Lest I should be misunderstood, I want to make it clear that I am not a gregarious man, not the type of man who needs to be always in contact with his fellows. I can do without the crowds and the clubs and the varied contacts that are the life of so many men on earth. Before my descent, I had lived a lonely, self-sufficing life. I had, as I thought, proved to myself that a lonely life can be at least as deeply happy and eventful as a gregarious one.
It was not, therefore, a mere superficial desire for company, resulting from a habit, that was gnawing at my mind during those early days. Nor was it even the physical darkness, nor the lack of the light of the sun or the rain or the greenness of grass that afflicted me most, though these were dreadful deprivations. It was the inner darkness, of which the Master had told me, that was beginning to come upon me from the depths of my own mind, and from which I was endeavouring to escape to man’s normal refuge—the comfort of other life around me.
If I had known that there was any animal, however low in the scale of life, that would have accepted me, I believe that, in the mood in which I was then, I would have tramped every mile of the darkness to find it.
There was no living creature to be seen, however, in those earlier days, except the snakes that came up from the swamps to feed, and that fled the moment they caught sight of me.
I struggled on, and, though there were times in that early part of my wanderings when my stoical mask fell from my resolve, leaving me weak and hysterical or numbed, it served my need, and with its help I kept myself braced to my task in spite of the despair that assailed me.
Gradually that first stage passed. My mind began to get accustomed to facing its own darkness, alone. Its needs grew less and less, as it stripped itself for the struggle. It needed its heroic mask no longer. I was beginning to be in reality the man that I had planned.
The hunger for the help and the comfort of other life seemed to have passed.
I had closed with the inner enemy, as well as with the outer one, and, in the struggle, my mind gradually dropped every shred of individuality, personality, feeling, tendency, thought, that blunted or weakened it for its purpose, so that it became a clear unity.
If it had been rewarded for its singleness of purpose, and concentration of effort and endurance, by even the slightest shred of outward success or the faintest encouragement for its hopes, it might have remained a unity. But no such encouragement came to it.
In no single place did the great mountain barrier open upwards or downwards, except into valleys and ravines that were more ghastly than the peaks that towered over them. Everywhere there was death—not the death that struggles with life, but death completely in possession, very still in its potency in the darkness. Every valley closed in sheer black walls that barred the way to life. From each my will turned my body back to grope along the cliff valley until it reached the next wall and the next defeat and my will drove it back again to begin once more the futile quest.
What I would do when I had found the exit I don’t think occupied my thoughts. Whether I would escape alone and abandon my father, or go back and try to rescue him—all that had become irrelevant.
There remained only one question, one problem: the discovery of a way out. My mind had canalled itself into that one channel of action, and it pursued its purpose with a concentration of attention that not only left no room for anything else, but produced a most remarkable degree of efficiency in that one task.
Not only was there a firm will to execute the purpose: there was also a remarkable power to deal with the material obstacles. The climbing of almost unclimbable cliffs, the fording of dangerous torrents, the passage of treacherous swamps—all these things were carried out with a sureness that would, I believe, have been almost impossible to a man in his normal state.
It was the same in dealing with the dangerous creatures I met. In the southern parts of the barren lands they had been rare, but, as I worked northward and the land got swampier and more possible for reptile life, I began to meet large serpents and big lizards with much greater frequency.
In the far recesses of the swamps and mountains, where they were distant from the lake settlements, these brutes had not seen man or got the terror of his powers that was so noticeable in the lands along the lake, and they attempted to seize me on several occasions. I was so concentrated on my single external purpose that it might be imagined that I would prove an easy victim. Exactly the opposite was the case. I was so alert to all external danger that I had an almost superhuman capacity for foreseeing the attempts of these creatures and circumventing them, or, in the last resort, facing them with an emanation of will and emotion that cowed them like a physical blow.
I felt at the time that my self-hypnotism had freed in my subliminal life some source of power that is never realised in normal men, but, when I look back now on that period, it seems to me more likely that the unusual power of will and intuition that I possessed was the result of incipient madness, caused by the suppressed struggle with fear that was being carried on below the surface of my mind.
That this latter was the source of my abnormal acuteness of observation and power of will is, I think, clear from the fact that, a short time afterwards, my mind had begun to seek a different exit from the physical one that my body was seeking.
The first form of this flight of my mind, from the prison in which I had caged it, was, I believe, an hallucination in which I thought that it was my soul and not my body that was wandering in darkness in search for God and light and love.
The next avenue of escape was the creation of visions of the things that I had lost—the brightness and beauty of earth’s growths, the rush of the wind, the swing of the sea, the waving of branches, the faces of men under the sunlight.
I began to imagine that I had died and gone back to earth as a disembodied spirit, or that I had been rapt up there alive in my body.
It was as if, after a prolonged period of bare monomaniac existence, my mind could bear it no longer, and had to bring back the old cluster of thoughts and emotions and habits, but in a different way.
When these visions first began, they were fitful and spasmodic, like fever fits, and, when I came out of them, they left me weak and desolate, like a man that wakes from a fever. As time went on, however, they grew more constant and permanent. I had reached the third stage of my development, in which I kept what sanity remained to me through the delusion that I was back on earth again, engaged in all the common little joyous things of daily life, with which I had formerly occupied myself, without knowing how precious and beautiful they were.
There can hardly be any doubt that this third stage lasted for quite a long period, before I struck the great cliff barrier that bounds the north of that land from east to west; and that, during that time, I was living in a state of deliberate self-delusion, in which I was trying to produce a simulacrum of the ordinary course of life on the upper earth.
I would find myself in the process of buying clothes, newspapers, or other necessaries of life on earth, holding elaborate conversations over an imaginary counter, while I waited for change from a luminous fungus or a sea-weedy tree that represented living people.
I have found myself sitting in a snake-swamp, discussing politics with the reptiles, or some book that I thought I had read, listening for their replies, answering them point by point, and then getting up and ending the visit with the usual social interchanges. I engaged taxis, took trains, wrote and posted letters, ate meals in hotels and restaurants, and carried through all the necessary contacts for these operations. I even went to church and worshipped with my fellows, who were either snakes or fungi or the sea-weedy growths, and took part lustily in the singing.
I don’t think I ever did this without some other form of life being present to enable me to reproduce the scene, but any form of life seemed to suffice. A tree or a large fungoid growth did as well as a snake or a lizard, in order to enable my mind to go through the series of actions that supplied contact.
&nbs
p; It will be supposed that, by this time, I had gone completely over the brink and was insane, at least while performing these acts. In fact, I do not believe that this was so. The acts certainly did not arise from the same sources in the mind as those that arise from the delusions of the ordinary lunatic. They were, of course, accompanied and made possible by a definite form of hallucination, but, when I look back on them, in so far as I can recall the dim confusion that was my life during that period, I see them rather as a set of automatisms—automatic reproductions of former acts, a mimicry of human life above, instinctively carried out by my mind with the unconscious purpose of filling the emptiness that would otherwise have annihilated it.
I do not say that these transactions were purely memories of acts actually done in my life and re-enacted below in the darkness. I do not think that this was so. They were rather like dreams than faithful mimicry, in that they were a piecing together, oftentimes in a fantastic and improbable way, of bits of experience.
Some of the people, for instance, with whom I dealt or lived in these re-creations, were people that I had known on earth. Others were imaginary people, but, as in dreams, it is worth noting that I cannot remember in a single instance getting the face of the person in any clear line, or even an impressionist picture. I would know, for instance, that the man who was selling me matches had red hair and little blue eyes set closely on each side of a narrow nose like a fish-bone, but I never actually saw the narrow nose like a fish-bone, or the redness of the hair, or the blue of the eyes. That always evaded me, as did the answers to questions of which I did not myself know the answer.
The most inanimate form of life had now become for me what the presence of a human being is to ordinary men. It stood between me and nothingness, and protected my mind with a roof or wall of life, under the cover of which it could revive itself by remembrances when it was approaching too closely to annihilation by the cold interstellar vacuum where it moved.
It was as if, when it felt itself freezing to death in the icy emptiness of infinity and eternity, it instinctively created a warmth by collecting a heap of little human memories and making of them a fire, over which it crouched.
One of the peculiar things about this shadow life, in which my mind took refuge when in danger, was that it included not merely a mimicry of ordinary acts, but a mimicry of the minor illusions that often accompany a human act, when the act produces a more than usual passion of interest in the person.
I don’t know whether other people have the same experience, but I often find that, when I am engaged very intently on some achievement, whether it be the making of a scientific discovery or the learning of a language, or even the perfecting of my command over a physical performance such as golf, a certain illusion tends to surround the particular thing, making it, for the moment, much more urgent than it really is, setting a time-limit in which it must be done, and, in general, concentrating on its completion with a passionate interest which seems inexplicable to me at a later stage, when my enthusiasm for the particular piece of work or play has died down.
Now, one of the peculiar things about the little fires of memory that I built in the darkness was that they reproduced these minor illusions of real life as to the pressing and urgent importance of the more intense and prolonged actions.
There were long periods of time when I went through the darkness of those mountains intent on some project that I was carrying through on the upper earth—an invention, an industrial reconstruction, a business deal; even, at times, the passionate search on the Roman Wall for the entrance to the world below—and this intentness was accompanied by all the manifestations that have accompanied it in real life—the sleeplessness, the pains under the right ear, the throbbing in the temples, the quick, irritable reactions to imaginary intrusions or interferences of other matters.
The most extraordinary thing, perhaps, of all was that, when my mind played in this way with phantasms of upper life, it often dealt with them with a clarity of thought that was not dimmed or enfeebled by the phantasmal nature of its operations. I remember, for instance, in my supposed role as a Midland industrialist, thinking out the problem of how to prevent the money capital that is used in industry from deserting the other type of capital, called “real” capital, that is its fellow and colleague in supporting industry, and saving its own skin alone in times of crisis. The problem is a difficult one, but I remember tackling it with amazing lucidity in some barren valley of a land in which no such problem had ever been allowed to present itself, and I can recall distinctly the letter I wrote to The Times embodying the conclusion my mind reached for the solution of the problem, namely, that such a desertion and betrayal by one form of capital of another, which was nailed to the field of battle and could not leave, should be met by the same penalty that meets a soldier who deserts on the battlefield: deprival of existence.
But, though I remember tackling the question and writing and posting the letter, I have no remembrance whatever of the real place or time in which I carried out this phantasmal act, beyond my deduction that it must have been some time in the later stages of my quest, when I was nearing the northern cliff barrier.
There can hardly be any doubt that the lucidity with which I worked it out was one of the most serious of the symptoms of growing mental disorder, and that, if my isolation lasted much longer, I should have become definitely insane.
One proof of this is that my consciousness of external things during that later period was so submerged in the dreams with which I was drugging myself that I can remember only in the dimmest fashion the details of real life.
The earlier part of my wanderings I remember vividly enough—the heavy darkness of the lower lands, the clinging slime underneath, the occasional dim light, the glimmering trail that was the movement of a snake, the stony earth that broke my feet on the upland slopes as I stumbled along through the darkness, the green and blue lights of the settlements on the rare occasions when I was allowed to come to them to replenish my supply of food.
The memories of the same things in the second stage, when I had concentrated fiercely for action, are even more vivid, particularly those of the pits of darkness that were ravines between the peaks of the great western range.
Then gradually my memories of the real life became dim—a spectral background for the much more vivid memories of the phantasmal acts I performed in my delusions. Real consciousness was leaving me. The result was not yet that which the Master of Knowledge had hoped to produce when he was sending me out alone to face the darkness, but that result was approaching. The process of disintegration had set in.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Escape and Recapture
I DO NOT KNOW how long this strange condition lasted, before I reached the cliff barrier that blocked further access to the north. When I reached it, a curious thing happened. I felt suddenly as men feel at the end of the old year. I felt that something had ended, something new was going to begin.
I seemed to wake up to life, for I remember thinking, in a confused way, that, if the information that I had gathered in the city was correct, the cliff ran almost due east towards the great water. This is the first definite thought that I can recall about real things in the third stage of my wanderings.
I turned my face to the east and began to work eastward along the base of the cliff.
One would have said that this change of direction could mean little or nothing to a man in my desperate need. Yet, for some reason or other, it had a profound effect on my mind, so that my consciousness of real things began to come alive again from the torpor into which it had fallen.
I know that, since I can remember quite clearly all my actions from the time when I turned eastward, whereas my memory of the period that went before that is merely a dream memory of acts, drowned in a phantasmagoria of illusions.
Perhaps it was because I had turned my face towards the sea! Perhaps some shadow of coming events cast themselves before me.
However it be, there is no
question that the turning of my face eastwards to the sea marked the point at which my personality began to pull itself together again and to take over unified control of my actions.
If my conjecture was right, the cliff along which I was now moving to the eastward was the face of the great mountain barrier under which I had come, on the ocean stream that had carried me through the swamps and the tunnel into the Central Sea. If this was so, I should presently be brought to a stop by the waters of the sea. If I asked for transport across it, it would not be given to me. I should be driven back again from the shores and the settlements to retrace my steps in the barren highlands that I had traversed in my northward journey. I had no intention of suffering this, if I could prevent or evade it.
Up to now I had not used any violence or deceit, but I had no intention of allowing these men to drive me back to the darkness that I now believed held no exit. I would search along the base of the cliff, however I did it. If a tunnel appeared, I would try it. If I could not penetrate into the cliff through any tunnel, or climb its face by any steps, then I would get across to the opposite shore by hook or by crook, by fair means or foul, and pursue my search on that side.
It was in this mood that I started to coast along the cliff base.
I had little food, but the ground was swampy and there were snakes and crabs and edible growths. From that point of view, the way presented less difficulty than the search of the barren heights. It also presented less difficulty from the point of view of visibility. If the swamps proved at all passable, they would in fact be easier from every point of view. They were phosphorescent in patches, so that there was always some light, and they contained a supply of food, if I could get at it.
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