Under African Skies

by Charles Larson

  “There isn’t even a bush path!”

  “What a pity,” he said. “It was such a fine town, the most beautiful city in all the continent.”

  “And now, what is it?” she said.

  “What is it?” he replied dismally.

  With his stick he began to mow down the nettles which rose thick and menacing about them.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  She saw in the midst of the nettles a fallen statue, green with moss, a humiliated statue. It cast upon her a dead, gray glance. Presently she became aware that the look was not really dead, only blind, as the eyes were without pupils, and it was in fact a living gaze, as alive as a look could be. A cry came from it, an appealing cry. Was the statue bewailing its loneliness and neglect? The lips drooped pitiably.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “He was the ruler who lived in this place. His rooms can still be seen.”

  “Why don’t you set up the statue over there?” she said. “It would be better there than among all these nettles.”

  “That is what I wanted to do. As soon as the statue fell from its alcove I wanted to put it back, but I simply hadn’t the strength. These stone sculptures are terribly heavy.”

  “I know,” she replied, “and after all it is merely a stone sculpture.”

  But was it merely carved stone? Could sculptured stone have cast upon her such a piercing glance? Perhaps, then, it wasn’t mere stone. And even if it were nothing more than mere stone, the fact remained that for all the nettles and moss and the vagaries of fortune which it had endured, this stone would still outlast man’s life. No, it could not be mere stone. And with this sort of distress in its look, this cry of distress …

  “Would you care to visit his rooms?” asked the old man.

  “Yes, take me there,” she answered.

  “Pay particular attention to the columns,” he told her. “No doubt there is only one hall left here now, but when you consider the number of broken and fallen columns it does look as though there used to be at least ten halls.”

  With the end of his stick he pointed out the marble stumps and debris of broken slabs buried in the grass.

  “This gateway must have been exceedingly high,” he said, gazing upwards.

  “It can’t have been higher than the palace, surely,” she said.

  “How can we tell? I have never seen it any more than you have. By the time I arrived here, it had already fallen into the grass; but those who were here before my time declared that it was an astonishing entrance. If you could put all this debris together again I dare say you would get a surprise. But who could tackle such a task?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and continued: “You would need to be a giant, to have the hands and the strength of a giant.”

  “Do you really believe that a giant …”

  “No,” he replied. “Only the ruler himself, who had it erected, could do it. He could certainly manage it.”

  She gazed at the niches where great tufts of grass had been bold enough to replace the statues. There was one space, larger than all the rest, where the weeds grew particularly ostentatiously, like a flaming torch.

  “That is the niche, over there, where he used to stand before his fall among the nettles,” he remarked.

  “I see,” she said. “But now there is nothing left but wild grass and the memory of his agony.”

  “He used to find this city and his palace trying enough. He personally supervised the building of the entire place. He intended this town to be the biggest and this palace the highest. He wanted them built to his own scale. Now he is dead, his heart utterly broken.”

  “But could he have died any other way?”

  “No, I suppose he carried his own death within him, like us all. But he had to carry the fate of a felled Goliath.”

  By this time they had reached the foot of a staircase and he pointed out a little door at the end of the corridor on the left.

  “That is where I live,” he told her. “It is the old porter’s lodge. I suppose I could have found somewhere a little more spacious and less damp, but after all, I am not much more than a cartetaker. In fact, a guide is only a caretaker.”

  So saying, he began to make his way painfully up the steps. He was a decrepit old man.

  “You are looking at me? I know I’m not much better than the palace! All this will crumble down one day. Soon all this will crumble down on my head and it won’t be a great loss! But perhaps I shall crumble before the palace.”

  “The palace is older,” she said.

  “Yes, but it is more robust. They don’t build like that nowadays.”

  “What have you been saying?” she demanded. “You are not stone! Why compare your body to a palace?”

  “Did I compare myself to a palace? I don’t think so. My body is certainly no palace, not even a ruined one. Perhaps it is like the porter’s lodge where I live, and perhaps I was wrong to call it damp and dark, perhaps I should have said nothing about it. But I must pause for breath. These stairs. At my age no one likes climbing stairs.”

  And he wheezed noisily, pressing his hand over his heart as though to subdue its frantic beating.

  “Let us go,” he said at last, “up the few remaining steps.”

  They climbed a little higher and reached a landing with a great door opening off it, a door half wrenched from its hinges.

  “Here are the rooms,” he said.

  She saw an immense apartment, frightfully dilapidated. The roof had partly collapsed, leaving the rafters open to the sky. Daylight streamed in upon the debris of tiles and rubbish strewn upon the floor. But nothing could take from the chamber its harmonious proportions, with its marble panels, its tapestry and paintings, the bold surge of its columns, and the deep alcoves between them. It was all still beautiful, in spite of being three-quarters ruined. The torn and rotten tapestries and the peeling paintings were still beautiful: so were the cracked stained-glass windows. And although the paneling was practically torn away, the grandeur of the original conception remained.

  “Why have you let everything deteriorate so far?” she asked.

  “Why indeed? But now it is too late to do anything about it.”

  “Is it really too late?”

  “Now that the master is no longer here …” He tapped the panels with his stick.

  “I don’t know how the walls are still standing,” he said. “They may last a fair time yet. But the rain deluges through the roof and windows and loosens the stones. And then when the winter storms come! It is those violent storms that destroy everything.”

  He dislodged a scrap of mortar. “Just look, it’s no more than a bit of gray dust. I can’t think why the blocks don’t fall apart. The damp has destroyed everything.”

  “Was this the only room the master had?” she asked.

  “He had hundreds of them and all of them richly furnished. I’ve pushed the movable stuff into one of the smaller rooms which were less damaged.”

  He opened a door concealed in the paneling. “Here is some of it,” he said.

  She beheld a jumble of carved furniture, ornaments, carpets, and crockery.

  “Gold dishes, please note. The master would eat off nothing but gold. And look at this. Here he is in his robes of state.” He pointed to a canvas where the face of the statue was portrayed.

  The eyes were marvelously expressive. They were so even in the statue, although the sculptor had given them no pupils, but here they were infinitely more expressive and the look which they gave was one of anguish. “Is no one left near me?” they seemed to ask. And the droop of the mouth replied, “No one.” The man had known they would all forsake him, he had long foreseen it. Nevertheless, she, she had come! She had fought through the bush and she had wandered round the swamps, she had felt fatigue and despair overwhelming her, but she had triumphed over all these obstacles and she had come, she had come at last. Had he not guessed she would come? Yet possibly this very foresight had but accentuated th
e bitter line of his set lips. “Yes,” said those lips, “someone will come, when all the world has ceased to call. But someone who will be unable to soothe my distress.”

  She swung round. This reproach was becoming unbearable, and not only this reproach, which made all her goodwill seem useless, but the cry of abandonment, the wild lonely appeal in his look.

  “We can do nothing, nothing at all for him,” the old man declared. And she replied: “Is there ever anything we can do?” She sighed. In her innermost being she felt the anguish of this look; one might have thought it was she who cried, that the cry of loneliness welled from her own lonely heart.

  “Perhaps you can do something,” he said. “You are still young. Although you may not be able to do anything for yourself, you might perhaps help others.”

  “You know very well that I cannot even do that,” she said.

  She seemed overwhelmed, as though she bore the ruins on her own shoulders.

  “Are there still more rooms?” she asked him.

  “Lots of them. But it is getting late, the sun is sinking.”

  Daylight was fading fast. The light had become a soft, rosy glow, a light which was kinder to details, and in it the great room took on a new aspect. The paintings and panels regained a freshness which was far from theirs by right. This sudden glow was the gentlest of lights. But not even this light could calm a tormented heart.

  “Come along,” called the old man.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She imagined that once she went out of this hall and its adjoining storeroom her heart would perhaps calm down. She thought that perhaps she might forget the great cry coming from the storeroom. Yes, if only she could get away from this palace, leave these ruins, surely she could forget it. But was not the cry inside herself?

  “The cry is within me,” she exclaimed.

  “Stop thinking about it,” advised the old man. “If you hear anything it’s just because the silence has got on your nerves. Tomorrow you will hear nothing.”

  “But it is a terrible cry.”

  “The swans have an awful cry, too,” he remarked.

  “Swans?”

  “Yes, the swans. To look at them gliding over the water you might never believe it. Have you ever happened to hear them cry? But of course not, you are scarcely more than a child and with less sense than one, and you probably imagine that they sing. Listen, formerly there were lots of swans here, they were at the very gate of the palace. Sometimes the lake was covered with them like white blossoms. Visitors used to throw scraps to them. Once the tourists stopped coming, the swans died. No doubt they had lost the habit of searching for food themselves and so they died. Very well, never, do you hear me, never did I hear a single song coming from the pond.”

  “Why do you have to tell me all this? Have I ever told you I believe in the swan’s song? You didn’t need to speak to me like that.”

  “No, maybe I shouldn’t have said it, or I should have said it less suddenly at least. I’m sorry. I even believed in the swan’s song myself once. You know how it is, I am old and lonely and I have got into the habit of talking to myself. I was talking to myself, then. I once believed that the lord of this palace, before he died, sang a swan’s song. But no, he cried out. He cried so loudly that …”

  “Please tell me no more,” she begged.

  “All right, I suppose we shouldn’t think about all that. But let’s go.”

  He carefully closed the storeroom door and they made their way toward the exit.

  “Did you mean to leave the door of the big room open?” she asked, once they had reached the landing.

  “It hasn’t been shut for a long time,” he replied. “Besides, there is nothing to fear. No one comes here now.”

  “But I came.”

  He glanced at her. “I keep wondering why you came,” he said. “Why did you?”

  “How can I tell?” she said.

  Her visit was futile. She had crossed a desert of trees, and bush and swamps. And why? Had she come at the summoning of that anguished cry from the depth of the statue’s and the picture’s eyes? What way was there of finding out? And moreover it was an appeal to which she could not respond, an appeal beyond her power to satisfy. No, this impulse which had moved her to hasten toward the town had been mad from the start.

  “I don’t know why I came,” she repeated.

  “You shouldn’t take things to heart like that. These painters and carvers are so crafty, you know, they can make you realize things you would never have considered. Take that statue and the portrait, for instance. Have you noticed the look in the eyes? We begin by wondering where they found such a look and eventually we realize they have taken it from ourselves; and these are the paradoxes they would be the first to laugh at. You should laugh, too.”

  “But these paradoxes, as you call them, which come from the depth of our being, what if we cannot find them there?”

  “What do you find within yourself?” he answered her.

  “I have already told you: unbearable loneliness.”

  “Yes,” he said, “there is something of that in each one of us.”

  “But in me …”

  “No, not more than in anyone else,” he insisted. “Don’t imagine that others are any less alone. But who wants to admit that? All the same, it is not an unendurable state of affairs. It is quite bearable in fact. Solitude! Listen, solitude isn’t what you imagine. I don’t want to run away from my solitude. It is the last desirable thing left me, it is my only wealth, a great treasure, an ultimate good.”

  “Is he just saying that to comfort me?” she wondered. “But it is no consolation, a shared solitude can be no consolation. The sharing only makes the solitude doubly lonely.”

  Aloud she said: “That doesn’t console me in the least.”

  “I didn’t think it would,” he replied. They had by now reached the foot of the staircase and the old man showed her the little corridor leading to his room.

  “My lodge is here.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “You’ve told me already.”

  “But I haven’t told you everything. I didn’t say that my room is right beneath the staircase. When visitors used to climb up there in throngs they were walking over my lodge. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you don’t understand at all, you don’t realize that they were marching on my head, wiping their feet on my hair. I had plenty of hair in those days.”

  “But they weren’t really wiping their feet,” she said, “they …”

  “Don’t you think it was humiliating enough anyway?”

  She did not know how to reply. The old man seemed slightly crazed: some of what he said was very sensible but a lot of it was sheer nonsense. “The solitude has gone to his head,” she told herself, and she looked at him afresh. He was certainly very old. There must be times when age and loneliness together … Aloud she remarked: “I don’t know.” And then, all of a sudden: “What made you say that solitude is an ultimate good?”

  “How very young you are” was his only reply. “You should never have come here.” He made off toward his lodge, saying: “I’m going to prepare a meal.”

  “I shall rest here awhile,” she said as she climbed the steps.

  “Yes, do have a rest, you’ve certainly earned one. I shall call you when the food is ready.”

  She sat down and gazed at the evil weeds. The nettles were by far the most numerous and reminded her of the ocean. They were like a great green sea which surged around the palace trying to drown it, and ultimately they would completely engulf it. What could mere stones do against such a powerful wave? A wave with the deceptive smoothness of velvety leaves, a wave which hid its poisons and its sorcery beneath a velvet touch. It seemed to her fevered imagination that the wave was already rising. Or was it simply the darkness? Was it night which was burying the lowest steps? No, it was really the wave of nettles, imperceptibly advancing in its assault upon the palace. A transient attac
k, no doubt. Probably this sea of nettles had tides like the ocean. And perhaps it wasn’t merely a simple tide. Perhaps …

  She leapt to her feet. The tide was about her ankles. She climbed several steps and the tide rose as quickly.

  “Caretaker!” she screamed.

  But she could no longer see the porter’s lodge. Perhaps the sea had already entered the room while she was sitting down. She couldn’t be certain now whether it had a door which shut. Even suppose it did have, how could a door stop such a wave?

  “What is to become of me?” she asked herself. She climbed a few more steps, but the tide continued to pursue her, it really was following her. She paused; perhaps if she stopped, the tide in its turn might stop rising. But instead it flowed right up to her, covering her shoes. Feverishly she resumed her upward flight and gained the landing opposite the doorway of the main hall. But to her horror she realized that the wave was there almost as soon. It was inches away. Must she drown in those horrible weeds?

  She rushed to open the storeroom door, only to find that the sea had beaten her and had borne everything away, literally washed off the face of the earth. There was no longer any storeroom left! It had been engulfed beneath the flood of nettles, with its furniture and tapestries and dishes, and the portrait as well. Only the cry, the great cry of anguish remained, and it had become vaster and louder, more piercing and heartrending than ever. It swelled to fill the whole earth! It seemed to her as though nothing could silence it anymore and that whatever she did she could never escape. Her heart could never escape again. Yet at the same time she tried to bolt the door upon it as though in spite of all she knew she might evade it yet. But what could she escape to? There was no way of escape left open, it was either the cry or the flood. She was a prey to this cry and in no time she would be the victim of the flood. She was trapped between two floods, the one which swallowed up the storeroom and was lying in wait menacingly on its threshold, and the other one which had pursued her step by step up the stairs and across the great hall. She had no choice but to cast herself into one of these two floods which were soon to merge. Placed as she was, she could neither advance nor retreat.