We were in the forests where the water sank and trickled toward
Congo, not toward Nile. There rose about us a fearful, a magical
beauty.
A path ran that seemed a chain of roots and rootlets, kindly pushed
above the soil by the trees for our use. So light and yielding was
this soil that we seemed to step upon black air or black water that
did not wet, but into which there might be sinking. The soil was
black vegetal life asleep, thick memories, premonitions of life in
infinite leaf. We came into arcades, aisles where water ran, where,
far up, so far up, there glowed fillets of blue. Away from these
there had never been aught since the world began but a green heaven,
a mighty emerald and jade arabesque.
The air hung humid, warm, oppressively still; the light, green light,
rayed from a sun that must be far away and small. Birds or the face
of a chimpanzee looked down or out upon us.
The thin, extended line of burdened men wound on slowly, following
the naked guide ahead. Footprint fell in footprint, over the black,
low-settled mist of old life, so pregnant, so fecund, so
instant-ready the moment the spark should call....
I walked in a forest of my own thought. I was remembering that the
earth was alive--that those whom we called planets--stars--suns were
persons, individuals--that there was communication between them--that
they made a society--that they pursued an ideal unity and spoke of an
over-self.
Planetary consciousness--solar consciousness--universal
consciousness, universal, eternal, integrated! I saw the star ahead,
faint and far, and between were light-years as the sands of the sea
for number, light-years and their vast successiveness of event. The
strange sweetness was that the ray it sent was a ray of home and drew
with the cords of home.
All feeling, all knowing, all doing rang forth from that. _There_
was the heart of action. _There_ was all the action.... But what
was the action? How to further it? How definitely to let go the
little will, let the One Will pour through? How to increase the
mind's weak zephyr until the eternal cleansing truth blew free?
The path wound, though still it went on. The powdery earth that was
half-life seemed hardly to afford footing, and yet did give support.
Strange trees, ferns, mazy creepers, air-plants, roof over roof,
light like the depths of the sea! Suddenly, smilingly, there walked
into my mind child-verses learned at my mother's knee:
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Still the huge controversy! Was that so--or the mighty ocean and the
pleasant land did they make the water drops, the sand grains? Or was
there no true problem, and the whole vexed question but a
lantern-fantasy to melt in the flooding day?
The flooding day--that was what I wanted.
The enormous forest slept, a sea of strange shapes. I wished to know
the life that made the shapes--drew limiting lines around its own
essence for its own uses--knew the use, the purpose, was at itself,
gathered its mind together and knew itself.... The only path was the
inner path, the way of the ever more inclusive, ever less inhibited
"I" or "We"--just as one chooses to call it. Now Michael Forth
called it "I," and now he called it "We." But never did he mean only
that manacled, dungeoned particle, born in the year 1862.
The forest halted. Here came and passed and stayed a stream crossed
by a swaying bridge of woven lianas. Upon the farther bank, in a
brown and green space, appeared rows of smallest, frailest huts of
cane, and a body of Pygmies, warned that we were friendly, drawn up
by their talk-house to meet us. They struck their drums. Boom!
Boom! Their fetish-men advanced, striving hard to look terrible.
And all around stood the forest, the rooted, the yet further manacled.
We dwelt several months by this stream, with these Pygmies. They
were a simple, low-scale folk, away down, away down.
I listened to the drum-beat in this village. I watched the ritual of
the fetish-men. They were children in height, but they wore
head-dresses that they thought made them towering. Around and around
they went in a circle.... It was as though there was an invisible
stake, an invisible rope; they got to the end of their tether and
went round and round. I thought, "Break the rope, for God's sake,
and rise!"
One night, in a half-dream I saw more than these Pygmies. I saw
Africa and its stake and rope and weary circle.... Asia and its
circle--Europe and its circle--America and its circle....
This village, this forest, this stay with the Pygmies, came, with me,
into the column of turning-points, the hinge column.
I was weary of inner debate, weary of turning around my own stake in
my own circle. There would come upon me here, if I stayed here
forever, withered horror.... I would clear out--trust to rising--but
move anyhow!
I had had intimations of a path. To treat syntheses as phenomena to
be realized, used, and grown by just as their component phenomena had
been realized, used, and grown by--to take Memory and Imagination as
the great Powers that they were--to use Reason with a wider swing--to
trust Intuition--to cease saying, "It is not penetrable," or, "It is
afar," or, "It is dead," or, "Past and Future are unenterable," or,
"There is no participation nor perception outside this circle."
The night held dark and warm and close. There was something tolling
in the forest. A red light upsprang by the talk-tree, and the
fetish-men began again their twisted dance. All the Pygmies followed
with their eyes; their bodies also moved in sympathy.
At Landon once there had been a lynching. I had been among those who
tried to stop it. But we had word too late and were there too late.
I saw again the swinging body, the crew of masked Pygmies beneath....
I thought of many another crippled truth and frozen love. America
and its weary, ancient circle....
Break, break from ignorance! Nor halt from fearing, "Is this a
path?" Go the way you can go, and trust to its widening and serving
the others!
That night, my body lying straight in the tent that I shared with
Maxwell, I went away in the inner man. Just as much as that inner
man could reap of inner space, time, and form, he might reap. Just
as much as he could understand and share he might understand and
share. There was no barrier save himself.
It had been an oppressive day in this forest and this Pygmy town.
The rains were at hand. We faced a considerable stay here, and the
prospect had some distaste.... I went away. I fled like the eagle
upon the breathing air. Beneath me flowed the sea. Then there was
land and mountain-tops.... But up in the air--up and up!--till it
thinned, till atmosphere lay below me as hydrosphere and lithosphere
lie under atmosphere. The Sea of Air--and I saw its surface as from
a cliff is seen the surface of the sea. It was in waves, little and
great, and the upper forces dashed against and through it, and there
was a wild spray of utterest light.
Down in the Pygmy village arose some night disturbance. Maxwell sat
up. "It's Ferraro's watch--"
I rose. "I'll go see."
The affair proved to be nothing more than the push of some forest
beast against the last cane hut's most diminutive garden-patch. I
returned to the tent. "It's all right."
Maxwell lay back. "I was dreaming of Scotland. I smelled the
moors--had heather in my hand.... Michael, don't you think that the
whole round earth may be within us?"
"I certainly do. Look in upon Scotland whenever you will!"
He turned. I knew that there was a woman with him upon the moor. In
sleep it mattered not at all that she was what they called "dead." I
divined other planes where, too, it did not matter.
The rains began in the basin of the Congo. We stayed their season
out among this Pygmy people.
We made for ourselves indoor work.... For one thing, among others,
while I was in this place, I wrote the beginning of a story. I never
finished it, never used, later, the fragment. I place it here
because I was writing out of my own straining toward light, and my
own intuitions of certain of the forms and ways of that faint, faint
dawn which was all that as yet I knew.
The fragment follows here as I wrote it in the huts of the Pygmies,
in tropical Africa.
ESCAPE
He had been in prison ten years. The prison was a fortress where
were kept offenders against the state. His prison chamber was a
place of stone pillars and arches, long, but not so wide. The
shadows hung about the ends of it. The loophole, grated window was
set in the middle of the outer wall; the lamp swung from the middle
pillar. There was a low bed and a heavy chair and table. The floor
was stone and sounded when he walked to and fro, unless he walked
lightly. He walked much, to and fro, and to and fro.
Morning and evening came a jailer with food and water, a silent
jailer with a heavy and a weary air. He evoked pity, chained to a
monotonous life. Few others came. If any came it was at
tremendously long intervals. Nor were they friends of heart and mind
who came.
Often enough it was cold enough in the prison room that in part was
sunk below a river level. In time of flood the river might be heard
without. The prisoner had a thick coverlet for his bed, and a long,
wide and warm cloak. He needed both when he saw, high up, the gray
snowflakes behind the window-grating. Both had been the gift of a
woman. He had never seen the woman. At long intervals some
comfort--a book perhaps--had come from her, brought by the jailer.
She must have influence. He knew that the giver was a woman only
because the jailer said, "A woman sends it." And again, "A
woman--yes, the same woman--sends it." But now for a long time, for
nearly two years, nothing had come from her. The prisoner believed
that she was dead.
Ten years....
He knew very well his dungeon with pillars and arches. There were
the two shadowy ends. Lying on his bed, he gazed at one and the
other until they seemed to stretch forth like a giant stretching his
arms. What was at the giant's finger-tips? And what just beyond the
giant's reach? When he walked that way it was merely into dimmer
parts of the fortress room. There was the window high in the side
wall. Beyond it spread breadth of the earth. But the walls about
the window space, and the bars across, and his body passing to and
fro beneath, were alike material, and the first held back the second.
The free space of the window was smaller than his body. It could not
go through.
How rigid were conditions!
Ten years.... To and fro--to and fro. The dropping moments, falling
in a line.... Stalactite and stalagmite meeting--the pillar of them.
When first he came to this place he had been active with plans for
release or escape. His mind had moved swiftly this way and that,
searching iron keys for an iron door, means to reach friends without,
means to change the views of foes without. With his hands, with a
file made from some scrap of iron, he had worked at the stone that
cased the window. In none of these things had he succeeded. In them
all like was opposed by like, by a more numerous and massive like.
At last he saw that a heavy like was opposing a less heavy like, and
that in the nature of things, the latter could not beat down nor
penetrate the first. He desisted from these efforts. That had been
a long time ago.
Dull stagnation and despair. There had been a frozen year of
that--gray, icicle-hung...
Out of that, little by little, he had reached a more clement season.
How he came into this he hardly knew. Something had worked for him,
underground or overhead, in his own nature. As the floor upon which
he trod was the roof of cellars and gave forth low sound as he
walked, so, doubtless, his own being had stories.
He came to where he could help himself, in that story where he
consciously dwelt--and so, doubtless, helped all the other stories....
Now he took up again, though not in the first fevered strain, and
with difference of aim and method, the deliberate, day-by-day
endeavor to remove himself from this prison. If what opposed was too
numerous and too massive to-day, that might not be the case
to-morrow. He worked with brain and hand. Necessarily, it was inch
work.... The opposing forces had an air of resting yet in their
age-deep bed. He persevered, but he saw that an angel must break
these prison bars. Well ... make the angel! Make or awaken--he
cared not which, so that the winged being arose.
He was born a thinker and artist. It was the artist in him that had
set him here. He had laid hands upon a misshapen state, trying to
bring it into juster proportions and beauty. But Behemoth had
elected to remain for the present Behemoth. Now he was here in
prison, but he would widen this from above if he could. _Where
there's a will there's a way. Where there's a will there's a way_.
The books were few that he had in his prison, but worth while. He
had been allowed to bring a certain number with him upon his coming
here. That same woman had sent more who now sent no more. So well
did he know them now that he knew much in them that was not written
down. He had also the much that he had read before coming here.
Pondering this mass, traveling in mind to and fro upon its surface,
learning by degrees to sink into its interior, to permeate, as it
were, its molecular structure--he found open to him, in a sort,
fields of space and rivers of time. Emotional freedoms likewise,
releases of energy, desires, longings, aspirations, satisfactions ...
and higher vineyards, orchards, and wheat-fields where the mind
strengthened itself ... and mountain summits where the sky of spirit
seemed not far away.
It was a life.... But yet, compared to life that he longed for, it
was pallid, hushed, slow, twilight, a land never to be scorned, a
real land, always to be loved and thanked for good help for
travelers, but yet a Stygian land compared--
Compared to what? Traveling to what?
He had a power of longing--but all was cut across by a wall of pearly
mist.... There must be light there, for he saw the wall.
When neither lamp nor window showed him the page of his book, or when
he lay awake upon his bed, he might sink into the sea of memory.
That was a dense element in which he was at home. He could move to
and fro there and take much pleasure. It was a very ancient, very
wonderful sea. He became a skilled navigator, over and through its
waves and currents.... Mnemosyne! Her face was fair, though turned
always over her shoulder....
He wrapped memory about him like a cloak, he sat beside it like a
fire. Motionless upon his bed, or in his chair beneath the faded
window, he wrought until the dead lived again and the past put on the
present's crown. Until the dead almost lived again and the past
almost put on the present's crown. He wrought and wrought until he
opened blocked-up paths. With an infinite patience he matched ends
and colors....
He began to see his life as he had not seen it before. He sorted
past phenomena and put them in sequences. He recovered moods and let
like flow into like, and felt the river systems of them and the
uninterruptedness of their being. He put together purposes and saw
that always they were threads of larger purposes.
What at first he had called memory, and had bathed in for sensuous
warmth, repose, security--for a finer, haunting, melancholy
pleasure--for rhythm and returning chords--passed by stair and stair
into Recollection. Mnemosyne came alive, looked around, moved....
The change was profound. It was as though a geisha, soft,
attractive, exquisitely skilled to soothe material care, had given
way to a goddess--such a goddess as a man must be very high, subtle,
and deep to serve!
Yet were all these but inns, but shrines, but cities on the way out.
He must not rest, lob-lie-by-the-fire, in the inn--he must not kneel
too long before the image in the shrine--he must not even dwell, a
busy citizen, too long in the ant-hill city. He was addressed to
real escape, with all his being....
Every power of desire, will, knowledge, judgment! He brooded like a
witch over her caldron upon the data of science. Each bit of
knowledge was a chink in the wall. Get a finger in, work and work
until the hand slipped through....
Power of Recollection. As a man awaked from sleep, as a man turned
to saneness from delirium, so there might be a still, smooth, deep,
and entire return to one's self. Then these walls would be paper and
mist.
Power of Imagination. He was alive to possibilities here. It was
his belief that mankind was not using for flight one feather of that
mighty wing. Then imagine!
What was reality?
What were real perception, real knowledge, real will, real
action--what was recognition of reality?
Could one make reality; give it, as it were, birth from desire, mind,
and will?
Make or find or recover reality....
He was a man religiously minded, for all that nine out of ten had
called him infidel or atheist. Much of that life of his, outside
this prison, had been spent in what seemed to the nine destruction of
ancient and venerable buildings.... The work, too, within himself,
of dilapidation--how many years he had given to that! To see fall
from his own interior world this tower and that keep--to take away
the clinging ivy--to disturb the winged life that had built in every
cranny--what sad and heavy and dogged work much of it had been! Yet
he could do no else, for his own power drove him on, and there was a
word that rang somewhere above him. In the light stood justification.
That anguished toil had passed into something like building and into
hopeful joy in building--long ago it had passed.
Religion! To remember the god in you!
Every day a day of splendor, but fairly shadowy, almost night, before
the more splendid dawn it foresaw. Ever the hunter in the keen air
of his own being--ever the adventurer with the wild-grape scent from
the new land just within his nostril--ever the lover with the beloved
wearing a starrier crown.
Religion! Ever more comprehensive, comprehending, until there was
consciously but the Various One--who might have his own vast days and
dawns....
He paced his prison, up and down, across, around. He sat in his
heavy chair, motionless, his eyes upon space. One entering would
have thought him carved there, while all the time, within, was
intensity of action. He lay upon his bed, his arms straight at his
sides or crossed upon his breast, so still that he might have been
thought dead. Without the grated window the snow fell, the wind
struck the fortress like a flail. The river could not be heard, for
it was covered with ice. His mind was warm with its own deep speed.
Freedom ...
Plato's World of Ideas--not Plato's solely, but any man's before him
and after him, who might grasp the rim of that world and draw himself
up into it--over the wall, through the window.
Pragmatic Sanction.... What would work, what you could bring into
experience. Truth. The Actual. Make it with your magic, if you
were so fortunate a magician.
The mind-born. The born of mind and will.
"If ye have faith ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove, and it
shall remove."
Strength of a larger self--on the road to a larger yet.
Freedom--
Eleven years. He had been in this fortress eleven years.
He lay on his bed and the snow fell without the window. He lay
wrapped in the cloak that the woman had given. The gray flakes fell,
he knew that the wind was high. Then very quietly, gently, without a
jar, quite simply, naturally, he himself, his consciousness, awoke
outside his body.
It was both without and within. It was as though he were free in the
room, but had left--just that much of himself--a guard within the
body. The body lay as though it were asleep. When, presently, he
would try experiments, he was immediately back within it, awake, and
looking at the falling snow behind the grating. It was as if a very
high volition of itself raised or lowered its rate of vibration. The
lower rate laid it here within the thick body, the higher freed it.
He gathered force and again passed out from that citadel. He knew
where he left it, he kept a fine line of communication open between
him and that guard left within. But with the intensed rest of him he
was out and away.
Not, indeed, that there was fullness here, either! Even with so much
of blessed freedom, he was aware of stronger and vaster volitions to
be attained, to be exercised. Compared to what might be here was
only a slow-spinning, cold, and dim star. The blaze of glory was yet
above. But compared to what had been he experienced strength and
bliss.
He passed out of the fortress, to his consciousness withdrawing from
it like a cloud, a vapor, or like light, like radiant energy, passing
through the pores of the stone, as if the stone were no more than a
gray fog-bank. He was aware of sentries, but the sentries did not
stop him. One or two might turn head as he went by, but they did not
call nor start forward nor threaten with any weapon. He realized
that they did not know why they had turned.
He remembered an old wood, known to him when he was a boy, and
remembered it in its summer dress.... The wood was about him, and it
was green and the sun filtered in between the leaves.
That fact of infinite gradations in vibration, infinite intensities
of imagery and will! He was here in the wood, and as formless as
air. Into mind came the old warm pressure of the soil, the odor of
sun-washed pine and fern, the bird song from coverts, the boy's happy
abandon, down-flung upon Mother Earth.... He took form. Whether his
power slackened to that or heightened to that he was not then clear.
But he was here, in the fair shape of a man, and he first kneeled and
then lay upon the warm earth, and felt deep joy.
Of old time, in this wood, when he was a boy and afterward in
manhood, he had been well able to image and remember, to dream and
picture, to disintegrate and bring into new combinations experiences
of his own or of others, to live in a manner in poetry-land,
romance-land, history-land, and in the news of the world that came to
him hot from the oven. His faculty in this wise had been very
considerable. And he could share in elemental life. Wind and water,
earth and fire, were wide and deep words to him, holding wonder....
That so straitly bound, that steel and iron, that painful fortress
life, had forced, for very relief's sake, his ancient power to exert
itself and grow in massiveness and edge. He recognized now that this
present enormous access of strength was a matter of altered degree
rather than kind. Hastened by great need, lifted at last by will
grown athlete, he had in one effort overpassed many degrees. He had
come into superconsciousness, but into what degree of that, or high
or low, he was not prepared to say. He saw that his degree bordered
the old consciousness, in part blended with it. He was not
arrogantly minded, and he was prepared to believe that it was not,
save relatively speaking, a high country. But oh, beside the old, it
was high and wide and blissful!
This wood was dear to him whether it slumbered or whether, as now, it
bent its boughs in the summer wind. A little thing that he thought
he had forgotten started solidly forth again. A straying dog came by
and started a rabbit-hunt. The rabbit went like a flash down the
forest-scape. She and the dog disappeared, whereupon a pheasant
stood out from some dead leaves and twigs upon the ground and looked
at him, lying there motionless, with a knowing eye, then, turning,
whirred away. That old time he had laughed, and now he sat up, arms
about knees, and laughed. The dear old wood, the rabbit only half
scared, the knowing pheasant!
He laughed, then that without-wire spoke to him, and immediately he
was in the fortress chamber, returning as he had gone forth, slipping
again into the body there, coalescing with the guard he had left.
The key grated in the door, the jailer appeared bearing evening food
and water. The prisoner sat up, rose from the bed, and came to the
table. "Good evening, friend!"
"Good evening," said the jailer. He set down the dish and jug. "You
look very well, tall and strong," he said. "I wonder!"
He stood and stared. "Things turn inside out," he said. "It seems
to me that the jailed are better off than the turnkeys."
"Perhaps they are," said the prisoner. "I wish that we were well off
together! There must be a way to that, too."
"Well, it's all a riddle," the other made reply, and went away.
"Good night," he said at the door.
"Good night--good night!"
The key turned and was withdrawn. The prisoner, seated at the table,
ate sparingly, drank water. Rising, he paced the floor, up and down,
up and down. Outside the grating the snow was falling, falling, the
gray light fading. The prisoner lay down upon his bed, drew the
thick coverlet over him. Once or twice a fear had knocked at his
heart, hurriedly whispering at a keyhole. "How do you know that you
can do that again? How do you know that it was not a dream?"--Yet he
knew that it was not a dream, and that he could go free.
He lay still, he gathered energy, he heightened consciousness, he
felt that fear dissolve in inner light. He left the body and the
fortress.
The snow. He had watched it of late and imaged the fall of it, the
heaped silver of it far and wide. Now with his freed consciousness
he entered, as it were, into the snow. He was finding that it would
be difficult to resist the taking of form. There was here a most
prolonged memory--whether to be indulged or overcome later judgment
might tell. He thought of the veil, the continuity, the movement of
falling snow, thought of it with pleasure....
The air was thick with snow, drifting, endless. He was snowing over
vast fields, steppes, tablelands and mountain systems, steadily,
quietly, restfully. He needed this great escape into space, this
subdued mood, even, so solitary for so long had he been, this
solitariness. With a quiet indifference, neither pleasure nor pain,
but stillness, he moved in whitening flakes. He felt both the
movement and the rest where they lay. He stretched himself in
gleaming white over leagues of land, and touched and melted into
leagues of ocean.... His thought changed and with it his form. He
left the gray, multitudinous, crystalline peacefulness and became the
liquid sea. He lay afar beneath the air, and here was sunlight and
here dark space and the stars. The earth kept him curved about her,
but he quivered also toward the moon and followed her in tides. But
most, he thought, he felt the sun. When he did so he rose, in part,
from himself, he became mist and vapor, he rode on high as clouds.
Liquid again, he fell as rains, torrential or fine. He sank upon the
earth and into the earth, he drew from springs and brooks into
rivers, and then in a vein-work of rivers great and small, and with a
lullaby, lullaby of going home, the mother calling and the thousand
thousand children returning, bringing experience, he returned to
himself and was ocean with an added hue and dream. Again, elsewhere,
he mounted, and that perpetual wheel rolled on. With his waves he
struck a thousand coasts and felt the rebound; in long rollers he
advanced upon the smooth beaches. Currents flowed in him, rivers
vast and small, and he was their stream, their bed, their shores. He
felt whirlpools, deeps, and shallows. He lay quiet beneath the stars
and the sun, and where the air thickened and moved against him he
rose in a storm. In hills of water with far-flung spray, he
contended with the air. Yet down below was quiet, and elsewhere he
and the air lay at peace together. He saw how universal was drama.
Water.... He followed himself afar. Cloud and sea and stream, but
he was also present elsewhere. He was locked in earth and mineral,
he was held in receptacles of myriad shapes and sizes. He was
cradled in the plant, in the grass of the field, the reed, the rose,
the oak and the palm, the wheat ear and the grape. In him, where he
gathered together and was the sea, moved the fish, waved the
sea-growths, dwelt the creatures of shell houses. But likewise he
was within and of the fish, the sea-flowers and the shell creatures
and their houses. The ships moved over his waves, but in minute
waves he moved within the timber of the ships and the bodies of the
sailors. He was in the cup that was raised to the lips, and in the
hand that held the cup....
Beyond this orb, far in the fields of space, he felt himself, where
about other earths he stretched himself in other seas.
... Also, by likeness, in thought and imagination. Like a great dawn
he realized presence in subtler fields. As at a bell from a tower,
or a thunderclap, or a lark's song, he was in a realm like and not
like, changed and yet similar.
In the old, more narrowly conscious life, in the old remembering,
imagining, conceiving, in the huge dialectic that the emotions and
the mind, under some approval of the ultimate spirit, carried forever
on, there had been provided in line and color many a _mise-en-scène_
and of characters a multitude. Always there had been a central self
and those portions of its periphery to which it gave provisional
attention. But that peripheral world had been without visible body
and self-movement. In dreams, truly, there was in some sort body and
self-movement. But from dreams was lacking something of great value,
present in "waking" commerce with memory and imagination and
prophecy. But however strong might be these latter they had never
been able to march beyond a certain point. Now, that center moving
with heat and light unknown before or long forgotten, they marched.
They became three-dimensional and vital. That middle power, fire of
desire and of will, rayed forth in correspondence with its central
strength. All that now it abstracted from itself and looked at, all
that it imaged or remembered, had gone up a stage. It was become
what in that old world they called reality.... And still he knew
that he but dimly divined himself across great space.
The present Adventure seemed new, yet in some wise he followed old
lines, traceries, co-ordinations. He had made them, they were truly
to be used, scroll and arabesque, illumination in gold and silver,
scarlet and green and blue border of the great text of himself that
he could only stumble over, so little a child was he in Recollection!
Yet he had garments that he wove and wore, wealthy, lovely, and in
their moment satisfying.
He drew himself together from the silver sea. A promontory, rock and
sand and sere sea-grass and small, twisted trees, rose at hand.
Behind spread an ancient, lovely country wound with tendrils of the
sea, and green-sloped mountains lifted above them. "Poseidon!" he
said. "I am Poseidon."
He rose, a giant form, strong, immortally young and potent, fluent
and various and mighty. He moved upon his sea beaches, he stood upon
the promontory and looked far and wide. At no great distance gleamed
a small temple with columns and a sculptured relief showing the god
of the sea and the goddess Demeter. It glowed in light....
A giant woman came toward him. Majesty breathed around her, but she
was genial, too.... He remembered the prisoner in the fortress, the
cloak and the books that had been sent. Instantaneously he was
behind the barred window, within the body there--the prisoner of
state who had been shut away eleven years.
He sat up, he rose, he went to the table, he laid his hands upon the
books piled there. Among others he touched a small and curiously
bound volume--Dante's _Vita Nuova_.... He lifted a fold of his cloak
and pressed his brow and cheek against it. This was an accustomed
action. He had felt that so he touched comfort of his kind--pity,
humaneness....
And all the time had she been himself? Was her name Beatrice? By
the sea he had named her Demeter--
The written fragment went no farther, ended there.... The rains came
down. The Pygmies swarmed or slept. They were not ill folk, and
each in his casket kept the spark of intelligence. In some the spark
had better fuel, in some not so good. But in all it burned and
taught the fuel to draw toward it.