The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  —Yes, said Doctor Dee. Lamb. Lion. Sheaf of wheat. What others?

  —I know not. Fishes. A king. I could not see.

  Turning in a slow spiral downward like a hunting hawk, the one who bore him fell toward the abbey church. One by one the vast personages retreated into the earth as into sleep, and could no longer be discerned.

  —Then he showed me. In the old abbey. The place where I should dig.

  —And did you dig then?

  Mr. Talbot rubbed his brow, as though to bring up the memory.

  —I think I did not. He … I swooned. I remember nothing. He bore me away, and I awoke home again.

  —Or woke never having left, said Doctor Dee.

  Mr. Talbot glanced toward Arthur, and then leaned close to the doctor’s ear, to speak urgently.

  —If it was a dream, it was a true dream. For I went later on foot that same way. And there was the church, as I had been shown it. There was the place I was to dig, there where two pyramids were. But for the stonecutters at work there, it was the same, all the same. I waited for night to fall. By the moon I dug. I found the chamber, and in it the book.

  Doctor Dee said nothing, nor looked at Mr. Talbot. He studied his own hands on his knees. Then he rose, and pinched out the light.

  —We will know more tomorrow, he said. We will reach the abbey before noon.

  Long after midnight Mr. Talbot awoke, forgetful of where he was, still walking Thames-side with his book under his arm, feeling pursued on a windy night and seeing a dark boat and a boatman skimming toward him over the water’s surface. He lay open-eyed, remembering. Arthur’s face lay close to his, his long-lashed eyes seeming half open but his spirit far elsewhere, Mr. Talbot could tell it by his breath, so regular it seemed not the boy’s own. On his other side, wrapped in his big coat, Doctor Dee slept, deep-rumbling.

  A little light came in through the horn of the low small window. The eaves dripped. Mr. Talbot thought of Wales, where once he had run away to hide when he was a boy. He thought how he had hidden in the mountains, and lived alone for many long months; how he had built himself a hut of skins and branches, like brutish men of olden time, and sat within it listening to the rain drip from the leaves. After long thought he had dug a mine into the earth; he had shaped a vessel of clay, and fired it in a fire of wood and coal. He knew what to do next.

  He awoke again then, in the inn bed, and lay awake till dawn, feeling clear and pure inside more intensely than he had ever before, as though his heart were turning to gold. Had he ever gone to Wales really? He thought about what he had seen and done there, the rain blown across the stone faces of the hills; the mine, the fire. He felt within himself two clear pools, one dark, one light, that he could dip from: this, and that; the one, the other; and there was not anything that could not be made from the mixture.

  After the Dissolution of King Harry’s time, Glastonbury Abbey and its messuages, its woods, streams, and fields, had been deeded to various lords and gentlemen, sold by them, resold. Whatever of value could be stripped from the church and the buildings was stripped, lead roofs and gutters, ornament, glass; the books and manuscripts were thrown away or burned or sold to booksellers or paper-makers by the cartload. Now dock and dandelion grew in the roofless aisles, violets in the tumbled stone; the campfires of homeless men sheltering within the ruins of chapel and chapter-house blackened the walls. The immense cathedral served the present owners as a kind of quarry; dressed stone could be taken away by whoever paid a fee to the landlord.

  —They know not what they do who sell these stones, said Doctor Dee when the little party stood within the abbey precincts. They know not what they do.

  He put out his hand to touch a stone eagle, fallen there, a stone book within its talons, bright grass grown up around it.

  —Here stood the ancientest church of this isle, he said. Here that holy man of Arimathæa came, with that Cup never seen again since those times. Here, only the place is lost, Patrick is buried, and what other great carcasses? Dunstan of Canterbury, in a tomb known only to the monks of this place, and now since they are driven away, known to no one. And Edgar, peaceable, provident king.

  —And Arthur, said Arthur.

  —In a great sarcophagus, not of lead or of stone but of oak, an oak tree hollowed out, they found him; his shin bone larger than your shin and thigh together. There were giants in the land in those days. His wife with him; a lock of golden hair was in the tomb when it was opened, but a monk touched it, and it turned all to dust.

  —Guinevere, said Arthur. He was shivering in the thin rain that had been falling all morning.

  —Is it there? Doctor Dee asked Mr. Talbot. There where you dug?

  Two obelisks stood by the old track through the abbey, Dod Lane. Mr. Talbot, hugging himself, turned in the huge churchyard.

  —I don’t know, he said. It seems not the same now. I cannot tell.

  —We’ll look, said the doctor.

  And so all of that afternoon they climbed over grass-grown monuments and poked between fallen stones and climbed down into vaults filled up with rubble and started a badger from his den, while Mr. Talbot, finger to his lips and eyes uncertain, tried to remake the journey or redream the dream that had once brought him here; until, wet and tired, they took shelter in the Mary chapel, under an unfallen piece of roof. They made a camp there, and lit a fire on the stones of the floor, and ate bread and cheese they had brought from the inn.

  —I have a journey to go, Doctor Dee told them then. A short journey. If I do not return before nightfall or soon after, I will not come till morning. Then we will look again.

  He rose, and took up his staff and plaited hat; he saw to it that his son’s coat was dry inside, and that there was a dry place for him to sleep by the fire, and a cloak to wrap him in; he blessed the boy’s head.

  —Watch well, he said to Mr. Talbot. Think hard where we shall look.

  When he had walked away, picking his way carefully amid the wet stones, Mr. Talbot sat with Arthur by the fire. The boy had grown silent, a little uncertain with his father gone.

  —Shall we look? Mr. Talbot said.

  —No.

  They sat, hands in their sleeves, looking into the feeble fire.

  —I’ll tell you a secret, Mr. Talbot said.

  Arthur’s eyes opened wider.

  —My name, said Mr. Talbot, is not Talbot.

  —What is it then?

  Mr. Talbot said nothing more. He put a stick into the fire; the wetness of it sizzled and smoked.

  —I know what that book tells, he said then. It tells how the work of making gold is to be done. I know that’s what it tells, though I can’t read it.

  —How is gold made? Arthur asked.

  —Gold grows, said Mr. Talbot. Deep deep in mountains, where the earth is oldest, gold is. So you make deep mines to find it. But you must never take away all the gold; you must not, for you will take away the seed of gold, by which it grows. Like fruit, take away that which is ripe; leave the rest to ripen. And it will. Slowly, slowly, the stones of the mountain, the clays of it, grow up to be gold; they become gold.

  —Do they?

  —In Wales, Mr. Talbot said. In Wales, when I went into the mountains, I knew the gold was growing, all around me, in the earth; deep within. It seemed I could hear it grow.

  —Hear it?

  —One day, in a thousand years, a thousand thousand, all stone will have grown into gold.

  —The world will end by then, said Arthur.

  —Perhaps it will. But we can teach the gold to grow faster. If we learn how. We can help, like midwives, to bear the gold from what contains it; we can bring it to birth.

  Arthur said nothing to that. The rain had slackened, begun to cease, and the clouds once again to part and change; the sun shone. Glastonbury was not gold but silver.

  —I’ll go piss, said Mr. Talbot.

  He went out past the little fire and into the long green alley of the chapel’s nave, and thought a long time. He
went down toward the sanctuary along the wall, stopping to look into side-chapels. When he reached the sanctuary and the place where the altar had been, he looked back; he could no longer see the campfire. He took from within his coat a small stone jar, well sealed with wax.

  He looked around for a spot. He saw a narrow flight of steps, leading downward beneath a carved arch; when he went down them, he found that the way was blocked with fallen stones, except for a narrow opening just large enough for him to get half his body in, but not to crawl inside. He thought he heard, within, a sound of water, as though there were a well inside. He closed his eyes; he saw the dog-face of a smiling being; he dropped the jar into the space within.

  Tomorrow, with Doctor Dee, he would find it there, as he had found his book; and the story could go on.

  At the top of the bald high hill called the Tor of Glaston-bury there is a tower like a finger of stone, St. Michael’s tower. At the foot of the hill, in the valley that lies between the Tor and the hill west of it, Chalice Hill, there is a well, the Holy Well. The road that leads up the Tor passes this well. Doctor Dee, on his way upward, stopped by it. Chambers have been built around it, of heavy stone that shows the tool that worked it, and which Doctor Dee supposed the Romans put there, or even the Druids before them.

  They were great and wise men, the Druids, and of the doctor’s own race, though in their pride they had denied Christ and striven against His disciples. There were tales of how they had set up the stones that stood in a ring on Salisbury plain, had brought them here out of Ireland through the air, like a flock, and settled them there on the plain. Doctor Dee knew that when blessed Patrick had questioned them, and asked them who made the world, the Druids answered: the Druids made it.

  He stepped down into the mossy way that led into the chambers of the well. At the dark door he put out his hand against the stone, listening for a time to the sound of the waters; then he entered. It was somewhere up on Chalice Hill that the spring arose that fed this well; it arose, so it was said, at the spot where Joseph of Arimathæa buried the Cup from which Our Lord drank at His last supper. The Cup, calix, crater from which that hill was named. Unless the chalice the hill was named for was the hill itself, a cup inverted on the earth and pouring out its liquid water-wine here. Doctor Dee looked down at the stones that the water passed over—they were streaked and soaked with red. Blood Well was this place’s other name.

  He drank there, and prayed, and went on. The road left the shelter of the greening trees, and by stages proceeded around the Tor in a spiral as it went upward. The sky began to clear, and a sharp breeze was on the doctor’s cheek. As he rose higher, farther and farther spread out the lowlands in his sight, even as far as to the sea. Above these lowlands rose Cadbury Hill, and Chalice Hill, and Weary-all Hill like a whale lifting a huge back into the air, and the hill he climbed. In ancient times, he knew, they had all been islands, these hills; the lowlands were all under sea. Glastonbury itself had been an island, Avalon, isle of apples. This Tor could be got to by boat; Weary-all was the isle where Joseph first put ashore, where he plunged his staff into the earth. There, the Thorn had sprung up, the Thorn that blossoms at Christmas. Doctor Dee had seen it, the Holy Thorn, all white flowers at Christ’s nativity: for he had climbed these hills many times, and described their antiquities, and measured the earth around. Chorography was another art of his: the measurement and description of a portion of earth and its contents and its geometries. Only there was no portion of earth that was like the one he stood on now, no other portion that he knew of.

  Breathing strongly, and pressing his own staff into the roadway, he climbed. The road turned. He was approaching the summit; and as he trod the spiral track, the lowlands and the hills around began to awake.

  The Lion that Mr. Talbot had seen could not be discerned from the Tor, for he lay on the slope of the hills opposite Somerton; but now the doctor could make out Virgo, toward the east, outlined by the black and silver penstroke of the Cary River—Virgo, like his Queen, with her staff, and the wide panniers of her skirts. East of her, the Scorpion lay curled by the river Brue, the sting in his tail an outcrop of bright stone.

  The Centaur next awoke, who was Hercules too, hero and horse in one, made of the Pennard Hills or himself making them or both; West Pennard church steeple the arrow in his bow. And north of him the Goat, and the old fortification they called Ponter’s Ball making the Goat’s horn. Doctor Dee went on walking sunwise around the cone of the Tor. Figure by figure the Twelve came forth, from the Ram in Wilton and Street with the corn on his back green now that would be golden fleece come harvest time, all around to the two Fishes tied together at the tail: one being the great whale of Weary-all Hill, the other lying in the village of Street, its round eye the old round churchyard there. A huge nativity that no one who did not know it was there could ever see, not even from the top of the Tor, though it might be discerned—it might be—by one who flew overhead, hovered overhead like that hawk, and looked down.

  If it had not been a dream, who had carried him?

  Doctor Dee had reached the precincts of the tower. In its height the wind hooted, the freshening wind that plucked at the doctor’s beard and at the hem of his coat. Now the land lay open all around, and Doctor Dee stood in the center as though at a gnomon and looked out over Logres.

  Kingdoms had been smaller then: and yet when the sea had filled the low places and covered the sands between the isles and high places that formed these figures, figures of the starry universe above them, then Arthur and his knights had had kingdom upon kingdom hereabouts, land upon land to travel in. For one kingdom is all kingdoms: a hill, a road, a dark wood; a castle to come to; a perilous bridge to cross.

  Avalon was the isle where Arthur was borne away to die or sleep: and yet the same isle was Camelot where he reigned. And Avalon was Perceval’s island too, by right from his father King Pelles who had his seat there: so some old books had it. It was the place from which Perceval set out to seek the Grail: that Grail sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone, sometimes a dish, which was not different from the cup that blessed Joseph brought to this isle, which poured good water still: had poured water into Dr. Dee’s hands this very day.

  By Michael’s tower Doctor Dee sat down, and drew his coat around him. Clouds lifting from the Severn Sea like winged creatures showed him a white bar and a gray line that was his own land of Wales far to the West, the West into which the Druids had gone away, bearing the past with them.

  There was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were Grails of earth, water, fire, air: there was a stone, a cup, a crater or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintessence. Unless that Grail be not truly the whole seven-ringed cup of heaven itself, containing all things, contained within all things, the cup from which, willy-nilly, every soul must drink.

  He thought: Is the universe one thing? And is the whole of it contained in every part?

  Years ago, long years ago, he had discovered what might be a sign for the one thing the universe is. He had drawn it with rule and compass, and for a year he had bent his mind upon it to see if it would grow, to see if it would begin to draw to itself like a lodestone more and more of what the world is made of: fire, air, earth, water; numbers, stars, souls. The more he regarded it, the more it did so. It became a glyph like the holy glyphs of Ægypt that contain knowledge otherwise inexpressible, words too long to speak. He carried his sign with him as a woman carries a child, until one week in Antwerp (he was a fire of knowledge in that week, a burning bush) he had committed his sign to a little book, and belched out all that he knew about it, wrote without knowing what he wrote, until he was empty.

  He had written it; he had had it set in type, and printed.

  And it might still be that the sign which he had made was a sign for the one thing that the universe is. But it was a seal over secrecies now. It had passed fr
om him, and he no longer knew what it pictured; he could not understand the book he had written.

  He might come to know again and understand. He might, now. Not any answer withheld from you. The hawk that hung in the middle of the air, looking down, began to fall in a long gyre. The sun was setting in the sea: Doctor Dee could almost hear it hiss.

  To go about Logres, as the sun goes about the year; to search the circle of creation, and find, in a castle that is your own, the Grail, long-sought, long-hungered-for, that belongs to you alone. In the High History that Doctor Dee had read in the old language, King Perceval’s name is construed Par lui fet: made by himself.

  And the cup that he sought, wounded, in the castle of his wounded father, what was it but this cup Aquarius that Doctor Dee looked down on in the star temple laid out in Somersetshire below?

  And though it might be only here that such figures of earth (now darkening, and closing great eyes in sleep) had been cut by wizards’ hands, still the stars shine everywhere; and so it must be that in every place there is a star temple, impressed upon circles of earth, large or small. And inside every one of them must a Grail be hidden.

  Doctor Dee raised his eyes to the heavens, whose stairs were swept of cloud now, and Tell me, he said: Tell me: Is the universe one thing? Is it, after all?

  The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his question to: they saw him, for this ring of earth is a place they often stop by, to gaze into it, as into a mirror, or through it, as through a keyhole. They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, to look over their shoulders—for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind.

  TWO

  All on an April morning, Pierce Moffett walked out of his apartment and down Maple Street toward town. In the yards along his way householders were digging, planting, freeing shrubs of winter garb and cutting their ragged hair. Some turned to watch Pierce go by, and most greeted him. “Morning!” Pierce said heartily, grinning inwardly to be hailed in this way, it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn’t imagine how odd it was for him, a city man, to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. He blessed them, blessed their big fannies protruding as they bent over their pots and borders, blessed their hedges and the lemony blossoms of their springing black bushes, now what was that stuff called again, was that forsythia?