Palace of the Peacock (8 page)

“Better we stop and turn back,” said Jennings sombrely.

“Impossible. Where can we land? If we turn back we’re lost. How can we run the rapids in our condition? We do need help
more than ever to locate a safe ground trail if we succeed in escaping these walls….” he waved his hands at the cliff. “O it’s a hellish business and trial and responsibility I never foresaw. If one of us –” he stared at them with a glassy eye – “gets across he’ll carry the mark of a beast or a bird I tell you. It’s a wounding dream and task….” he began to ramble and rave. “Let’s hope there’ll be someone there to meet us and heal us in the end whatever we are. It’s all that counts….”

“Ah used to feed she with me lip,” daSilva said.

“O shut up,” Cameron cried. “Who cares?”

“Why did you pelt it?” daSilva cried.

“Wait you going on like if is you I pelt. Aw shut up, I hungry.”

“I ask you why you pelt the ring of me flesh….”

“O Christ, shut up,” said Cameron. “I didn’t pelt
you.
I didn’t see no precious ring. You is bewitched … that’s what….”

DaSilva muttered wildly – “I tell you when you pelt she you pelt me. Is one flesh, me flesh, you flesh, one flesh. She come to save me, to save all of we. You murderer! what else is you but a plain vile murderer? She ain’t no witch….” His face was mad.

“Who say she is a witch …” Cameron began to protest.

DaSilva jumped. Cameron’s hands flashed. For the first time in his life he missed. The truth was he had no footing in the water: he groaned and fell, his face grinning and splashing surprise. The crew were dumb. They bore him up unwittingly. He was dead and his blood ran and encircled their hand.

DaSilva shook like a leaf. The knife and blade fell from his fingers as flesh from bone turning dean and silver in the stream.

“O God,” said Donne in voiceless surprise and horror as at himself. “What have you done daSilva to a brother friend?”

DaSilva did not hear and understand. He too was deaf and dumb. He saw Cameron in the stream and in the sky where
their joint flesh had flown and darted above the fantasy of their carnal death. He looked around foolishly, telling himself Cameron had attacked him in some idle and faithless fashion. It all seemed blind and empty now like the air and stream that jostled them.

The Arawak woman pointed and Vigilance, straining his mind from the volcanic precipice where he clung, looked and saw the blue ring of pentecostal fire in God’s eye as it wheeled around him above the dreaming memory and prison of life until it melted where neither wound nor witch stood.

The Arawak woman rolled like a ball on the cliff, clinging to tree and stone and Vigilance was able to follow. The river crept far beneath them, and above them – beyond the wall they were climbing – lay safety and freedom. Vigilance knew that every step he made was a miracle of survival. It was incredible he had escaped after the wreck of the boat and succeeded in climbing so far and high. Millions of years had passed he knew until now he felt bruised and wounded beyond words and his limbs had crawled and still flew. He had slept in a cradle of branches and in a cave overlooking the chasm of time. However strange it was the fact remained he was living after all. The memory of the conventional crew was a dead eccentric belief that still continued to haunt him every now and then whenever he thought he had fallen and died in the primitive moments of a universal emptiness and fear.

The fantasy of the fourth day dawned – the fourth day of creation – since they had all set out from Mariella. From his godlike perch he discerned the image of the musing boat in which they had come. They had found a cave the previous nightfall and they had stretched their limbs until morning.

It was a close fit lying there – too close for ease and normal sleep – and everyone stirred when Vigilance moved. They could not help turning their dull eye upon the vessel they had managed to anchor at their ghostly side in the stream and it was as if they sought a long lost friend and soul. Everyone stirred and woke, all except Cameron. He was dead with a stab wound in his back. In their enormous
fatigue
the night and day before they had kept him at their side as they would an idol and companion.

They hurriedly abandoned him in the cliff, turning the room in which they had slept into his grave alone, and were soon travelling fast in the river when Jennings deliberately shut off the engine and the boat swung in the stream, lodging its bow in a fresh hollow of stone.

“Ah got an idea,” he announced. He spoke with hopeless obstinacy. His face was no longer the same as before: it had changed into a dream, the dream of an unnatural unshaven dead man’s beard and growth. The cheeks were hollow as the caves in the wall and the blackness of his skin had grown lighter and greyer into an older drier mask and presence lying within. The lust and soul of rebellion had been killed abruptly in a manner that left him suddenly empty. He felt now only the loss of an opposition and true adversary within himself. His eyes had lost all rude fire and in their blindness and loneliness they spun deeper than nature’s darkness and light. It was the strangest abstract face Vigilance had ever seen – the abstraction of a shell afloat over a propeller and a machine with the consistency of a duty rather than of a desire and a spirit. Indeed it reminded him of a coconut shell he had once observed beached against the river; someone had brought it a long way from its natural grave on the seacoast and deposited it here dry and desiccated and foreign in the midst of the river’s stone and vegetation. He had held the husk in his hand and it had given a dry brittle harp’s cry of relief, mummified and mystical and Egyptian, melting at the same time into an inner dust that crumbled to an ancient door of life.

It was the oldest soulless expression of self-surrender he had ever seen – the dutiful mask of resurrection and the engineer of death.

“Ah got an idea,” said Jennings again. His voice was meaningless. “Let we look for the hole where the wild tapir pass through the cliff. Was when? Yesterday? Or day before yesterday? Let we pass through the same door to the land … This is dead man river … We can’t stay here any more….”

DaSilva shook his head. “Ah dream you done dead already Jennings,” he tried to crack a joke. “And the hole close up for good for you a million year ago. You is a prehistoric animal.” His chest brayed foolishly. “Where Cameron?” he asked.

No one replied.

“Where Cameron?” he asked again. A sickly smile that reflected everyone’s condemnation wrinkled his lips. “Ah dream Cameron dead too,” he confessed, “and yet he swim and float next to me trying to hug and kiss me. Is he pull me down. Is a sight to feel a drowning man clinging to you,” he pleaded and confessed. “I had to stab at he to mek he loose me. And still he hold on. Don’t mind how ugly you find it …” he shuddered and hiccoughed in a sentimental bloated fashion of goodwill … “is still the dream of love floating everywhere … I forgive he … even if he mek me dream bad that a bewitched whore killed us both … grabbed hold us in the water … pulled us down …” He spoke with the blind innocence of a clown floundering in the blank of memory in the shattering of his life.

Jennings turned his abstract face towards him indifferently as if he knew another version. “Yes is common knowledge you kill poor Cameron daSilva. Is common knowledge in the world you encourage he to mek this trip and that you quarrel stupid-stupid with he in the end. Nobody know the reason ’cept was jealousy or love. Is he probe at me till he enrage me to lef’ the shit I been living in. I was always a stay-at-home not like wutless Cammy.” A grotesque tear opened his cheek.

DaSilva chuckled gaining a flash of an old rumour of fellowship in winning this ugly tear and response – “He butt me like if he was mad. I dive and pull away from he … But I didn’t mean to hurt he. Not Cammy. How could I ever hurt Cammy? Was me last memory and hope of happiness in this world. I remember feeling surprised that I had seconds of drowning life and fight lef’ in me while poor Cammy was bewildered and dead and didn’t feel a thing….”

“You believe a drown-man skin got no feeling in it and
can’t make out friend or foe pon his back?” Jennings mumbled his rhetorical senseless question and his face cracked open a little more. He knew it was all invention, da Silva’s erratic memory and story, all the crude prevarication and sentiment of life they debated and that it was pointless and pretentious for one dead man (which was the only feeling he felt inside himself) to address another on non-existent spiritual and emotional facts. No one could truly discern a reason and a motive and a distinction in anything. It was as bad as talking of two sexes and of blind love all in the same breath in his wife’s mother’s sitting-room. The old harridan! she had helped to drive him from his hell and his home. The shock of memory and of a duty to fight to rescue himself drove him again to address himself to the thought of another frightful revolution and escape he had to engineer however soulless and devastating the thought of a living return to the world was.

“If we find the door where the wild tapir pass we can land and live….” He spoke without conviction and with dread at the thought of embarking again for a place he hardly relished and knew. It was better to stay just where he was and crumble inwardly he said like a man who had come back to his shell of nothingness and functional beginning again.

“What tapir?” mocked daSilva. “I tell you I remember no tapir. You recall any?” He turned in a foolish mocking way to his twin brother.

Vigilance was startled. He had forgotten this particular twin and brother. He recalled seeing him last with Donne tracking the old woman in the Mission while the other one remained with Cameron at the campfire. He had completely forgotten him until now when he saw him in the mirror of the dreaming soul again – an artifice of flight that had been summoned rather than a living man and way of escape. His reflection was the frailest shadow of a former self. His bones were splinters and points Vigilance saw and his flesh was newspaper, drab, wet until the lines and markings had run fantastically
together. His hair stood flat on his brow like ink. He nodded precariously and one marvelled how he preserved his appearance without disintegrating into soggy lumps and patches when the wind blew and rocked the pins of his bones a little. He shook his head again but not a word blew from his lips. DaSilva stared at the apparition his brother presented as a man would stare at a reporter who had returned from the grave with no news whatsoever of a living return.

Now he knew for the first true time the fetishes he and his companions had embraced. They were bound together in wishful substance and in the very enormity of a dreaming enmity and opposition and self-destruction. Remove all this or weaken its appearance and its cruelty and they were finished. So Donne had died in the death of Wishrop; Jennings’ primitive abstraction and slackening will was a reflection of the death of Cameron, Schomburgh had died with Carroll. And daSilva saw with dread his own sogging fool’s life on the threshold of the ultimate stab of discredit like one who had adventured and lived on scraps of vulgar intention and detection and rumour that passed for the arrest of spiritual myth and the rediscovery of a new life in the folk.

Vigilance dreamed and felt all this; he recognized the total exhaustion of his companions like his own superstitious life and limbs. And he rested against the wall and cliff of heaven as against an indestructible mirror and soul in which he saw the blind dream of creation crumble as it was re-enacted.

The daSilva twin and scarecrow of death had vanished in the dawn of the fifth day. Donne rubbed his eyes in
astonishment
. He did not feel inclined to search every cave and indentation in the wall, and after a lusty shout and halloo brought no reply, he decided to set out again and go on. Furthermore Vigilance and the old Arawak woman had also disappeared. Donne rubbed his eyes again wondering whether on leaving Cameron in the cave the previous day he had lost count of the living crew as well. An idea flashed upon him and he scanned the smooth cliff as if he followed a reflection. He saw nothing, however. And a wave of hopelessness enveloped him: everyone in the vessel was crumbling into a door into the sun through which one perceived nothing standing – the mirror of absolute
nothingness
.

An abstraction grew around him – nothing else – the ruling abstraction of himself which he saw reflected nowhere. He was a ruler of men and a ruler of nothing. The sun rose into the blinding wall and river before him filling the stream and water with melting gold. He dipped his hand in but nothing was there.

He felt it was certainly better to move than remain where he was, and he started the engine, pointing the boat up-river for the fifth morning and time. Jennings’ wrist was aching and swollen. Donne sent him to serve as look-out at the bow while daSilva remained between them, in the middle, smiling foolishly at nothing.

The river was calm as the day before, innocent and golden as a dream. The boat ran smoothly until the stream seemed to froth and bubble a little against it. A change was at hand in
the sky of water everyone sensed and knew. The vessel seemed to hasten and the river grew black, painted with streaks of a foaming white. The noise of a thunderous waterfall began to dawn on their ear above the voice of their engine. They saw in the distance at last a thread of silver lightning that expanded and grew into a veil of smoke. They drew as near as they could and stopped under the cloud. Right and left grew the universal wall of cliff they knew, and before them the highest waterfall they had ever seen moved and still stood upon the escarpment. They were plainly astonished at the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly from the river’s tall brink. The cliffs appeared to box and imprison the waterfall. A light curious fern grew out of the stone, and pearls were burning and smoking from the greenest brightest dwarfs and trees they remembered.

Steps and balconies had been nailed with abandon from bottom to top making hazardous ladders against the
universal
walls. These were wreathed in misty arms blowing from the waterfall.

Donne looked at the engine and felt its work was finished. They needed only their bare hands and feet now to climb the wall. He unscrewed it from its hold and wedged it at the foot of the stairway. Jennings and daSilva assisted him also in hauling the boat out of the water and upon a flat stone. In a couple of months it would start to rot in the sun like a drowned man’s hulk in the abstraction of a day and an age. As he bade goodbye to it – as to another faithful companion – he knew there was some meaning in his farewell sadness, something that had duration and value beyond the years of apparent desertion and death, but it baffled him and slipped away from him. All he knew was the misty sense of devastating thoroughness, completion and endless
compassion
– so far-reaching and distant and all-embracing and still remote, it amounted to nothingness again.

He shook himself into hands and feet of quicksilver and
dream and started his ascent of the ladder, followed painfully by Jennings and daSilva.

As he made the first step the memory of the house he had built in the savannahs returned to him with the closeness and intimacy of a horror and a hell, that horror and that hell he had himself elaborately constructed from which to rule his earth. He ascended higher, trying to shake away his
obsession
. He slipped and gasped on the misty step and a noose fell around his neck from which he dangled until – after an eternity – he had regained a breathless footing. The shock made him dizzy – the mad thought he had been supported by death and nothingness. It flashed on him looking down the steep spirit of the cliff that this dreaming return to a ruling function of nothingness and to a false sense of home was the meaning of hell. He stared upward to heaven slowly as to a new beginning from which the false hell and function crumbled and fell.

A longing swept him like the wind of the muse to understand and transform his beginnings: to see the
indestructible
nucleus and redemption of creation, the remote and the abstract image and correspondence, in which all things and events gained their substance and universal meaning. However far from him, however distant and removed, he longed to see,
he
longed
to
see
the atom, the very nail of moment in the universe. It would mean more to him than an idol of idols even if in seeing it there was frustration in that the distance between himself and
It
strengthened rather than weakened. The frustration would disappear he knew in his sense of a new functional inspiration and beginning and erection in living nature and scaffolding.

The wind rushed down the cliff so strong he almost fell again but it turned and braced him at last and he continued ascending as a workman in the heart and on the face of construction. He fastened on this notion to keep his mind from slipping. The roaring water was a droning misty machine, and the hammer of the fall shook the earth with the
misty blow of fate. A swallow flew and dashed through the veil and window. His eyes darted from his head and Donne saw a young carpenter in a room. A light shone from the roof and the curtains wreathed slowly. Donne tried to attract the young man’s attention but he did not hear and understand his summons. He hammered against the wall and shook the window loud. Everything quietly resisted. The young
carpenter
nevertheless turned his face to him at last and looked through him outside. His eyes were darker than the image of the sky and the swallow that had flown towards him was reflected in them as in window-panes of glass. Donne flattened himself against the wall until his nose had been planed down to his face. He wanted to see the carpenter closely and to draw his attention. He saw the chisel in his hand and the saw and hammer lying on the table while the ground was strewn with shavings resembling twigs and leaves. A rectangular face it was, chiselled and cut from the cedar of Lebanon. He was startled and frightened by the fleshless wood, the lips a breath apart full of grains from the skeleton of a leaf on the ground branching delicately and sensitively upward into the hair on his head that parted itself in the middle and fell on both sides of his face into a harvest. His fingers were of the same wood, the nails made of bark and ivory. Every movement and glance and expression was a chiselling touch, the divine alienation and translation of flesh and blood into everything and anything on earth. The chisel was old as life, old as a fingernail. The saw was the teeth of bone. Donne felt himself sliced with this skeleton-saw by the craftsman of God in the windowpane of his eye. The swallow flew in and out like a picture on the wall framed by the carpenter to breathe perfection.

He began hammering again louder than ever to draw the carpenter’s intimate attention. He had never felt before such terrible desire and frustration all mingled. He knew the chisel and the saw in the room had touched him and done something in the wind and the sun to make him anew.
Fingernail and bone were secret panes of glass in the stone of blood through which spiritual eyes were being opened. He felt these implements of vision operating upon him, and still he had no hand to hold anything tangible and no voice loud enough to address anyone invisible. But the carpenter still stood plain before him in the room with the picture of the swallow on the wall perfectly visible amidst all and everything, and there was no earthly excuse why he could not reach him. He hammered again loud to attract his attention, the kind of attention and appreciation dead habit taught him to desire. The carpenter still looked through him as through the
far-seeing
image and constellation of his eye – clouds and star and sun on the windowpanes. He hammered again but nothing broke the distance between them. It was as if he looked into a long dead room in which the carpenter was sealed and
immured
for good. Time had no meaning. The room was as old as a cave and as new as a study. The walls – whether of glass or stone or wood – were thicker than the stratosphere. All sound had been barred and removed for ever, all communication, all persuasion, all intercourse. It was Death with capitals, and when he saw this he felt too that it was he who stood within the room and it was the carpenter who stood reflected without. This was a fantasy, this change of places, and he hammered again loud. The image of Death in the carpenter stared through him, the eyelids flickered with lightning at last in the midst of the waterfall. He raised his hammer and struck the blow that broke every spell. Donne quivered and shook like a dead branch whose roots were reset on their living edge.

The carpenter turned to another picture he had framed on the wall. An animal was bounding towards him through the prehistoric hole in the cliff Jennings had dreamed to find. It had a wound in its side from a spear and its great horns curved into a crescent moon as if the very spear had been turned and bent.

The animal was so lithe and swift one had no eye for anything else. It bounded and glanced everywhere, on the table, on the windowsill with the dying light of the sun,
drawing itself together into a musing ball. It danced around the room swift as running light, impetuous as a dream. It was everywhere and nowhere, a picture of abandonment and air, a cat on crazy balls of feet. It was the universe whose light turned in the room to signal the approach of evening, painting the carpenter’s walls with shades from the sky – the most elaborate pictures and seasons he stored and framed and imagined. The room grew crowded with visions he planed and chiselled and nailed into his mind, golden sights, the richest impressions of eternity. It was a millionaire’s room – the carpenter’s. He touched the dying animal light at last as it ran past him and it turned its head around towards him, a little startled by his alien fingers and hand, remembering something forgotten. The alert dreaming skin – radiant with spiritual fear and ecstasy – quivered and vibrated like the strings of a harp where the mark of the old wound was and it tossed the memory of the spear on its head, trying to recall the miracle of substance and flesh. It stood thus – with the carpenter’s hand upon it – with a curious abstract and wooden memory of its life and its death. The sense of death was a wooden dream, a dream of music in the sculptured ballet of the leaves and the seasons, the shavings on the ground from the carpenter’s saw and chisel. His finger had touched an ancient spear point and branch and splinter and nail, whose nervous vibration summoned a furious portrait to be framed by the memory of creation. The windowpane clouded a little with the mist of falling evening and water and one had to press one’s face and rub with all one’s might to see through. The animal light body and wound – upon which his hand lay – turned into an outline of time followed by its own wild reflection vague and enormous as the sky crowding the room. The bulb shining from the roof turned green as water, weird and beautiful as the light-colour from long-dead twinkling stars and suns millions of years old. The room became a dancing hieroglyph in the illumination of endless pursuit, the subtle running depths of the sea, the depths of
the green sky and the depths of the forest. It was the mist on the windowpane of the carpenter’s room, and one had to rub furiously to see.

One saw a comet tailing into a flock of anxious birds before the huntsman of death who stood winding his horn in the waterfall. The sky turned into a running deer and ram,
half-ram
, half-deer running for life. A ball of wind was set in motion on the cliff. Leaves sprang up from nowhere, a stampede of ghostly men and women all shaped by the leaves, raining and running against the sky.

They besieged the walls of the carpenter’s room,
clamouring
and hammering with the waterfall. He leaned down and removed the shaft once again from the side of the hunted ram – as he had moved it an eternity before – and restored the bent spear of the new moon where it belonged. The signs of tumult died in the animal light and cloud and the stars only thronged everywhere. So bright they framed his shape through the misty windowpanes. The carpenter looked blind to the stumbling human darkness that still trailed and followed across the world. He closed his window softly upon Donne and Jennings and daSilva.

Jennings cried slipping suddenly in the dark upon a step in the cliff. His wrist gave way too with the shaft of his engine snapping at last as a branch in the flight of the stream. They both answered him but their voices were drowned in the waterfall and they saw nothing save the ancient winding horn of the moon falling from the sky like the bone of his metal and wood.

They shook with the primitive ram again, scanning the endless cliff in fear and ecstasy, feeling for the bodily image of themselves.

Darkness still fell upon the cliff and the horn of the new moon vanished in the end behind the window of the wall as into a long-feared shelter in the earth rich with the frames of humility of God’s memory and reflection. The stars in the sky shivered as they crawled once more up the fantastic ladder
and into the void of themselves. They wondered whose turn would be next to fall from the sky as the last ghost of the crew had died and they alone were left to frame Christ’s tree and home.

As they climbed upward Donne felt the light shine on him reflected from within. He had come upon another window in the wall. The curtains were drawn a little and after he had rubbed the windowpanes he began to make out the interior of the room. He looked for the carpenter but at first he saw no one. And then it grew on him a woman was standing within. A child also stood at her feet seeming hardly above her knee. The room was an enormous picture. It breathed all burning tranquillity and passion together – so alive – so warm and true – Donne cried and rapped with the world of his longing. He felt a glowing intimacy as he knocked but the distance between himself and the frame stood as the distance between himself and the stars.