The Purple Cloud

by M. P. Shiel

on the decks--they are descending. There is surelya strange odour of almonds--I only hope--it is so dark, _mon D_----'

  So the Frenchman, Tissu.

  [Footnote 1: This must be French reckoning, from meridian of Paris.]

  * * * * *

  With all that region I would have no more to do: for all here, it usedto be said, lies a great sunken continent; and I thought it would berising and shewing itself to my eyes, and driving me stark mad: for theearth is full of these contortions, sudden monstrous grimaces andapparitions, which are like the face of Medusa, affrighting a man intospinning stone; and nothing could be more appallingly insecure thanliving on a planet.

  I did not stop till I had got so far northward as the PhilippineIslands, where I was two weeks--exuberant, odorous places, but so hillyand rude, that at one place I abandoned all attempt at travelling in themotor, and left it in a valley by a broad, shallow, noisy river, full ofmossy stones: for I said: 'Here I will live, and be at peace'; and thenI had a fright, for during three days I could not re-discover the riverand the motor, and I was in the greatest despair, thinking: 'When shallI find my way out of these jungles and vastnesses?' For I was where nopaths were, and had lost myself in deeps where the lure of the earth istoo strong and rank for a single man, since in such places, I suppose, aman would rapidly be transformed into a tree, or a snake, or a tiger. Atlast, however, I found the place, to my great joy, but I would not shewthat I was glad, and to hide it, fell upon a front wheel of the car withsome kicks. I could not make out who the people were that lived here:for the relics of some seemed quite black, like New Zealand races, and Icould still detect the traces of tattooing, while others suggestedMongolian types, and some looked like pigmies, and some like whites. ButI cannot detail the two-years' incidents of that voyage: for it is past,and like a dream: and not to write of that--of all that--have I takenthis pencil in hand after seventeen long, long years.

  * * * * *

  Singular my reluctance to put it on paper. I will write rather of thevoyage to China, and how I landed the motor on the wharf at Tientsin,and went up the river through a maize and rice-land most charming inspite of intense cold, I thick with clothes as an Arctic traveller; andof the three dreadful earthquakes within two weeks; and how the only mapwhich I had of the city gave no indication of the whereabouts of itsmilitary depositories, and I had to seek for them; and of the threedays' effort to enter them, for every gate was solid and closed; and howI burned it, but had to observe its flames, without deep pleasure, frombeyond the walls to the south, the whole place being one cursed plain;yet how, at one moment, I cried aloud with wild banterings and gladlaughters of Tophet to that old Chinaman still alive within it; and howI coasted, and saw the hairy Ainus, man and woman hairy alike; and how,lying one midnight awake in my cabin, the _Speranza_ being in a stillglassy water under a cliff overhung by drooping trees--it was theharbour of Chemulpo--to me lying awake came the thought: 'Suppose nowyou should hear a step walking to and fro, leisurely, on the poop aboveyou--_just suppose'_; and the night of horrors which I had, for I couldnot help supposing, and at one time really thought that I heard it: andhow the sweat rolled and poured from my brow; and how I went toNagasaki, and burned it; and how I crossed over the great Pacific deepto San Francisco, for I knew that Chinamen had been there, too, and oneof them might be alive; and how, one calm day, the 15th or the 16thApril, I, sitting by the wheel in the mid-Pacific, suddenly saw a greatwhite hole that ran and wheeled, and wheeled and ran, in the sea, comingtoward me, and I was aware of the hot breath of a reeling wind, and thenof the hot wind itself, which deep-groaned the sound of the letter _V_,humming like a billion spinning-tops, and the _Speranza_ was on herside, sea pouring over her port-bulwarks, and myself in the cornerbetween deck and taffrail, drowning fast, but unable to stir; but allwas soon past and the white hole in the sea, and the hot spinning-top ofwind, ran wheeling beyond, to the southern horizon, and the _Speranza_righted herself: so that it was clear that someone wished to destroy me,for that a typhoon of such vehemence ever blew before I cannot think;and how I came to San Francisco, and how I burned it, and had my sweets:for it was mine; and how I thought to pass over the greattrans-continental railway to New York, but would not, fearing to leavethe _Speranza_, lest all the ships in the harbour there should bewrecked, or rusted, and buried under sea-weed, and turned unto the sea;and how I went back, my mind all given up now to musings upon the earthand her ways, and a thought in my soul that I would return to those deepplaces of the Filipinas, and become an autochthone--a tree, or a snake,or a man with snake-limbs, like the old autochthones: but I would not:for Heaven was in man, too: Earth and Heaven; and how as I steamed roundwest again, another winter come, and I now in a mood of dismaldespondencies, on the very brink of the inane abyss and smiling idiotcy,I saw in the island of Java the great temple of Boro Budor: and like atornado, or volcanic event, my soul was changed: for my recent studiesin the architecture of the human race recurred to me with interest, andthree nights I slept in the temple, examining it by day. It is vast,with that look of solid massiveness which above all characterises theJapanese and Chinese building, my measurement of its width being 529feet, and it rises terrace-like in six stories to a height of about 120or 130 feet: here Buddhist and Brahmin forms are combined into a mostrichly-developed whole, with a voluptuousness of tracery that is simplyintoxicating, each of the five off-sets being divided up into aninnumerable series of external niches, containing each a statue of thesitting Boodh, all surmounted by a number of cupolas, and the wholecrowned by a magnificent dagop: and when I saw this, I had the impulseto return to my home after so long wandering, and to finish the templeof temples, and the palace of palaces; and I said: 'I will return, andbuild it as a testimony to God.'

  * * * * *

  Save for a time, near Cairo, I did not once stop on that homewardvoyage, but turned into the little harbour at Imbros at a tranquilsunset on the 7th of March (as I reckon), and I moored the _Speranza_ tothe ring in the little quay, and I raised the battered motor from thehold with the middle air-engine (battered by the typhoon in themid-Pacific, which had broken it from the rope-fastenings and tumbled ithead-over-heels to port), and I went through the windowlessvillage-street, and up through the plantains and cypresses which I knew,and the Nile mimosas, and mulberries, and Trebizond palms, and pines,and acacias, and fig-trees, till the thicket stopped me, and I had toalight: for in those two years the path had finally disappeared; and on,on foot, I made my way, till I came to the board-bridge, and leantthere, and looked at the rill; and thence climbed the steep path in thesward toward that rolling table-land where I had built with many agroan; and half-way up, I saw the tip of the crane-arm, then the blazingtop of the south pillar, then the shed-roof, then the platform, ablinking blotch of glory to the watery eyes under the setting sun. Butthe tent, and nearly all that it contained, was gone.

  * * * * *

  For four days I would do nothing, simply lying and watching, shirking aload so huge: but on the fifth morning I languidly began something: andI had not worked an hour, when a fever took me--to finish it, to finishit--and it lasted upon me, with only three brief intervals, nearly sevenyears; nor would the end have been so long in coming, but for theunexpected difficulty of getting the four flat roofs water-tight, for Ihad to take down half the east one. Finally, I made them of gold slabsone-and-a-quarter inch thick, smooth on both sides, on each beam doublegutters being fixed along each side of the top flange to catch anyleakage at the joints, which are filled with slaters'-cement. The slabsare clamped to the top flanges by steel clips, having bolts set withplaster-of-Paris in holes drilled in the slabs. These clips are 1-1/2in. by 3/17 in., and are 17 in. apart. The roofs are slightly pitched tothe front edges, where they drain into gold-plated copper-gutters onplated wrought-iron brackets, with one side flashed up over the blocks,which raise the slabs from the beam-tops, to clear the joint gutters..
..But now I babble again of that base servitude, which I would forget, butcannot: for every measurement, bolt, ring, is in my brain, like aburden: but it is past, it is past--and it was vanity.

  * * * * *

  Six months ago to-day it was finished: six months more protracted,desolate, burdened, than all those sixteen years in which I built.

  I wonder what a man--another man--some Shah, or Tsar, of that far-offpast, would say now of me, if eye could rest upon me! With what awewould he certainly shrink before the wild majesty of these eyes; andthough I am not lunatic--for I am not, I am not--how would he fly mewith the exclamation: 'There is the very lunacy of Pride!'

  For there would seem to him--it must be so--in myself, in all about me,something extravagantly royal, touched with terror. My body hasfattened, and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broadBabylonish girdle of crimson cloth,