by Ray Furness
And he also saw cross-roads on the tracks between the swamps and the steep ditches. The hour of midnight was approaching, full of horror and torment … A will o’ the wisp flickered up, quick as thought, above the marshy pools, a silent, mysterious effulgence … and a dog started to bark in a neighbouring village, then another, answering with a long, drawn-out whine, and then the sharp sound of the night watchman’s horn, and then silence again, silence which penetrated, deep and black, into the darkest abysses, drawing everything into itself, my Today, my Tomorrow, laming every step and every movement, and making me so lonely, so remote and a stranger to reality.
And before his eyes his homeland arose in a whole variety of pictures: a gigantic sheet, ripped and torn into green rags of barley, into white fields of heather, golden carpets of rye, blood-red fields of wheat with ears as heavy as whips … the whole earth is drunk with May, lustful in its glorious blossom, monstrous in its creative madness, in the nuptial majesty of pious love, the whole earth, right up to the boundary of the white church upon the hill.
The bells poured their broad streams of euphony down upon the flat land and the waves of a mighty hymn washed through the fields during the Corpus Christi procession: the white dresses of the girls are gleaming between the black bushes and the thick foliage, girls who are scattering flowers at the feet of the priests carrying the Holy Sacrament, and the long peasant coats are blue, tied with a wide red sash …
He twitched and started up, lusting for greater longing …
Endless … in miraculous configurations, a wedding procession on a day in July. The broad sobbing of the violins, made from the bark of the lime-tree, the hoarse groaning of the basses which jangle with the coins that the bridegroom has tossed into them, and a jubilant cry which cuts through the air at regular intervals: Hooray! And then again a funeral procession in late autumn on rain-sodden country roads … A couple of girls are carrying the white coffin of a child and then a solemn pilgrimage wending its way to the miraculous picture of a Saint, then again … oh, endless, measureless …
His eyes slowly darkened; only a few vague, ragged pictures slid sluggishly and tentatively across his brain … His soul grew dusky, rocked in tender dreaming and extinguished – until suddenly rearing up in a mighty song.
The malicious enchantment of the flowers, the intoxicating poison of exotic blooms, and the paradise of his homeland made his soul resound with the thundering, brazen steps of knights who seemed to be cast in bronze and who made the earth tremble under their victorious, exultant marching, and then his soul melted in the sobbing moans of a mother lamenting the death of her first-born … his soul grew verdant in the myrtle wreath of epithalamia, it raged and roared in the drunken tavern dance, stamping and shouting, it shot upwards with a wild shriek like the mullein’s bloom upon the searing hot earth of the fallow field, the whole song paved itself into a dark, wild bed, it dried, drew backwards, yet only to burst forth again more powerfully and finally flooded the plain itself …
A monstrous force seized him in its arms. The rabid frenzy of the storm gripped him with the groaning of damnation, hurled him on to the seething spume of an abysmal whirlpool, raged in him, howling, crashing and hurled him howling up the steep cliffs like a wreck, and in the depths, down in the bottomless depths of a funnel he heard a bright sound which faded, returned, sank down and came again like the reflection of a pale star in the churning uproar of dark waves.
This bright radiance had long fought against the spray of the flood, against the storm of mountainous waves, but it continued to spread its light in long, slim beams dancing over the turmoil in graceful, serpentine convolutions, contracting, then expanding again like a feather which rolls and unrolls: still, yearning gentle waves of light hovered above the storm-tormented abyss, above the desperate moaning and shrieking, above the anguish, the howling and the screaming of the insane uproar … Waves of tranquillity grew and became ever wider, waves of lightness and denial, of joy and salvation, embracing the storm, the shrieking terror, in holy maternal arms, pressing it in an eternal love, and rocking it in a supernatural longing, in a swooning dream of ecstasy.
There:
A girl’s face appeared, a bright, holy chord in the black, stormy uproar, the light reflection of a pale star in the churning froth of dark waves … he had never seen it before, but he knew it, he knew it well, this female countenance … He awoke, he rubbed his eyes and walked up and down the room, but could not dispel the vision of this face, half child, half woman.
Yes, it must be she! It was she who had had the flowers handed to him on the podium.
He asked himself how he was so certain that it was she.
Some stranger had handed him the flowers.
And he thought, and brooded …
So she was there, she was sitting in the front row, and the dark dual stars of her eyes had shone into his soul, leaving their radiance within him. At that time, when the whole world was dissolving before my eyes into wraiths of mist, when everything was seething in the hurricane which was howling beneath my fingers, the power of longing had fixed the radiance of her eyes within me … It was I also who formed the countenance to these eyes, for it is only this face and none other that can glow in the radiance of such eyes …
And the radiance embraced him from all sides, it poured into his blood and swept through his veins, a hot tremor shuddered through him; he was trembling in an unknown ecstasy of joy.
For there are indeed strange signs and portents before the hour of salvation, he muttered to himself: the whole of mother earth has awakened within me, the whole of life has slid with the speed of lightning across the firmament of my soul, the whole desperate joy of my life has spread its heavy, wounded pinions before mine eyes, from one end to the other …
He stopped, and stared for a long time at the bouquet with the wide red ribbon and the mystical name …
Yes, she is as slim and supple as the stem of the tuber, and her eyes are as pure as the white stars of Bethlehem which rest on him and move dreamily to and fro …
But where did I get the vision of this countenance, half child, half woman?
He thought:
This is the mysterious hour, before the sun awakens.
He gazed for a long time out of the window at the snowy fields of the suburbs … The snow was turning blue in the first flush of dawn … A stripe of bright hues was writhing along the horizon, disappeared, then came again and caught the East in an ever wider embrace …
From this time onwards the vision of that tender, delicate countenance constantly hovered in front of him, a face that cast its radiance into his blood … He constantly saw that slim girlish figure, half woman, half child, like a tuberose, which rocked upon its stalk two white blossoms, two white eyes of Bethlehem.
He sat for hours, thinking of her, dreaming …
The same pictures kept coming back before his eyes: in the depth of his soul the images of his homeland were inextricably enmeshed with the secret dances of sounds and songs, the scent of flowers, the dark storm and the reflection of pale stars in the maelstrom of heaving waters.
He could not understand the connection – nevertheless – it seemed as though she were his homeland in the exultation of spring, the flowers that she gave him, the dress, eternally new yet eternally the same, of her soul, the eternal form of her being, that the eyes, her eyes …
He deliberately severed the flux of his thoughts, he seized the flowers, threw them at himself, thrust his feverish hands into their midst and dreamed of her, and sought for her.
He was already holding her in his arms, crushing her against his breast in a sick ecstasy, kissing her, kissing …
And then he made up his mind, he had to find her!
He must!
To catch one glance from her eyes, only one gleam, a trembling light in her gaze – and he would recognise her, he would certainly recognise her if her eyes should gleam for a thousandth of a second …
He wandered for days around
the streets of the town, hanging around for hours in the parks that ringed the city. Thousands of people slipped past his gaze, he thought he recognised her in every girl he saw, every glance seemed to arouse the same joy in his blood as her eyes had done, the same wounding of the heart, but in vain: always the same disappointment! It was not her!
And yet, in the dusk, he sometimes heard footsteps close behind him, like the beating of restless wings, wings that were ready to take flight … sometimes he saw the quick, furtive gleam of a dark pair of eyes, penetrating his soul from near or from far – and once the touch of a soft, tender hand caressed him as he stood in the darkness of a church, enjoying the secret, precious gift of twilight prayers, but when he turned round, seeking to rend the darkness with his eyes, the vision dissolved, there was only a shaking luminescence, only warm breath of a febrile hand, and along his nerves the feeling of a slim tuberose with two white stars.
He was a King, yes, a King and a powerful ruler …
O the sick, tormented joy of sleepless nights, as he lay on the terrace of his palace, gazing at the luxurious splendour of the star-strewn heavens!
Tropical ivy grew in rank profusion; golden tufted blossoms rose from dark foliage; calyces like brazen bells, flowers surrounded by leaves which shimmered like polished cast-iron or molten brass … There were flowers with lightly haired pudenda, virgins blooming with eternal life, flowers which laughed with the eyes of living, knowing courtesans, or which stared and searched with the lost eyes of dying, exhausted seagulls and white albatrosses … He saw stalks and stems like lilies growing from dead hearts or from potatoes like skulls … Tongues leered forth from the syphilitic maws of incredible orchids, monstrous shapes strewn with purple fever pustules, tongues, which crept outwards and seemed to smear their poison across the carpet of flowers.
As far as the eye could see there were monstrous forests of primeval darkness, tangled, entwined, knotted in a dense, impenetrable mass, with ropes and cords of ivy, lianas, bindweed and creeping vines; and this heaving mass of parasitical growth twisted around the darkened ferns and bracken, the Isaurian palm trees, the coconut trees and breadfruit; it wove them into wickerwork and tangled them inextricably into each other; from the top of the terrace it looked like a mass of otters creeping out of the primeval magma.
And in this nocturnal darkness, star-longing, light-lusting, in this abysmal fever of matted forms, of sick perfumes and of colours seen as if in the delirium of opium the king dreamt of her, her, the only one … He crawled on the thick soft carpets, his fingers gripping the feet of the chairs, he drew in the poison exuded by the most monstrous of the flowers, and he screamed for her.
In vain!
Until:
He ordered the most beautiful virgins to be brought to his palace; in the vast hall he sat them in two rows which stretched from the throne into the gloom of the gardens …
And, dressed in incredible regal splendour he sat for a long time on his throne, cradled his face in both hands and gazed at the virgins who were trembling with hope and anticipation, each of whom would have surrendered to him and, in highest ecstasy, become his slave.
He looked at them, looked at them, and he wondered:
Which one is it?
How could he find her in this sea of heads, blonde, dark, auburn?
Is it she, whose eyes glow like belladonna growing amongst the debris?
Or is it she whose soft eyes suddenly glitter with the bloodthirsty gaze of a tame jaguar?
Or that one perhaps whose brow is lit by a lightning flash, a gleam of light born in her heart and which casts an endless sorrow across her face?
That one, whose arms hung slackly like tired lilies, or that one who held the lustful fruits of her body in a seductive embrace, perhaps that one there, with the gleaming suppleness of a snake, or that one, who arose from the womb of a lotus, or that one, far away, blooming out of a starry calyx, born from the radiance of moonlight?
He buried his face deeper in his hands, painfully, for he felt that he would not find her, the chaos of shapes, one dissolving into the other, forms, faces, eyes, darkened the King’s soul.
He climbed down the steps from the throne, and the virgins bowed like a white row of birch trees, freshly blooming, when the wind blew through it.
The heads bowed like precious ears of corn in the searing midday heat when a hot breath suddenly passes over them; the whole room seemed to gasp in the intensity of expectation and the bated breath of hope.
Three times he walked up and down the rows of the most beautiful maidens of his realm, more slowly, and sadder, until he finally sat once more on the throne: he waved his hand, and was alone.
The hall grew dark. The king buried himself in his despair: he pressed his face against his clenched fists, and brooded.
Then suddenly he felt that someone was creeping along the pillars which supported the vaulted roof, somebody was sliding through the dusk, and behind himself he noticed the white gleam of a naked body.
The kind proudly lifted his head, for no mortal had ever dared to gaze at him in his desperation.
He clapped his hands, and from an invisible source of light a cold metallic gleam cast its illumination into the room, and in the half-light he saw that a Syrian slave-trader was creeping towards the throne, dragging a naked girl behind him.
Bangles embraced her arms, golden snakes, and golden snakes twisted around her ankles, and a golden girdle held her hips, its clasp was in the form of a lotus flower, set with precious stones.
The king looked at her, astonished.
He did not see her face, for she crossed her arms before it: he only saw her figure, her slim, supple limbs, a tuberose with two white stars behind the lilies of her arms.
With bated breath the king gazed at the magical wonder of the maiden’s body, trembling in dread lest the dream should evaporate, he saw her rocking back and forth as if in a fire of fear and shame: her hair was flowing over the white lilies of her body like a molten stream, and suddenly she was kneeling and gazing up at him.
She, it was she!
He gripped the arms of his throne with both hands and whispered, trembling:
Did you give me the flowers?
She nodded …
With a hot scream he stretched out his hands towards her, and everything vanished …
He rubbed his brow …
He was awake.
Indeed he was, but only to fall again into a deeper, still wilder dream.
Now he was a magician, all-mighty, all-powerful, a servant of his Lord and, at the same time, a God …
Yes, ipse philosophus, magus, Deus et omnia …
He had prepared himself for his incantation for three days and three nights. For three days and three nights he had studied the magic books, deciphered the holy runes and unlocked the seven seals of apocalyptic vision. He committed to memory the fearful spells which would make him the master of unknown powers, for three days and three nights he drew in the intoxicating, poisonous vapours brewed from plants and roots which bloom mysteriously on midsummer night until he felt within himself the power to accelerate the growth of plants, to stop a river in its course, to make a womb infertile, yea, even to bring thunder down onto earth.
And in the hour of the great Arcana he put on the precious robes of his high office which once his ancestor Samyasa had donned: he tied his hair with the seven-fold knotted head-band, took his sword in his hand, drew a circle, wrote mystical formulae in it and stood in the middle, before a large mirror, declaiming loudly:
O Ashtaroth, Ashtaroth!
Mother of love, thou who devourest my heart with the poison of longing and desire, thou who pourest the fire of an insane torment into my veins; unique Mother, who tearest from the strings of my soul the anguished moaning of hopes that are vain and shrieks of desire; thou fearful Mother who hath stretched me upon the hellish rack of futile writhing –
Have mercy upon me!
O Ashtaroth, Ashtaroth!
Thou he
llish Daughter of deceit and duplicity, thou who conjurest before mine eyes at night the most unspeakable lust and ecstasy, thou who throwest the woman I seek into the wild embrace of my limbs and melts her, shrieking, with my own flesh, thou fearful, cruel, Hell-Queen, sucking force and life from my blood in order to awaken me anew to new torments and despair –
Have pity on me!
O Ashtaroth, Ashtaroth!
Mother of perversity, guardian of the sterile womb and unfruitful desires, thou who hast implanted in my soul a yearning which thou dost not still, into my bloody dreams that are not of this world, and into my brain the convulsions of lustfulness that darken my eyes with madness –
O harken unto me!
His hair rose up in an inhuman act of will … He shuddered and trembled as though every limb were possessed of its own life. It seemed to him as though he were stepping out of his own body as though, outside his body, he were incarnate anew, as though something were forming which was streaming forth from his soul, from his desire and from his most hideous torment.
A crash of thunder, as though a planet had torn itself from the sky to fall into an abyss of nothingness; a fearful storm had broken all the bonds, a hellish laughing, howling, shrieking was raging in his brain … In horror he saw a mist stream around the mirror, which glowed, shaped itself, took on palpable form … He saw it solidify, a body, breathing, pulsing with blood, alive!
The room was seized by streams of lightning, a clap of thunder smashed the mirror, there was a shriek and she threw herself at him, in wild, unconquerable lust, she whom he had sought so long and for whose sake he had forfeited his salvation …
O insane night of unquenchable desires!
* * * *
These dreams terrified him.