From claw to crest it reared itself about eighteen inches from its resting-place, and in plumage was of a uniform saddish green, though tinged at the extremities of its primaries and of its tail feathers with a dull cinnamon, its breast deepening to a faint shot purple towards the belly.
With dipping and sidling head it surveyed the minute surrounding plateau, showing in its quick movements a faint unease as if its senses were dimly aware of strange and dangerous company. So translucent was the surrounding air that even at this distance the old man could mark the silvery rim to the iris of its eye, and could count the horned, outspread claws that clutched the stone. He had long since descried too, even to the delicate markings of its rosettes, the leopard apparently sleeping away its vigil on the height above.
The bird that had thus alighted on the stone nearby, appeared to be in quest of company. It bowed and becked now a little this way, now a little that; it stretched and sleeked a wing until every speck on its neutral-patterned feathers displayed itself in the sun. Then crouching lower and amorously into its soft plumage, with stealthy movements it twisted its neck upon its shoulders until its beak, as if in maternal joy and quietude, lay gently upon its bosom. The old man smiled at the realization that while this last gesture had come straight from nature’s teaching, what had preceded it seemed to have been learned by mimicry and to have been practised with reluctance.
A slight stir within the arbour now caught his attenion. Instantly the visitor on the stone drew herself down and sped swiftly into cover behind and beneath the boulders that lay along the margin of the stream. Many minutes passed. The sun swept upward into the heavens, rejoicing in his strength. By infinite degrees the shadows cast by mountain peak and crest moved in a vast curve like the hands of an enormous timepiece. At faintest touch of their chill in its lair the leopard had stirred, lifted and stretched itself, and after one swift glance over the scene spread out beneath it, had vanished from sight, as if in obedience to a secret cue.
And now from out the pitch-black arch of its nesting-place, issued into the blazing glare of the morning a creature compared with whom the visitor to its domains was but as a handmaid in the train of the Queen of Sheba compared with King Solomon in all his glory. Its crested head was of molten gold – a gold which swam and rippled down towards its folded wings into a lively green seen only in rare mosses and in the shallows of the oceans. Green, blue, and purple then mingled their beauty. The wing tips were black as soot; the tail coverts, interrupted with snow, resembled them; while above them, arched over its back, flowed upwards two paler shafts terminating in a lyre-shaped pattern of hues almost indistinguishable the one from the other, as they glinted, flashed, and melted in the sun.
This lordly creature, having surveyed a moment the surrounding day, trod delicately onwards to its bathing-place; and after a while returned once more to preen itself amid the odd riches which it had collected and strown in devices recognizable only by itself, around its arbour. And not until now stole out again its humble infatuated visitor.
The old man almost laughed outright to see the disdain with which his lordship refused to recognize his visitor’s presence there. Indolently, methodically he continued his exquisite toilet. While she, poor creature, as if now utterly ashamed of her former wiles, cowered half in shadow, half in sun, gently observing him. ‘O Lucifer, Son of the Morning,’ muttered the old man – beads of sweat, in spite of the sheltering branches above him glistening on his bald pate, ‘O Lucifer, Son of the Morning, by pride fell the Angels.’
Sheer curiosity seemed at last to overcome her as she drew a little nearer to watch the adored one rearrange his treasury. Now one shell, then another, a fragment of quartz or of glinting metal, he lifted with his beak and disposed in place. There appeared to be singularly little method in his peculiar hobby, for as often as not he returned to its former place in the pattern what but a moment or two before he had with extreme deliberation deposited elsewhere. Possibly some outlying province of his bird-like mind and attention was concerned with his faithful visitor. But not the faintest ripple of neck or plume betrayed it. His complete heed seemed to be solely for his pretty collection.
‘How strange it is,’ thought the old man, ‘that even in the simplest of her creatures nature consistently endeavours to reach the least bit further than she can stretch.’ There was something almost human in the queer devices these creatures of the same kin and kind were exhibiting, though neglect and contempt were steadily reducing the unwanted one to her own sovran and instinctive self. She rose out of the shadow, displayed once more an indolent wing, and emitted from her throat a curious, bubbling, guttural note.
And apparently, as if at last in heed of her entreaties, her disdainful idol had suddenly thrust forward his golden head; every feather on his body seeming to bristle and roughen itself as he stared. Yet even this could be but small comfort to her meekness and vanity, for his silver-lined eyes were now fixed not upon herself but a few paces beyond her.
There was a deathly pause. For an instant or two the small lovely universe around them, snow-masked mountain-top to brawling stream, seemed to have been swept up in a soundless swoon. Then, as if at a signal, three sentient objects flashed into movement, so rapid as to be individually indistinguishable.
With a mighty whirr of wing, scattering with its talons as it rose the shells and pebbles strown around it, the Bird of the Arbour flashed into the air; and the crouching leopard leapt towards its prey.
Distracted an instant by the foe swooping to attack it, the beast swerved in its leap, missing by a few inches its assured victim, succeeding merely in tearing out a few dull feathers from her wing. She screamed piteously as she fled, then turned too late to observe what had befallen. Plunging with beak and claw, the master of the arbour had cowed for a moment her assailant. The leopard crouched snarling, with lashing tail, defending its eyes against plunging beak and claw. Then suddenly, and with one lightning buffet of its paws, it leapt into the air, and smote its aggressor down.
St Dusman drew his roughened hand over his forehead; and seizing his staff issued out from his retreat towards the fray. If he had intended to intervene to any purpose in what was passing, he had come too late. After one glimpse of this advancing Strangeness, the leopard with cringing body turned swiftly and fled.
The old man approached the wounded and dying bird, which feebly endeavoured to beat off his advances. He raised it gently in his arms, and carrying it back into the shadow of its arbour, laid it down among its treasures. The creature’s dimming eye gazed vacantly on these vanishing possessions.
‘Poor soul, poor soul,’ the old man whispered. Then hastening down to the stream, he dipped the hem of his outer garment into the water and returning, squeezed out a few drops into its yawning bill.
Strange changes of hue seemed to be chasing, like wind over wheat, across its miraculous plumage. Its glazing eye was fixed, hardly in terror now, but in mute hopeless entreaty, upon the old man’s face.
‘There, there, my dear,’ he said, as if an old bachelor of a hundred generations had somehow learned to croon to a hurt child. ‘There, there, my dear; it’s only time to be whispering adieu again. The longer the journey the more numerous the inns. And perhaps a moment or two’s rest in each.’
But as he watched its quickening pangs the old man suddenly rebuked himself for his stupidity in not reminding himself that other comfort – tenderer than any human heart could offer – was near at hand. He lifted his eyes and searched the surrounding thickets. It was not yet too late. The carcase of the creature beneath his hands was not yet wholly insensitive. And having moistened once again the pointed tongue within its beak, the old man rose to his feet and shuffled off as quick as his old bones would allow, down into the ravine where brawled the mountain river.
Nor while the morning hours lasted did he attempt to look behind him. He merely sat there lost in reverie.
And since the tongues of the water kept up an incessant roar and babblement, n
o faintest murmur of the plaintive farewells behind him told whether, like the fabulous swan, the Bird of the Arbour sings only at the approach of death.
KOOTOORA
Even the keenest eye slowly and circumspectly directing its gaze in as remote an ambience as it could command from any one of the blackened crests that lifted themselves fifteen to twenty feet like the billows of a frozen sea on this Plain of Kootoora, would have discerned no sign of life. Minute slender steel-coloured midges, it is true, their burnished wings like infinitesimal flakes of mica beating the arid air, their horn-shaped snouts curved beneath their many-prismed eyes, drifted in multitudinous clusters in every hollow. They might be animate ashes.
Specks even more minute circling at ethereal altitudes above the vast crater of distant Ajubajao betokened the haunt of some species of vulture, though what meat nourished them more substantial than the air in which they circuited there was nothing to show.
Their towering vans commanded, however, an immense range of scene, and they long since must have descried from so dizzying a coign, a tiny erect shape scrambling toilsomely from out of the east towards the centre of this wild and hideous plateau. From crest to crest of the parched savanna of lava, now pausing to recover his breath and to survey what lay before him, now sliding and swaying into the yawning hollow beneath him; clam-bering to his feet when some unnoticed obstacle or more dangerous glissade had sent him sprawling; he pushed steadily on.
In his pertinacity, in the serene indomitableness of his age-raddled countenance he resembled no less a personage than the first Chinese patriarch, Bodhidharma, as – muffled in his mantle – he is depicted crossing the Yangtze river, his broad soles poised upon a reed.
For this very reason, maybe, the vultures of Ajubajao wheeled no nearer. Or it may be that a pilgrim or traveller who of his own free will, or at the promptings of a bizarre romance, or in service of some incalculable behest, dares the confines of a region as barren as this, quickly dissipates whatever pleasant juices his body may contain. Or it may be some inscrutable intuition in those carrion-fed brains had revealed that destiny had him in keeping beneath her brazen wing. Abject and futile creature though he appeared to be, he came undeviatingly on.
Its last filmy wreaths of sulphurous smoke had centuries before ceased to wreathe themselves from Ajubajao’s enormous womb. Leagues distant though its cone must be, its jagged outlines were sharply discernible, cut clean against that southern horizon. The skies shallowly arching the plain of lava that flowed out annularly from its base in enormous undulations, league on league until its margin lay etched and fretted against the eastern heavens – this low-hung firmament was now of a greenish pallor. In its midst the noonday’s sun burned raylessly like a sullen topaz set in jade.
But utterly lifeless though the plain appeared to be, minute susurrations were occasionally audible, caused apparently by scatterings of lava dust lifted from their hollows on heated draughts of air. These gathering in volume, raised at last their multitudinous voices into a prolonged hiss, a sustained shrill sibilation as if the silken fringes of an enormous robe were being dragged gently across this ink-black Sahara.
As they subsided once more, drifting softly to rest, a faint musical murmur followed their gigantic sigh, like that of far-distant drums and dulcimers from a secret and hidden borderland. Then this also ceased, and only the plaintive horns of the midges and the scurry of beetles scuttling beneath their shards to and fro in their haunts in the crevices of the lava broke the hush.
In a deep angular hollow of the nearest of these lava dunes, lay basking a serpent, flat of head and dull of eye, its slightly rufous skin mottled and barred in faintest patternings of slate and chocolate. So still she lay, her markings might appear to be but the vein of an alien stone or metal imbedded in the lava. But now and again, at the dictate of some inward whim, her blunted tail arched itself an inch or two above the floor of its black chamber, emitting a hollow and sinister rattling – as if in admonishment or endearment of the brood of her young that lay drowsing in an apparently inextricable knot of paler colouring nearby.
The hours of Kootoora’s morning glided on, revealing little change except an ever increasing torridity, until the thin air fairly danced in ecstasy – like an exquisitely tenuous gas boiling in a pot – above every heat-laved arch and hollow. The skies assumed a yet paler green, resembling that of verdigris, and deepening towards the north to a dull mulberry. Strange tremors now shook the air, and thicker-crusted though its skin might be than any leviathan, a sinister insecurity haunted the plain. Here took its walks that spectre, danger, but more appallingly bedizened than in any other region of the earth.
Sluggish stirrings, the warning of some obscure instinct, in the serpent’s blood now quickened her restlessness, though the lidless eyes set in that flat and obtuse head betrayed no glimmerings of intelligence or fear. She drew in closer to her brood and again and yet again her rattle drummed sullenly in the heat. A sound alien from any experience that had ever been hers in these familiar haunts had broken the silence. It was the footstep of approaching fear.
Writhing swiftly beneath and towards the face of the lava incline, wherein a black splash marked the crannied entrance of her secret chamber, she swept aside the fragments of dried skin which she had sloughed in bygone years. An increasing movement in the lively tangle behind her showed that her last insistent summons had been heeded. One by one her restless younglings disentangled their coils from the general knot, and slid noiselessly into cover. But a few yet remained, semi-torpid, and, as her inscrutable wits warned her, in imminent danger beneath the glare of the sun, when suddenly the presence and influence of a human shape struck down across the lava wall; and the diffused purple shadow cast by the rayless sun lay over its hollow.
The body that caused it was invisible to the serpent. But her rattle sounded unceasingly, as with groping coils she turned now this way, now that, in endeavour to repel this menace to her solitude and her young’s safety. Rearing herself at last in a blind fury of terror and anguish, with blunt head and flickering tongue she struck again and again, not at the dreadful human gently surveying her out of his smiling yet anguished face, as draggled, parched, and half-fainting he watched her every movement, but merely at the insensitive shadow that overhung her lair.
The hollow desperate thumping of her slenderly boned head knocking its own knell grew fainter. But the last of her brood had made its way into safety before, bruised and bleeding, it drooped motionless in the dust. At this the old man scrambled down into the hollow. It had been an arduous journey for what might seem so trivial an errand, but there was no symptom of impatience in his gestures as, having moistened with spittle the ball of his thumb, he gently smeared the muzzle of his victim.
Then he too bent his head, heedless of the still feebly flickering tongue, and seemed to be whispering into the creature’s sense some far-brought message of his own.
And, yet again, from across the parched precipitous flanks of Ajubajao, moved, as it were, a vast suspiration of wind, sulphurously hot, of a dense suffocating odour, bestirring in its course the hovering multitudes of the midges, and driving before it a thin cloud of lava dust, as the wind drives shadow across the flats of a sea. Yet again that insidious whispering filled the quiet; and the remote dulcimers tattooed their decoy.
The saint crouched low, hooding as best he could beneath his mantle his eyes, mouth, and nostrils against the smothering, skirring particles. A minute whirlpool of air came dancing like a host of dervishes into the sheserpent’s hollow. Lifting the dried scaly fragments of her discarded skin, it dispersed them here, there, everywhere, in its minute headlong rout …
THE SEVEN VALLEYS
The Rest House at the mouth of the Seventh Valley was made of a supple withy woven together layer above layer, with a shell-shaped thatch roofing it in. Seen from a distance this smiling morning, perched amid the green undulations surrounding it, it had the appearance of a beehive. For these withies or osiers, as they
dry in that temperate air, fade from their first willow grey-green into a gleaming bronze. Sprouting out of the thatch, too, bloomed and flourished whole families of minute plants, their round-budded clusters showing like the heads of some congregation of insects engaged in prayer.
It was the only dwelling completely within view, rising above the sward on which it stood some thirty yards within the mouth of the valley, the sides of which yawned smoothly wider and wider until they narrowed again towards the entry of the Sixth. Beyond that, yet again – further away than it looked in this translucent atmosphere – tapered into the stillness the summit of yet another Rest House. And so on and on, as it would seem, valley by valley, to the very gates themselves.
The shelving hollow of the nearer expanse was of a tranquil yet lively green. The close turf moulded itself over these verdant contours as delicately as the bloom on the cheek of a sleeping baby or a plum. Clumps, here and there, of a low blossoming tree, its fragrance rilling and wreathing into shallows of sweetness upon the still air, alone interrupted its surface. While in drifts of sapphire blue, over which now hovered and fluttered hosts of a narrow-winged silver butterfly, shimmered like a diapered carpet the myriads of yet another tiny-statured flower.
Winding their way between them, skirting always as near as possible each grove in turn, green paths, faintly patterning the darker green around them, converged like the outspread claws of a gigantic bird, towards the Rest House, the two westernmost of them dipping suddenly out of sight into azure space, as if here they plunged into an abyss of air.
Little traffic, it would appear, could occasion tracks so faint. Up and inward, beyond the Rest House indeed, the broader track was fainter yet; while, bordering it closely in a clean straight line, descended yet another, shallowly printed over with the gallopings of innumerable hoofs.
At a few paces distant from the Rest House, on a rough wooden seat sat the young man Cuspidor. ‘A humble office,’ had smiled his old friend, ‘merits a humble name. Not all the saints, you will find, have endearing manners. The eager hunter has only his quarry in mind. He does not pause to examine every small chit-chat bird that scolds at him from a bush. Others of the saints, my son, discern only too keenly. The modest syllables of the name you now possess may therefore bring a trace of indulgence into their scrutiny. That of shoe-cleaner of the Seventh Valley may appear to be a humble occupation. It is an unworthy one, however, only if one pay regard not to the wearer but merely to the worn.’
Short Stories 1895-1926 Page 40
