The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (35 page)

Ending thus, she stepped from that ashen strand to the dark prow of the barge; and even as it had come, without wafture of wind or movement of oar, the barge put out on a sea covered with the fading petals of sunset. Incredibly soon it passed from view, while the desert lost those ancient asphodels and the deep verdure it had worn again for a little. Darkness, having conquered Illarion, came slow and furtive on the path of Aphrodite; shadows mustered innumerably to the grey hills; and the heart of the poet Phaniol was an urn of black jade overfraught by love with sodden ashes.

Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Nay, tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space: for I am a little weary of all recorded years and charted lands; and the isles that are westward of Cathay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote enough to be made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new for my thoughts to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons that are too recent.

Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend and of which there are no myths in our world or in any world adjoining. Tell me, if you will, of the years when the moon was young, with siren-rippled seas and mountains that were zoned with flowers from base to summit; tell me of the planets grey with eld, of the worlds whereon no mortal astronomer has ever looked, and whose mystic heavens and horizons have given pause to visionaries. Tell me of the vaster blossoms within whose cradling chalices a woman could sleep; of the seas of fire that beat on strands of ever-during ice; of perfumes that can give eternal slumber in a breath; of eyeless titans that dwell in Uranus, and beings that wander in the green light of the twin suns of azure and orange. Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.

The desert of Soom is said to lie at the world's unchartable extreme, between the lands that are little known and those that are scarcely even conjectured. It is dreaded by travellers, for its bare and ever-moving sands are without oases, and a strange horror is rumored to dwell among them. Of this horror, many tales are told, and nearly all of the tales are different. Some say that the thing has neither visible form nor audible voice, and others that it is a dire chimera with multitudinous heads and horns and tails, and a tongue whose sound is like the tolling of bells in deep funereal vaults. Of the caravans and solitary wanderers who have ventured amid the sands of Soom, none has returned without a story to tell; and some have never returned at all, or have come back with brains devoured to madness by the terror and vertigo and delirium of infinite empty space. . . . Yes, there are many tales, of a thing that follows furtively or with the pandemonium of a thousand devils, of a thing that roars or whispers balefully from the sand or from the wind, or stirs unseen in the coiling silence; or falls from the heavens like a crushing incubus, or yawns like a sudden pit before the feet of the traveller. . . .

But once on a time there were two lovers who came to the desert of Soom, and who had occasion to cross the sterile sands. They knew not the evil rumor of the place; and, since they had found an abiding Eden in each other's eyes, it is doubtful if they even knew that they were passing through a desert. And they alone, of all who have dared this fearsome desolation, have had no tale to relate of any troublous thing, of any horror that followed or lurked before them, either seen or unseen, inaudible or heard; and for them there was no chimera, no yawning pit nor incubus. And never, never could they comprehend the stories that were told by less fortunate wayfarers.

From the nethermost profound of infrangible slumber, from a gulf beyond the sun and stars that illume the shoals of Lethe and the vague lands of somnolent visions, I floated on a black unrippling tide to the dark threshold of a dream. And in this dream I stood at the end of a long hall that was wholly wrought of sable ebony and was lit with a light that fell not from the moon or sun nor from any lamp. The hall was without doors or windows, and at the further extreme an oval mirror was framed in the wall. And standing there, I remembered nothing of all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, were alike forgotten. And forgotten too was the name I had found among men, and the other names whereby the daughters of dream had known me; and memory was no older than my coming to that hall. But I wondered not, nor was I troubled thereat, and naught was strange to me: for the tide that had borne me to this threshold was the tide of Lethe.

Anon, though I knew not why, my feet were drawn adown the hall, and I approached the oval mirror. And in the mirror I beheld the haggard face that was mine, and the red mark on the cheek where one I loved had struck me in her anger, and the mark on the throat where her lips had kissed me in amorous devotion. And seeing this, I remembered all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, alike returned to me. And thus I recalled the name I had assumed beneath the terrene sun, and the names I had borne beneath the suns of sleep and of reverie. And I marvelled much, and was enormously troubled, and all things were most strange to me, and all things were as of yore.

Nasiphra the philosopher had sought through many years and in many lands for the fabled touch-stone, which was said to reveal the true nature of all things. He had found all manner of stones, from the single boulders that have been carven into the pyramids of monarchs, to the tiny gems that are visible only through a magnifying-glass, but since none of them had effected any change or manifest alteration in the materials with which they were brought in contact, Nasiphra knew that they were not the thing he desired. But the real existence of a touch-stone had been affirmed by all the ancient writers and thinkers, and so, he was loath to abandon his quest, in spite of the appalling number of mineral substances that had been proven to lack the requisite qualities.

One day Nasiphra saw a large oval pebble lying in the gutter, and picked it up through force of habit, though he had no idea that it could be the touch-stone. Its color was an ordinary grey, and the form was no less commonplace than the color. But when Nasiphra took the pebble in his hand, he was startled out of his philosophic calm by the curious results: the fingers that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton, gleaming white and thin and fleshless in the sunlight; and Nasiphra knew by this token that he had found the touch-stone. He proceeded to make many tests of its odd properties, all with truly singular results: it revealed to him the fact that his house was a mouldy sepulchre, that his library was a collection of worm-eaten rubbish, that his friends were skeletons, mummies, jackdaws and hyenas, that his wife was a cheap and meretricious trull, that the city in which he lived was an ant-heap, and the world itself a gulf of shadow and emptiness. In truth, there was no limit to the disconcerting and terrible disclosures that were made by this ordinary-looking pebble. So, after a time, Nasiphra threw it away, preferring to share with other men the common illusions, the friendly and benign mirages that make our existence possible.

Too far away is her wan and mortal face, and too remote are the snows of her unimaginable breast, for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles her whisper comes to me, like a chill unearthly wind that is faint from traversing the gulfs between the worlds and the ultimate white horizons of icy deserts. And she speaks to me in a tongue I have never heard, but have always known; and she tells of deathly things and of things beautiful beyond the ecstatic desires of love. Her speech is not of good or evil, nor of anything that is desired or conceived or believed by the termites of earth; and the air she breathes, and the lands wherein she roams, would blast like the utter cold of sidereal space; and her eyes would blind the vision of men like suns; and her kiss, if one should ever attain it, would wither and slay like the kiss of lightning.

But, hearing her far, infrequent whisper, I behold a vision of vast auroras, on continents that are wider than the world, and seas too great for the enterprise of human keels. And at times I stammer forth the strange tidings that she brings: though none will welcome them, and none will believe or listen. And in some dawn of the desperate years, I shall go forth and follow where she calls, to seek the high and beatific doom of her pure inviolable distances, to perish amid her indesecrate horizons.

I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height,

A mountain's utmost eminence of snow.

Beholding ashen plains outflung below

To a far sea-horizon, dim and white.

Beneath the spectral sun's expiring light

The world lay shrouded in a deathly glow;

Its last fear-laden voice, a wind, came low;

The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright.

I watched, until the pale and flickering sun,

In agony and fierce despair, flamed high,

And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom.

Then Night, that war of gulf-born Titans won,

Impended for a breath on wings of doom.

And through the air fell like a falling sky.

O many-gulfed, unalterable one,

Whose deep sustains

Far-drifting world and sun,

Thou wast ere ever star put out on thee;

And thou shalt be

When never world remains;

When all the suns' triumphant strength and pride

Is sunk in voidness absolute,

And their majestic music wide

In vaster silence rendered mute.

And though God's will were night to dusk the blue,

And law to cancel and disperse

The tangled tissues of the universe,

His might were impotent to conquer thee,

O indivisible infinity!

Thy darks subdue

All light that treads thee down a space,

Exulting over thine archetypal deeps.

The cycles die, and lo! thy darkness reaps

The flame of mightiest stars;

In aeon-implicating wars

Thou tearest planets from their place;

Worlds granite-spined

To thine erodents yield

Their treasures centrally confined

In crypts by continental pillars sealed.

What suns and worlds have been thy prey

Through unhorizoned reaches of the past!

What spheres that now essay

Time's undimensioned vast,

Shall plunge forgotten to thy gloom at length

With life that cried its query of the Night

To ears with silence filled!

What worlds unborn shall dare thy strength,

Girt by a sun's unwearied might,

And dip to darkness when the sun is stilled!

O incontestable Abyss,

What light in thine embrace of darkness sleeps—

What blaze of a sidereal multitude

No peopled world is left to miss!

What motion is at rest within thy deeps—

What gyres of planets long become thy food—

Worlds unconstrainable

That plunged therein to peace

Like tempest-worn and crew-forsaken ships;

And suns that fell

To huge and ultimate eclipse,

And from the eternal stances found release!

What sound thy gulfs of silence hold!

Stupendous thunder of the meeting stars

And crash of orbits that diverged,

With Life's thin song are merged;

Thy quietudes enfold

Paean and threnody as one,

And battle-blare of unremembered wars

With festal songs

Sung in the Romes of ruined spheres;

And music that belongs

To undiscoverable younger years

With words of yesterday.

Ah! who may stay

Thy soundless world-devouring tide?

O thou whose hands pluck out the light of stars,

Are worlds but as a destined fruit for thee?

May no sufficient bars

Nor marks inveterate abide

As shores to baffle thine unbillowing sea?

Still and unstriving now,

What plottest thou,

Within thy universe-ulterior deeps,

Dark as the final lull of suns?

What new advancement of the night

On citadels of stars around whose might

Thy slow encroachment runs,

And crouching silence, thunder-potent, sleeps?

I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing

That Nature hath, of sound and form and hue—

The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew,

The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;

Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm

Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame

Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came,

And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.

Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills

Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills,

And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.

Her face the light of fallen planets wore,

But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,

Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.