Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  "I think with you."

  '"The overthrown stack—obviously of human construction, since it covered a grave—was it fashioned like a devil, that the hill should bear the name it does?"

  "So I am told."

  "Taking into account its long standing in a damp climate, could that portraiture have been intended?"

  "Who knows? It is not here as in Egypt."

  "But if it were a work of art, magic or sacred, it would nearly point towards a female interment. For the times were savage and the tribal superstitions impossibly other than crude. A dead male chief, dreaded in life for his strength and ruthlessness, would surely keep off grave-robbers by the terror of his ghost. The departed wife or paramour of such a chief must be defended in her last house. And so a malignant spirit-entity, to squat for all time upon her bones."

  "Miss Fleming arrived at the identical conclusion, I have no idea by what means."

  "Thus already the guess is probably right."

  "Does it go further?" asked Saltfleet.

  "I will say the things that I think, but I will not grasp at air."

  "Then I shall put it. If gods historically have died and been buried in stone sepulchres, why not goddesses?"

  Arsinal threw him a side-glance of quick anxiety.

  "Why this, Saltfleet?"

  "It as well serves to bring more facts into the synthesis, and give it more cement. My shade last night should have been taller than the very tall. You know whom you've been seeking."

  "You are in earnest?"

  "I think that if a woman has been buried yonder, she has been unlike all other women."

  "Could this afternoon decide it?"

  "I have a plan. May it be fruitful!"

  Arsinal's face became expressionless and dark. He dropped the subject of the tomb, but, after some more steps pushed in silence, asked:

  "Are there any surviving local legends or superstitions relating to this hill? For frequently such go an immense way back; their present unlikely form, as in a well-known children's game, is identifiable with a surprising original."

  "I've heard of nothing," replied Saltfleet.

  They reached the angle of the shoulder, and Devil's Tor came suddenly into their view, startling both men quietly, for its identity was unmistakable, yet the apparition was unexpected and neither had seen its shape before. Saltfleet dragged foot and halted, whereupon Arsinal's remaining doubt instantaneously dispersed; but it already was as if he had known the hill from some existing picture in his head—yet none had even lightly sketched it for him. He too stopped.

  Balls and streaks of white mist still clung motionless to the Tor, but it was truly visible at last as far as its flat top. The air had little draught; the surrounding moors were in a gloomy haze, while the sky was dull and colourless. From a bright patch where the south-west sun should be, a fan of dark vertical and slanting shafts fell on a circumscribed area of the great falling sweep of land continuing past the distant open road down below, lifting the grey-green of the moor to a sort of pallid solar shine; but elsewhere one felt that the day had failed. Already it was between three and four o'clock.

  "We may get a better view by keeping along," counselled Saltfleet. And soon, as he had supposed, they won a point from which the whole east face of the Tor, from stream bed, up through the witch-kitchen of cataclysmal ancient rocks ringing the inferior slopes, to shorn summit, was thrown up for them and defined in close detail, interrupted only by those few floating vapours.

  Standing there, his arms tightly folded behind his straightened back, Arsinal inquired where Drapier had died, and then where the overthrown stack had stood. Not too quickly, Saltfleet indicated both spots in succession with a considering forefinger. Afterwards they relapsed into a silence of contemplation that prolonged itself to minutes. Twice now had the one man known unutterable experiences upon that grey enigma always newly starting up; but the other's imaginings, less personal, were on that account possibly the richer and deeper in the grandeur of a metaphysical antiquity. It was Saltfleet who first restlessly broke the spell.

  "Who could have been those tomb-makers, Arsinal?"

  The addressed one emerged unwillingly.

  "If the half-stone were brought here from elsewhere, I cannot answer you, and an answer is unnecessary. But if this hill, as we must dare to think, has been the first seat and terrestrial home of the undivided lith, then an answer would be more possible, though difficult. It is not the technical books, however, which will teach us what we wish to know."

  "I ask you."

  Arsinal faced his companion with an uneasy and still absent eye.

  "Yet if I am to attempt any sort of reply, I must first clear the way. The palæontological library, I say, is increasingly a welter of chaos. Petrified crania and bits of crania have been measured, physical characters of human and subhuman types have been compared and contrasted, the vocabularies of the seven or eight great Aryan stocks have been exhaustively examined for common roots, to arrive at the last common habitat. Superstitions, proverbs, religions, fairy stories, have all been put under bloodless analytical survey, to discover what men could have started them, in what regions of the globe, under what circumstances. Then caves, lakes, marshes, mounds, barrows, have been dredged and ransacked, flint implements innumerable studied under optical power, all the available remains of 'mammoth' art squeezed for their last drop of meaning. The beginnings of ancient nations as recorded have been ruthlessly pulled to pieces, in order to be reconstructed de novo. … And, as the broad result of all, to-day there is a wider contrariety of learned opinion than ever before, as to what manner of man or manlike ape has autochthonally occupied each land—what simian features have been contemporaneous with what degree of emergence to intellectuality. Each new fragment of yellow skull, each new far-fetched lingual derivation, but draws us further into the intricacies of the labyrinth—which in the end may well prove to have neither centre nor exit for us. …

  "We are at least assured that the so-called Nordic races have been, beyond all others, warlike and freedom-loving, the primitive Romans stern, severe and disciplined, the Achaeans brilliant, rational, aesthetic, the Celts poetically restless and mystical. All these have been blue-eyed peoples. It is no conjecture, but a necessity, that these blue-eyed peoples, appearing suddenly as strangers in a world of brown humanity, should be derived from one stock. The later branchings and differences are to be otherwise explained. It is scarcely a conjecture that the home of that single blue-eyed stock has been north-west Europe.

  "The metamorphosis took place—I have spoken of it to you before. It took place amongst a certain brown race, because of its latent possibilities of advancement. The after branchings—as of Goth, German, Roman, Celt and Greek—were a consequence of the tremendous spirituality of the new characters, overflowing into a vital flood that would not for long ages be confined to any one racial channel. But the north-west European race, who were the fathers of all, may well have been more stable. Over a stretch of a thousand or fifteen hundred miles, perhaps, and during untold ages, such a race may have moved practically not at all, in the way of social or spiritual development. It waited. It should have been in Britain; Britain was still the connected extremity of the continent of Europe. The North Sea was still a river, of which the Rhine and the Thames were unequal tributaries.

  "And that race should be identical with the earliest of the Eolithic cave-dwellers. They need not all have dwelt in caves, but the caves have endured, the forest huts of mud and wattle have vanished. An outpost of that great widespread European brown-eyed people may have become settled in this valley at our feet, in a time when it was supernatural and frightful with dark trees...

  "And they would be the tomb-makers!" said Saltfleet.

  "They have even been described. Yet few have noticed the accounts, for science has had its other more beloved fashions. The Icelandic sagas are full of such descriptions. … I don't know now if we shall ever enter into the discussion. Certainly there is n
o time now, at this minute. We have stayed here too long, Saltfleet."

  "On the contrary, I regard it as so extraordinarily essential to get you proved right or wrong in all, that I'm prepared to stop here half an hour longer if necessary. For the same reason that I withheld my vision this morning from you, I want you, in advance of the next, to predict its elements by pure reason, logic, intuition—call it what you will. … For supposing you have this demoniacal nose for hidden things, the common measures of prevention may not be enough."

  Arsinal turned a wrinkled glance on him.

  "So that I could refuse to answer at all, and be well within my rights as a sensible man. But I shall neither blow up our quarrel again here, nor will I waste time over urging you forward before you are quite ready. Let us only finish quickly. …

  "I said, the sagas. To persons acquainted with the sagas and reading with heedful mind, a singular racial circumstance everywhere outcrops in them. It is that throughout all these northern stories, the two distinct types of northern men persistently appear, frequently in the same generation of the same family. A single instance may stand for all. Skallagrim had two sons. Now Thorolf, the older of the pair, as a child 'grew to be tall and was fair of countenance,' while Egil, the younger, was 'ill-favoured like his father, with black hair'—and as the passage has always struck me as important, I can conclude it verbatim:

  "'When but three years old he (Egil) was as tall and strong as other boys of six or seven. He was soon talkative and word-wise. Somewhat ill to manage was he when at play with other lads.'

  "And Skallagrim himself resembled that son, whereas Thorolf the elder, the brother of Skallagrim and uncle of Thorolf the younger, entirely resembled that younger Thorolf in fairness and good looks and affability.

  "That black, ill-featured type finds mention in a hundred chiefs, sea-rovers and bondis of the north. Doubtless it was as prevalent as the fair, golden, sun-like type, which yet was ever the more popular and remained the standard of perfection of the stock. Sigurd Fafnirsbane, Gunnar of Lithend, Kjartan Olafsson, were yellow-haired, blue-eyed, handsome, easy of speech and open of character, the favourites of all men, the beloved of all women. Skallagrim, Egil, Skarphedinn, Grettir, and numberless others, were either black or red-haired, ugly, quarrelsome, and often secret-natured. Sometimes they were credited with being descended from the stock of the 'hill-giants'. …

  "But also this curious natural antithesis finds presentation in an essential and principal feature of the Norse cosmogony which hitherto has always baffled the commentators. In the last day the sons of Muspellheimr, that flaming world of the south, headed by Surtr—he who sits upon and guards its border, 'his sword outshining the sun itself—are to sally forth and destroy the gods and all mankind. These fiery golden beings, Saltfleet, may well stand for the archetype of the yellow-haired men of the north; and that last destruction of the old order should surely be the second coming of the power of the lith, raising those yellow-haired ones to new and sublimer and final splendours.

  "Very awful and beautiful to me is this mysterious sudden shooting forth of the mythos into an inexplicable quarter, like a flashing of genius. Opposed to Muspellheimr is Niflheimr, the abode of freezing cold and gloom. The Edda says:

  '"That part of Ginnungagap that lies towards the north was thus filled with heavy masses of gelid vapour and ice, and everywhere within were whirlwinds and fleeting mists. But that part that lies towards the south was lighted by the sparks and flakes that flew into it from Muspellheimr.' Those sparks and flakes, may not we at once call them the meteors of the sky, and may not the already ignorant reference be to the forgotten tradition of the fall to earth of one aerolith in particular? ... Niflheimr: that is, the dark primal world of savagery and gianthood. And the account proceeds. From the commingling of the fire generated by those sparks and that congealed vapour, arose to life the giant Ymir, with the cow Audhumla, who fed upon the salt and hoar frost of the stones round about and the milk of whose teats nourished Ymir. But from the stones thus licked by her sprang the father of Odin, endowed with beauty, agility and power. …

  "Those licked stones, then, were the same dark half-giants of Niflheimr; and that cow was the allegorised figure of the Mother. The stones as well, however, were doubtless the fragments of the aerolith, shattered by its fall to ground, and here the myth must somehow have become corrupted. The father of Odin and his named wife (to omit an obviously falsely inserted generation) were the chosen individuals from a pre-existing barbarous tribal forest-folk. Odin himself was the resulting god-man.

  "But one entity remains over—Ymir. He, the frost-giant, was not before the cow Audhumla, for her milk nourished him; yet his mention is before her, and so it is to be understood that their appearances in the world were simultaneous and inseparable. With Ymir, indeed, we find associated a whole new branch of naively grand fable, with which we have nothing to do, and which may probably represent another myth-system altogether, crudely welded to the first at a later date. His original shape and meaning, difficult to grasp, perhaps too soon became troublesome to immature intelligences untrained to abstractions, so that they fell to easier stories.

  "I hazard that Ymir was united to that female visitant from another flaming sphere of pure spirit, as a sinister 'infra' force, for the automatic defence of her sacredness in a dismal blood-reeking underworld of crouching beasts and half-beasts. His strength and malignity were those of death itself. … Well may it be, Saltfleet, that this hill standing up against us was at one time 'Ymir's Tor.’ His carven image was erected yonder to continue his office after the most fearful of all burials. Drapier has fallen to his wrath. …

  "And now I shall answer your question, or attempt to do so, after so long a digression. 'Who were those tomb-makers?' They were the infinitely-distant progenitors of the ill-favoured, blackhaired men of the sagas, the original stock of the European north-west, probably for the most part dwelling in rude hovels in the extensive dark, marshy forests of those days, who in after times became the fearsome giants of countless songs and stories. … For the bones of these so-numerous giants have till now not been recovered, and we are therefore to credit that this popular term 'giant' anciently described not the possessor of an exceptional stature, but of a wild bodily strength, rudeness and unsociableness beyond the later common. Never did the type disappear, but it came to mix its blood with that of its supernatural fair-haired conquerors, and so grew erect and alert, better-mannered, fonder of the light of day; yet always the fundamental distinction endured. … More than the other northerners, perhaps, the Celts may have retained their 'giant' characters. …"

  Arsinal paused; whereupon Saltfleet asked him:

  "But why should not that mystical translation to the highest have occurred among another race? Nor do I see any great worship of womanhood in these people, to prepare them for the bowing down before a Great Mother. That, I well remember, was a point of yours."

  "Consider, Saltfleet. Isn't the cultivated rose, by nearly universal acclaim, the loveliest of flowers? Yet it is from the simple briar, that has no more beauty than the violet, primrose, bluebell, or a dozen other wayside blooms. Why then has the rose been victorious over all wild competitors? Because the briar always possessed the capability of holding in its sheath-to-come the multitudinous curving petals that constitute the glory of the garden rose. And equally, the grim-featured, black-haired savage of the ancient northern lands must have possessed potentially in his foreshadowed later brain the group of strange and noble characters whose interaction afterwards was bound to produce that saltus for mankind.

  "Still you may object that other races have attained a comparable height by simple evolution, without a break and without unearthly intervention; but I reply, no! the height has never been comparable. The Chinese and Japanese have given us decorative forms of art that could not rise to sublimity. A few peoples have built magically for sky and land, not for heaven. No dark-skinned race has yet achieved a philosophy; for the Upanishads of India
are from the Aryans. The Jews and Arabs have willed, rather than meditated, their sullen monotheistic systems, and these systems have remained barbaric, of blood and towards blood.

  "All has been communal, non-individual; only in the European north and west has the genius of the individual soul been possible. Therefore, that slumbering, half-frozen stock, dreaming uneasily during some thousands of generations before the coming of the grand translation—it alone, of all the human peoples, was undergoing the impress of outward circumstance which could at last break it up into persons. The long black winter nights, the frightful brute creation, hunting as well as hunted, the impassable forests filled with imagined shapes of awe and panic terror, the bogs, rains, damps, chills and fogs, making of life one long misery and struggle, the splitting of the race into the smallest groups, wherefrom speech remained uncommon, concerted action unknown, and loneliness the rule—all was towards the formation of minds brought permanently face-to-face with reality... not the reality of practical things, but that of the whole of cosmic existence. But for untold ages the misery was escapeless and men sought no escape; hearts were being silently hammered to the beginning of agonised wonder, and there was as yet no thought in the north, but only a damming of the future thought that was to break through like a mighty flood. … Compare this, for example, Saltfleet, with the easy, eloquent tears and breast-beatings of the primitives of the Old Testament, the vocal distresses on account of the loss of possessions, whether human or material; and you will discover why the one people should already have swelled to maturity and run its short course, before the other had succeeded in establishing its foundations of dark majesty and sovereignty over all the latter nations of the planet. …