Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  He stared across to where the Tor should stand, and knew that some change altogether had come to him since the same time yesterday. He contrasted his present frame of mind with that on the identical spot when he had been on his way to seek Drapier. What were the positive differences of circumstance? Then he had believed Drapier alive, while now he lay grey and stiff in a dark room. Arsinal was unexpectedly down. The other half of his flint, the search for which would have been well-nigh desperate, had marvellously turned up of itself. He himself had become acquainted with a most unusual girl. Last night he had seen an authentic spirit. One or two other new nonentities were irritating him. The invisible height before him had grown definitely consecrated for his imagination by the solitary dying sighs of a victim. Arsinal had disclosed himself a little more...

  But it was not even the totality of these matters that could explain his mood. The spectacle of death was no novelty to him, the girl was not especially capturing his thoughts, his phantom was only being recalled now and again. Arsinal, actually, was fatiguing him. Tibet had faded into a rather disagreeable passage of his unwritten autobiography. There was some other cause for what he was feeling.

  Purity and loneliness seemed increasingly to enwrap him while he stood here. If it was a waft from Devil's Tor, it would be strange; and still, that was the likeliest. The hill should be charmed. The powers of air and earth used it as a competing ground, fate employed its loose rocks to bowl men over, a magical stone had in and on it been found and re-found. If all the theories advanced to him were to be believed, its ruined tomb might quite easily be that of the founder of the higher human species. It might yet be haunted, and the haunter might at this moment be signalling the psychic waves that were reaching him as his purifying and quieting of temper. … But then, what would be the connection between such a haunting and the much more tremendous fate that could stretch over half the world and through a human generation, to bring so many factors to a hidden end together? ...

  He squared his shoulders and yawned, wondering why he was stopping like a statue to put questions unanswerable by himself, when doubtless that girl awaited him yonder through the fog, who should be the most sensitive of any to the influences underlying the facts, whose most extravagant fancies, it appeared, were securely founded upon another sort of truth, whose home district this was, and who had never yet been unwilling to speak. But had he truly come up in the hope of meeting her? In part, yes, without a doubt. But also he had had to see Devil's Tor again; he had felt, he still felt, that it held something for him. Yesterday he had not got as far as the top, he had not seen the blocked entrance to the tomb's passage. …

  He started the descent to the valley.

  Arsinal kept returning to and teasing his mind. He was vexed that he could come to no finality about that man. Their friendship could not be the same again, now that his secret egoism had discovered its appetite, but he had trusted to see but little more of him, and to ignore him while out of his presence. His sudden great weariness of him should have helped to that. This weariness was probably the back-springing of the bow from their unnatural tension of intimacy of months. Yet Arsinal throughout remained just underneath, or just within, his conscious mind, like an unpleasantness... and now all at once, half-way down the hill, it occurred to him that the involuntary brooding must have been busier than his will. For, somehow, his disdain of the inn had swelled to anger and that was why he had been unable to shut out thoughts of Arsinal. But that was also why it had started with disdain. The anger was not on account of any injury done to himself, or it would have flamed up immediately; it was an impersonal moral judgment and condemnation, by the tribunal of his heart, not his understanding, and its earliest effect had been the failure of his respect for his old associate, and the strong desire to cease the acquaintance.

  Thus it concerned a third person, who should be injured or threatened by Arsinal, and who, perhaps, was ignorant of the fact, and stood defenceless. Such a third person was sufficiently named! The man himself had sneered at Ingrid Fleming's "deflective influence". It was nonetheless a sneer because cunningly disguised by the aspect of gravity and reproachful sorrow; despite the self-pity, the shaft had been shot. It had been intended to hurt. And for the shape of the sneer: the "influence" related to his, Saltfleet's, plastic weakness in the modelling hands of a girl, and might pass for silly; but the "deflective" was more illuminating. It revealed that an armed camp was already in being. All outside the camp was enemy ground, and so this girl was Arsinal's rival and antagonist before she had even raised a finger to obstruct his plans. But she was unprepared without knowing more about it to sacrifice her curiosity and sense of wonder to his, and this was her offence. Everyone was to bow down before the career he had chosen for himself out of spiritual voluptuousness.

  The unfairness, the greed and colossal insensibility of it were what were angering him. … Yet this could be neither early enough, nor deep enough. For surely his new dislike of Arsinal must have begun to work before this morning. Instinctively he must have known what the man's attitude towards that girl was to be, and his following words and gibes had initiated nothing. So that Arsinal's malice sprang naturally out of his life-long obsession, and had always been predictable. His spirit was grasping. That it grasped not at money, power, or the common honours of men, mattered nothing: the high soul was magnanimous and renouncing. But though this should be the source and beginning of it, it was not the worst of it. That he should be so callously ready to refuse the legitimate deep concern of a girl coming to the strangeness by another road, was bad enough—if he should be waiting to insult her as well, however! ... And not insult her alone, but, it might too easily be, harm her! For it appeared that the joining of these two belonging stones was to be no jest, but a serious risk. Clearly were they bewitched. They showed queer skies of stars, and were accompanied by apparitions and supernatural noises, and had come from ancient places; prophecies were written around them. Their reuniting was a bold man's business. But there was no security that she, in whose possession the one of them was, would not be invited to challenge their nature and the tradition, in her own person. …

  Supposing Arsinal hid beneath his mild exterior this icy heart of insanity, then Ingrid Fleming must never be in his company alone. …

  He stopped again on the brink of the rain-swollen, discoloured brook, and saw it not, although he could still smoke composedly.

  These painful fantasies, it was his final mental task before proceeding, were somehow to be reconciled with the fact of his new purified feelings in the unseen presence of the Tor he was immediately to attack. The only half-credited superstitious explanation of the latter, he would drop at once. In effect, his half-amused, half-reckless enthusiasm for Arsinal's chase across the globe had fallen away, that he might stand back, silent, heedful, and rather disturbed, before the spectacle of wonders greater than himself; and this was his sense of ennoblement, that now the solitude of the Devil's Tor approaches but emphasised. Such an ennoblement, unless quite transitory—which perhaps meant, if continued to be fed by fresh marvels—was like a view of a known scene from an upper stand; the details should dwindle, and a background appear and assume chief importance. Thus Arsinal, from having been the centre and whole of an affair, was now occupying his correct place as one among many. That he should still strive to be the whole was a contradiction of the new circumstances, as absurd as offensive. That he should drag others to subserve his imaginary lordship, might be of the nature of crazy Lucifer himself. Saltfleet's discontent with that proud angel had always been that his pride was vulgar and second-rate; he had not that quality of pride that could scorn his own ambitions, he was infinitely far from the scorn of self, and so, before and after his fall, remained a boy. Arsinal too, for all his sapient airs, continued a boy—but boys, Saltfleet also remembered, were hard, brutal and cruel.

  He need not take emphatic action yet—nothing unpardonable had been done or said. No need to break with Arsinal until it was not any l
onger to be avoided; wherefrom, later, the satisfaction would be his that at no stage of the business had his feelings been out of control. But again he determined it: from now on, after this morning and while down here, he must watch Arsinal's every movement as he would watch the craft of a lunatic. …

  Why then had he been at pains to reject young Copping's offer, seeing that its acceptance would have closed everything, and kept the girl at arm's-length during their one remaining day? He reconstructed his mental reactions to the proposal, and believed that he had a very little wished to chasten Arsinal by a postponement, that the honouring of his own word had had rather more to do with it, and that he had also wanted to serve Ingrid Fleming, as no one else seemed wishful to serve her, by procuring her the satisfaction of her desire to remain included in the unrolling of the great mystery behind these wonders. Yet after all these imperfect motives were allowed for, there should still be a residue.

  He dimly conceived that a recognition in his head of her psychic predominance was constituting a background to everything. Matters, during all the present week, seemed to be touching her, not Arsinal; their best interpretation was to be looked for from her. Arsinal was being clogged by the past, but her unencumbered and delicately-sensitive perceptions were just the fitting instrument. … And the background of this background showed itself in strange gleams of insight: that, if she was to be the affair's chief interpreter, it was also because she was the nearest to it—because it was for her sake. … His refusal of Copping's offer had been a response necessitated. She was not to go out; therefore something, someone—he—was to keep her in. So he too was an unconscious subordinate. …

  With a smile not quite cynical, but arising from the silent antithesis between his spirit of independence and his eternal self-disdaining, he jumped the stream, and at once commenced the climb beyond.

  Soon he came upon the scene of Drapier's death.

  The ground around was much trodden by iron-shod boots, but otherwise all was as it had been yesterday, nor was the day unlike. Very metaphysical, accordingly, seemed to him the disappearance of that crushed form. … He never halted, but still pressed upwards, step by step putting the limit of his last ascension behind him.

  At the very top the breeze was livelier, and the dense mists constantly went past him, as on a journey. He stood, cigar yet in mouth, just inside the edge of the hill’s crest, looking quietly about him. Quite quickly, Ingrid Fleming's still, sitting form arrested his whole attention. She was on a stump of weathered rock, with her back to the sea of white that suggested and hid the open south lands. No one was with her. Her profile was towards him, but she was not very close, so that at first he found nothing unnatural in her poise. There was no need for her to have seen him yet.

  He would not advance on her till he had taken in, from where he stood, the rest of his surroundings. He looked west, and the ragged evacuated site of the stack was shut off from him by a long, flat granite block, one of two within the shifting proscenium of his vision. It was plain what they were, and where the remains of the hole must be. …

  His gaze returned to the girl, in her grey mackintosh. She had never moved, and at last it struck him that all could not be quite right with her. Surely it was with an abnormal fixity that she was staring at whatever was straight before her, which the intervening block prevented himself from seeing. Her face was dead-white, too, and like a mask for its changeless relaxed calm. Yet she could hardly be in a faint, since the mere retention of her seat would demand a muscular effort. It was very low to the ground. The knuckles of the hand of one hanging arm were actually touching; but the other hand was loosely closed on her lap. She sat slightly bent forward.

  He took a few tentative steps towards her, and then realised that her state was one of trance, or something very like it. From inside her bent fingers he saw peeping forth a stone, that at once he knew could only be Arsinal's original treasure from Tibet, which they had never seen since. For this girl had had it, in her possession, and what other stone should she be holding?—while Drapier, likewise, had been grasping its fellow at death... and not improbably he as well had been in a trance, so otherwise incomprehensibly to throw away his life. But this present spectacle was painful to watch and rather terrible to understand. Some real or imagined apparition must be standing up there in front of her. It was as if he himself were again in contact with a spirit.

  When she recovered, would she reveal to him the thing she had been seeing?—for ask her, he never would. He wished not even to seem to have been near her at any time... and so again he retreated. Now he sought that side of the slab which hitherto he had not seen. The broken entrance to the wrecked tomb should be there, and in its direction her set, questionless gaze rested. …

  He saw a long fissure in the ground, running parallel with the length of the slab. It ended, just before his feet, in a broadening and deepening, that spoke of a staircase, but no longer was one. No technical gang could ever reopen it. It was hardly essential that it should be reopened, seeing that its ghostly inhabitants could still slip through! The neighbouring soil had been all tormented by the earthquake.

  Very positively, it was uncanny, this spot and this experience in a fog. Right underneath his feet was the home of Arsinal's second stone, whither Drapier, his accidental acquaintance, had by a long chain of accident descended, not for that purpose, accidentally to bring it back to daylight after God knew how many tens of thousands of years. And almost immediately afterwards he had died. But now a haunting had begun, and that girl behind his back was a present victim. …

  How long should her seizure persist? How much longer then would she need for restoration to her common senses, before he might considerately address her? For of this overtaking she must speak herself, if she desired, but certainly her mother's proposition must be made known to her, and Arsinal's arrival, and Copping's new attitude towards a meeting. So, if it were an hour, he must wait. He turned round to her once more, and saw no horror in her face. The trance must run its course.

  He returned to the slab's east, and perched himself on its edge, dangling his legs, while keeping a light watch on the girl by periodically twisting his neck towards her. An instinct of delicacy denied his staring at her defencelessness for all the time. He faced the way by which he had come up, but the route was veiled. During some minutes he pulled grimly at his smoke, and eyed the procession of the mists and tried to think of nothing. …

  Soon, however, an unaccountable lethargy, foreign to his temperament and impossible to withstand, seized upon him with an abruptness that gave no time for measures against it. Nearly at once, it seemed, his eyes became glued, and his senses stupefied. The hand holding the cigar dropped relaxed towards the ground, though the cigar was still held. …

  He roused himself violently to sit erect, but now was seeing differently. The stupor had passed as suddenly as it had come, he was wide awake again, yet this new alertness was applying to other things; he was in other surroundings, and being confronted by other images. It was night, not day, and the fogs were gone.

  It was no kind of blindness, for the sky was really of night, and filled with magnificent stars. A perpetual noise of rushing waters came up from below, but the darkness prevented his seeing to the valley. Penetrating the sound, an intermittent bellowing excited his ears, as of angry bulls, perhaps off the Tor, but still not far away. The bellowing was fiercer and more menacing than the challenge of any savage cattle within his experience.

  High in the sky, midway between zenith and south horizon, above and behind the girl's form, that still showed darkly, a gleaming blue star, curiously like a lamp for its brightness and steadiness, first drew his attention by its superiority of splendour over all the rest, then retained it by the fact of its motion. Rather languidly it was passing through its immediate neighbours. Thus it could be no fixed luminary, but must represent either a meteor or a mechanical flying light. The vile intrusion of a machine, however, in this mystic sky was unthinkable.

&nbs
p; Next, the star augmented to such a glory of mild intensity, that the meteoric explanation also had to be dropped. No aerolite, trailing through the earth’s atmosphere, was ever thus steadily increasing and sluggishly lovely.

  It plainly descended, so that its first slowness must have been due to its prodigious height in the heavens. Now, faster and faster, it captured field after field of the sky, in a kind of parabolic curve that, being pursued, should bring it to strike the ground somewhere near this hill he was on ... and yet he could not have calculated it so nicely; it must be intuition. Anything half so weird and wonderful he had never known. Its blue was no blue of earth; its sheer brilliance was as incomparable. …

  Already it must be quite close down—perhaps but a few miles overhead from the Channel, falling north at this last of its terrific sky-swerve, to meet the night-like moor. … But very suddenly it vanished. His final impression was that it had rushed down that concluding steep of space with a fearful momentum.

  The whizzing thud of an invisible body tore the air diagonally from above to downwards past the hill. It seemed to him that the noise was occult, so awful was it to his imagination and so alien to his understanding. It was not the awe of combined mass and force, for the lump must even have been quite small, nor was it the awe for an unusual lithic missile from the sky, since his mind was astronomical enough easily to incorporate a meteorite, but there had been something special in the sound; with no musical note, it had been of the nature of music; with no communication to his intelligence, it had been like the passage of a messenger. By now the body should have rooted itself in the valley bed. …