Graham Robertson (1866-1948), a painter, playwright, and illustrator and a good friend of AB.

  1 AB frequently expressed his fascination for trees, particularly pines: “The oak for strength, the ash for mystery, the birch for her feminine grace and so forth; but the pine, like a sharp sword, pierces straight through to that inner sense of beauty which accepts or rejects beyond all question of analysis. The personality of this ‘common’ tree touches the same sense of wonder that is stirred by the presence of a human personality, strong beyond ordinary; and worship is ever subtly linked with wonder.” “Pines,” Country Life no. 647 (May 29, 1909): 769.

  2 AB was himself the son of an evangelical lay preacher, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood. AB escaped from the narrowness of his father’s teachings by reading Buddhist texts.

  3 This is probably a reflection of AB’s childhood home, the Manor House, north of Crayford, in Kent, where AB lived from 1871 to 1880.

  4 Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92), poet laureate of England from 1850 to 1892. Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903), dean of Canterbury and a prominent British clergyman of the later nineteenth century. He was the author of the popular volumes The Life of Christ (1874
) and Life and Works of St. Paul (1879) and of the more controversial Eternal Hope (1877), in which he questioned the doctrine of the eternal punishment of sinners.

  5 Francis Darwin (1848-1925), third son of Charles Darwin and a prominent botanist. He delivered several addresses before the Royal Society, but none of the sort described here. However, in The Power of Movement in Plants (1896), cowritten with Charles Darwin, he maintained that a plant’s radicle is analogous in function with the brain of the lower animals.

  6 [William] Holman Hunt (1827-1910) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) were cofounders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 as a revolt from the academic conventions of Victorian painting. Rossetti was also a prolific poet and critic.

  7 William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), British poet and critic. In contrast to Mrs. Bittacy’s suggestion in the next paragraph, Henley was a militant Tory and very far from being a socialist. He was a good friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, collaborating with him on several plays. The poem quoted a few paragraphs later is from “Rhymes and Rhythms” (1889-92), no. 24, ll. 1-5, 7, 17-29.

  8 Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

  9 Prentice Mulford (1834-91), American journalist and essayist, and proponent of “New Thought,” a mystical popular philosophy that enjoyed a vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His essay “God in the Trees, or the Infinite Mind in Nature” is in Your Forces, and How to Use Them (New York: F. J. Needham, 1888-92), vol. 5.

  10 “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8).

  11 Cf. AB’s prose poem “Wind” (1909), in TMS.

  12 Cf. AB’s discussion of his early attraction to Nature as quoted in the introduction (p. viii).

  13 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26).

  14 “The sun, the planets, the entire universe, in fact, seemed then alive; we knew it was alive; we were kin with every point in it; and worship of a sun, a planet, or a tree, as the case might be, somehow drew their beings into definite relationship with our own, even to the point of leaving the characteristics of their particular Powers in our systems. A human being was but one living detail of a universe in which all other details were equally living and equally—possibly more—important.” Julius LeVallon: An Episode (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), pp. 45-46.

  15 “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).

  16 Another amalgam of biblical utterances: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12); “Thou shalt not be afraid . . . for the pestilence that walketh in darkness” (Psalms 91:5-6).

  17 Cf. O’Malley in The Centaur: “The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth as wavelets upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree” (C 95).

  18 Saint-Raphaël is a town in southeastern France, in the province of Var on the Côte d’Azur, about 15 miles southwest of Cannes. AB had several friends in the area and stayed with them on numerous occasions.

  19 Eastbourne is a town on the south coast of England, in East Sussex. Its seafront has been a fashionable resort area since the eighteenth century. AB had a cousin who had a farm in the South Downs just above Eastbourne. AB frequently stayed with several friends who resided elsewhere in Sussex, including Hilaire Belloc in Kingsland and the Baron and Baroness de Knoop in Wadhurst. See AB’s article. “The Unconquerable Charm of Sussex” (Country Life, July 6, 1912), chiefly a discussion of Belloc’s The Four Men.

  20 Cf. AB’s account of fleeing into the wilderness to escape the oppres siveness of his life in Toronto: “A pine forest beyond Rosedale was my favourite haunt. . . . Here I lay and communed, the world of hotels, insurance, even of Methodists, very far away. The hum of the city could not reach me, though its glare was faintly visible in the sky. There were no signs of men; no sounds of human life; not even a dog’s bark—nothing but a sighing wind and lapping water and a sort of earth-murmur under the trees, and I used to think that God, whatever He was, or the great spiritual forces that I believed lay behind all phenomena, and perhaps were the moving life of the elements themselves, must be nearer to one’s consciousness in places like this than among the bustling of men in the towns and houses” (EBT 57).

  21 Tennyson, Maud (1855), part 1, ll. 613-16.

  22 Cf. the children’s fantasy The Education of Uncle Paul (London: Macmillan, 1909), where the young protagonists, because they are close to Nature, can actually see the wind: “The winds moved in their sleep, and awoke. In loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured sheets towards the region of the tree tops” (pp. 135-36).

  23 “. . . there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10).

  SAND

  “Sand” was first published in PG; it had no prior periodical publication, as AB completed it in early 1912 and inserted it at the last moment into PG. It was written at Helouan (more properly Helwân), a spa town on the east bank of the Nile, about 15 miles south of Cairo and across the river from Memphis. AB spent the first three months of 1912 in the company of the Baron and Baroness de Knoop, who owned a hotel (see n. 33) and a sanitarium at Halwan. It is, with “A Descent into Egypt” (in IE), AB’s most poignant and terrifying evocation of the wonder and mystery of Egypt. (The novel The Wave also has a predominantly Egyptian setting, but is not a notable success.) AB’s fascination with Egypt is reflected in several articles he wrote in 1912: “The Egyptian Desert from Helouan” (see nn. 11 and 32), “Animal-Life in the Egyptian Desert” (see n. 7), “An Arab Pilgrimage” (Country Life, October 26, 1912), and, especially, “Egypt: An Impression” (see n. 6), later revised as “The Spell of Egypt” (in Tongues of Fire, 1924). Other stories set in Egypt include four tales in DNS (“A Desert Episode,” “By Water,” “The Wings of Horus,” and “An Egyptian Hornet”).

  1 W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), ll. 9-12.

  2 An adaptation of the Latin motto Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”).

  3 The following passage exactly describes the course of the journey taken by O’Malley in The Centaur, as his steamer proceeds from Marseilles across the Mediterranean, past Greece, through the Black Sea to the Caucasus Mountains. AB himself took such a trip in the summer of 1910.

  4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820), 1.745.

  5 AB himself relished the life of a vagabond, with few possessions and no settled residence: “The plague of possessions . . . has never troubled me, either actually or in desire, while the instinct to reduce life to its simplest terms has strengthened. The homeless feeling of living in my trunks is happiness, the idea of domesticity appalls, and the comforts of rich friends wake no echo in me, assuredly no envy. A home, as a settled place one owns and expects to live in for years, perhaps for ever, is abhorrent to every instinct in me” (EBT 332).

  6 “The spell [of Egypt] works underground, and, being not properly comprehensible, is nameless. Moreover, it is the casual visitor, unburdened by antiquarian and historical knowledge, who may best estimate its power—the tourist who knows merely what he has gleaned, for instance, from reading over Baedeker’s gener
al synopsis on the voyage. He is aware of this floating power everywhere, yet unable to fix it to a definite cause. It remains at large, evasive, singularly fascinating.” “Egypt: An Impression,” Country Life no. 879 (November 8, 1913): 625.

  7 “The bird-life [of the Egyptian desert] is, perhaps, more interesting than any other form of desert life. One notices the flocks of kites, large grey birds, the moment one gets to Cairo. They circle, sometimes at an enormous height, sometimes close above the roofs and streets, and their peculiar sharp, petulant cry is distinctly one of the Cairo sounds—when the traffic allows it to become audible. Round Helouan they are very plentiful indeed, and in an hour’s walk through the desert hundreds may be observed in spots where they have scented food, most likely in the form of a dead baby camel. Vultures, too, are common, especially the carrion vulture, the well-known ‘rakham’ of the Arabs. They will follow human beings for very long distances, with intentions that may easily be imagined.” “Animal-Life in the Egyptian Desert,” Country Life no. 810 ( July 13, 1912): 61.

  8 During his years in Switzerland (1908-14), AB would frequently spend summers in Dorset, at the home of his friends, the archaeologist Ed wyn Bevan and his wife Mary, who lived at Rempstone near Corfe Castle.

  9 An afreet (or afrite) is a demon in the Islamic religion.

  10 Khedive is the title of a succession of Turkish viceroys in Egypt from 1867 to 1914, when Egypt won independence from the Ottoman Empire.