by Patrick Guinness, Ithell Colquhoun, Peter Owen, Allen Saddler
The Anchorite did not tell me who the girl was.
‘Just where we are,’ he went on, ‘the coast is so formed that the water can’t ebb as far as it does from the opposite side of the bay. It’s about dead-low now, and as you can see, there are only two or three hundred yards of sand between the road and the water. Well, as I was telling you, we were staring at the cathedral, which is hardly ever uncovered, when a lady stepped out of the sea quite near us. She appeared just where the sand dividing us from the water was narrowest, that is, about opposite where we are now. She was tall and fair and dressed in a robe of yellow silk, the colour between orange and lemon. She came towards us, and we walked over the wet sand to meet her.’
My eyes had come back from across the bay and were now concentrated upon the waveless touch of the nearer sea and shore. I could all but see the yellow-clad figure standing at the water’s edge; and it seemed to me that there must have been other of her people – sea-men and sea-women, with her or not far behind, though the Anchorite said nothing about them.
‘She spoke to us,’ he continued (and I could almost hear the sea-woman’s voice), ‘telling us her name was Vellanserga, and inviting us to go with her into the cathedral. I refused; but the girl went, and was never heard of again.’
I knew that if the same invitation had been offered to me, I too would have accepted; and it showed how completely the Anchorite’s movements were in subjection to my Uncle’s service, that he had not done so.
Seeing that I was engrossed in meditation on his tale, the Anchorite withdrew.
Storm is in the air, but distant. Does it echo, or threaten? Is the air weighted by the melancholy of a tempest subsiding, or the anxious hush that precedes its first assault?
On the sea floats a head in profile, of heroic traits, a collar of violets encircling the severed neck. The flaxen hair, once looped-up, is now spread upon a watery surface, and tilted by recurring small waves. Some distant storm, surely, tore this head from a ship’s prow; and the wood still bleeds, oozing a purple growth.
The salty taste of blood, I mused, comes from the sea, which being without colour, reflects a tint from the air above while turning its red globes into sea-anemones; but blood has kept these as a dye.
Here is the end of the land and the beginning of a country under the sea; an impalpable region stretches over the last of the earth and extends a long way under water. It is said that our starvation is their plenty; that in time of war here, down there reigns the deepest peace.
In a douce air above stones and soil, one is not alone; mist is blown out towards a silvered horizon, nothing perishes. Sometimes there is a thickening, and a growing menace.
Round coastal rocks flows a true water, the authentic Atlantide. It is not the peacock that divides two continents, shrill-voiced but never terrible; nor that narrow and more deceptive iris strait; nor yet the electric blue sweeping from Teneriffe to Tory, though a swish from the tail of the same dragon.
Under granite the saints lie buried; here a monument measured to human form still stands, there a tree takes shape from the bones beneath, an honourable vessel. In yet earlier rock there pulses an ancient sensual life, but the saints must be roused up first. Their diadems are bright with Sunday flowers, already they lift head and shoulders from their covering slabs. When they come alive and walk their own realm, the kingdom of vegetation, then blood of beasts must warm the older stones and power will wake from a deeper cave.
Men must be sacrificed then, but those who feed upon them do not want their flesh – they are eaters of dreams. The powers of the sky are hungry and only men can fill them. They desire the direction of their four main streams.
I turn inland, not noticing where I go, and come suddenly upon a structure, half barn, half grotto, peopled with a pallid statuary, relict of ancient prows. Immediately before me rises a tall figure, a great woman, full Hesper, water in the curves of her heavy hair, in the massive folds of her clothing, in the acanthus-like foliage of the scrolls that support her – a wave breaking into leaf. Her eyes, hypnotised by the pole-star, see further than eyes with sight, for they meet both sky and ocean, empty of all but the moment that endures. Her gaze is intent upon an ever receding horizon, her posture stretches towards a region impossibly remote, an undiscoverable time. She is the type of the hero-woman, both mother and warrior, debased long since as Britannia, but stemming from the ancient line of foundered Atlantis.
Here in a sea-Valhalla, its walls encrusted with shells, are found her sisters; many are not heads merely, but forward-straining bodies too, mightily draped. All have a family resemblance, all reflect our sea-mother’s noble features.
Before one of them, the seared amazon of antiquity comes to mind, for hazard has shorn away one of her breasts, and the scar is whitened now like the rest of her body by recent painting. Another figure, the central one of the tableau, seems ready to take flight from between two carved winds who, crouching to her left and right on a throne of cloud, blow from distended cheeks, while above her hangs a frieze of lightning and cumulus. Some are fully-coloured, some altogether whitened, some white with faded washes of colour or traces of gold. Their dress recalls that of the queens on playing-cards, four directresses of destiny armed and resplendent. Some touch heart or brow with a rose, petals that resist both wind and tide. If it were not for the small feet or sometimes the shoulders – echo of mermaid-torso – which hold these figures of adventure back, attaching them to object and present – that unseen ship which yet moves, sways with the flux, disintegrated though seemingly solid – they would dash onwards in unending foam-like career. Head tossed upward, neck outstretched, and breast swelling with a double air – the lung’s breath and the oncoming breeze – all declare it. What vision has parted these eyelids, fixed these pupils, carved these smiles of ecstacy, dishevelled these massive tresses, filled these bosoms, bent these spines like a bow, frozen this whole?
The sea’s voice, almost out of earshot, is heard only as in the ear of a shell; and the sole water visible is an oblong tank, clear but black, which reflects a pod-like column bursting with strange fruit and unconcealing leaves. The women, their backs to the sea, look now towards that garden where trumpet-flowers and tree-labelias remind them of some exotic shore.
But I have explored it already, and though the other day I could not find it when I looked for it, to-day I have no desire to enter. Still bemused by the gaze of the statue-woman, I cannot but search for her everywhere; and I find her in the land’s own long memory.
She overthrew the Norsemen, she melted the Romans down. It was she who led the people. She fought on the hill of stones, she wore the tunic of battle, she wielded the sword, she rode. A breastplate of stone and glass covers her egg-ribs; and it is said that small living creatures dwell within, but she can scarcely comprehend their gnat-like life.
Vellanserga weeps, her valley fills. She comes from the land-under-wave remembering the summer fires lighted in her honour and her train of young worshippers, girls and boys with fiery hair. But at full moon she is delighted; stone maidens wake and dance, notes jet from two or three giant pipes to the south-east somewhere by her knees, and from the north-west near her elbows are answered. Her bones become flutes. On the anniversary of her feast she stirs, sighs, half turns over, struggles to awake.
At the dark of every moon Vellanserga bleeds. Her quick is hidden by a cloven bud overgrown with root-like tendrils, strawberry-red like a huge rose-gall; and by day an intoxicant juice is exuded drop by drop from the grotte below. Above the bush of rootlets a stem pushes up, with numbers of small tassels sprouting from it like greenish flowers, and by night this wick gives out an incandescent vapour – the colonist surmounting her left shoulder sees a distant glow in the hollow – and the organs are shaded by canopies of enormous leaves, each six-feet square and supported on a stalk scattered over with red barbs.
On a flat space of ground an oblong is marked out with sticks and a cord, a sacred enclosure. Phantom walls arise; her da
ughter dances there with a dark acrobat in magnetic embrace. Impalpable wires swing them out to the planets, cords and poles hang through space; and now, their breast-bones touching, they glide in the air, their limbs’ action springing from a single centre. On paths drawn by the sea-gull they plunge and sway.
The other daughter goes down to a beach made of broken shells; what strange light is there, it is neither day nor night. The sea is calm, stretches away; on the wet sand there stands the skeleton of a tower. A few scaffold-poles rise upward, and others are held across them with rope. They wait. She calls to the king of fishes.
On the slope of Vellanserga’s right thigh a ghost sometimes appears painfully at dusk, and horses shy on one of her arterial roads. Down the middle of her body goes a slim furrow furred with shrubs, marking the course of her stream towards the sea. Her navel is a pool of water-lilies; from her armpit evening-primroses sprout. On the haunted bend by the mill is shown the sanctuary where she lived as a saint, and on her demesne are found other view-cells and a healing well. Vellanserga sleeps; the thickening of her coma is mist.
From her left side juts one of her ribs, a headed stone; on the front is sketched a cross, on the back an indecipherable poem in ogham is inscribed. This marks the entrance to her chapel, now only foundations. Ferns cover the mouldered walls, a single column remains at the centre. The east is wanting the pelvic arch, the white egg-cell, the lamp-ichor; north and south lack aromatic fume and the candles’ waxen glow.
‘Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé
Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine
Avarement aura noyé
Le flanc enfant d’une siréne.’
– Mallarmé.
Back at the mansion, I determined to explore more fully the interior of my Uncle’s domain; and accordingly I approached the door of the study through which, on my first evening, I had been vouchsafed the spectacle of the illuminated hands. To my surprise, the door was now slightly ajar; I pushed it open and found myself in what was no more than an ante-room giving, to the left, upon a series of chambers which housed the exhibits of a museum, and to the right, upon the immense dusky cavern of my Uncle’s library. I say ‘dusky’, and this indeed was the impression it made upon me; yet it was by no means ill-lighted, and the areas at window-level were furnished with books well-bound in, seemingly, the latest editions. It was further up, on the shelves above the windows, that shadow and festooning cobweb combined to hide a tattered array of volumes; while higher still, the rafters of the soaring roof were draped in utter darkness, and the forbidding antiquity of the treatises here stored formed but a screen for the flitter-mouse’s crannies. These upper shelves were reached by an occasional rickety ladder leaned against the wall; and temerity bade me climb, but only about half-way, up one of these.
I began to examine the titles now ranged level with my eyes, such as El Arte de los Metales of Barba, Anima Magica Abscondita, Coelum Terrae and several other of the mystical essays of Thomas Vaughan including – ironically enough, considering the place in which I found it – Aula Lucis. Not far away were The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King of Eirenaeus Philalethes, with A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby and The Fount of Chemical Light by the same author; while further on I discovered The Golden Age Restored of Henry Madathanas, A New Pearl of Great Price and The Sophic Hydrolith. But most of all it was the enigmatic Book of Lambspring by Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas that held my attention; and as I turned over its emblem-engraved leaves, a few pages of manuscript fell out, written in a crabbed hand I could only suppose my Uncle’s. I had set myself to lay open all I might of his secret researches, and accordingly had no hesitation in scrutinising the papers before me. This is what I read:
‘Everything found on land is found in the sea.’
‘Is it not time to break through that dismal convention of the scientific periodicals which orders, however suavely, that only the driest language be used? One would hardly know that these people were making discoveries from the way they have to write them up. Their particular kind of good form decrees that every experiment, no matter how dramatically successful, should be tabulated with less symptom of personal zest than the pages of a ledger can show.
‘I have been able to observe some remarkable facts about plant-life, hitherto unnoticed, particularly with regard to habitat; and I expect other biologists to give these investigations their due, despite their unusual guise and staging. Indeed I hope the more orthodox savants may even recognise here a certain justice, since the things I am going to describe seem like sports of nature; though who knows? further research may prove them to be instances of some law previously unknown.
Experiment I.
‘As I was climbing over the rocky ridges of a valley I came upon a wide fissure slanting down towards the centre of the earth. I looked in and found that its distant floor was water. I began to climb down inside, taking hold of a natural bannister here, stepping on an unhewn stair-tread there, which the uneven surfaces provided. This descent was not easy, as the rock was green with damp and patched with a viscous wine-coloured growth.
‘I had now penetrated to a vertiginous depth; if I looked upward, the walls rose above me in a cool shaft; turning downward, I could see a cave filled with water the colour of crysolite, illumined from some hidden source and darkened where a turn of wall or jutting rock threw a shadow. One such submerged projection hid the mouth of the cave, making it invisible from the surface of the ground.
‘I noticed that the water was not tideless, for it began to sink with gurgling sounds, and in its retreat left the cave without light. The rhythm of this tide was very rapid, for scarcely had the cavern been emptied, when the water came lapping back, bringing the light with it. I tasted the water and found it salt; and being unable to explore the cave further because of its swift return, I began to climb back towards the earth’s surface. The going was still more difficult than before, as I now discovered fish like flowers growing directly from the stone without leaves. I could hardly get foot-hold or hand-hold without crushing or gripping these cold petals, which spread their cherry and blue-grey all about the ascent, a salty deposit covering them with a dusty grape-like bloom.
Experiment II.
‘It is not generally known, and certainly I never before this realised, that scattered about even the most cancerously-urban districts of great cities, there exist patches and stretches of wild marshy land or heath. I do not mean the parks – they are as urban as the buildings. These spaces are different because you cannot find them by looking for them – at least it seems to be so, as far as our present knowledge takes us.
‘The other day when I was with a companion I found such a patch – a rough tussocky piece of land, quite extensive, where flowers of a unique and curious species were growing. The petals were large and looked as if they were made of paper – more like sepals, rather stiff and pointed; the colour was pale orange-pink at the edges, deepening further in and finally becoming a dusky reddish-brown at the centre.
‘They grew in swampy places and we had to get wet in order to come close to them; we had to climb over rocks, too, and I was annoyed by my companion’s lack of adventure in these matters – the way he jumped over the rock-pools you would think a drop of water would kill him. But I did not care; I made my way over the stones and streams to one of the biggest flowers.
‘I found that inside and below the petals was a kind of bowl made of the same stuff; but it must have been stronger, because when I lifted the petals I saw that it was full to the brim with dark water. In this water were strange living creatures, like sea-anemones but larger and harder and without tentacles – more like scarabs perhaps. They were of various jewel-colours, ruby, sapphire, emerald, some of them spotted with white. They crawled and clung to the sides of the pool; I put my hand in and touched them, but my companion seemed afraid to. Then we turned northwards across the moor.
Experiment
III.
‘Another day I was looking for somewhere to live and went in a north-westerly direction. From some dingy agent in the vicinity I got the key of a house to let. Wandering along the streets I came to a row of peeling stucco houses with cat-walks in front, and mouldering urns, which could hold nothing, surmounting their plastered gate-posts.
‘My key fitted the front door of one of these houses; I went in and up the stairs to the first floor. I entered a large room with three windows looking out upon the road; folding doors connected it with the room behind. These I pushed open and found myself in another room exactly like the first; I went over to the central one of its three windows and looked out. Instead of the characterless gardens and hinder façade of a parallel block, I saw a sloping strip of ground overgrown with brambles, then a pebbly shore, and beyond, the crash and smother of Atlantic waves, breaking ceaselessly and without tide. This ocean stretched away to the horizon where it met a misty sky, but did not merge with it – the heaving water set up a melancholy distinction out there; and here within, a briney exultant smell penetrated the panes, cutting through the mustiness of a house long closed.
‘What extraordinary growths, I wondered, flowered in those wasteful depths? There must be a submerged garden whose silken green held curiosities far surpassing those I had come upon before. Idiots often visit such places and describe what they see; making idiots is one of the sea’s favourite games. But when it tires of this from time to time, it casts up instead a supernatural being on an unwelcoming strand, who ever afterwards, spends his nights asleep at the bottom of some vast watery gulf.’
* * *
These notes belonged I imagined, to an early period in my Uncle’s explorations when he was chiefly addicted to the study of plant-life, and before he had buried himself in his island retreat. Now, I had reason to believe that the direction of his interests had changed.
