by Edith Nesbit
‘I say,’ said Quentin to himself, ‘here’s a rum go.’
He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time ago as it seemed.
The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a rhythm which he knew well enough. He had felt it when he and his mother went in a little boat from Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight. There was no doubt in his mind. He was on a ship. But how, but why? Who could have carried him all that way without waking him? Was it magic? Accidental magic? The St. John’s wort perhaps? And the stone — it was not the same. It was new, clean cut, and, where the wind displaced a corner of the curtain, dazzlingly white in the sunlight.
There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of shuffling as though people were arranging themselves. And then people outside the awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all like any music you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune than a drum has, or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough glorious exciting splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense all-alive feeling that drums and trumpets give.
Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.
Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by bigger waves than he had ever dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men, dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea — but they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, ‘struck so,’ for their eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he noticed curiously, but with surprise and ... could it be that they were afraid of him?
Quentin was shivering with the surprise and newness of it all. He had read about magic, but he had not wholly believed in it, and yet, now, if this was not magic, what was it? You go to sleep on an old stone in a ruin. You wake on the same stone, quite new, on a ship. Magic, magic, if ever there was magic in this wonderful, mysterious world!
The silence became awkward. Some one had to say something.
‘Good-morning,’ said Quentin, feeling that he ought perhaps to be the one.
Instantly every one in sight fell on his face on the deck.
Only one, a tall man with a black beard and a blue mantle, stood up and looked Quentin in the eyes.
‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Answer, I adjure you by the Sacred Tau!’ Now this was very odd, and Quentin could never understand it, but when this man spoke Quentin understood him perfectly, and yet at the same time he knew that the man was speaking a foreign language. So that his thought was not, ‘Hullo, you speak English!’ but ‘Hullo, I can understand your language.’
‘I am Quentin de Ward,’ he said.
‘A name from other stars! How came you here?’ asked the blue-mantled man.
‘I don’t know,’ said Quentin.
‘He does not know. He did not sail with us. It is by magic that he is here,’ said Blue Mantle. ‘Rise, all, and greet the Chosen of the Gods.’
They rose from the deck, and Quentin saw that they were all bearded men, with bright, earnest eyes, dressed in strange dress of something like jersey and tunic and heavy golden ornaments.
‘Hail! Chosen of the Gods,’ cried Blue Mantle, who seemed to be the leader.
‘Hail, Chosen of the Gods!’ echoed the rest.
‘Thank you very much, I’m sure,’ said Quentin.
‘And what is this stone?’ asked Blue Mantle, pointing to the stone on which Quentin sat.
And Quentin, anxious to show off his knowledge, said:
‘I’m not quite sure, but I think it’s the altar stone of Stonehenge.’
‘It is proved,’ said Blue Mantle. ‘Thou art the Chosen of the Gods. Is there anything my Lord needs?’ he added humbly.
‘I ... I’m rather hungry,’ said Quentin; ‘it’s a long time since dinner, you know.’
They brought him bread and bananas, and oranges.
‘Take,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘of the fruits of the earth, and specially of this, which gives drink and meat and ointment to man,’ suddenly offering a large cocoa-nut.
Quentin took, with appropriate ‘Thank you’s’ and ‘You’re very kind’s.’
‘Nothing,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘is too good for the Chosen of the Gods. All that we have is yours, to the very last day of your life you have only to command, and we obey. You will like to eat in seclusion. And afterwards you will let us behold the whole person of the Chosen of the Gods.’
Quentin retired into the purple tent, with the fruits and the cocoa-nut. As you know, a cocoa-nut is not handy to get at the inside of, at the best of times, so Quentin set that aside, meaning to ask Blue Mantle later on for a gimlet and a hammer.
When he had had enough to eat he peeped out again. Blue Mantle was on the watch and came quickly forward.
‘Now,’ said he, very crossly indeed, ‘tell me how you got here. This Chosen of the Gods business is all very well for the vulgar. But you and I know that there is no such thing as magic.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Quentin. ‘If I’m not here by magic I’m not here at all.’
‘Yes, you are,’ said Blue Mantle.
‘I know I am,’ said Quentin, ‘but if I’m not here by magic what am I here by?’
‘Stowawayishness,’ said Blue Mantle.
‘If you think that why don’t you treat me as a stowaway?’
‘Because of public opinion,’ said Blue Mantle, rubbing his nose in an angry sort of perplexedness.
‘Very well,’ said Quentin, who was feeling so surprised and bewildered that it was a real relief to him to bully somebody. ‘Now look here. I came here by magic, accidental magic. I belong to quite a different world from yours. But perhaps you are right about my being the Chosen of the Gods. And I sha’n’t tell you anything about my world. But I command you, by the Sacred Tau’ (he had been quick enough to catch and remember the word), ‘to tell me who you are, and where you come from, and where you are going.’
Blue Mantle shrugged his shoulders. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘if you invoke the sacred names of Power.... But I don’t call it fair play. Especially as you know perfectly well, and just want to browbeat me into telling lies. I shall not tell lies. I shall tell you the truth.’
‘I hoped you would,’ said Quentin gently.
‘Well then,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘I am a Priest of Poseidon, and I come from the great and immortal kingdom of Atlantis.’
‘From the temple where the gold statue is, with the twelve sea-horses in gold?’ Quentin asked eagerly.
‘Ah, I knew you knew all about it,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘so I don’t need to tell you that I am taking the sacred stone, on which you are sitting (profanely if you are a mere stowaway, and not the Chosen of the Gods) to complete the splendid structure of a temple built on a great plain in the second of the islands which are our colonies in the North East.’
‘Tell me all about Atlantis,’ said Quentin. And the priest, protesting that Quentin knew as much about it as he did, told.
And all the time the ship was ploughing through the waves, sometimes sailing, sometimes rowed by hidden rowers with long oars. And Quentin was served in all things as though he had been a king. If he had insisted that he was not the Chosen of the Gods everything might have been different. But he did not. And he was very anxious to show how much he knew about Atlantis. And sometimes he was wrong, the Priest said, but much more often he was right.
‘We are less than three days’ journey now from the Eastern Isles,’ Blue Mantle said one day, ‘and I warn you that if you are a mere stowaway you had better own it. Because if you persist in calling yourself the Chosen of the Gods you will be expected to act as such — to the very end.’
‘I don’t call myself anything,’ said Quentin, ‘though I am not a stowaway, anyhow, and I don’t know ho
w I came here — so of course it was magic. It’s simply silly your being so cross. I can’t help being here. Let’s be friends.’
‘Well,’ said Blue Mantle, much less crossly, ‘I never believed in magic, though I am a priest, but if it is, it is. We may as well be friends, as you call it. It isn’t for very long, anyway,’ he added mysteriously.
And then to show his friendliness he took Quentin all over the ship, and explained it all to him. And Quentin enjoyed himself thoroughly, though every now and then he had to pinch himself to make sure that he was awake. And he was fed well all the time, and all the time made much of, so that when the ship reached land he was quite sorry. The ship anchored by a stone quay, most solid and serviceable, and every one was very busy.
Quentin kept out of sight behind the purple curtains. The sailors and the priests and the priests’ attendants and everybody on the boat had asked him so many questions, and been so curious about his clothes, that he was not anxious to hear any more questions asked, or to have to invent answers to them.
And after a very great deal of talk — almost as much as Mr. Miles’s carrying had needed — the altar stone was lifted, Quentin, curtains, awning and all, and carried along a gangway to the shore, and there it was put on a sort of cart, more like what people in Manchester call a lurry than anything else I can think of. The wheels were made of solid circles of wood bound round with copper. And the cart was drawn by — not horses or donkeys or oxen or even dogs — but by an enormous creature more like an elephant than anything else, only it had long hair rather like the hair worn by goats.
You, perhaps, would not have known what this vast creature was, but Quentin, who had all sorts of out-of-the-way information packed in his head, knew at once that it was a mammoth.
And by that he knew, too, that he had slipped back many thousands of years, because, of course, it is a very long time indeed since there were any mammoths alive, and able to draw lurries. And the car and the priest and the priest’s retinue and the stone and Quentin and the mammoth journeyed slowly away from the coast, passing through great green forests and among strange gray mountains.
Where were they journeying?
Quentin asked the same question you may be sure, and Blue Mantle told him —
‘To Stonehenge.’ And Quentin understood him perfectly, though Stonehenge was not the word Blue Mantle used, or anything like it.
‘The great temple is now complete,’ he said, ‘all but the altar stone. It will be the most wonderful temple ever built in any of the colonies of Atlantis. And it will be consecrated on the longest day of the year.’
‘Midsummer Day,’ said Quentin thoughtlessly — and, as usual, anxious to tell all he knew. ‘I know. The sun strikes through the arch on to the altar stone at sunrise. Hundreds of people go to see it: the ruins are quite crowded sometimes, I believe.’
‘Ruins?’ said the priest in a terrible voice. ‘Crowded? Ruins?’
‘I mean,’ said Quentin hastily, ‘the sun will still shine the same way even when the temple is in ruins, won’t it?’
‘The temple,’ said the priest, ‘is built to defy time. It will never be in ruins.’
‘That’s all you know,’ said Quentin, not very politely.
‘It is not by any means all I know,’ said the priest. ‘I do not tell all I know. Nor do you.’
‘I used to,’ said Quentin, ‘but I sha’n’t any more. It only leads to trouble — I see that now.’
Now, though Quentin had been intensely interested in everything he had seen in the ship and on the journey, you may be sure he had not lost sight of the need there was to get back out of this time of Atlantis into his own time. He knew that he must have got into these Atlantean times by some very simple accidental magic, and he felt no doubt that he should get back in the same way. He felt almost sure that the reverse-action, so to speak, of the magic would begin when the stone got back to the place where it had lain for so many thousand years before he happened to go to sleep on it, and to start — perhaps by the St. John’s wort — the accidental magic. If only, when he got back there he could think of the compelling, the magic word!
And now the slow procession wound over the downs, and far away across the plain, which was almost just the same then as it is now, Quentin saw what he knew must be Stonehenge. But it was no longer the grey pile of ruins that you have perhaps seen — or have, at any rate, seen pictures of.
From afar one could see the gleam of yellow gold and red copper; the flutter of purple curtains, the glitter and dazzle of shimmering silver.
As they drew near to the spot Quentin perceived that the great stones he remembered were overlaid with ornamental work, with vivid, bright-coloured paintings. The whole thing was a great circular building, every stone in its place. At a mile or two distant lay a town. And in that town, with every possible luxury, served with every circumstance of servile homage, Quentin ate and slept.
I wish I had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept and ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what Atlantis was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of Atlantis must have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the cities of that fair and lovely land.
That night, for the first time since he had first gone to sleep on the altar stone, Quentin slept apart from it. He lay on a wooden couch strewn with soft bear-skins, and a woollen coverlet was laid over him. And he slept soundly.
In the middle of the night, as it seemed, Blue Mantle woke him.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘Chosen of the Gods — since you will be that, and no stowaway — the hour draws nigh.’
The mammoth was waiting. Quentin and Blue Mantle rode on its back to the outer porch of the new temple of Stonehenge. Rows of priests and attendants, robed in white and blue and purple, formed a sort of avenue up which Blue Mantle led the Chosen of the Gods, who was Quentin. They took off his jacket and put a white dress on him, rather like a night-shirt without sleeves. And they put a thick wreath of London Pride on his head and another, larger and longer, round his neck.
‘If only the chaps at school could see me now!’ he said to himself proudly.
And by this time it was gray dawn.
‘Lie down now,’ said Blue Mantle, ‘lie down, O Beloved of the Gods, upon the altar stone, for the last time.’
‘I shall be able to go, then?’ Quentin asked. This accidental magic was, he perceived, a tricky thing, and he wanted to be sure.
‘You will not be able to stay,’ said the priest. ‘If going is what you desire, the desire of the Chosen of the Gods is fully granted.’
The grass on the plain far and near rustled with the tread of many feet; the cold air of dawn thrilled to the awed murmured of many voices.
Quentin lay down, with his pink wreaths and his white robe, and watched the quickening pinkiness of the East. And slowly the great circle of the temple filled with white-robed folk, all carrying in their hands the faint pinkiness of the flowers which we nowadays call London Pride.
And all eyes were fixed on the arch through which, at sunrise on Midsummer Day, the sun’s first beam should fall upon the white, new, clean altar stone. The stone is still there, after all these thousands of years, and at sunrise on Midsummer Day the sun’s first ray still falls on it.
The sky grew lighter and lighter, and at last the sun peered redly over the down, and the first ray of the morning sunlight fell full on the altar stone and on the face of Quentin.
And, as it did so, a very tall, white-robed priest with a deer-skin apron and a curious winged head-dress stepped forward. He carried a great bronze knife, and he waved it ten times in the shaft of sunlight that shot through the arch and on to the altar stone.
‘Thus,’ he cried, ‘thus do I bathe the sacred blade in the pure fountain of all light, all wisdom, all splendour. In the name of the ten kings, the ten virtues, the ten hopes, the ten fears I make my weapon clean! May this temple of our love and our desire endure for ever, so long as the glory of our
Lord the Sun is shed upon this earth. May the sacrifice I now humbly and proudly offer be acceptable to the gods by whom it has been so miraculously provided. Chosen of the Gods! return to the gods who sent thee!’
A roar of voices rang through the temple. The bronze knife was raised over Quentin. He could not believe that this, this horror, was the end of all these wonderful happenings.
‘No — no,’ he cried, ‘it’s not true. I’m not the Chosen of the Gods! I’m only a little boy that’s got here by accidental magic!’
‘Silence,’ cried the priest, ‘Chosen of the Immortals, close your eyes! It will not hurt. This life is only a dream; the other life is the real life. Be strong, be brave!’
Quentin was not brave. But he shut his eyes. He could not help it. The glitter of the bronze knife in the sunlight was too strong for him.
He could not believe that this could really have happened to him. Every one had been so kind — so friendly to him. And it was all for this!
Suddenly a sharp touch at his side told him that for this, indeed, it had all been. He felt the point of the knife.
‘Mother!’ he cried. And opened his eyes again.
He always felt quite sure afterwards that ‘Mother’ was the master-word, the spell of spells. For when he opened his eyes there was no priest, no white-robed worshippers, no splendour of colour and metal, no Chosen of the Gods, no knife — only a little boy with a piece of sacking over him, damp with the night dews, lying on a stone amid the grey ruins of Stonehenge, and, all about him, a crowd of tourists who had come to see the sun’s first shaft strike the age-old altar of Stonehenge on Midsummer Day in the morning. And instead of a knife point at his side there was only the ferrule of the umbrella of an elderly and retired tea merchant in a mackintosh and an Alpine hat, — a ferrule which had prodded the sleeping boy so unexpectedly surprised on the very altar stone where the sun’s ray now lingered.
And then, in a moment, he knew that he had not uttered the spell in vain, the word of compelling, the word of power: for his mother was there kneeling beside him. I am sorry to say that he cried as he clung to her. We cannot all of us be brave, always.