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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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HE was perhaps the strangest little old gentleman that had ever scrambled up into a rear seat in a tourist coach. His trousers were quaint in cut and of such cloth as could only have come from the darkest corner of the darkest shelf in the most antediluvian tailor's stall. His gray waterproof came down to his ankles, and was two sizes too big for the puny little body within. On the hasp of the smooth worn clasp that buckled it under his wizened chin the lion and unicorn of the first Charles were still thinly outlined.
His hat, Jove! that marvellous wide-awake, bore the marks of having been brim-tilted into twenty fashions, and was withered into a dozen hues of heaven only knew how many winters. And the old carl himself who stood inside and under that extraordinary wardrobe was thin, and lean, and crabbed; spindle-shanked and bent-backed, with crooked fingers and age-white hands upon which the veins rose up like the ivy strands upon the ash trunks in December.
His face was yellow and cunning, and his strong gray eyebrows met pent-house-wise across the bridge of his eagle nose, and under those eaves his eyes were small, sharp and bright, and twinkled as brightly when he spoke as big stars on a frosty evening in midwinter. His hair was gray, his beard frayed and jutted from his chin—as thin and ragged and as infinitely suggestive of long stress of weather as the outermost hawthorns on some storm-swept thicket by the sea. He was in faith the quaintest little fellow that ever paid half-a-crown for a round on a tourist drag, and as I mounted the ladder behind him with my face close to those infinitely darned russet hose of his and silver-buckled shoes, I could not help wondering in my mind what had brought such an ancient and shabby gentleman to such a conventional outing as that in which I was about to take part.
We were bound for a circular drive through some of the historic places of the western coast. There were twenty-eight of us, and a more cheerful, good humoured set surely never went out to combine an aesthetic admiration of the beautiful with the consumption of unlimited bottled beer and ham sandwiches.
Our guide was a jovial gentleman in a brilliant drab suit, with a large, well-opened red rose in his button-hole, a sky-blue necktie adorned by a diamond pin, and moreover blessed with a volubility like that of a fishwife on a Saturday night. There was nothing, great or small, he could not and did not discourse upon; now it was the earliest history of some ancient monolith we were passing on the road, and then he would drop by easy h-less gradients into a sure recipe for curing pip in chickens or corruption in parochial councils; from pigs to patriarchs, and jobbery to ancient giants he clattered like his horses' hoofs, without a pause. Next to him upon the box seat sat a mild curate, who beamed benignly on us laity below and especially upon an affable lady who had come forth for the day's outing in grass green silk with a pack of moss rose buds in her black bonnet, and victualled with a capacious handbag, from which she produced an indefinite quantity of stale refreshments, consuming them with as much steady persistence as though she had joined us to clear up the arrears of a dozen forgotten luncheons. There was her spouse beside her, and half a score other substantial tradesmen, two weak-eyed young men from behind the counter who shared nuts and gingerbread with a couple of giggling damsels of like employment; there were the usual pair of amatory beings without whom no such collection of human beings as ours is complete; but of any capacity to appreciate the places we were visiting, or of any nice understanding of the silent story of the hills around, there was not in that merry brakeful a trace.
And I am not sure that I myself had any right to claim exception from this general pervading matter-of-factness. I had come out just to say I had seen Finmart and Flenapp and Beneraird and the Craig looming like a gray steeple away on the broad blue water—to bask and smoke, and in truth I took, during the early part of that drive, only a moderately intellectual interest in the autocratic archaeology of our guide or of those traditions of fallen heroes and ancient battles of which he told. What interested me much more was the personality of that little fellow at my elbow; he had a quaint mesmeric effect on my soul, curious to feel and impossible to describe. Whenever my eyes met his I was conscious of a start and tremor as though of a slight electric shock, and yet it did not repel but rather drew me towards him. At first I had thought him a harmless eccentric, but it soon appeared he had a wonderful store of curious learning, indeed I never knew a man with more particular and accurate information regarding history. In spite of this he evinced small interest in half a dozen striking places we visited, and it was only when we came to a reputed battlefield of very mythical times indeed that my friend brightened up, slipping off the coach before any of us and hobbling away in that long gray cloak of his with truly curious eagerness.
I have good cause to remember that battlefield! It was a gorsy, undulating flat, at the seaward mouth of a deep glen between the converging hills but there was nothing warlike, to my prosaic eyes about it. Not even the truculent eloquence of the gentleman with his red rose and the blue necktie, could mar the pleasant repose of that unconsciously famous meadow, with the frothy river prattling a mile away amongst the alders, and a long slant of warm sunshine making purple and golden patchwork of the great hills above us; and the affable lady sat down on a stone and produced another ham sandwich from her cheap German reticule, and the lovers went behind a heather bank and proceeded to renew their vows of eternal constancy under the insufficient shade of a blue umbrella. The few thirsty ones for knowledge who still drank of our guide's eternal fountain of information, grew fewer and fewer. I had not been of them, and after wandering about a little threw myself down under a whin bush to enjoy the quiet sunshine and watch the scattered figures strolling about the peaceful flat.
For my part, I did not in the least believe a battle had ever taken place there. I am not sure I even believed with any very substantial belief in the bare existence of the bloody Atha, the "Terror of Heroes," as he was picturesquely called, or the giant Ferouth, who were said to have taken a leading part in it—the sun was warm and comfortable on my legs, and the sixpenny cigar I was smoking was exceedingly mild and well-rolled and better than might have been expected at the price—thus thinking I turned over on the dry, short August grass to better watch the erratic wanderings of the little antiquarian—and there, jutting out of the turf in which it was deeply embedded, scarcely a dozen inches from my face, was the head of a beautifully polished green stone axe! It was a find such as might have delighted the most experienced of treasure seekers in these fields, and coming as it did in the midst of my scepticism, it gave me a thrill of pleasure and gratification. Very gently I pulled it from its mossy setting and cleaned and smoothed it, handling with a new-born excitement that suggestive trophy of an ancient world, admiring the tremendous weight of it, the perfect evenness of the polish which was now just as it had been when it left some infinitely remote lapidary's wheel, and in fact that lump of jade fascinated and bewitched my mind in a way even now I can hardly understand. I thirsted to see the long-dead owner of the strong arm that had swung it—I let my imagination weave a wonderful history for a deep notch conspicuous on the crescent rim—I had not half done fondling and cleaning that trophy when the signal was given for us to collect that the coach might start again.
Very carefully I wrapped the axe head up in my handkerchief and soon found myself sitting on the back seat again with my little friend in gray. He was as despondent now as I was cheerful, shrinking into the depth of his ancient cloak and pulling his storm-frayed hat over his eyes, the image of chagrin and disappointment. I rallied him on this and soon, thinking to cheer him, told him a curious bit of antiquity had come my way on yonder battlefield—"I had found an axe head which was two thousand years old if it was a day!" As I said it a spasm of surprise shook the gray bundle at my side, the antiquarian's head suddenly emerged from the folds, his bead eyes flashed, and he yelled rather than asked "An axe head?"
"Ay!" I said, "an axe head without a handle."
"Green—green is it?" he gasped.
"Green," I answered, "yes, as green as the sea in March."
"Oh, Shee an Gannon! and has it a notch in the edge—a notch, so—so—twice as big as my thumb nail?"
"Look for yourself," I answered, and out came the great wedge of polished green stone.
The little man saw it and flushed saffron yellow from the top of his wrinkled forehead to as far down his withered neck as his crumpled Georgian stock would let me see. He threw out his arms, thereby knocking the felt hat of the amatory gentlemen who sat in the seat in front of us over his eyes just as he was raising for the twentieth time his lady's hand to his lips under the friendly cover of a copy of that morning's Dundee Meteor. He stepped back, and in so doing trod heavily upon the mild curate's toe (he had come down from his place upon the box), subsiding into that churchman's lap, and sending wideawake and Murray spinning out into the hedge. In fact, if I had not grabbed the little fellow by the belt I do verily think he would have been over himself, amongst the wheels and dust below, so immense was his surprise and wonderment.
Well! we stopped for the curate's hat, the lovers adjusted their ruffled feathers, and the affable lady, who had gone into incipient hysterics, took another ham sandwich, after which we proceeded once more towards the turning point on our excursion. But nothing now cared my little friend for wayside beauties or the suspicious glances of his fellow travellers. He seemed in a fever of excitement to get hold of that axe-head. He startled me, he was so vehement and improbable. He began by muttering that he had been looking for it off and on "for a thousand years," and then, that he had searched every collection in Europe for the stone, and spent long days amid the dusty lumber of museums, and ploughed up a hundred ancient battle fields to no purpose—"and then to think that an outsider—a wastral country fellow had found it under his elbow!" He wrung his hands and asked me what I would take for the precious thing?
That was not the way to make a bargain. Had he been a little more composed and cautious I am not certain he might not have had the axe for nothing, but his extreme solicitude to own it roused my curiosity; I shook my head at his fantastic offers, and the higher he bid the more firm became my resolve not to sell it lightly. I would not even let him handle the toy for fear he might possess himself of it by some sleight of hand, and so we haggled and chaffered until the next point of our journey was reached, and the little man was still as far as ever from the object of his ambition.
We had pulled up in front of a green and white gate, giving admittance to a tea garden, laid out under the sheer slope of a limestone crag. This crag had in its face the entrance to a famous and extensive cavern; it was to see this we had come. We had also come, I learned, to take tea in this cockle-shell Arcadia. On either side of the gateway were seductive notices to the effect that boiling water was provided free within, that ginger beer was to be had, and that fresh whelks and shrimps were provided daily. The little green tables, under their scanty arbours, were set out ready; there was a good deal of greasy paper lying about, and a general smell of stale bread and butter and discarded cheese-rind pervaded the place. It was all extremely vulgar.
I had no heart to accept the pressing invitation of a slip-shod waiter to sit down and watch the affable lady devouring shrimps and bath-buns, or to join the young commercial gentlemen in their ginger beer and cheap cheroots, or even to emulate the accommodating disposition of our mild ecclesiastic, who was dipping the unethereal whelk into bad vinegar and dropping him down his capacious throat, in the centre of an admiring group, as though the accomplishment had been part of his canonical education.
I wandered apart from these revellers, and presently got into the little zig-zig gravel path, lined on either side with the ginger-beer bottles and empty whelk-shells of countless feasts that twined up through a ragged shrubbery to the mouth of the big cave, and wherever I went that little man stuck close to me. In one place, indeed, where the undergrowth was a trifle dense, he held on to my sleeve as though fearful I might escape from him in the tangle. So we came to the cave itself, and handing out our sixpence each for admission, were ushered into the mysterious place by the flippant young lady who sat on a stool at the portal.
It was a solemn stately chamber, though the ceaseless tide of excursions had done all that was possible to rob it of natural dignity. The high-vaulted roof sprang from the distant side walls in sombre arches of jagged rock, like the pillar and buttress of a cathedral. Under foot the sand was deep and soundless, the fraying and dust of many ages, and all down the sides, thickly inscribed with the patronymics of plebeian too-much-pencilled moderns, were a double row of tallow candles that guttered and dripped in their iron sockets, making greasy stalactites on the walls, and dimly showing the ghostly black shadows here and there which indicated the entrances to narrower and deeper passages into the crevices of the rock.
I was always adventurous in a cautious way, and went round the great central cavern, exploring and investigating, and wherever I went the little man was at my heels, whining for the green jade axe, and fidgetting and vexing me. At last it came to a head, and I turned on him just as we got to the farthest extremities of the cavern, and were almost hidden in the deep, shadowy mouth of a great inlet.
"Look here, sir," I said pulling the old axe-head out of my pocket, with a touch of anger in my voice. "I don't believe this thing of stone is worth half the breath and eloquence you have spent in trying to wheedle it out of me. I will tell you what I will do. I will give it to you for nothing provided you will leave me in peace afterwards and will answer one question I put to you."
"Ay! Ay!" cried the fellow, his face beaming, "it is well enough for the leaving alone. Only give me the jade and I will be off, never fear—but the wish?" and his face dropped; "oh, be careful."
"I have not forgotten," I laughed, "the first two wishes of each holder of this stone, I think you said some little time ago, wished while he holds it thus, must be gratified. Well, then, here goes; I am going to wish."
"Have a care, sir; have a care! You know not what you do," screamed the diminutive man.
"Oh, nonsense!" I said, disgusted with his mendacity and credulity. "I am not going to ask for anything wonderful, like a bewitched prince in a fairy book, but just an ordinary every day question. I want to know, sir, why you want this axe-head?"
It was a question I thought which would not have embarrassed a cockroach, and yet that wrinkled tourist before me cowered back as I uttered these words as though they were some hideous spell, and stood there gasping and trembling in the twilight of the shadows, with his face working and fingers twitching in a fashion pitiful to behold. For a minute or two he could not even speak, and when he did his voice was dry and cracked and sounded somewhere from down in his Tudor shoes, so that I in turn started with the infection of his pain and chagrin.
"Out of an hundred thousand questions," he groaned, wringing his hands, "you have asked the only one I feared to hear you ask! And yet it is so, and it was so, and it must be so—I have no power to gainsay you. You really desire to know for what I desire that axe head!"
"Really and sincerely, and I and the jade do not part company until I fully understand, sir, what you must admit is your very strange conduct in this matter."
"Well, then, come with me, and on their heads be the mischief of this afternoon who put that stone in your way and that accursed wish on your lips," and signing me to follow he turned straight round upon his heels and strode into the darkness of the cavern. I am not of a nervous disposition and I was twice the height and strength of that crazy little fellow if he intended to play me a false trick, so without another thought I went after him. At first it was easy enough to follow. The distant shine of the candles cast a faint yellow radiance on the ragged roof, the slanting, sandy, yellow floor and the grim gray walls seamed with strange veins of harder stuff that caught the light and stood out spectral in the gloom in the strangest filigree—the distant lights shone on these for a space so that I could just notice the walls converging, the roof coming down, and the fantastic figure of the little man in front now almost blocking up that strange defile, and then we turned some corner or other, and the shine was lost and there was not a vestige of light to go by but a dim, pale glimmer here and there where some jut or hanging pinnacle of rock aloft caught from another rock the faint distant glow of the upper world.
In a minute we were enveloped in the profoundest darkness. I staggered and plunged forward, sinking to my ankles at every step, down a steep black slope, and at this stage of the journey, it must be confessed, had it been I would gladly have gone back, but as I staggered and plunged, and knocked up against first one rugged wall of that detested burrow and then the other, anon coming down upon my knees, the slope was so steep it seemed to me that to go back were more difficult than to go forward.
And while I debated it with the perspiration thick upon my forehead and something that was not a blessing behind my teeth on that philosopher, back he came. I felt the flap of his threadbare coat like a bat's wings in the profound dark, the hot sniff of his breath in my face, and the next minute his lean old hand was upon my wrist and he was asking, "Was I afraid? Did I desire to return?" For the life of me I could not bring myself to say I was, but, "Go on, sir!" I cried; "even if this were the road to hell as certainly in fact as it is in seeming, I would not turn back from it now."
Without more parley he led me forward, and at a marvellous pace considering the circumstances. Although it was inky black above and below, without a glimmer of light or a ray to guide ourselves by, yet we were going at a swift walk minute after minute which, such was my guide's excitement, occasionally, broke into a run when the ground underfoot seemed firmer and freer from loose material.
Down we went, ever downwards. I could feel, as it were, the sharp facets of the cavern on either side brush by my cheek as we ran recklessly forward; not a sound broke the tremendous stillness of that dreadful road but the scuffle of our hurrying feet upon the soft dust of unnumbered ages, and, now and then, the thin tinkle of water falling somewhere. Down we went, and it grew warmer and warmer as we descended. At one place my guide checked suddenly. "And have a care here," he cried, "so! step as I step;" and in an instant we were edging gently over a long smooth slab of rock that bridged some hideous abyss. I know it, for a thousand fathoms below I heard the wail of an unknown river running down to a nameless sea, and I felt the wet dead vapour, bitter and pungent with strange earth salts, drift up across my face. Then on again, as fast as we could foot it, over a better road that no longer fell away so sharply, and in a mild black climate that was more like a sultry starless night in June than aught else I can think of.
We had gone like that some two miles or so, with not a sound to cheer us but the pant of our labouring breaths, when again I heard the noise of falling water, but this time, not as previously, far under foot, but on a level with us; a dim, sullen, confused roar, that came in ever-swelling volume out of the night ahead, and, full of terror from the first, rolled down upon us presently in more and more majestic thunder until the very ground under our feet seemed humming to the thousand voices of a great cascade, and the very air as it passed our lips was thrilling with infernal harmony.
We came in a minute to the margin of the lake into which the midnight flood was plunging, and there an ancient skin coracle, I knew it by the feel, was waiting for us—a cockle-shell boat that one would scarcely venture in upon a placid salmon pool. The ancient man took his place and, obedient to his order, I put one foot upon the inner keel, then hesitated.
"What! afraid at last," he screamed in my ear.
"No!" I cried, "not yet, old fellow," and in I got.
He rowed me out into what seemed a vast subterranean estuary with a starless dome of rock above and measureless abysses of lapping, chilly water underneath. It was as black as midnight on every hand, starting point and haven were alike invisible, there was no shore to that infernal sea, we were rowing down a solid plane of material night and it was quaint and dreadful to hear the gurgle of the water against our sides and the short sniffing breath of that little rower as he dipped with nervous strokes his invisible oars into the invisible ocean.
And all the time the bellowing cannonades of that tremendous unseen waterfall were tearing the palpitating air about us, and rollings down low along the cold black waves in mighty gusts of discord, and vibrating and howling in the iron sky above till my breath came short and thick with the stress of it, and my tired ears were dazed and deadened under that accursed tumult. We rowed for an unknown time across the Stygian pool, now in a draught of gusty wind, coming up from the open doors of the nether world, that made our cockle-shell dance and fret upon the inky waves, and then enwrapped in close, fine spray from the great fountain yonder.
I could but wait, and wonder, and hope, and sure enough presently the great sound fell away behind us, the water lapped more gently against our sides, and soon even that sound ceased again and nothing was to be heard but the measured dip of the oars and great black rain drops falling gloomily, one by one, from the roof above into the silent waters around us. I waited, and wondered, and hoped, and in another minute I felt in the air that we were near a shore, and then, with a gentle grind, our prow ran up upon the beach!
Now, if what has gone before is wonderful, that which follows is more wonderful still. The little man making the boat fast to something that clanked like a copper staple in the rock, took me by the hand and led me up a stony landing place and about three hundred yards down a sandy tortuous passage, of which I could now and then touch the side with an outstretched arm. We must have gone about that distance when it flashed upon me with a throe of pleasure that there was a suspicion of light in the air, though I could not even see whence it came, and at once my heart set off beating wildly. I held my peace and waited, and in another minute a tender ethereal radiance, a fine veil of blue haze was resting like fairy cobweb on a jut of rock above the level of my head. It was the first light I had seen in all that hideous travel, and I welcomed it with a heartfelt fervour of thankfulness. Another turn or two and the light was shining strong and clear on the rocks, and on the smooth printless sand under foot, but it was not daylight for certain, nor lamp-light, nor any light I knew of; it blossomed silently on those gray walls in the ghostliest, deadliest fashion imaginable, and along with it came such a quaint fine breath of ancient air, such an eddy of a wind long bottled in those wondrous hollows of the earth, that I turned sick and faint, and leaning a space against a rock undid my Birmingham collar stud. Phew! it was like the smell of a mighty bunch of dead flowers, and my blood began beating in my head, and my tongue went dry; perhaps I swooned for a minute, and when I came to, the first thing that caught my eyes was the outline of my friend.
He was standing stock still at the last turn in the full blaze of the most wonderful radiance I had ever seen in my life. Nothing but a magic brush in the hand of a master could convey an idea of what he looked like fixed trembling there in the shining mouth of the tunnel, his clothes all ashine with a shine of water falling in moonlight, his elfin locks lifting to the dead tinctured gust that blew behind that sweet haze, his lean old face streaked with an agony of wonder, and fear, and reverence, and his black shadow in ebony on the purple rocks behind him. But his eyes—oh his eyes were wonderful to look at, and his mouth was twitching, and his hands were grasping vaguely at the fold of his shabby cloak—for the life of me I would not have foregone seeing what he saw, and I went boldly forward.
How can the poor monochrome pencil describe the subdued magnificence of the scene which burst upon me, or convey the splendid pageantry of that silent picture spread out before my face.
It was, I saw with a thrill of terror and delighted wonder, a noble amphitheatre in the deep mid-earth, a stately recess of infinite dimensions, with a black vaulted roof, fathoms high above, and under foot a great plain of golden sand that faded away, ever gently rising, into the far, still twilight of that mighty den. Overhead, the black gloom of the rocky sky, whereof the great hanging bluffs and cornices were like widespread thunderclouds, was spangled with constellations of strange crystals that twinkled and shimmered redder than Mars, whiter than Venus, greener than Uranus when he lies low down over the sea; and below—scattered right away along the dusky vistas were blocks, and seats, and pillars of white stone, and gray, and black, and red, all littered here and there—tier on tier of resting places in those acres of dim gloom. And right in the mid of all—flushing the jagged heaven from verge to verge, sending a faint light like dawn down to the remotest depth of that place, was a wonderful thing indeed. I shaded my eyes and looked at it. Out of a cleft in the earth a natural gas was jetting three feet into the air, in a strong eternally burning fountain, and as the magnificent opal spray of that silent, scentless flame fell perpetually in mighty globules, glistening themselves like meteors, they made a basin of lavender fire that filled a hollow twenty feet across, and ebbed somewhere through the sand as quickly as it was replenished, and neither got larger nor less, but slowly wavered and heaved and trembled in its veiled loveliness, and the glowing apex of the vast amphitheatre cast from its glistening ripples long rays of light above and below.
And that was not all. Those soft beams of fairy radiance made twilight over all the leagues of yellow nether sand, and—I noted it with a tremor of fear and wonder—near and far the great hall was thronged with the dry, lifeless forms of long dead men and women. There was nothing unlovely in them—I hardly understand how I knew they were dry—they were just as they had been in life, tall, strong men, and fair, light-haired women, scores and hundreds of them, all in groups and gangs about the daises of the rocks, sitting, standing, and leaning, as though they were all puppets that one great, dramatic hand had sorted for a splendid puppet show; comely, handsome and tall, clothed in the varied magnificence in which they had died thousands of yours ago, the flush of health and feeling on their checks and the light of a wonderful secret life in those thousands of sightless eyes that gazed from every quarter so dreamily into the molten glow of the great mid lake, and yet they were dead—obviously and certainly dead—and as brittle as tinder, it seemed to my wondering senses.
If I wrote for a hundred years, I could give you no adequate conception of that marvellous picture. I gazed and gazed and gazed in awe and delight, and so strung were my nerves and so confused my commonplace mind that when that strange custodian of the dead at my side took me by the hand and whispered in my ear "Come! they know you are here and will speak to you"—I went forward as though I had expected so much all along.
First we went by where a group of bards were lying on their elbows gazing at the light, and as I approached the white-bearded chief my presence seemed to thaw the stiffness in him; he smiled and bent over the silver harp in front and, untouched, it began to play with such extraordinary softness and melody that I stopped spellbound. First it played meltingly, and the soft melody was like the very breath of love itself, and then it played low, and my heart went down chord by chord, until I was near dying of its exquisite sadness. Anon the strings trembled to a louder measure, and instantly, my cold modern blood was coursing in my veins, and as those notes rose in proud deep cadences on the still air, the very incense of valour, the birth verse of patriotism, my checks flushed and my fingers tingled, and my eyes I knew were bright, my courage rose, I was, I felt, a hero for that moment, the co-mate of gods and heroes—and then the music stopped.
"Good!" said the old bard, in dreamy monotone, "the harp of Ullin Grey-hair has not yet lost its cunning!" and all the lesser bards around him, without taking their half-shut eyes from off the fire, nodded dreamily.
Next we picked our way by sleeping groups of heroes, mighty, tremendous men, who slept with all their ancient wounds still open, their heads upon their arms, their naked weapons still in their fists, their bodies wrapt in rough gold and wolf skins, sullen, stalwart, princely fellows, everyone who dozed and gazed as though this were but some midnight camp and they still dreamed and listened for reveille; we stepped over the legs of princes and round by the fair brown heads of stately maids and matrons, and everywhere I went a vapour of life from my life settled on those sleepers, they stretched their dry limbs and turned over on the sand and half rose as though each were eager to speak to me.
At one place a splendid girl was lying on the ground, her head on the knees of a dead chieftain and his hand tight held in hers, while behind them, sullen and scowling into the blaze, was a big dark fellow leaning against a column of gray stone. There was a stab in her bosom and another in her lover's, and I had never seen sorrow so hard frozen into a fair face as it was into hers. I stopped and looked at her, I could not help it, and in a minute she sat up, and started and stared, and then burst out without preface or explanation—"He killed me, he, Black Duchomar there against the rock. Look! look! the red blood of Cathba still runs from his sword. He came to me so in Tura's cave and told me he had killed my lover," screamed the pale girl, with splendid gestures, "and my heart broke, and I was mad, and I asked to see Cathba's blood, and put the sword against a rock and threw myself upon the point and like the flame of a taper, when the strong blast roars, my soul went out into the night wind," and back she sank upon the chieftain's knee, gently murmuring to herself "out, out into the night wind, out beyond the reach of dark Duchomar," while two great tears were shining on her dead checks, I saw, in the fire-shine.
A little further on, past many dimly glittering gangs of silent warriors, was a group upon another sandy tier, a gray-haired king bending in grief over the drowned form of a tender daughter; the green sea-foam seemed still wet upon her pale lips, and her soft, damp drapery clung to her like another skin. The old king felt my presence, and began to chafe those long, fine hands, calling constantly on "Daura! Daura!" his "heart and his life," and cursing an unknown traitor; but this wild and incoherent grief would not allow me to clearly understand him. Next them lay Ma-ronnan and Aldo—so my guide named them in a whisper—mighty adventurers, side by side on a yard of yellow sand, for whom the world had once been all too narrow; and Cormac, the son of Arth, leaning sleepily upon the spear, one thrust of which had changed the fate of kingdoms; and long Artho and many others whom we passed in silence. Next them again slumbered Ninona, "the soft blushing daughter of Torman," so one of her dead companions sighed as my glance fell upon her, and next Brassolis and Grudar and many stately groups, some dozing placidly in soft, indefinite contentment, and others itching with deathless wounds and an unslaked resentment whereof they thirsted to tell me. And, oh, the wild, fierce passions of which that place was record-house and my ears reluctant receptacle. There a damsel started up in our path, and screamed—screamed right in my face, and pointed to two warriors lying all in a tumble in the violet shadow. "I am unhappy, Colma, and I went out to meet Salgar," she cried, like all of them plunging into the mid of her sorrow at once. "Salgar, whom my brother of pride hated. And the moor was dark and dreary, and the rain beat in my face, and the night wind whistled in the leafless boughs above me. I came to the meeting place and 'Salgar,' I cried gently. 'Salgar,' but nothing answered. I moved out upon the moss and cried 'Salgar' again, until the black owls in the whistling thickets mocked me. I moved again, and tripped and fell!—look, look!" she cried, and held up two crimson hands, "they had met—'twas over their dead bodies in the dead midnight that I fell into a pool of my brother's blood!" And with a sob and a shiver the maid sank back upon the sand.
"I had no lovers," laughed a tall, pale figure leaning against a column a little way off, and turning I saw the speaker—Jove! such a sweet and queenly woman, all in white, with a white, proud face staring at me out of the gloom, and great fierce lamp-like eyes burning with a terrible light, and loose brown hair about her bare ivory bosom, a lovely girl, indeed, not born to come within any touch of roughness—and then again she laughed in bitter mood and twined her white fingers—"I had no lovers. I was a prince's child. Kings courted me, but I was proud and coy, and wrapped me in my chastity; then one night the Dane came, and every step upon the oaken stairway in our stronghold smoked with my kinsmen's blood—oh!—they lay butchered in our hall like swine in the shambles, and I was prize to Arngrim, of Thord—Arngrim, the Drunkard!" It seemed for a minute she had finished, then she flared up again. "Look at him! Was ever such a dog born before of a woman?" I looked and there asleep on his elbow at her feet was as wicked a ruffian, as black, scowling a North Sea rover, all in dirty banqueting finery, as could be imagined. "For many days I was thrall to that hound, and toyed in secret—like the coward that I was—with the white blade hidden in my hair, and then one night of furious revelry, in my father's hall, before all his drunken captains and comrades he made me—pale, proud me—drink damnation to my kindred out of my father's skull. That night, as we lay abed together, I stabbed Arngrim of Thord, Arngrim the Drunkard—ay, beast, was it not so?" and as that sweet tall lady spurned the rover with her foot, he grunted and woke and sat up, and drowsily nodding, opened his thieved finery, uncovering thereby his vast brown chest, and pointed with sleepy indifference to the black lozenge-shaped stab that had let out his wicked soul. The next minute he was drunkenly sleeping again on his elbow.
"Now tread lightly," said the philosopher at my side, "and, whatever you do, keep tight hold of that greenstone axe, for we come near to him who owned it, and the explanation you asked for."
Sure enough a few stops brought us to a patch of brighter sand than any, whereon the shine of that wonderful fire seemed to have spread a fine purple coverlet, and there, in the centre of a great ring of fallen warriors, sitting moodily on a block of white stone, his chin in one hand and the other hanging down with headless haft of an axe in it, was the handsomest fellow of all in that wonderful valley. His shoulders were vast, his size was immense, his shadow went back a furlong into the gloom of the cave. With a feeling of wonder and awe I approached, stepping over the buskined legs of his courtiers, and standing before him bewitched by the handsome passionate face I forgot all about the treasure and my guide's warning, and in a minute my eyes met those of the dead king.
How can I say effectively what followed? I laugh at the bare idea of conveying in a few lines the crowded emotions of the next few seconds! That glance of mine vivified the king. He rose from the ground like a green withy when you bend its red point to the marsh and let it fly; the green jade was snatched from me in a trice, and, as I leant back with a yell I could not control, the king fitted it for the first time in two thousand years to its haft in his other hand.
Then, armed, he glared round, and I can compare his look to nothing but that of a famished tiger, who finds himself suddenly in the midst of a drove, such a magnificent picture of heroic bloodthirstiness I never saw, and what made it the more terrible was that all that den seemed to know he was armed, and the most astounding sounds of fear and consternation, came welling from every point. It was like the sigh of the pine woods when the thunder is coming up the valley, or the low groaning of ten thousand wounded men lying untended on some midnight battlefield. But before I could grasp the measure of that murmur—in perhaps two seconds from the time the axe was wrested from me—the king was ready to begin his "slaying-stir." I saw the green jade flash through a glittering parabola against the dark shadows beyond, and be lost in the gloom for a moment, the next minute it was hurtling through the violet air, straight at the head of a bulky warrior not two foot from me.
Perhaps the king was a little stiff or out of practice, or perhaps the warrior moved a trifle. Be that as it may, the axe lit harmlessly with a furious thud on the rock behind striking a volcano of sparks and smoke from the hard granite, and in a second I had picked it up! Then I did a thing I have often regretted, a thing unworthy of my mettle, I wished the second wish that stone had the power to gratify. It was a commonplace and plebeian desire, and I can only say in excuse that it came spontaneously to my lips, and my courage had not time to revise it, but as I held that ancient battle-bolt in my hand I said aloud, "I wish—I wish I were well out of this!"
The result was as astounding as everything else that wonderful day. As those words left my lips, my feet lifted from the ground, and I swung out horizontal, like the needle of a compass, the light dimmed down, the perpetual dead-leaf-smelling draught of that great hall grew suddenly into a tornado, and on it, like a straw in a hurricane, I was hurtled along, I felt myself lurch and swerve as we took the backward sinuosities of the subterranean passage, I felt the mists of the nether lake like a cold hand drawn across my face, and the thunder of the stupendous waterfalls sound in one single infernal intonation, and then I was going up, up, like a javelin through the blackness, and the next minute I was gently disgorged on to the soft sand of the familiar outer cavern above the tea garden!
My head spun, my senses reeled, I staggered to the mouth and there lay the fair open country, green and gold in the sunshine, and in the thickets the thrushes were singing, and the gray smoke curled from distant cottage tops; a smocked ploughman was whistling as he went afield, and chubby, rosy little lassies were, playing in the meadows down below—could it be fact—was this truly the outer world again? I passed my hand across my face and went out, and as I did so a voice said in my ear—"Your umbrella, sir, you have forgotten it." And then the voice went on—"There will be fourpence to pay; our cloak-room charge is twopence a day, and you left this here yesterday afternoon."
Truly I had come back to the land of the living, and I paid my fourpence, and gently declining a carpet-slippered waiter's insinuating suggestions of rest and refreshments in the gardens below walked into the nearest town with my chin upon my chest and my head full of the strangest visions of unfinished terror and beauty.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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