by H. F. Heard
These periodic settlements into contemplative silence only made more impressive the renewed upsurging of their choric hymn. They would rise with one spontaneous sweep, as though caught up by an unfelt wind, move with their wings spread laterally, and so circle in great eddies on the floors, and, when they had exhausted all lateral patterns, would, in a moment, enrich the whole by stepping effortlessly off and up into the air, rising thence in great spirals of living forms. I watched with inexhaustible interest, for every design seemed to lead to fresh enrichments. It was an immense epic of form which extemporized its evolution hour after hour. How heavy and plummeted I felt! Again and again, out of sheer empathetic delight, my feeble little arms would rise, my stumpy fringe of fingers flutter, pawing the air on which they could not climb. And I would feel the sheer weight of these massive loins of ours: that great anchoring girdle of our broad-basined fundament of pelvis in which wallow the great intestinal coils; that great coulter of the fused vertebrae that now is the lump of the sacrum. So we have to be braced and bound in order to be reared on those clumsy pillars, our legs of which we are so proud. So we stump about and stride the earth. But for even that small elevation we have to pay constant toll. We have to waste most of our strength and be tied forever to the earth by those clumsy stilts.
I would get to my feet as they swept anew from the ground, their great spread hands driving down the air, and I would feel my shrunken small pectoral muscles, my upper weakness, my lower clumsiness. In comparison with them I was a sort of shambling anthropoid, a kind of gorilla. Yes, I was a stage behind them and on the path downward. They were salient—toward the sky, truly vertical creatures. I was a horizontal animal centered in stomach, abdomen, and loins, with the wizened chest rising out of this coil and the head stretching like a chick caught in the egg from which it can’t free itself. Their center was in their huge heart and great lungs, and so they had conquered the air. With a mammal’s power of thought but with the sure lightness of the bird, they had gone on, on into the air, while the human species still remained a hyphen creature halfway between the submerged and these, the truly free-movers. I saw it now. They had as a race chosen the pure energy of air and breath. We had stuck fast, held below the median line.
Before my eyes they rose and fell in waves, but I could see them now in their real significance. Here was the full tide of life itself rising and brimming to ever higher levels of viability and experience. In waves of rhythm they sustained this great act of manifested natural worship. Here was the still unspent creative power within reaching out to its future, outlining its still unsatisfied desire to be. At last, I felt, I was seeing realized with perhaps perfect fulness that pattern of spontaneous harmony which is shown in fragments by the flight of birds and the sweep of fishes in water. As I watched, there came into my mind a queer passage from old Philo where he describes how his (perhaps idealized) Therapeutae would come out of their small sheds on the margin of the Western Egyptian desert and keep up their meeting all night. There they would chant and dance from moonrise to its setting, intoxicated with the pure sense of the vast unity that “in love and out of it, moves the sun, the moon and all the stars.”
And as I thought of that, I noticed we had indeed for a time—I, even—enjoyed the highest of all freedoms—freedom from time. No, perhaps that’s not right. I think I ought to say, rather, we had been in such rhythm that at last we had ceased for a while to be “out of time,” in wrong time; we had been, in the right sense, in the musical sense, in time with time. And as, when one goes as fast as the wind, all is still, so time had stood with us, and only the world had been moving noiselessly under our feet. We had been floated suspended above its whirl. I looked again, and it was true. But, as must be, I suppose, with all such experience of real peace, we only know we have had it when it is over. I looked again, for now I was trying to take my bearings and find out what had gone by. In following that great rite of movement I had been turned round. Now I was pointing west, and the moon was sinking there. Once more the huge choirs surged up, but now the moon was drawing them away. They swept upward, and now it was no longer above them. They were soaring that they might catch the last glance of it as the earth received it into its shadow. I strained to follow their flight and saw them, as they had been at the start of the great festival-service, again no more than small ruddy shapes, mothlike flakes, their glossy fur tawny in the moon’s beams (beams turning amber as they shone up from the horizon) as from a bonfire, as it sinks, the last ghostlike embers float up and disappear in the dark of the sky. All was silent except for the far-off velvet murmur of those supple vans, for the volcano vent was now wholly still.
I stood up, stiff, clumsy, old. How embedded I felt in my body. I stumbled up the ramp on which I had been seated and thence clambered up to one of the cornices on which that strange congregation had been ranged. I could see, as I looked around, a few hundred yards behind me the great black void, the mouth of the pit out of which we had been blown. I was looking at that, for it was an awful-looking void, when I heard a swift rushing, and the whole host that had risen to the zenith was pouring down headlong. Down they rushed like a tempest of arrows shot truly at a target. The whole vast congregation, drawn together like the closing vanes of a giant fan, closed in and diving down from the height, lunged straight into this black maw, straight into the earth’s depth.
The revels now were ended; these my players might indeed have melted into air, into thin air. The air was undoubtedly thin and still. And in it another light was showing. I turned and saw the dawn, and felt it as alien and as cold as poor Tithonus felt Aurora to have grown, when it was he that had changed, he that could age but could not die. Each minute I saw lit in clearer, yes, in harsher, light, the desert—the desert so ancient and inhuman that those strange vanished denizens of the dark were nearer to me than this loneliness. I felt a creature marooned, left behind, stranded, when I should, had I been “Well-found,” with power of sailing, have gone with the rest, breasting the bar, and found harbor. But no, I was grounded, sunken, and the brimming wave had passed, leaving me a derelict.
I turned about heavily; never did my body seem so clumsy and the earth so hard. I bumped along, stumbling and beating my awkward feet on the rock and against the stones, a shambling figure indeed, an animal that had missed its tide, a creature that could not stay the pace and had been discarded.
Well, I found my way down to some village, not the one I had left. The people at this new place weren’t friendly, but in a sort of way I felt they were pitying. After a time (for I fortunately had my wallet still on me, and they had fed me) I heard them talking outside the room they put at my disposal. There were snatches that gradually linked up in my dozing mind: “He’s seen them!” “He’s been held by them.” “He came in from the direction of the bad country.” “And last night was the full moon.” “And the death-cave monster was roaring, belching out his spawn.”
I stayed for a week, sleeping most of the time. And gradually this world came back to me as my place, the place, and the human form as the form, and everything as on our scale, measured by feet, a just estimate for a creature that is always looking for clues on the ground and who cricks his neck if he tries to study for more than a little while the printless sky, the blinding sun, the deserts of the galaxies.
Yes, I know that sounds the usual reaction. The first feeling is, of course: Why, they’re just horrors, and we are the one and only right sort. And then, just as blindly: Of course, we’re just junk; they’re the model that has the future. Conservative and romantic, they’re only two sides of the same thing: our inability to take in what is really unfamiliar. Gradually I had to learn how much my mind had been shocked by something too big for it either really to approve or disapprove. Slowly I came to the conclusion—I own it’s not a very constructive one—that all I had gone through was somehow only to be understood as something that was symbolic of a drama, a destiny too big for me to explain, interpret, moralize. The only way I’d ever be able to
make out what it meant for me would be to go on living, not publicizing it, heaven forbid, or even trying to theorize it out.
But perhaps, now and then—again like my forerunner, the Ancient Mariner—meeting someone like you; then I’d find an opening and be able to, perhaps have to, tell my tale. And you in turn must make your own personal sense, use, and application of it. It wouldn’t be any use, even if you could, for you to try and have my actual experience and check up on me. The curtain has come down. Perhaps that’s why I was let go there, and only once. After all, they were wonderful, stupendous creatures—but maybe almost too free, almost too little earth-bound for this earth, too lightly held. They were—at least I believe at the end—only holding on to physical form by an invisible strand lighter than their gossamer cables. The future, at least on this world, may have been meant to be with us surface-bound creatures, held in our narrow bound, our strait path, not with those wonder-creatures, those demons who, with a splendid instability, swayed between the dark brooding depth of that plutonic vault and the complete unrestraint of the boundless night-sky. We’re creatures heavily ballasted, it is true. But while our bodies ride heavily over this rough earth our minds are continually spurred and jolted. This world isn’t only sky and subsoil, light and dark. There’s a middle way, and the in-betweens and superficials may, after all, stay longer and carry further than either depth or height. The obvious may in the end prove more mysteriously significant than the obviously mysterious.
But I mustn’t run on like that; I’m breaking the rule I gave myself just now. It’s for you to draw your conclusions, not I for you. I’ll finish up my story and be gone.
One day they came to me with my burro. And, what is more, as far as I could judge, he still had on his back all my gear. Of course, that’s not as strange as it would sound to one who hasn’t been in strange parts. All backward people have a natural dread of touching a dead man’s goods. Such things are deodands, as they’re called. They belong to the unknown gods and are under the unseen protection of the spirits to whom the man has gone. Indeed, the odd thing was that they gave the burro harborage, for they have no kindness to animals and their natural reaction would be to treat it as a scapegoat and drive it out to die in the wilderness. I guess they were of two minds and were inclined to keep it on the chance that someone would claim it and pay salvage for it. Of course, it was odd that they had found the little beast, for I could judge fairly well that where I was ejected was on the other side of a range from the side at which I made my entrance into that underworld. How then did a hobbled donkey find its way round? These villages had little contact, or none, with one another. I gained some light on that question when I went through my baggage, but it was a light of that sort which leads one up to still odder questions. As I’ve said, the baggage seemed not to have been touched, and I feel pretty sure the Mexicans themselves hadn’t touched it.
But, when I began to unroll it, I had a worse start than Joseph’s brethren, when, neatly wrapped up in the folds of the small tent and the blankets, I found my climbing rope, the small grapnel, the torch, and the rucksack. But when I opened that, my surprise began to be shot with what was still further surprise, but with a smile in it. For in the rucksack I found the small leather case in which I kept my dried food. I opened that and the food was gone; no, again I’m sure it was not the Mexicans’ doing; for in place of what had been taken an exchange had been made. The case now held two cannisters; they were made from the husks of the cactus fruit, as out of dried lemon rinds you can make small boxes. And they were very neatly made with tops that fitted as close as a watchcase. I opened one and began to smile, then the other, and I positively chuckled. Here was a real and touching link across the vast gap that even at closest had separated me from my mysterious hosts. For here was the closest tie that can exist between human beings—the same sense of humor!
For, you see, what was in the one box was a neat and fragrant paté of flies, and in the other, set round prettily by leaves, was caviar of spiders’ eggs served, as the Chinese serve their bird-nest delicacy, actually in their silver cocoons. My old friend of the underworld had not only seen that my donkey should be found, given my gear, and led to where I should find it, but, with a kind of farewell smile of humor, had sent me this little joke, this wave of the hand, this playlet of fun as we parted on our strangely divergent destinies. And as I looked at these little offerings, so neatly prepared, the smile that it awoke became poignant, for this was more touching than any sentimental farewell could have been. How could there have been any sentiment between us—that leather-winged monster and I, this old piece of wandering shoe leather? But there could, I now saw, be humor, and in that there could be something that really touched across the vast gap, something of real affection. I held these little offerings in my hand for some time, looking at them as a man may look at the relics of a vanished civilization—say, a child’s toys found in an Egyptian sarcophagus. Should I take them back with me, only to leave them on some lodging-house mantelpiece for a fussy landlady to throw with a grimace of disgust into the fire?
Then I suddenly realized what was fitting. I went along to the little church: since the priests were driven out, the cloak of Catholicism has become very threadbare and torn. The perennial religion of Life goes on in these small shrines, where squalor and garishness find a neat balance and the patina of dirt gives a certain smoldering richness to the utter crudity of modern color. Outside this one was a small shrine to that Madonna of the Mexicans, Our Lady of Guadalupe. She was evidently working well and to the satisfaction of her children; for, as in such places from Ireland to Australia, you could hardly see the little Madonna magnet, so thickly round had a blind but grateful piety crowded her niche with votive offerings: crutches, models of snakes that hadn’t bitten you and of tarantulas that had, but from which you had taken no harm, little bunches of dead flowers, pieces of withered gourd. Here, I knew, was the place for my offering. It was given to me to bridge the gap between two great orders of physical being, and now in turn I would offer it from the underworld beings to this most ancient mother of the springing earth. As I came away, I saw that my offering, as do all rightful offerings, had made another link for me. One or two people smiled at me as I came away, for they had dogged me to the church as I went on my little pilgrimage. And as I arrived back at my room a couple came up and volunteered to put me on my way, if I wished to reach a big village. I accepted their offer gladly. My voyage into the unknown was over. As they had assured me, a day’s trek led me to a village which in that district, no doubt, thought of itself almost as a town. It was a place that knew about the great world and no doubt was quite proudly secular and scornful of the peasants’ up-country superstitions. So I met with no questions and offered no information. Cash was all they wanted; that was the one magic that worked once more in this upper world and outer society, and with that I passed back for better or worse into this.
No, the place can’t ever be visited, as I’ve said. You think people could track it from the hints I’ve let drop? Maybe they might have. But not now. Yes, I did go back into that province. But as soon as I was in that district, the first thing I heard of was the eruption and the earthquake. I did push on a little to be sure. And, sure enough, the whole landscape of that part had been altered. I couldn’t put you back on those tracks if I wished to and if anything was left at the end for you to find. I gathered that huge vent must have blown up. Water and steam and sulphur oozings were all over the place. No doubt the spot may become quite fertile in a few hundred years. That’s the way nature renews herself. No place ends by being more fertile than one where a volcanic eruption seems to have blasted everything for good. So in the end it may be the best thing for the poor starved humans round there—besides, they’ll now be able to keep cows without others getting the milk. Still, I own I am sorry. For one more of Life’s great experiments, who knows, perhaps the greatest, is over. And one more of those strange eyes (of which the mind of Homo sapiens is perhaps far from th
e brightest), those eyes by which the universe has striven to see itself and know itself, has been darkened forever.
THE CUP
Won’t you sit down? No, it’s in this room. There at the end behind the small silk hanging on that stand. That’s why I was here, at this late hour, when you called. I’m not gagging. I do want to tell you a few things about what you’ve come for. You’ll find it worth a moment or two of your time. The story would add a grand or two to your haul. What’s the use of the finest animal without its pedigree papers? You don’t work, of course, through fences but right with the transatlantic buyer on the spot. Forgive me, I know you’re a little surprised, shocked even, at my using such—shall I say, technical?—terms, but, believe me, I promise you’ll be more surprised, interested, yes intrigued, if I may use that hackneyed phrase, when I’ve told you why I can. It adds, you’ll agree with me, immensely—another overworked word but here used precisely, advisedly—to the value of the piece that you’ve called to fetch. You believe you were in luck to find me with it? It couldn’t have been better arranged if you yourself had planned it? I agree, I agree. Providential is the way I’d put it. But, to be frank, I am with it a great deal. I admire it even more than you do. Again, that large, loose word can really be filled out by this thing till they fit each other. For it grows on one. I see more and more in it, and I’ve studied it for a considerable time.