The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER XXIII

  I TOLD Morgan all these things, but she would not say very much; all I could get her to say was: "Your dreams march with mine." "Morgan," I said, "what is the truth?" "You are not the first man to ask that question," said she. "I think I'll go and have a wash, the same as him," said I, seeing there was nothing to be got out of her. When I got back she was busy making supper, dressed in a long flowing dress of wine-coloured velvet, the big wing-sleeves looped back to her shoulders and showing their silvery lining, leaving her arms free for what she was doing among her copper pots and casseroles. She had lovely arms, rounded, firmmuscled; the skin smoothly, opaquely white; the hands not small but long-fingered, and supple and eloquent in a way she had learnt among the Latins. I sat down in my usual chair at the far end of the long narrow table and watched her. She was making a fanciful French dish that is supposed to catch fire as it cooks, and presently it blazed up and we sat down to our meal. There was no chance of talking while she was doing this, for it was a tricky business and she took her cooking seriously, a lot more seriously than I took my painting, or even my houseagenting; moreover, Morgan would never talk to a man until she had fed him, a rule she had learnt among the South- American presidents, who are quick with their guns. But when I was fed, and was smoking and drinking my coffee, she suddenly said to me: "What is truth, Wilfred?" "That was what I have just been asking you," said I, "and you snubbed me." "No, it wasn't," said she, ignoring my innuendo. "You asked me what was the truth concerning a certain matter, and I am asking you what is truth in itself? We cannot deal with the particular until we have dealt with the general. What is truth, Wilfred?" "God knows," said I, "what it is in general, but you know all right what it is in this particular instance, whether you choose to tell me or not." "I am not so sure that I do," said she. "What do you imagine to be the truth about me, Wilfred?" "Sometimes I think one thing, Morgan Ie Fay," said I, "and sometimes I think another. It just depends how I happen to be feeling at the moment." She laughed. "I expect that is about as near to the truth as we shall ever get," she said, "for that is exactly my position too. Sometimes I think one thing about myself, and sometimes I think another. As long as I believe in myself I find I can do certain things. If I ceased to believe in myself, I think I should just crumble into dust, like an unwrapped mummy. There is more than one kind of truth. A thing that does not exist in our three-dimensional world may exist in the fourth dimension and be real in its way." "And what may the fourth dimension be?" said I. "I am incapable of the mathematics of the matter," said Morgan, "but for all practical purposes I take mind as the fourth dimension, and I find it works. That is good enough for me." "It isn't good enough for me," said I. "I want to understand things a bit better than that before I am prepared to trust them." "You will never understand things until you trust them, for you inhibit what you doubt." "And you will never know if the ice will bear unless you get on to it, and then, if it won't, you go through." "And you will never make custards without breaking eggs." "And what's to be done about it?" "I don't know what you mean to do about it, but I know what I mean to do." "What is that?" "Take my precautions and take my risks." I offered no comment, and she asked for none. She knew that when it came to the point, where she led I would follow, she being her. "I can show you things that I can't tell you, Wilfred," she said. "Very curious things. I don't pretend to understand them, but I know that they work. Leave them alone for the present, because the moon will be waning by next week-end; but come back to me at the next full moon, and I will show you."

  CHAPTER XXIV

  MORGAN'S instructions to keep away till the next full moon meant that I did not see her for a month. It was the first time I had missed my week-ends since she came to the fort, and a very long month it seemed. It taught me pretty unequivocally what Morgan meant to me, and the part she played in my life, and what life would be like without her. By the end of that month my mother and sister were seriously considering my original offer to set them up in a separate establishment. What Morgan did during that time I do not know, but when I came out again there was a curious, subtle difference about the fort that I cannot define, and the smell of cedar and sandal had soaked into it till the whole place was redolent. The fort felt like a harp that had been tuned ready for use; and every now and again, like an aeolian harp, faint sighing sounds came from it spontaneously. I shall never forget the curious tense expectancy of the atmosphere and the all-pervading odour of the incense-woods. There was something curious about the sea, too, that is not easy to describe; it seemed as if it had come much nearer to us and could at will How in and fill all the rooms. And yet it was not a drowning and alien element, for a kinship had been established between us and the sea, and we would be able to breathe in its waters as if we were amphibian. I cannot put into words the curious sense I received of being made free of the sea: as if no wave would ever sweep me off the point, but I could walk down into the depths as I would walk out into a fog--conscious of a denser medium but not of an alien clement. Morgan gave me a very odd supper. There was almond- curd such as the Chinese make; and scallops in their shells; and little crescent honey-cakes like marzipan for dessert--all white things. And this curious pallid dinner-table was relieved | by a great pile of pomegranates in an earthenware dish in the | centre. "It is moon-food," said Morgan, smiling. "And if you cat the pomegranates," I said, "you never come back," and I took one. We didn't do anything that night, but just sat over the fire; I tried to amuse Morgan with anecdotes of Dickford, but it wouldn't work, the atmosphere was too tense, and we went early to bed. I went early to sleep, too, or at least I think I did, and I dreamed a very curious dream. It seemed to me in my dream that I was standing in the big living-room downstairs, and that all the pictures on the walls were real, and not painted plaster, and the Priest of the Moon on his throne was real, too, and he came forward and stood beside me in his strange high head-dress, like the crown of Upper Egypt. I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine, and I felt a more perfect confidence in him than I have felt in any living being. We went out together, moving with the floating movement of sleep. The glass of the great windows offered no impediment to our passage, and we passed on to the point where the poor moon-calf had perished, and so out over the sea. And then I found myself on that high tabular peak of Atlantis where the sacred college had stood, though whether it was sunk in the Great Atlantic Deep or high in air, I do not know. My guide had gone, and before me were two figures veiled in misty light. I could see neither face nor form, but only the shadowy sweep of the robes and great folded wings behind them. What they said to me, or I said to them, I shall never know, for nothing remained in memory save that I knelt on the knee before them upon the rock of the plateau and iridescent, opalescent light played all around me, and there was in my soul a reverence so profound and awe so great that ever afterwards life has been to me a sacrament. Then I found my guide beside me again, and we were far out over the sea; and presently I saw the rocky point of Bell Head below, and we passed over the place where the poor moon-calf had died and were back whence we started, and I woke up in bed. That is all there is to tell. It might have been a dream; but it was a dream like no other dream that I have ever had, and it changed my whole life. One thing, and one thing only had I brought back with me through the veil that was dropped as I returned--I knew that my dedication had been accepted, and that I was chosen of the sea-priestess to be sacrificed to provide power for whatever ends she had in view, whether the land were to be saved from the sea, or whether the sea were to regenerate the land. I started to tell Morgan of my experience when I came down next morning, but she held up her hand and stopped me. "I know everything," she said. "Do not talk about it." I was glad of this, for I felt that to talk about it might cause it to vanish. After our usual belated breakfast we went up over the down for a walk, and I saw that the white moon-pyramids, two by two, had been reconstructed, and the processional way stood as it did in ancient days. I wondered what the natives made of the great pylon th
at showed up against the sky-line on the crest of the down. However, there weren't many natives to make anything of it, only a stray crab-catcher or two along the rocks, and thatchers cutting reeds in the marsh. I offered no comment on the state of affairs, and Morgan didn't either, and we walked along the ancient way as if we were making pilgrimage. There is a curious power in silence when you think alike without word spoken and each knows the other's thoughts. As long as nothing is said, the thing you are thinking remains in another dimension and is magical, but as soon as you speak it, you lose it. It is the old story of the jewels bought in the goblin market, which you must only look at by moonlight or you find them to be a handful of dead leaves. There is more than one kind of reality, and they won't mix. We passed through the great pylon, and I felt as Caesar must have felt when he crossed the Rubicon. Something was sealed with our passing, and sealed irrevocably. Yet nothing was said as we walked over the short grey sea-down grass, with only the sound of the waves below us and the crying of the gulls overhead. It is very curious, that power of silence in another dimension, and very potent. We came to the end of the long sea-down, and below us the weathered limestone of the cliff-face fell away in broken buttresses to the steep slope where Trethowen was trying to grow vines. Far down below I could see the narrow beds banked with stone to hold the shallow soil, and edging them the grey aromatic herbs that were infused in the sacred wine, and that Morgan Ie Fay used to make into the stinking incense she sometimes burned; why, I never knew. Morgan walked down the steeply-sloping, treacherous turf that fell away to the sheer drop. I have not got too good a head for heights, and felt horribly gone in the knees. But I followed her, and we entered a shallow fold of the ground that deepened into a gully as we advanced and took us down on to a high and giddy ledge that clung like a balcony to the cliff-face. It bore the mark of tools and sloped evenly, a yard wide, and presenting no difficulties to a reasonably steady head provided one did not set foot on a rolling stone; for it was a very long time since tools had been used on that high and perilous path, and the weathering limestone had dropped down on to it in detritus, and although the overhang had caused the heavier stuff to fall clear, enough had remained to demand careful walking, and it was no place to come along in the dark. I wondered whether Morgan had risked her neck here, watching the moon-rise. The way sloped down at a steeper pitch than even the War Department had dared to use for its road; but we had not far to go, and presently I saw what I had been expecting to see-- the narrow cave-mouth set obliquely in the rock that we had once seen from below as we sat on the vine-terraces in the heat of a sultry summer afternoon. Then I had been in my shirt-sleeves and Morgan in blue linen, and now I was clad in a Burberry and Morgan muffled up in furs. It amazed me to remember that then I had been so shy with her that I hardly knew how to address her, and now I was so intimate that I could bicker with her like I did with my sister when she rubbed my fur the wrong way. There is no greater test of intimacy than to be able to have a row with a person without quarrelling with them. We went down a short flight of rough but regular steps as we entered the cave, and in the centre I saw a rectangular table of solid stone that had evidently been made by cutting away the natural level of the floor--hence the steps leading down from the entrance. Round the walls that had been shaped to a semicircle a low stone ledge had been left to serve as a seat; and in the centre, facing the entrance and in line with the table-stone, was a higher block that looked as if it might serve for a throne, or the seat of the priest. Whether the stone table was an altar, or a couch, or a slaughtering-slab, I could not tell, and Morgan did not tell me. The place had been, I thought, recently swept, for there was no debris of ages in here like there was on the path that led to it. Then I noticed that on either side of the entrance stood two braziers such as road-men use, and in a recess was a heap of coke. The ceiling was darkened by the fumes, which I guessed found their way into the long rift in which it terminated. From the degree of the blackening of the ceiling I judged that Morgan Ie Fay had been here a good deal. She offered no explanation of anything, but let me look all round at my leisure. Then I saw that near the entrance stood a small portable electric battery with a coil of wire beside it, and the wire went up and terminated in the rock overhead. "What is that for, Morgan?" said I, unable to contain myself any longer, for I knew the use of batteries like that and their tamped-in wires. "That is how I shall shut the door when my work is finished," said she. "And which side of the door shall I be when you shut it?" said I, wondering if this were the substitute for the rising tide. She smiled. "You will be outside, and at a safe distance," said she. "Don't be alarmed, Wilfred, I don't intend to make a living sacrifice of you. I want you alive, not dead." "That is very sweet of you," said I bitterly. Then we walked back by the way we had come. The wind was cold. I turned up my coat collar, Morgan snuggled her furs about her, and we walked fast. We were glad to get within the shelter of the forecourt of the fort, where the banking of the gun-embrasures kept off the wind. "Morgan," said I, "when are you going to let me get to work on the repairs?" For after the storm we had simply cleared the court by chucking the debris over the wall into the water, reconstructing nothing, and the place looked a bit battered. Morgan did not answer, but walked on towards the point. A sudden flash of knowledge told me that she did not mean to reconstruct it. "If you don't have that underpinning attended to, the end wall will come down in the next storm," I shouted after her. She went on without answering, and I turned and went into the house and tried to warm myself by the huge fire of drift that blazed between my beloved dolphins, for I had suddenly realised that the cold wind had penetrated to my very bones, and getting chilled through is not the best thing for asthma. Being upset, I was sulky, and when she came in, Morgan saw it. But she did not say anything, and neither did I; for 1 had realised that every time either of us spoke, something went wrong. We ate our Sunday dinner, and then slept it off, and it was dusk before anyone was stirring. Morgan went out on to the point again, but I did not offer to stir from the fire. "The wind has dropped," she said when she came in. "Glad to hear it," said I. "Moon-rise at midnight," said she. I said nothing, for I had nothing to say on the subject. We had a kind of high tea, the ideas for which Morgan had borrowed from Yorkshire in the course of her travels. It was pretty exotic according to Dickford standards, where the proper thing for Sunday supper is cold beef, beetroot, and blancmange. I had provided crumpets, which I thought were appropriate moon-food, being white and flabby. Morgan smiled her strange smile and removed the sausage rolls out of my reach before I had had my second. "To-night's the night," she said. I knew it was, but I never felt less like anything esoteric in my life. I reckoned I should be a wash-out as a dancing partner, or whatever it was she wanted me for. Round about ten, as I was beginning to get sleepy, she began to get active. She produced a kind of kimono made of the coarse white shantung which I fancy is native-woven and native-bleached. Anyway, it has a certain roughness of texture and is not dead white. On to my feet went a pair of pliable rubber sandals such as bathers use, only painted with silver paint, and on my head by way of head-dress went a large loose square of silver lame. After she had arranged it in the appropriate folds, the effect was vaguely Egyptian. Then she handed me an enormous cloak made of heavy curtain velvet in dark indigo blue. It was perfectly circular, and came right down to my heels and had a hood, and there must have been fathoms of material in it--I know it weighed a ton--but I was pretty glad of it before the night was out. It was held at the throat by a massive silver buckle on which was a three-pronged trident, the sea-gods' sigil. "I want you to go out to the cave," she said, "and sit there in meditation till the moon-rise, and then come back to me here." "What am I to meditate on?" said I. "Whatever comes to you," said she. "Won't that be a pretty barren performance?" said I. "No," said she, "I have been meditating there for the last month; it will not be a barren performance. Try and see." She gave me an electric torch. "Keep it under your cloak as you go down the path over the cliff-face. I don't want any
one to see the light from the coast, for no one suspects the existence of the path to the cave." I went out. As she said, the wind had dropped and it was no longer cold. The moon had not risen yet, but there was clear starlight from a cloudless sky. I went slowly along the down between the two rows of sentinel cairns, and it seemed to me that there was something alive about them and that they were watching as sentinels watch. To me it was: ."Pass, a friend I" but I would not have envied any stranger my job of going up between those silent watchers. It might have been my imagination, or it might have been the effect of straining my eyes in the obscurity through which they loomed half-seen, but each appeared to glow towards the apex and to be crested with a faint white flickering flame. But when I approached the rebuilt pylon there was no question about it but that here was something odd and out of the ordinary. I could not actually see anything, save its dark bulk against the stars, but my heart began to beat as I drew near and there was a most extraordinary sense of electricity in the air. I cannot describe it better than that. And a sort of heat that was not heat. I passed through, and it was like entering and coming out of a tunnel from one dimension to another. East of the pylon was another land, an older land, where things were real that are hallucination with us. I noticed that there were no rabbits about. They had all disappeared. It was their feeding-time, and they should have been there in thousands, but not a rabbit was to be seen. Maybe the sentinel cairns had put the fear of God into them the same as they had into me. I found the fold in the cliff-face easily enough, being guided thereto by the cairns. It was not as bad by night as it was by day, for I could not see the drop beneath me. I got down on to the path all right, and picked my way pretty cautiously over its uneven surface. Then I saw a dull red glow among the rocks, and knew that the cave was there, and that it was lit up. I passed through the narrow slanting entrance, and found that the glow came from the two big braziers that were alight and stoked to the brim with coke. It was pleasantly warm inside, and the fumes disappeared up into the lofty crevasse of the roof and gave no trouble. A curious rug of Morgan's, made of the skins of white Samoyedes, lay over the throne-like stone, which I took to be the seat of the priest, and on this I sat and commenced my vigil. I remembered that dogs are sacred to Diana, who is likewise the Moon, ruler of the tides of flux and reflux. I wondered what the tide was doing, and wished I had noted. I fancied it was going out. Except for the faint crackling of the burning coke there was no sound in the cave, for the wind had dropped and no traffic moved among the marshes at night. Then I heard, faint and far off, the lowing of a calving cow. And in some odd way it was not inappropriate, for Luna is also Isis, who is also Hathor under another form, and the horns upon her brow arc interchangeable with the crescent moon. The cow lowed intermittently as the birth went on and then was quiet, and I guessed that there was a new life in the world. After that there was nothing but the crackling of the coke, and I sank deeper into meditation. I felt very much the priest, sitting there on the curious stone throne with the dark folds of my heavy velvet cloak about me and my silver sandals showing under the hem. I had thrown back the hood, and the folds of the soft silvery stuff of my headdress fell down straight on either side of my face. I laid my hands along my thighs after the manner of the gods of Egypt and gave myself up to meditation. I could tell at once that much magical work had been done here, for the images rose and flowed with spontaneous case and abnormal vividness. Incense had been scattered on the coke, and as the fire worked its way through, a scented smoke began to rise and take on curious shapes as it eddied in the draughts of the cave, and I saw faces in it as I had seen the faces in the waves. I had an odd feeling that the other cave in Bell Knowie was all lit up and that vigil was being kept there also, although, with my rational mind I knew that it was long since filled with the fallen earth of ages. But my rational mind was in abeyance that night, and things were real to me that I would normally have called illusion, and all my mundane life had ceased to be. I was the priest keeping vigil, and I was concerned with things that are not of this world. With what was left of my intelligence I pulled myself together and tried to do my duty by the meditation. I visualised the country stretched out below the cave as I had seen it in the previous visions, and tried to project myself back into them. But it wouldn't work. The memory-pictures had none of the vividness of vision, but were dead and in two dimensions only, without depth, like painted canvas. I saw that the conscious effort was a mistake, and sat still and let the pictures form as they would. The marsh and its water-ways faded and were replaced by the deep blue of the night sky, and it was starless. A faint silvery haze appeared at the centre and began to spread, and formed into bands like the rings of Saturn. Then long shafts of light like wheeling searchlights cut the sky, and everything began to swing round and round and to revolve upon itself. And as I watched, stars and suns swung into being, keeping station like ships in line. And I heard the machinery of the universe take up its marvellous rhythm--synchronised, synthetised-- and through all moved the station-keeping stars. And there were harp-notes in it, sweet arpeggios, and strong gongs calling through the deeps of space as the stars spoke one to another. And I waited and listened for the shouting joy of the sons of God that should have rung out over all; but there was silence, and I knew that something was lacking--something to which Morgan and I held the keys. To each sphere of the heavens is assigned a vision, so Morgan had told me, and to the Sphere of the Moon is assigned the Vision of the Machinery of the Universe, and this, I thought, is what I must be seeing. I watched that vast machine working like a dynamo, more organic than mechanical and with the sensitiveness of a living thing. And I saw life begin; and the tides of life that move like water and have no form; they swept backwards and forwards like the tides in the estuary off Bell Head, and it seemed to me that the beginnings of form streamed in them like the seaweed streams in the sea. I felt that this peculiar tidal rhythm was in all things, like a great breathing. And I remembered that the Moon was called Our Lady of Rhythm and the Ruler of the Tides of Life. There rose to my mind one of Morgan's songs with which she had plagued me with an all too sweet torment: "I am that soundless, boundless, bitter sea. All tides are mine, and answer unto me. Tides of the airs, tides of the inner earth; The secret, silent tides of death and birth. Tides of men's souls, and dreams, and destiny-- Isis Veiled, and Ea, Binah, Ge." Isis Veiled, I knew, was Our Lady of Nature, just as Isis Unveiled is the Heavenly Isis. Ea was the soul of Space and parent of Time, older even than the Titans. Binah, the Dark Sterile Mother of All, was the Great Sea whence life arose, the female principle and pre-matter. And Ge herself was the magnetic earth that is like an aura to our globe and in which move the tides that the Easterns call the Tattvas. These things I knew, for Morgan had already told me, and I realised that I was now watching them. How long I would have waited and watched, I do not know, but the rim of the rising moon cut the edge of Bell Knowie and the first beam of the moon-dawn fell full on my face as I sat on the throne of the priests. I rose, and went up by the giddy way that clung to the eaves of the cliff, and along the down where the sentinel cairns stood white in the light of the moon. There was no wind and I could hear the sea below me, and I knew by the sound of its far-off voice that it was at ebb, and calm.