The View from Mount Dog (4 page)

Lost in the immense gloom of a great forest was a small clearing where the sun might break in to bring extraordinary treasures to light. Feathery tufts of palm made moiré patterns behind each other and against the blue of the sky; the delicate arms of porphyryngias were raised to bestow a benign shade upon the humbler glyptopod. On every side vines restrained the frothing tonnage of vegetable life which otherwise seemed likely to break loose and balloon skyward, lifting with it the rest of the forest from the face of the earth. Amongst this foliage glowed flowers and fruit of every kind: bells and cups, cynths and calices, sprays and single blooms like solitary gongs mingled with pricklefruit, quinsicums and the scarlet orbs of the tart
tabitabi.

To one side of this clearing stood a hut made of fronds like a woven basket set upon timber legs. And in this hut, all by himself, lived the Poet. Many years ago he had come from a distant country, a cold grey place inhabited by a cold grey people little moved by Art but much interested in Commerce. Hither had he come, a wanderer, a solitary in search of he knew not what except that it would thaw the chill from mind and marrow. For, truth to tell, his first book of poems,
Nard
for
the
King,
had not been well received in his native land.

Then he had curled his beard and put upon himself traveller’s raiment. ‘For,’ he reasoned, ‘while it is little to me that I am unappreciated, it is everything to my Soul that it should be able to feed on beautiful things. Here there is only ugliness and
meanness since the cold grey North has crept into these people’s hearts and locked them in ice.’

For a while he trudged the world, and the world rewarded him with wonders and delight. In love and gratitude he spoke his verse in dusty squares and village lanes; in bazaars he raised his voice among gold-capped minarets, and the desert wastes heard his songs. At length, meagred by hunger and worn out with travel, he wandered into a library where, having first ascertained that it held no copy of his poems, he found a map of the country he was in. It was rather old and still had the word ‘Unexplored’ printed across many a region of the interior.

‘That’, mused the Poet, ‘is where I must go. I have lived too long among the known. A hundred cultures have I seen’ (this was, of course, poetic licence) ‘and sundry domestications of the earth. And always where the hand of man sets its imprint a strangeness vanishes, a uniqueness is lost, an otherness is made the deadly same.’

So saying he drew a line across the map with decisiveness and was engaged by the Librarian in a short conversation before making his way to the market-place to find bearers to carry his few necessities. Then he recurled his beard, gathered his tatters about him and taking up his leather pouch of manuscripts set off on his last journey.

On the tribulations which beset him there is no need to dwell. At the end of the time it took to write four sonnets and an epithalamium he pushed his way through a clump of stinging millefoils and limped into the clearing. And in that instant he recognised his home.

*

Time passed, and the Poet moved through intensities of vision. At dawn he would rise to watch the night’s distillates tremble their dewdrops along the edges of leaves as the first rays of the sun pierced the upper branches. Nearby there ran a shallow stream whose laterite bed was home to sly brown elvers and translucent prawns which a quick eye and a defter hand might net. Across this each dawn shimmered the first gauzy dragonflies like scattered dream-residues, which would vanish as the heat hardened into broad day. At noon he ate a simple meal of fruit and rinsed his mouth in the crystal runnel before retiring to his hut, doubtless to write. At dusk a light breeze would spring up and lemon-censers spill their fragrance on the air which with the aromatic popping of peppernut husks would bring the Poet
forth, stretching the cramps of creativity and yawning in the cool of the evening.

And thus in simple splendour he passed his days. Sometimes he was a little lonely. ‘But’, he told himself, ‘I have my Art, and all Art demands sacrifice. If I have renounced companionship, I still live in a world of Beauty and Love,’ since the love he lavished on his poems was indeed that of a parent for its child. Nevertheless, at dusk sometimes a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some shy and gentle faun – might be glimpsed flitting from the undergrowth to the rude hut wherein the Poet glowed and burned and gave off sparks in his solitude.

Now, there was a Headman whose village lay some way off in the forest and in whose bailiwick the Poet was living. Sometimes when the sun was high and smothered the clearing with its heat this man would trudge through, now carrying a great bundle of wood on his head, now with merely a bow and a knife but with his body streaked with sweat and the bright blood drawn by cruel whipthorn. Often the Poet would be so entranced by his Art that, lost in inward vision beneath the emerald tent of a clump of sagathy plantains, his eyes were blind to the Headman’s weary progress past his hut. But at another time he would spring up and bid the Headman rest awhile.

‘I fear,’ he would apologise on such occasions, ‘that I have little enough to offer your body by way of refreshment, so simply do I live. But your mind – ah! that I can refresh. I have just this moment made the most exquisite ballad, and there should be a fragment of ode lying around somewhere from last night.’

Then he would read to the Headman in a strange and beautiful voice. And it was as if his words were so attuned to the Nature from which it seemed he had drawn them that the very leaves shivered and the twigs like silver tuning-forks responded to his pitch until the whole glade rang softly at his words. Even the insects’ mechanical clamour grew hushed. Shard and carapace ceased their husking; mandibles in mid-munch froze; locust heads with many-faceted eyes swivelled to where this music came.

The Headman sat as if enraptured. ‘Oh, you have spoken truly’, he would say in a soft voice when the last hum had died away. ‘You have once more spoken the Truth, my great and good Friend.’

And the forest exhaled its long-pent decaying breath, the jewelled birds dared try again their own small voices. For the Poet had spoken of things which other men cannot see but which on hearing they know to be true; and this recognition makes them inexpressibly sad yet eager to hear more as if it were a cure for unacknowledged wounds. And the Poet knew of his power and whence it came. ‘Wherefore’, he said to himself when the heaviness of night lay on the forest outside his hut and the fireflies inside tangled their shining paths in the thatch overhead, ‘I hide myself from the world and formulate medicines for its pain. I am not a Prophet in the wilderness, for I herald no one. Also I foresee nothing. Yet am I a Seer, for I see everything as it is.’

Since he was not a stupid man, either, he saw that part of the reason for the Headman’s visits had to do with a supply of gin, the last remnants of which the Poet still had laid by him from the day of his arrival, having known of no good reason why plain living and high thinking should be any further penalised. Thus grew up between them that agreeable companionship which may be distilled from grain and words. And each was much the better for it since under its benign influence the Headman could forget he revered this foreigner as a shaman while it would quite slip the Poet’s mind that he sometimes thought of this native as marvellously dignified.

So tireless sun and patient moon swung each other about the sky in a literary device known as tachychronia, signifying the rapid passage of time. And dawn preceded dusk and vice versa until the day came when a hardly audible sound like a memory of thunder hung breathing about the forest’s distant rim. It rose and fell on the breeze so that at times it was not there at all but then took its place once again behind the jungle cries of insect, bird and beast. Some days later it had become almost constant, and when the Headman appeared, bowed beneath trusses of viridian gourds, the Poet having bade him rest and refreshed him as usual with verses and gin asked him what it might mean. ‘I fear’, he added, ‘that dreadful disasters, storms and earthquakes such as never before must be shaking the land about us. And yet the ground whereon we sit is curiously unmoved.’

The Headman, too, had heard the sound but was equally uncertain as to its cause. His village had spoken of the roar of floodwaters since it bore some resemblance to that caused by the river in spate with the coming of the monsoon. Days later still
the noise had grown more menacing, and amid its now constant growl were to be discerned irregular pantings such as wild beasts make when rending prey. This-time the Headman was more informative.

‘A messenger has arrived by boat. He comes from the King. The King in his wisdom, caring only for the greater well-being of his subjects, has contrived a brilliant plan to make us all rich. Maybe you as well’ – he gave a reassuring bow to the Poet. ‘For, although you are a foreigner and a wonderful teacher not like us, yet still you sojourn in the King’s land and may receive of his benison.’

‘But I am already far richer than I deserve.’ The Poet looked round in bewilderment at the familiar yet ever-changing beauty of his domain. ‘I need no other wealth. The King is, of course, too good,’ he added politely. ‘But what is his brilliant plan?’

‘He has sold the forest’, announced the Headman, ‘to strangers like yourself from far-off lands. They have bought all the trees and now they are cutting them down. Those are their remarkable machines which you can hear even as we speak. They say they can make a field this size’ – he pointed at the clearing – ‘in the time it takes us to cook rice and
banban
and of it make a sweet-sap pudding. Whereas it would take my people with their axes fourteen suns to clear this ground for our slender purple cassava.’ And with that the Headman left, his head dazed with Progress and the benefits it promised to shower on his hitherto moneyless folk.

But the Poet was filled with anguish and with rage. For a further two whole days he listened to the inexorable tide of engines encircle his beautiful world and watched in love and pity the trees put forth their young leaves, the spiders spin their sticky threads, the elvers in the crystal stream lave their slippery ribbons in the current. All was as it ever had been, and all was changed for ever. He alone of those myriad creatures to whom the clearing was the universe knew it and could mourn their end before they ended.

Then on the third day at dawn the Poet arose and addressed his domain with bitterest tears:

‘Is it not I who have brought this down upon you? Is not the fault mine? For at last they have tracked me down, my cold compatriots: they pursue me and my kind even to the uttermost ends of the earth. I took upon myself an exile’s life that I might court the Muse in her natural halls, and even so did she come to
me. Where before was silence we have made enduring music; we have wrought marvellous songs. Out of nothing have we spun our webs of words and hung them up to ensnare with gentlest Art the unhappy souls who chance by. We have magnified the beauty of the world whose outward sign Creation is and lo! the hearts of men grow greater in response.

‘Now they, those countrymen of mine whose blood is salt with the driven spume of grey and Northern seas, whose hearts are cold with Nonconformist zeal and will not be warmed except before the twin fires of self-righteousness and greed, they have tracked me here so they may lay waste my Soul.’

And the clearing was hushed as he paused and it seemed as though the uneasy rumble of vile mills had drawn a little closer.

‘Is it not I who have brought this down upon you? Oh, my lovely elverines, beloved
tabitabi
tree, is not the fault mine? My error lay in thinking them indifferent. Yet, though many years have passed, they have not forgotten me, hidden in your midst in populous solitude. What other motive could they have, thus to track me even to Paradise itself and encompass me about with hateful engines? Even now they steadily abolish Nature who for so long has cherished me secretly in her bosom as a pearl in a precious setting. What other motive could they have but vengeance? Is not the world already full enough of Swedish furniture? Lives there a man who would not see a shaggy, ancient hardwood tree stand in living majesty rather than in the office of some executive? Who, looking at such a noble giant, thinks only of a heap of desks? No, the fault is mine, the fault is mine.’

Thus spake the Poet; and he ceased, weeping. And the clearing heard his words and the forest trembled, for it knew that, although in matters of detail he slightly erred (the logging consortium which had gained the Royal Warrant being, in fact, Japanese), in essence he was accurate and once more spoke a Truth. So the Poet retired to his simple hut heavy-hearted and, with the world’s encroachment ringing in his ears, began his greatest work: an Elegy such as had not been before or since and written as though his very eyes had shed every one of the
lacrimae
r
e
rum.

Meanwhile by devious routes the reputation of this stranger living in the land had reached the ears of the King.

‘Seemingly,’ he told his Chamberlain, who had actually brought the news himself a month or two ago, ‘there lives in a
distant region of Our Kingdom a Poet with the gift of Truth and Beauty. We find this hard to believe, for such parts are commonly lived in by displaced zoo populations and dreary savages. Wherefore would a Poet seek Beauty and Truth in such a place? Nevertheless, it is Our wish and Our command that a poem from this man’s pen be brought that We may judge with Our own eyes the truth of these astounding claims.
Selah’
(which, being interpreted from the language of that land, means ‘Hurry’).

But the Chamberlain groaned inwardly; for, although it was his pleasure and his pride to do his Monarch’s bidding, he was wont to do it comfortably at Court and had not the slightest desire for arduous travels to howling outposts. Nonetheless he went; and towards the end of quite excessive tribulations through lands which would not recognise his ebony stick of office, sumptuously inlaid as it was with rubies, onyx and the clearest amethyst, he came upon the Headman, who undertook to guide him through what remained of the forest to his final goal.