The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘At last we decided to make our camp for the night—although we were in the realm of everlasting day. There would be no darkness for several months. But we were tired, and would no doubt sleep well. There was still little speech amongst us. Only the basic and most necessary phrases passed our lips. The immense silence was not to be trespassed upon. And yet, as I lay down and closed my eyes against the limitlessly tall sky and white glare of the ice, a sense of silence was the first casualty of my attempts to rest and sleep.

  ‘Once again I felt that singing and summoning, except even more so. The silence was not silence but it hid a silent music, ethereal and mystical and full of the longing and content of the outer planets in their deep slow orbits. Maybe the composers who could have done justice to the music of the ice and the chill sarabande of the planets had been born; but if so their task would be a daunting one. And yet I felt if I could but write out the notes of the singing silence, I would possess the unpossessable—and I would always be safe.

  ‘I must have found a fitful sleep. The tent made little difference to the piercing quality of the light, and I still joined in the desultory conversation when the waking trance that I was conscious I was in allowed me to. Only Garwood seemed to have retreated—or have been taken—slightly out of the world as I had also been.

  ‘One by one we made for sleep. I continued to doze, and then snap awake, fleetingly, into a consciousness of supreme clarity, as of a vision. The silent music continued, low on the very threshold of my mind, although I was sure I felt it deep and lively within my spirit. It was inseparable from my affinity for snow—except here in the snow’s home it was not the mere unreal shadow that I had hitherto known. It was becoming the real thing.

  ‘I dreamed that it was winter, and eternal day had been taken over by the long night. Shimmering in the star-strewn sky was the majesty of the Northern Lights, its curtains and flashing falls of light whirring and singing a wordless choral measure that wrenched at my heart and chilled me to the bone. And then I knew that this was occurring even during the daylight months; its invisibility had no effect to one who had the glamour on him and was summoned. And the affinity was still as strong as ever, although I was now aware that I was being protected from its full and awesome revelation. Like a thirsty man being given full and strong wine instead of the life-giving water that he first needs, for the present I needed to be shielded from the truth.

  ‘I have never been a somnambulist and neither, to the best of my knowledge, was Garwood. Yet we both got up and left the tents behind us. We remained silent as we climbed. I was fully aware that he was the better qualified for this particular terrain; but that perhaps it was the case that I was the one here by a prior right.

  ‘When we reached the top of a small plateau I turned and faced Garwood. He was standing as still as a carven idol, and his blunt, broad face was transfigured as if in a rapturous affinity. His figure became indistinct as I continued walking onwards into the interior of the plateau. Once more the air and snow-covered ground shimmered like a rainbow, and I saw many more colours in them than the seven. Soon I was seeing the secret stars of the day, and in and all around their myriad diamond lights was the weaving and swirling of the Northern Lights. Snow swept through me and into me and all recesses of my mind; the snow of this part of our tiny Earth swirled up through and in the Aurora to the infinite fields and the Sun and planets and stars, and all was mixed into icy stardust and was sent back to enhance and if need be, to take.

  ‘Eventually I realised I was lost. I must have walked miles on the plateau, yet I was certain that there were no such miles of ice and snow. The distances were not the sort that I had become used to experiencing in our slow silent assaults upon the uncharted land. And while in those hard slogs I had often been apprehensive of what we might find, and on edge to avoid such obstacles as morasses and avalanches, now I was sheerly frightened—the fright of terrible awe, of the Sublime, of a horror of the depths.

  ‘And then the old affinity returned, as in my cloistered past back in the old country, when all it allowed me was the prediction of snowfall and a joy in its intricate beauty. Now there was vastly more. The intricate beauty was soul-searing, implacable, and wholly transcendent. Maybe it was simply Nature.

  ‘There was little of the sense of the mild snows of Britain. My affinity was for something waiting outside—waiting to come down and in and overtake everything on our Earth. And yet its advent would be marvellous and glorious. As everything, as everyone, froze and died, how the growing ice crystals would sing out and praise in gratitude and worship! The dance would go ever on; the Earth would hymn and join the outer planets in their frozen and ceaseless round.

  ‘I felt that my power to see into the heart of a snow crystal had been extraordinarily magnified and I could see now, in a vast onrush of strange sight, right into the heart of all that is, in a succession of faltering, transient images which glimmered and then dissolved. My sense of being lost increased, although I knew now that I was all but psychically lost, not physically. And then Something, at last, fully awoke and turned the rest of its attention to me.

  ‘I had thought that I had come to know what cold and light were. I was wrong. Now the icy glare was directed on me. I—I alone of all of us, was being permitted to experience … and there was a price. Nothing was being asked of me; rather, I was being given something. The light exposed and examined my soul pitilessly but without hate or rancour; the cold seared into it and left its mark clear, this time for ever.

  ‘Garwood was gripping my shoulder, asking why I had followed him up to the little crest. He said that there was scarcely room on it for two, and it was a miracle that one of us had not slid off. And yet behind his veneer of gruff concern, he knew. Even if only for a fraction, he knew. He had also been selected, but something had held him back. And yet a tiny part of the vision may have been vouchsafed him, enough to know that his task had been done, and his silence bought. Garwood had perhaps seen a glimpse, but he had not stood on the precipice of space and time and the soul and seen into the very essence of the Void, as I had. We returned in the utter silence and stillness, with the mordant aura of the arctic sun casting a hard lustre over all.’

  The Connoisseur paused once more. ‘There are a few pages more about the conclusion of the expedition and the descent to the furthest bay, but there is little more about his interior experiences. It is as if he suddenly wished to remember only the bare physical details of the expedition, to immerse his memory again in simple human sensations. But there is a coda:

  ‘So it will readily be seen, I am sure, why this is the secret history of the first crossing of Spitsbergen. The things I have described could hardly find their way into Conway’s official chronicle if he wished to maintain his public stature, nor could Garwood say aught of them if he wished to be regarded as a safe man for future mountaineering expeditions. Yet now that they and the others have passed, and I have spent much of my life in some other rather curious ventures that Castain found for me, which have in part vindicated my experience, I believe it is right to record my encounters there, in the white wastes of the last archipelago.

  ‘And my conclusions? I have become convinced that originally, and eternally, and for us all, perhaps, eventually, the world is fluid; all things may be shaped according to our imaginings, as if thought were a spontaneous act of creation. But we must train our minds, our innermost spirit, to this; we must contemplate beauty, vitality, awe, to begin the novitiate here in this world which will yield us such marvels in the next. Those pure ice wastes, in which no gross mortal breath had been vented, were the finest possible material for the exalted reverie necessary to bring us near to the margins of the great mystery. In that luminous universe, that vast range of absolute white and intense blue, and in the habiliment of keenly chastened flesh, whittled down to the sparest of existences, I was able to reach out far, far into regions of the spirit that I have seldom encountered since, and I am not sure if any other human, except perhaps some
masters of the East, have ever reached.

  ‘I consider that all the things we think of as unassailable facts—our need for sleep and food and shelter, our imprint and burden upon the land—need not be so. We can sidestep these and enter into another order of existence where the flight of the mind through vast arcs and gulfs is simple and innate. But what we will find there will shatter us all. There will be nothing left but to retreat once more into the safety of a quiet ignorance or illusory metaphysics.

  ‘I have never sought the role of prophet or visionary. I simply record what I have experienced. I will let the words of a true visionary close my story. Like the friend of Mr H.G. Wells’ time traveller, I “saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” ’

  The Connoisseur set down the quarto notebook. ‘You may well imagine,’ he remarked, ‘how, as I read Philip Hazleton’s account, I determined to find out more about him and the other episodes to which he allusively refers. I soon found that his inclusion in the expedition to Spitsbergen was no mere whim of Conway’s, and that much of the rest of his career was very singular indeed. But these accounts, which I have with difficulty pieced together, will have to await another telling.’

  The Rite of Trebizond

  A great cloak of purple was cast upon the western sky, attended with fine aigrettes of scarlet and gold, as the sun deserted this part of the Earth. I stood next to my old friend known as The Connoisseur, watching through the high arched windows in his rooms. We gazed upon the scene for many moments until a dim indigo began to form and veil the ceremony from our profane eyes.

  My friend sighed, and took up again a pale, crumpled envelope, much postmarked, and addressed to him in a brisk, angular hand. ‘Listen to this,’ he said, ‘it’s from Gaspard.’

  This quickened my interest. Colonel Gaspard was, like my friend, a seeker after the curious, but he, instead of pursuing his studies from secluded rooms in a cathedral city, went out into the strangest outposts of the world.

  ‘ “My footsteps are not far behind his,” ’ he read, ‘ “There was a book-barrow on the quay at Mangalia where the smell of ship’s oil and seaweed lingers, and an old man sat behind it looking out through flimsy, crooked glasses in mild expectation of customers. I turned over the battered shabby volumes, finding nothing of interest in the long-dead histories and the flaccid memoirs of courtiers, until my fingers alighted upon something. It was by the man who called himself Essad Bey, printed in his learnt German. The title translates as Myths of the Black Sea. I questioned the bookseller about it, and he described who had sold it to him. A lord, he said, you could tell that from his look and his manner, though he was dressed as a peasant. He thought he caught a boat a few days ago. I am sending word ahead, through my old contacts here.” ’

  The Connoisseur put the letter down on a triangular tray of chased silver, tarnished by age, and beckoned me to an armchair.

  ‘I cannot reproach the boy for leaving England to follow the call of his soul. After all, he has no-one here now, and I am really no more than a chance acquaintance. Probably even I should never have earned his confidence, were it not for my habit of pursuing quaint byways of learning, in this case that of the lost liturgies of ancient churches. But then, the most curious and arcane matters have often come to me from quite respectable and mundane beginnings. All of this came about because I was involved in charting certain legal intricacies of parish boundaries in various parts of England. You know that I am obliged to undertake such work from time to time, for my private means are few. And yet, as it was the cause of one of the rarest encounters I ever had …

  ‘This work on some of the anomalies of the civil and ecclesiastical organisation of land leads me to trespass upon the margins of matters that have eluded general notice throughout the centuries. My impulse was to investigate more deeply, yet my duties did not require it, and my authority did not permit it. And yet I was still drawn to look further, to find more of the secluded preceptories whose history I had chanced upon, which had kept their quiet faith all far for centuries from the public gaze. None of their lands, I found, could easily be reached by any public road or easily-recognised route. They are enclaves in England, enclaves of preserved history.

  ‘I have gone out of my way to find them all, and in each I have encountered a sense of a place out of time. There was a brick and flint house in a clearing in a certain high wood in the Chiltern Hills—its tree-hidden domain was known as a Bronze Age hill fort; but to those with eyes to see, its ramparts were millennia older. There was a grey Norman manor house and church in one of England’s border counties, where the Marcher Lords once defended the rich land against invaders from the West. And another, in a high Northern dale, a small but exquisite survival—a castle retiring behind the safety of its narrow but deep moat, with its legendary black swans that still patrol it. A fourth was close enough to the sea-coast in a part of the country steadily being eroded by the waves to make inundation an eventual possibility. The old abbey grange and its gardens may one day be swallowed up by the waves; if so, a district of the Realm of the Sea will now form an anomaly to be explored by someone other than myself. Each of these, to their neighbours and few chance visitors, might have seemed merely the abodes of reticent and retiring people of sufficient means to keep to themselves and maintain adequate, albeit not munificent, households. Yet each held something more.

  ‘What took me to such remote places as these? To explain that, I must go back a little, to the year the Clerks of the Boundaries gave me the task of reporting upon the matter of extra-parochial districts for certain counties. I was allowed thirteen months to furnish my report, and at first this seemed ample time: but when I reflected that there were at least twenty-one such districts, and that there would be the usual tangle of civil, criminal, ecclesiastical and taxation law to research, to say nothing of the precedents allegedly achieved by “custom & practice”—why, then I knew that I should have much to do to prove myself. My appointment had not been without some small signs of opposition on the part of certain of the Clerks, since I was not in legal practice, as was usual: but my reputation as an antiquarian had swayed matters in my favour, and I was determined to justify the faith placed in me. I was later asked to extend my work to other regions of England, and it was then I encountered the further enclaves I have already mentioned.

  ‘It would be as well, I imagine, to say a little about the nature of extra-parochial districts, since they are quirks of territory which are unlikely to be known to most people. These parcels of land are, as their description suggests, outside of any civil or ecclesiastical parish. Frequently, they are therefore not liable to pay tithes, fees, ground rents, or local taxes. In some cases, more fundamental rights still are claimed, to the extent of absolute exemption from the Common Law, though these are seldom verifiable to any reasonable standard of tangible evidence. It was the Clerks’ ambition, of course, to absorb these anomalous places as fully as possible into the conventional framework of civil administration, either by a soundly-placed challenge to the supposed privileges of the area, or by careful negotiation with the present owner.

  ‘The origins of these curious domains, which seldom contain more than one habitation, are frequently fairly clear, and they may be categorised accordingly. At the outset of my survey of the region with which I had been entrusted, I laid out just such a summary for my own purposes. The nature of the ancient rights claimed could then be gauged, and my time divided accordingly. A swift study of the available literature suggested to me that most of the anomalous lands could be categorised as former abbeys, priories or others with ecclesiastical privileges; former royal residences, royal forests or places with Crown privileges; formerly uninhabited places, either of fen or moor; and some few of unknown provenance.

  ‘The first two of these categories promised to offer some complexities, no doubt, but of a ch
aracter such as is generally encountered where the Church and the Crown have interests: and I had few misgivings about these. The third category could be supposed to offer hardly any difficulty at all, since these were in desolate terrain which had not been encompassed within parishes for the simple reason that they were deemed at the time to be waste land, uninhabitable. The march of science, in the form of improved drainage or more sturdy agriculture, had remedied that, and there was in all probability nothing of a legal nature to stop their incorporation into the nearest parish: although doubtless this would not be the view of the current occupants.

  ‘It was the last category that clearly demanded my first attention. It would be necessary for me to visit these places to determine whether they could, in fact, be placed in one of the other three categories, or whether they would demand more than usual attention. Accordingly, as soon as I had received my formal orders from the Clerks, I set off for the first of these. It was my experiences and discoveries there which were the occasion of my writing, for my own private diversion, a supplementary account to my official report, since they were not, as will readily transpire, the stuff of which the Clerks could be expected to approve.

  ‘The place that I shall call Fineshade was some fourteen miles from the nearest town and, comprised about thirty acres of mixed woodland and pasture, with a ditch-stream running along most of its eastern edge and rising ground forming a natural bank to the west and north. The main approach was via its own unmade road from the south. It was a cold, brittle day when I made my way there, dimmed by the shadow of deep, formidable cloud, and permeated by a heavy silence. I covered the distance from the little, insignificant town, in only a few hours, keeping careful watch for the landmarks that would tell me I had entered the domain I sought. The Clerks’ powers, as invested in me, were wide, and I knew I might go where I pleased in the execution of my duties: but it is not every landowner who readily recognises this, and a certain amount of caution upon first going into places with such immemorial and jealously-guarded privileges, is entirely proper.