by John Buchan
IV
SPACE
"Est impossibile? Certum est." --TERTULLIAN.
Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we satbeside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correina Sidhe. I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he hadbeen taking an off-day from a week's stalking, so we had walked up theglen together after tea to get the news of the forest. A rifle was outon the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen fromthe top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at theburnhead. The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up theCorrei in a gillie's charge while we followed at leisure, picking ourway among the loose granite rocks and the patches of wet bogland. Thetrack climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hungover a caldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linna thousand feet below. It was a breathless evening, I remember, with apale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day. West-windweather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of theTropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hourshad been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat downon a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet.The clatter of the pony's hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees hadgone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No placeon earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the seasonbefore the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with theirhomely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence.The hillside was far from sheer-one could have walked down with alittle care-but something in the shape of the hollow and the remotegleam of white water gave it an extraordinary depth and space. Therewas a shimmer left from the day's heat, which invested bracken and rockand scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost havebelieved that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, thatfive yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness. Ihave a bad head, and instinctively I drew farther back into theheather. Leithen's eyes were looking vacantly before him.
"Did you ever know Hollond?" he asked.
Then he laughed shortly. "I don't know why I asked that, but somehowthis place reminded me of Hollond. That glimmering hollow looks as ifit were the beginning of eternity. It must be eerie to live with thefeeling always on one."
Leithen seemed disinclined for further exercise. He lit a pipe andsmoked quietly for a little. "Odd that you didn't know Hollond. Youmust have heard his name. I thought you amused yourself withmetaphysics."
Then I remembered. There had been an erratic genius who had writtensome articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematicalconception of infinity. Men had praised them to me, but I confess Inever quite understood their argument. "Wasn't he some sort ofmathematical professor?" I asked.
"He was, and, in his own way, a tremendous swell. He wrote a book onNumber which has translations in every European language. He is deadnow, and the Royal Society founded a medal in his honour. But I wasn'tthinking of that side of him."
It was the time and place for a story, for the pony would not be backfor an hour. So I asked Leithen about the other side of Hollond whichwas recalled to him by Correi na Sidhe. He seemed a little unwillingto speak...
"I wonder if you will understand it. You ought to, of course, betterthan me, for you know something of philosophy. But it took me a longtime to get the hang of it, and I can't give you any kind ofexplanation. He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at theBar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that herather fancied my legal ability. He came to me with his story becausehe had to tell someone, and he wouldn't trust a colleague. He said hedidn't want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged totheir own theories and wouldn't understand, or, if they understood,would get ahead of him in his researches. He wanted a lawyer, he said,who was accustomed to weighing evidence. That was good sense, forevidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in thelong-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simplededuction from certain data. Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk,and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respectfor his brains. At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they couldgive him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge. He was asimple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help. Iused to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would neverhave guessed that he had any thoughts beyond getting up steep rocks.
"It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matterthat was filling his mind. We had been taking an off-day, and weresitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple inthe twilight. Chamonix always makes me choke a little-it is so crushedin by those great snow masses. I said something about it--said I likedthe open spaces like the Gornegrat or the Bel Alp better. He asked mewhy: if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon?I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an emptyworld. He repeated the word 'empty' and laughed.
"'By "empty" you mean,' he said, 'where things don't knock up againstyou?'
I told him No. I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank aether.
"You don't knock up against things here, and the air is as good as youwant. It can't be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel."
"I agreed that the word needed explaining. 'I suppose it is mentalrestlessness,' I said. 'I like to feel that for a tremendous distancethere is nothing round me. Why, I don't know. Some men are built theother way and have a terror of space.'
"He said that that was better. 'It is a personal fancy, and depends onyour KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the DentBlanche. And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing.Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacentmatter. Blind men often have it. But in any case, whether got frominstinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.'
"Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could seelittle point. I told him so, and he laughed. "'I am not sure that I amvery clear myself. But yes--there IS a point. Supposing you knew-notby sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I knowthe truth of a mathematical proposition--that what we call empty spacewas full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hillsand houses, but with things as real--as real to the mind. Would youstill feel crowded?'
"'No,' I said, 'I don't think so. It is only what we call matter thatsignifies. It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the otherthing, for there would be no escape from it. But what are you gettingat? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?'
"He said he wasn't thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talkof another subject.
"Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he startedagain on the same tack. He asked me how I accounted for the fact thatanimals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country.I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.
"'Rubbish, man,' he said. 'That's only another name for the puzzle,not an explanation. There must be some reason for it. They must KNOWsomething that we cannot understand. Tie a cat in a bag and take itfifty miles by train and it will make its way home. That cat has someclue that we haven't.'
"I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush aboutthe psychology of cats. But he was not to be snubbed, and went ontalking.
"'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do notknow? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brainor a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space befull of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? Adog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why?Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways totravel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligencethan ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.'
"But at that point I fell asleep and left
Hollond to repeat hisquestions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.
"Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up atthe Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner. Ithought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Streetabout nine with a kit-bag full of papers. He was an odd fellow to lookat--a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones,clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set,greyish eyes. He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty goodcondition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for ninemonths out of the twelve. He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but thatnight I saw that he was considerably excited.
"He said that he had come to me because we were old friends. Heproposed to tell me a tremendous secret. 'I must get another mind towork on it or I'll go crazy. I don't want a scientist. I want a plainman.'
"Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor's. 'Do you rememberthat talk we had in August at Chamonix--about Space? I daresay youthought I was playing the fool. So I was in a sense, but I was feelingmy way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years. NowI have got it, and you must hear about it. You may take my word thatit's a pretty startling discovery.'
"I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew aboutas much science as the dustman.
"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what hemeant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'emptyhomogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimateconstituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, andwe think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all.That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosopherstaking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take thatview. An animal, for instance. It feels a kind of quality in Space.It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certainlandmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you likeintelligible. Take an Australian savage. He has the same power, and,I believe, for the same reason. He is conscious of intelligiblelandmarks.'
"'You mean what people call a sense of direction,' I put in.
"'Yes, but what in Heaven's name is a sense of direction? The phraseexplains nothing. However incoherent the mind of the animal or thesavage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data. I've beenall through the psychological and anthropological side of the business,and after you eliminate the clues from sight and hearing and smell andhalf-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.'
"Hollond's eye had kindled, and he sat doubled up in his chair,dominating me with a finger.
"'Here, then is a power which man is civilising himself out of. Callit anything you like, but you must admit that it is a power. Don't yousee that it is a perception of another kind of reality that we areleaving behind us?... Well, you know the way nature works. The wheelcomes full circle, and what we think we have lost we regain in a higherform. So for a long time I have been wondering whether the civilisedmind could not recreate for itself this lost gift, the gift of seeingthe quality of Space. I mean that I wondered whether the scientificmodern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is notan empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences,intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.'
"I found all this very puzzling and he had to repeat it several timesbefore I got a glimpse of what he was talking about.
"'I've wondered for a long time he went on 'but now quite suddenly, Ihave begun to know.' He stopped and asked me abruptly if I knew muchabout mathematics.
"'It's a pity,' he said,'but the main point is not technical, though Iwish you could appreciate the beauty of some of my proofs. Then hebegan to tell me about his last six months' work. I should havementioned that he was a brilliant physicist besides other things. AllHollond's tastes were on the borderlands of sciences, where mathematicsfades into metaphysics and physics merges in the abstrusest kind ofmathematics. Well, it seems he had been working for years at theultimate problem of matter, and especially of that rarefied matter wecall aether or space. I forget what his view was--atoms or molecules orelectric waves. If he ever told me I have forgotten, but I'm notcertain that I ever knew. However, the point was that these ultimateconstituents were dynamic and mobile, not a mere passive medium but amedium in constant movement and change. He claimed to havediscovered--by ordinary inductive experiment--that the constituents ofaether possessed certain functions, and moved in certain figuresobedient to certain mathematical laws. Space, I gathered, wasperpetually 'forming fours' in some fancy way.
"Here he left his physics and became the mathematician. Among hismathematical discoveries had been certain curves or figures orsomething whose behaviour involved a new dimension. I gathered thatthis wasn't the ordinary Fourth Dimension that people talk of, but thatfourth-dimensional inwardness or involution was part of it. Theexplanation lay in the pile of manuscripts he left with me, but thoughI tried honestly I couldn't get the hang of it. My mathematics stoppedwith desperate finality just as he got into his subject.
"His point was that the constituents of Space moved according to thesenew mathematical figures of his. They were always changing, but theprinciples of their change were as fixed as the law of gravitation.Therefore, if you once grasped these principles you knew the contentsof the void. What do you make of that?"
I said that it seemed to me a reasonable enough argument, but that itgot one very little way forward. "A man," I said, "might know thecontents of Space and the laws of their arrangement and yet be unableto see anything more than his fellows. It is a purely academicknowledge. His mind knows it as the result of many deductions, but hissenses perceive nothing."
Leithen laughed. "Just what I said to Hollond. He asked the opinionof my legal mind. I said I could not pronounce on his argument butthat I could point out that he had established no trait d'union betweenthe intellect which understood and the senses which perceived. It waslike a blind man with immense knowledge but no eyes, and therefore nopeg to hang his knowledge on and make it useful. He had not explainedhis savage or his cat. 'Hang it, man,' I said, 'before you canappreciate the existence of your Spacial forms you have to go throughelaborate experiments and deductions. You can't be doing that everyminute. Therefore you don't get any nearer to the USE of the sense yousay that man once possessed, though you can explain it a bit.'"
"What did he say?" I asked.
"The funny thing was that he never seemed to see my difficulty. When Ikept bringing him back to it he shied off with a new wild theory ofperception. He argued that the mind can live in a world of realitieswithout any sensuous stimulus to connect them with the world of ourordinary life. Of course that wasn't my point. I supposed that thisworld of Space was real enough to him, but I wanted to know how he gotthere. He never answered me. He was the typical Cambridge man, youknow--dogmatic about uncertainties, but curiously diffident about theobvious. He laboured to get me to understand the notion of hismathematical forms, which I was quite willing to take on trust fromhim. Some queer things he said, too. He took our feeling about Leftand Right as an example of our instinct for the quality of Space. Butwhen I objected that Left and Right varied with each object, and onlyexisted in connection with some definite material thing, he said thatthat was exactly what he meant. It was an example of the mobility ofthe Spacial forms. Do you see any sense in that?"
I shook my head. It seemed to me pure craziness.
"And then he tried to show me what he called the 'involution of Space,'by taking two points on a piece of paper. The points were a foot awaywhen the paper was flat, they coincided when it was doubled up. Hesaid that there were no gaps between the figures, for the medium wascontinuous, and he took as an illustration the loops on a cord. Youare to think of a cord always looping and unlooping itself according tocertain mathematical laws. Oh, I tell you, I gave up trying to followhim. And he was so desperately
in earnest all the time. By hisaccount Space was a sort of mathematical pandemonium."
Leithen stopped to refill his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fatewhich had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant ofa philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly toan ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill. As told by Leithen it was avery halting tale.
"But there was one thing I could see very clearly," Leithen went on,"and that was Hollond's own case. This crowded world of Space wasperfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhapshis mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed someatrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was livinghis daily life with a foot in each world.
"He often came to see me, and after the first hectic discussions hedidn't talk much. There was no noticeable change in him--a little moreabstracted perhaps. He would walk in the street or come into a roomwith a quick look round him, and sometimes for no earthly reason hewould swerve. Did you ever watch a cat crossing a room? It sidlesalong by the furniture and walks over an open space of carpet as if itwere picking its way among obstacles. Well, Hollond behaved like that,but he had always been counted a little odd, and nobody noticed it butme.
"I knew better than to chaff him, and had stopped argument, so therewasn't much to be said. But sometimes he would give me news about hisexperiences. The whole thing was perfectly clear and scientific andabove board, and nothing creepy about it. You know how I hate thewashy supernatural stuff they give us nowadays. Hollond was well andfit, with an appetite like a hunter. But as he talked,sometimes--well, you know I haven't much in the way of nerves orimagination--but I used to get a little eerie. Used to feel the solidearth dissolving round me. It was the opposite of vertigo, if youunderstand me--a sense of airy realities crowding in on you-crowdingthe mind, that is, not the body.
"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors andhalls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according toinexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what thisconsciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled andworried and helpless. I made out from him that one landmark involved asequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep thedirection without a mistake. He told me he could easily, if he wanted,go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon inthe thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the properangle to start from. I confess I didn't follow that myself. Materialobjects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bedin our world might be placed across a corridor of Space. The formsplayed their game independent of our kind of reality. But the worst ofit was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were aptto forget about the other and Hollond was always barking his shins onstones and chairs and things.
"He told me all this quite simply and frankly. Remember his mind andno other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him anodd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know thatnothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinitestrange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, hesaid, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug,thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man."
"How long was it before he went mad?" I asked.
It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross. "He never went madin your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you thinkthere was anything pathological about him--then. The man wasbrilliantly sane. His mind was as keen is a keen sword. I couldn'tunderstand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough."
I asked if it made him happy or miserable.
"At first I think it made him uncomfortable. He was restless becausehe knew too much and too little. The unknown pressed in on his mind asbad air weighs on the lungs. Then it lightened and he accepted the newworld in the same sober practical way that he took other things. Ithink that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him afeeling of extraordinary power and ease. His eyes used to sparkle whenhe talked. And another odd thing he told me. He was a keenrockclimber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head.Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold onhimself. But now all that had gone. The sense of the fulness of Spacemade him as happy--happier I believe--with his legs dangling intoeternity, as sitting before his own study fire.
"I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizardswho made their spells by means of numbers and figures.
"He caught me up at once. 'Not numbers,' he said. "Number has noplace in Nature. It is an invention of the human mind to atone for abad memory. But figures are a different matter. All the mysteries ofthe world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, ifthey knew no more.'
"He had only one grievance. He complained that it was terribly lonely.'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel theprophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shiftingcorridors of Space with no hint of another human soul. How could therebe? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had noplace. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this. Onewouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game ofchess. I asked him, but he didn't understand the question. I puzzledover it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely,there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began towonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, Iwas not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked asif his nerves might be going bad.
"Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself. He haddiscovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived inthis new world of his. You know how one dreams of triangular railwayplatforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides andnot colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we sayat the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the whyand wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories,where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he usedto go up to Cambridge for seances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him,and I don't think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatansthat he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed atMother's Meetings!"
From far up the Glen came the sound of the pony's hoofs. The stag hadbeen loaded up and the gillies were returning. Leithen looked at hiswatch. "We'd better wait and see the beast," he said.
"... Well, nothing happened for more than a year. Then one evening inMay he burst into my rooms in high excitement. You understand quiteclearly that there was no suspicion of horror or fright or anythingunpleasant about this world he had discovered. It was simply a seriesof interesting and difficult problems. All this time Hollond had beenrather extra well and cheery. But when he came in I thought I noticeda different look in his eyes, something puzzled and diffident andapprehensive.
"'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said.'It's unbelievable. I never dreamed of such a thing. I--I don'tquite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but--butI am becoming aware that there are other beings--other minds--movingin Space besides mine.'
"I suppose I ought to have realised then that things were beginning togo wrong. But it was very difficult, he was so rational and anxious tomake it all clear. I asked him how he knew. 'There could, of course,on his own showing be no CHANGE in that world, for the forms of Spacemoved and existed under inexorable laws. He said he found his own mindfailing him at points. There would come over him a sense offear--intellectual fear--and weakness, a sense of something else, quitealien to Space, thwarting him. Of course he could only describe hisimpressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he hadno material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them. But thegist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what hecalled 'Presences' in his world. They had no effect on Space--did notleave footprints in its corridors, for i
nstance--but they affected hismind. There was some mysterious contact established between him andthem. I asked him if the affection was unpleasant and he said 'No, notexactly.' But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.
"Think of it. Try to realise what intellectual fear is. I can't, butit is conceivable. To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves orsome other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of theflesh. Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so. Butimagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of purespirit. I can't realise it, but I think it possible. I don't pretendto understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences. But therewas no doubt about the fact. He was positive, and he wasn't in theleast mad--not in our sense. In that very month he published his bookon Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a mosttremendous public trouncing.
"I know what you are going to say,--that the fancy was a weakening ofthe mind from within. I admit I should have thought of that but helooked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. Hekept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. Itwas the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. Idropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that,taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be eitherordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his whichhad independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally,the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchersthink they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and Iwasn't quite serious. But Holland was serious enough.
"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he wasvery doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Spaceduring sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these werepowerful Presences. With the second and the third he was ratherimpressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and triedto stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty.But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond;indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness neverentered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took myfancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. Ienlarged on the pioneering before him. 'Think,' I told him, 'what maybe waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You mayopen up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You mayprove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from thefear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all theworld's mysteries.'
"But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid anddispirited. 'That is all true enough,' he said,'if you are right, ifyour alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else,something .... What that 'something' might be he had apparently noidea, and very soon he went away.
"He said another thing before he left. We asked me if I ever readpoetry, and I said, not often. Nor did he: but he had picked up alittle book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. Ithink his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows.He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran somethinglike
'Within the region of the air, Compassed about with Heavens fair, Great tracts of lands there may be found, Where many numerous hosts, In those far distant coasts, For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.'
Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. Itold him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. Headmitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see. He believed thateverything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can onlytake comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you...'
"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobodyfor a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on theEmbankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back withme to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him astiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly. There wasthat strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightenedanimal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin andbone.
"'I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrowand I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily intohis story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to askhim a question.
"'Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing.Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoketo you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I ambeginning to think that there is a fourth.
"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward andgripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. 'That world is theDesolation,' he said in a choking voice, 'and perhaps I am getting nearthe Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of. Itell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almostscreamed, 'that no mortal can think of and live.'
You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning outof a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror withmathematics? I don't see it yet... At any rate, I--You may be sure Icursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The onlyway would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. Andyet I couldn't, you know--it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, Itried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant ravingbosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dinewith me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mindbefore he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross,very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me prettyoften....
The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, wasabreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highlandvoices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle hadmade direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In thewake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen allswimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; thestag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky,looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birchesand emerged on the white glen highway.
Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it hadsomehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors andPresences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hourago. It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," whenthe mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on themorrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Thoseairy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns!
"I want to hear the end of your story," I told him, as the lights ofthe Lodge showed half a mile distant.
"The end was a tragedy," he said slowly. "I don't much care to talkabout it. But how was I to know? I couldn't see the nerve going. Yousee I couldn't believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might haveseen. But I still think there was something in it--up to a point. Oh,I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Somethingmust have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit morewhich we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...
"I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I startedI got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printedmy name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words--'Iknow at last--God's mercy.--H.G.H' The handwriting was like a sick manof ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend.
"I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary climbingaccident--you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talkedabout the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals--the usual rot.There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body wasonly recognised by the clothes. He had fallen several thousand feet.
"It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigsand Dupont, and they had done some hair-raising things on theAiguilles. Dupont told me that they had found a new ro
ute up theMontanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a'diable fou' and if you know Dupont's standard of madness you will seethat the pace must have been pretty hot. 'But monsieur was sick,' headded; 'his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved forhim and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.'
"He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day hespent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everythingin perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister.The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for theGrepon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, andthen he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that heleft the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer deGlace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party goingto the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.
"He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, andthere was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But Iguessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held histongue...."
We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. Thethought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of thetwilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After all,there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mindto comfort.
Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood. He looked glum and puzzled, asif his tale had aroused grim memories. He finished it at the Lodgedoor.
"... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die. He had seen thesomething more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from hismoorings. He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he mustneeds go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him. Godsend that he found rest! I believe that he chose the steepest cliff inthe Alps for a purpose. He wanted to be unrecognisable. He was abrave man and a good citizen. I think he hoped that those who foundhim might not see the look in his eyes."