Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  It would be an excellent thing to die, and leave it all!...And under what law, other than force majeure (to propound the question in the parliament of all the creatures of God)—under what law had the so-styled lower life been dispossessed and destroyed, to make way for a single species? The ugliness of it might pass, if a merit could be shown for the wholesale annihilation. To allow the entrance into the world of idealism and spirituality, he supposed the cant answer would be. Then all that murdered life had the right to demand, where are those things? And the man and woman of to-day gave the reply by talking only of money, luxury, sport, amusement and sex. The Aryan Brahmins, the Stoics, the Christian saints and martyrs, the Puritans, the makers of noble music, the sublime philosophers—they had been the justification for the destruction; and they were departed, and others had not stepped into their shoes. That assassination of Nature, begun in the instinct of self-preservation, continued in blindness and barbarism, never at any time in history aware of its own iniquity, but presently, during a very few centuries out of long thousands of years, offering to the Creator an equivalent compensation in the shape of the worship of His invisible height—it was now being brought rapidly to its last horrible consummation, in its destruction as well of the whole of beauty; in the insane building by that single conquering species of an iron prison wherein it should spend the rest of its span combating its own denied instincts, that must forever break out into monstrous excrescences.

  A most sinister state of affairs! How had it come to pass in this world, otherwise of flame, loveliness and passion?

  The ultimate answer was refused. The cause in time of the crime and blunder of course started with the possession by man of a brain; and was ending with over-population. The infinitely greater weight of the mass nowadays was an irresistible force pulling men towards each other and away from the lonely Austere and Sublime. The other name of this gravitation was democracy; so that democracy was the grand evil. No one man could fight such a pull of a whole world, however much he might know it to be suicidal and terrible. Or if he enlisted assistance, he was but inviting a second small democracy. Men united only to discuss men and the affairs of men, whether these affairs were on earth or in Paradise. It was all as hopeless as the coming on of a cancer.

  Yet if it was the ordained and necessary course of a world? For just as the thoughts, circumstances and environment of a child were mysterious and rich in beauty, while for the adult were only grim duties and responsibilities of lead, so it might be with the life of the species, and of the corresponding species of every life-bearing planet. First, Nature lived with and dimly apprehended through a veil of glory; the gods and goddesses, witches, elves and fairies. Then the transition; the Almighty and His saints, speaking the language of the Cross. And lastly the fully-emancipated intellect, finding itself amazed in a fearful life without personal future, for which it had never asked.

  Arsinal's 'Great Mother'—she was Nature, when men had been children. She was dead. Men themselves had killed her. Or could she conceivably rise again, in the fashion of a dead god? ...

  His stepping off the open road on to the moor coincided with the bending of his thoughts to his own more insistent problems.

  He had to consider what had happened to him since his talk with Helga last night. It was upon his first getting out of bed that the uneasy awareness had stirred in his brain of the very obscure and baffling existence of some link of true association between his various strains. Up to to-day he had never suspected them to be connected.

  It was the more obtuse in him, since all three must have dated approximately from the same time, namely, from between Tibet and Simla, on this last trip. He could recollect the indistinct beginning of one only in Tibet; after Simla all three were in action. The Tibet strain was queer, the other two were quite unaccountable; they had sprung up in him like strange weeds in a protected flower-border.

  The chief in rank was his premonition of death; but that was not the Tibet one. It was like a taste in the mouth, destroying all other tastes. Little by little it had sapped his love of life, till now he was not so sure that he would accept a longer career as a gift. It had introduced to his soul quietness, and easiness, and something of majesty; but not daunting or depression—he thought not depression. There were necessarily accompanying practical embarrassments, such as his new shunning of outside society, and his complete neglect of the future. But on the whole the taste was good. It was somehow both tranquillising and exciting. The tranquillity concerned his affairs, his worldly affairs, which by now seemed not to matter at all; but the excitement consisted in the adventure of it. It was like a preparation for a journey; anything might be going to happen to him. The principal evil of the business was that it left his present short remainder of life rather empty. He had too much time on his hands in which to hark back to the past, and repent the little use he had made of it.

  For, dividing all human acts into the two classes, those having eternal meaning and those others having only temporary applicability to the things of earth, then, obviously, he had woefully squandered the best part of his days and chances. He had loved none, he had brought into the world no work of perpetual beauty, he had relieved few in distress, and that most scantily, he had done nothing for the spirits or bodies of men, for long years he had not communicated directly with heaven; but he had hugged his æsthetic misanthropy in burying himself in wild places; and would leave no monument behind him. Unless it were his gravestone, on which should be carved the words:

  Whatsoever this man hath done, do thou avoid.

  Indeed his death mattered the less, because his life had been so trivial. Neither had it been ennobled by high deeds or love, nor darkened by suffering. A thousand million living persons knew the deeper experience.

  His sense of being slowly enveloped by death was not a bodily taste. It was not a blight, or malaise, gradually destroying his hold on life, and so translating itself for his consciousness. It was not a supernatural voice or message. If it could be compared at all, it was like a coming, rather than a going. Something positive was approaching, and this something was his death, and it was already dark, and void, and of a peculiar bitterishness, and altogether indescribable; but it was not being a mere cessation of his known experiences. It was bringing a new knowledge. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat with a slow, heavy exhilaration, as if it was hearing music—solemn music, that his ears could not.

  The second and earliest of his strains had to do with that flint he had shown Helga. It consisted in the always-increasing subjection of his imagination to what was surely the most amazing vision of natural beauty, reduced to the dimensions of art, that could at any time possibly have existed on earth. It amazed, because it was as living as a mirror reflecting real things, and yet the real things in its case were nowhere present. Provided the experiment were conducted in shadow, that night sky was just as visible by day, or those stars were just as needle-bright and shining when the true sky was thick with a mile of cloud. This he had discovered at a very initial stage. Since then, the little marvel had been in his hand a couple of hundred times perhaps, over a period of two months, so that his eye was sharpened to a much finer adjustment to the difficult details of its weird field. Great doggedness had been called for in the beginning. Barely enough advance had been yielded to encourage him to the persistence.

  Bit by bit had he been forced to discard his successive hypotheses. It was not a right mirror, because, looking upwards from it, he failed to see its images in space. But neither was the appearance a false one, due to some smokelike motion within the body of the stone. The tiny star-points sprinkling the black rifts and spaces between the white clouds, they were congregated into constellations—constellations unknown to him; and these constellations shifted, not quickly like the clouds, but during weeks of patient observation. The progress was from left to right. The constellations disappearing altogether off the right-hand margin of the field never came back; those appearing on the left were new. So a real s
ky of stars would behave; so no interior animation of the stone could. Therefore he was seeing the image of stars existing somewhere. And yet they were not real, but must be mystical, because by ordinary physical eyesight they must be indistinguishable by reason of their minuteness. There might be a hundred or more of them, scattered over a ground of a couple of inches. No human eye could separate such a packing, and make out its configurations, unless it should see differently, and so the phenomenon was both real and unreal in short, of a world, but not of this world.

  Thus it was mirror, microscope and magic crystal, combined. And he had begun to chart that sky of stars from day to day, but doubted if the exact information so obtained would form a sufficient basis for calculation within his time. To map the fourth—or as they would say in these days, the fifth dimension—it was fantastic enough! Yet if the theory was glib, what other covered the thing at all? Such a sky must be near enough for sight, while actually it was not in sight; therefore he must be regarding a part of physical space in another way. To state one possibility out of hundreds, he might be looking behind him, instead of before him round the extension of a prodigious circle. The same star might be seen by the eye in those two different manners.

  The flint itself might originally have dropped from the stars. There it might have been the product of an intelligence higher than any on earth, which had known how to construct such a celestial spy-glass. Some intuitive ancient on earth had recovered its properties, and had split it, to see inside. The other half had been lost; perhaps fifty thousand years since. This had travelled from temple to temple. Not inconceivably, it might have been so.

  A second of his senses had co-operated. One day, chancing to hold the stone nearer to ear than eye, he had heard too. The throb of what might be music was sounding; but so faintly, he could hardly distinguish between it and the vast silence of the Himalayan amphitheatre enclosing him as a mighty crescent during their midday halt.

  Afterwards his hearing, like his seeing, had adapted itself queerly to receive the elfin beating with a magnified distinctness, and then not quite the tune, almost the rhythm, came to him; perhaps from across space, the breadth of a universe away, the distance being mystically diminished. A strange half-caught pulse, quite beautiful in its suggestiveness. He had never been able, however, to better that achievement on that line. His brain, framed by Nature for practical use in a starved world, lacked delicacy for picking up any such unearthly musical message, if it were one.

  The flint in those days only moved between his hand and his pocket. When the monotonous caravan duties of the daily trek were again concluded each evening, supper consumed, and the log and records written up, he would seclude himself in his personal tent, or if it were warm, windless and still light, wander off to the nearest convenient open solitude, away from the range of inquisitive native eyes, and there once more lose account of time in a fruitless wrestling with those shifting hieroglyphics of another sphere. The idea had occurred to him, he forgot at which one of such camps, that the thing might literally be a communication from some planet of another far-distant sun; which opened other possibilities. As the communication was to rwo of his senses, while the transmission to both was imperfect, might not it be that the message was intended for a third sense, unknown on earth, perhaps lying midway between sight and hearing, and so being distantly related to both? It was a thought that impressed him tremendously; for then a sensible writing by a spirit differing from all human spirits was displaying itself there before him, signalling matters which it might be highly essential for the world to know.

  Uncomfortable had been his hesitations during those mountain days, as to whether or not he should wait for Arsinal on the border, to get the whole story from him, and probably learn something of the right manipulation of the flint. Yet already the determination was concreted in his mind not to give up again this prize, come into his hands by the wheel of fortune. So that meant that he would need to lie to Arsinal, declaring it to be mislaid or lost; for brass enough in his constitution to deny him the thing outright, he had not. And next the smell of death had begun to be in his nostrils, persuading him that he might be soon to die. Since all was so uncertain for him, it would be better for the present to lead the pair to suppose that he had merely gone on ahead without word, on a call of private business.

  But the spell of the stone had grown and grown within his head, until now no threat or counter-temptation on earth would induce him to part with it, and he had at last that 'brass enough' to face Arsinal, with the other at elbow, and simply notify to him the fact that this running-away of his was no piece of mere caddish indifference on his part, but a deliberate escape, covering a confiscation to be upheld.

  Latest of all—between Leh and Simla, he thought it was—had appeared, in extremest subtlety, the third of his three strains, yet still only as a rudiment. It was the instinct or occult attraction that was not to cease its silent work until he should be standing on a Dartmoor height, in England, over he knew not how many thousand miles of sea and land; yet that height he had never heard of, while in England itself he had had no business. Nor could he at the present moment be certain that the attraction had run its course. He was being further drawn to the interior of Devil's Tor. There it might be intended he should find his own grave; and so this instinct and that other of approaching death would have coalesced and come to a common fulfilment.

  But the instinct of death had known his other strain for its fellow in the affair's beginning; and this, as he had to-day begun to see, constituted the linking, or a linking, of all the three.

  For once he had decided to keep his prize, and once his presentiment had become too strong to ignore, he had had these two motives for getting back to England; to put distance between himself and Arsinal, and to settle with his lawyers in London the posthumous restitution of the stone. Neither reason for going home was over-strong, since he might have written the lawyers, and escaped to any other country; however, he had booked a passage. And in the very act of paying for it, it had flashed into his head that ever since Simla at least he had definitely planned to travel straight through to England, so that this later revolving of other motives for the journey was supererogatory. But on what account he had so planned to come at once to England, he puzzled himself over repeatedly, but never could remember. It had worried him greatly, in a minor way.

  Then, sailing from Bombay, he had arrived in London near the end of July; where three or four days had not passed before the same extraordinary mental freak overtook him. The weather in town during that week before last had been insufferably hot and close, there had been nothing to do, and the visit to the lawyers he had kept putting off; their trained questioning might elicit the theft, to his infinite humiliation. He had gone to a show or two, and been abominably bored.

  And so he had thought of his uncle and cousins in Devonshire. Helga was to be his executrix, and should be told of the will and its contents. Uncle Magnus might be the right person to address in the matter of Arsinal's treasure. There would at least be fresh air to breathe, and corners of the moor to escape to, away from people. He had not seen any of them since boyhood. He wondered how Helga would appear to him now; while her daughter too should be interesting—a grown-up, doubtless pretty girl. Accordingly he had written off, proposing a week's stay. And at the actual moment of posting the letter, he had realised—this time with a following shock that closely resembled fear—that it was on board ship, before his arrival in England at all, that the intention of inviting himself to Helga's had been fast fixed in his head. Yet, cudgel his brains as he might, he couldn't for the life of him recover under what circumstances he had come to the decision; what his special reasons had been, or what had started them.

  So mysterious a second case of losing and regaining a practical design affecting his movements excited in him, the more he thought about it, a rising though still sluggish curiosity concerning his whole present condition of soul, with its various quite unassociated stresses. He told
himself that he might be in an abnormal state all round. But still his foretaste of death had prevented him from really feeling anything of the natural alarm of a man whose mind should begin to crack. He did nothing about it; indeed, there was nothing to do. A doctor might certainly inform him that he was mad—and how would that help?

  Helga's reply had been friendly and pressing. During the first few days of a pleasant enough stay, nothing more had happened in the way of this sympathetic sounding of forgotten plans. But then at lunch only the day before yesterday, the name of Devil's Tor was for the first time in his life (so far as he was aware) mentioned in his hearing. Helga, solicitous for his entertainment, had introduced the hill as an excuse for an agreeable walk over the moor; of no especial interest in itself. Ingrid had said nothing. He had put a conventional question or two about it, and said in the end quite carelessly that he might make the trip next day; when of a sudden had come the same trick of astonishing memory. Not only had he very certainly heard of Devil's Tor before, but already, at some time since the beginning of his stay, had he made it a settled thing that he was to go out there.

  And now this was lunacy absolute. For how could he possibly have intended any such excursion to an unknown spot? It looked like imperfect control, or adhesiveness, or both jointly. A name was suggested to him, a plan followed, and the two became stuck together for him; then some fault of memory, always in the one direction, antedated the first suggestion of the name, putting it back half a week, a week or a month, as the case might be; and still the plan went with it. The explanation was grotesque, but might be correct. At least, there was no other at hand.