Devil's Tor (47 page)

Soon he came upon the scene of Drapier's death.

The ground around was much trodden by iron-shod boots, but otherwise all was as it had been yesterday, nor was the day unlike. Very metaphysical, accordingly, seemed to him the disappearance of that crushed form. … He never halted, but still pressed upwards, step by step putting the limit of his last ascension behind him.

At the very top the breeze was livelier, and the dense mists constantly went past him, as on a journey. He stood, cigar yet in mouth, just inside the edge of the hill’s crest, looking quietly about him. Quite quickly, Ingrid Fleming's still, sitting form arrested his whole attention. She was on a stump of weathered rock, with her back to the sea of white that suggested and hid the open south lands. No one was with her. Her profile was towards him, but she was not very close, so that at first he found nothing unnatural in her poise. There was no need for her to have seen him yet.

He would not advance on her till he had taken in, from where he stood, the rest of his surroundings. He looked west, and the ragged evacuated site of the stack was shut off from him by a long, flat granite block, one of two within the shifting proscenium of his vision. It was plain what they were, and where the remains of the hole must be. …

His gaze returned to the girl, in her grey mackintosh. She had never moved, and at last it struck him that all could not be quite right with her. Surely it was with an abnormal fixity that she was staring at whatever was straight before her, which the intervening block prevented himself from seeing. Her face was dead-white, too, and like a mask for its changeless relaxed calm. Yet she could hardly be in a faint, since the mere retention of her seat would demand a muscular effort. It was very low to the ground. The knuckles of the hand of one hanging arm were actually touching; but the other hand was loosely closed on her lap. She sat slightly bent forward.

He took a few tentative steps towards her, and then realised that her state was one of trance, or something very like it. From inside her bent fingers he saw peeping forth a stone, that at once he knew could only be Arsinal's original treasure from Tibet, which they had never seen since. For this girl had had it, in her possession, and what other stone should she be holding?—while Drapier, likewise, had been grasping its fellow at death... and not improbably he as well had been in a trance, so otherwise incomprehensibly to throw away his life. But this present spectacle was painful to watch and rather terrible to understand. Some real or imagined apparition must be standing up there in front of her. It was as if he himself were again in contact with a spirit.

When she recovered, would she reveal to him the thing she had been seeing?—for ask her, he never would. He wished not even to seem to have been near her at any time... and so again he retreated. Now he sought that side of the slab which hitherto he had not seen. The broken entrance to the wrecked tomb should be there, and in its direction her set, questionless gaze rested. …

He saw a long fissure in the ground, running parallel with the length of the slab. It ended, just before his feet, in a broadening and deepening, that spoke of a staircase, but no longer was one. No technical gang could ever reopen it. It was hardly essential that it should be reopened, seeing that its ghostly inhabitants could still slip through! The neighbouring soil had been all tormented by the earthquake.

Very positively, it was uncanny, this spot and this experience in a fog. Right underneath his feet was the home of Arsinal's second stone, whither Drapier, his
accidental
acquaintance, had by a long chain of
accident
descended, not for that purpose,
accidentally
to bring it back to daylight after God knew how many tens of thousands of years. And almost immediately afterwards he had died. But now a haunting had begun, and that girl behind his back was a present victim. …

How long should her seizure persist? How much longer then would she need for restoration to her common senses, before he might considerately address her? For of this overtaking she must speak herself, if she desired, but certainly her mother's proposition must be made known to her, and Arsinal's arrival, and Copping's new attitude towards a meeting. So, if it were an hour, he must wait. He turned round to her once more, and saw no horror in her face. The trance must run its course.

He returned to the slab's east, and perched himself on its edge, dangling his legs, while keeping a light watch on the girl by periodically twisting his neck towards her. An instinct of delicacy denied his staring at her defencelessness for all the time. He faced the way by which he had come up, but the route was veiled. During some minutes he pulled grimly at his smoke, and eyed the procession of the mists and tried to think of nothing. …

Soon, however, an unaccountable lethargy, foreign to his temperament and impossible to withstand, seized upon him with an abruptness that gave no time for measures against it. Nearly at once, it seemed, his eyes became glued, and his senses stupefied. The hand holding the cigar dropped relaxed towards the ground, though the cigar was still held. …

He roused himself violently to sit erect, but now was seeing differently. The stupor had passed as suddenly as it had come, he was wide awake again, yet this new alertness was applying to other things; he was in other surroundings, and being confronted by other images. It was night, not day, and the fogs were gone.

It was no kind of blindness, for the sky was really of night, and filled with magnificent stars. A perpetual noise of rushing waters came up from below, but the darkness prevented his seeing to the valley. Penetrating the sound, an intermittent bellowing excited his ears, as of angry bulls, perhaps off the Tor, but still not far away. The bellowing was fiercer and more menacing than the challenge of any savage cattle within his experience.

High in the sky, midway between zenith and south horizon, above and behind the girl's form, that still showed darkly, a gleaming blue star, curiously like a lamp for its brightness and steadiness, first drew his attention by its superiority of splendour over all the rest, then retained it by the fact of its motion. Rather languidly it was passing through its immediate neighbours. Thus it could be no fixed luminary, but must represent either a meteor or a mechanical flying light. The vile intrusion of a machine, however, in this mystic sky was unthinkable.

Next, the star augmented to such a glory of mild intensity, that the meteoric explanation also had to be dropped. No aerolite, trailing through the earth’s atmosphere, was ever thus steadily increasing and sluggishly lovely.

It plainly descended, so that its first slowness must have been due to its prodigious height in the heavens. Now, faster and faster, it captured field after field of the sky, in a kind of parabolic curve that, being pursued, should bring it to strike the ground somewhere near this hill he was on ... and yet he could not have calculated it so nicely; it must be intuition. Anything half so weird and wonderful he had never known. Its blue was no blue of earth; its sheer brilliance was as incomparable. …

Already it must be quite close down—perhaps but a few miles overhead from the Channel, falling north at this last of its terrific sky-swerve, to meet the night-like moor. … But very suddenly it vanished. His final impression was that it had rushed down that concluding steep of space with a fearful momentum.

The whizzing thud of an invisible body tore the air diagonally from above to downwards past the hill. It seemed to him that the noise was occult, so awful was it to his imagination and so alien to his understanding. It was not the awe of combined mass and force, for the lump must even have been quite small, nor was it the awe for an unusual lithic missile from the sky, since his mind was astronomical enough easily to incorporate a meteorite, but there had been something special in the sound; with no musical note, it had been of the nature of music; with no communication to his intelligence, it had been like the passage of a messenger. By now the body should have rooted itself in the valley bed. …

And with scarcely an intervening moment there ascended to him, as if from a considerable way off, a confused uproar that silenced the constant thunder of the waters, in the manner of a vast multitude of people, all bawling, wailing and shrieking at once. It was the most phantom-like and shocking yet. … But when the clamour, with its risings and fallings, had endured for what might be minutes, and never grew less agitating to his ears, the sound of a sullen, heavy, booming drum joined in, to master all those other noises, its single ominous strokes being dealt at brief and regular spaces. Afterwards the hubbub of voices died down, without entirely ceasing; but the drum persisted.

A little later again, a shrill horn screeched sharply above everything else, three separate times, like a call to assembly. The drumming stopped; the cries faded to silence. The sound of the rushing torrent once more reigned. …

An angry reddening of the night, from low down, perhaps from round an upper bend of the valley, told of a conflagration out of sight... and now he obtained his first view of the changed landscape. Instead of the quiet oudine and smooth flank of the shoulder across the stream he had traversed in getting here, that at its highest should not have overtopped this other hill by a hundred feet, his eyes were quickly startled by the spectacle of cliffs and naked crag masses, all lit by this fiery glare and flicker from an invisible blazing valley beacon, to tower indeterminate, rude, topless, towards and into the black sky of stars above. To come to the lowest stars, he must put his head back. He was against a mountain. …

A monstrous beast in silhouette, massive yet low like a rhinoceros, appeared in the moment of lifting itself over the Tor's edge, midway between himself and the dark shape of the girl, who, when he looked round to her, never moved. The brute displayed no hostility, but only the resolve to put height and distance behind it, in its unreasoning terror of the red shine of the valley. … And Saltfleet knew that the hyperphysical part of him that could communicate with these wonders and false threats was not the part which could come to harm on their account, and that neither could that entranced form come to harm. He had no impulse to rise to her assistance. …

Next, almost immediately after, she stirred on her seat, and while he was still turned, viewing her in half-expectancy, awaiting he could not have said what from her, the spectral night passed, without warning or sensation. …

He knew not how he was facing the valley again. He was perched on the slab yet, except that somehow his feet were touching ground, and through the old daylight he continued blinking at the silent white unrest that was all his view past the hill's top. The ceasing of the noise of the waters resembled a return from music to reality. The toneless quietude of this bright morning fog, after that other tortured red and black of a deceitful night, gave him the relief of having slipped out of a dream—and yet it had been none.

The cigar still burned between his fingers, and, putting it instinctively to his mouth, he wondered at the circumstance, and sat thinking. So those illusive happenings had actually occupied a far smaller space than had seemed, and
such
a liberty with time was dream-like. Again, when had he turned from the girl?—for at the very last moment he had been regarding her. His feet, also, had found the ground without his knowledge. All this was of a dream. …

He smoked and frowned through the drift. His face, square to the unseen height across the dip, kept its colour and stern composure, only his eyes were lighted by an unpleasant gleam that confessed his disturbance. In fact, he felt dazed, humiliated, and wholly confounded. No, it had not been a normal sinking of his senses into a dream, but they had been forced from outside into the likeness of one; and so, as he had known, it was not one. His brain had been forcibly compelled by something stronger than itself; and that was his humiliation...

The girl should be upon the point of coming round too, but he would not apply to her, or even seek her again with his eyes, till he had independently reached some idea of what this thing stood for. …

It seemed to him important to establish that it had not been the failure of his higher centres through sleep or coma. He had seen those sights critically, he had heard those sounds, not emotionally, but coolly; the queernesses in both kinds had not been the fantastic leapings of a dream; they had been
possible
—in the fast setting of a rigid, necessary world; if not the common world, to which he had been born and was accustomed. Therefore the experience had been real. The time of the
ego
of his daily life had continued to run straight forward without a break, he had not been in a state of false exaltation, but had remained curious and attentive, and he hoped he had retained that decent hold on his will. … And as little could it be a vision as a dream, since, properly, the two states were identical. To distinguish between the two, it was but a question of the degree of external consciousness. In the dream the brain was exclusively occupied with its own riotous images; in the vision it in part created its own images and in part remained in touch with the true world. But these images had not been created, for the faculties which should create them had at the time been legitimately employed. The proof had been his
sang-froid.

So, being objective, it had been real. Then different realities could co-exist, since the old reality of everyday life had been no more than overlaid. But if so, the co-existence could only take place in different situations of time or space. Here the scenery, as to its fundamentals, had been identical for both realities—they had occupied the same space, therefore. Their co-existence had necessarily taken place over the prolonged running line of time. He had just been in ancient history. This, too, he already knew, without the aid of logic. …

The hill was haunted, then, and he was not the first to know it. Drapier must have known it; the girl, perhaps now up and gazing at him, she undoubtedly had found it out. Its phantoms were real. They were contemporaneous with the beginning on earth of the undivided stone, long since broken to confusion. That stone had been the descending blue star; this he knew by intuition. Could he have seen down into the valley, it would have been given him to learn among what kind of people it had been received. When last had giant wild cattle and the rhinoceros roamed in Britain? Whatever was to be thought of Arsinal's character, the triumphs of his intellect were not fading—and he had also put forth that theory of the founding of the northern stocks. … The nearer the approach to the truth as well of his two recorded prophecies, the more pressing it became to exclude him. …