The child that played about the terraces and gardens in sight of the
Surrey hills never knew that it was he that should come to the
Ultimate City, never knew that he should see the Under Pits, the
barbicans and the holy minarets of the mightiest city known. I think
of him now as a child with a little red watering-can going about the
gardens on a summer's day that lit the warm south country, his
imagination delighted with all tales of quite little adventures, and
all the while there was reserved for him that feat at which men
wonder.
Looking in other directions, away from the Surrey hills, through all
his infancy he saw that precipice that, wall above wall and mountain
above mountain, stands at the edge of the World, and in perpetual
twilight alone with the Moon and the Sun holds up the inconceivable
City of Never. To tread its streets he was destined; prophecy knew it.
He had the magic halter, and a worn old rope it was; an old wayfaring
woman had given it to him: it had the power to hold any animal whose
race had never known captivity, such as the unicorn, the hippogriff
Pegasus, dragons and wyverns; but with a lion, giraffe, camel or
horse it was useless.
How often we have seen that City of Never, that marvel of the Nations!
Not when it is night in the World, and we can see no further than the
stars; not when the sun is shining where we dwell, dazzling our eyes;
but when the sun has set on some stormy days, all at once repentant at
evening, and those glittering cliffs reveal themselves which we almost
take to be clouds, and it is twilight with us as it is for ever with
them, then on their gleaming summits we see those golden domes that
overpeer the edges of the World and seem to dance with dignity and
calm in that gentle light of evening that is Wonder's native haunt.
Then does the City of Never, unvisited and afar, look long at her
sister the World.
It had been prophecied that he should come there. They knew it when
the pebbles were being made and before the isles of coral were given
unto the sea. And thus the prophecy came unto fulfilment and passed
into history, and so at length to Oblivion, out of which I drag it as
it goes floating by, into which I shall one day tumble. The
hippogriffs dance before dawn in the upper air; long before sunrise
flashes upon our lawns they go to glitter in light that has not yet
come to the World, and as the dawn works up from the ragged hills and
the stars feel it they go slanting earthwards, till sunlight touches
the tops of the tallest trees, and the hippogriffs alight with a
rattle of quills and fold their wings and gallop and gambol away till
they come to some prosperous, wealthy, detestable town, and they leap
at once from the fields and soar away from the sight of it, pursued by
the horrible smoke of it until they come again to the pure blue air.
He whom prophecy had named from of old to come to the City of Never,
went down one midnight with his magic halter to a lake-side where the
hippogriffs alighted at dawn, for the turf was soft there and they
could gallop far before they came to a town, and there he waited
hidden near their hoofmarks. And the stars paled a little and grew
indistinct; but there was no other sign as yet of the dawn, when there
appeared far up in the deeps of the night two little saffron specks,
then four and five: it was the hippogriffs dancing and twirling around
in the sun. Another flock joined them, there were twelve of them now;
they danced there, flashing their colours back to the sun, they
descended in wide curves slowly; trees down on earth revealed against
the sky, jet-black each delicate twig; a star disappeared from a
cluster, now another; and dawn came on like music, like a new song.
Ducks shot by to the lake from still dark fields of corn, far voices
uttered, a colour grew upon water, and still the hippogriffs gloried
in the light, revelling up in the sky; but when pigeons stirred on the
branches and the first small bird was abroad, and little coots from
the rushes ventured to peer about, then there came down on a sudden
with a thunder of feathers the hippogriffs, and, as they landed from
their celestial heights all bathed with the day's first sunlight, the
man whose destiny it was as from of old to come to the City of Never,
sprang up and caught the last with the magic halter. It plunged, but
could not escape it, for the hippogriffs are of the uncaptured races,
and magic has power over the magical, so the man mounted it, and it
soared again for the heights whence it had come, as a wounded beast
goes home. But when they came to the heights that venturous rider saw
huge and fair to the left of him the destined City of Never, and he
beheld the towers of Lel and Lek, Neerib and Akathooma, and the cliffs
of Toldenarba a-glistening in the twilight like an alabaster statue of
the Evening. Towards them he wrenched the halter, towards Toldenarba
and the Under Pits; the wings of the hippogriff roared as the halter
turned him. Of the Under Pits who shall tell? Their mystery is secret.
It is held by some that they are the sources of night, and that
darkness pours from them at evening upon the world; while others hint
that knowledge of these might undo our civilization.
There watched him ceaselessly from the Under Pits those eyes whose duty
it is; from further within and deeper, the bats that dwell there arose
when they saw the surprise in the eyes; the sentinels on the bulwarks
beheld that stream of bats and lifted up their spears as it were for
war. Nevertheless when they perceived that that war for which they
watched was not now come upon them, they lowered their spears and
suffered him to enter, and he passed whirring through the earthward
gateway. Even so he came, as foretold, to the City of Never perched upon
Toldenarba, and saw late twilight on those pinnacles that know no other
light. All the domes were of copper, but the spires on their summits
were gold. Little steps of onyx ran all this way and that. With cobbled
agates were its streets a glory. Through small square panes of
rose-quartz the citizens looked from their houses. To them as they
looked abroad the World far-off seemed happy. Clad though that city was
in one robe always, in twilight, yet was its beauty worthy of even so
lovely a wonder: city and twilight were both peerless but for each
other. Built of a stone unknown in the world we tread were its bastions,
quarried we know not where, but called by the gnomes _abyx_, it so
flashed back to the twilight its glories, colour for colour, that none
can say of them where their boundary is, and which the eternal twilight,
and which the City of Never; they are the twin-born children, the
fairest daughters of Wonder. Time had been there, but not to work
destruction; he had turned to a fair, pale green the domes that were
made of copper, the rest he had left untouched, even he, the destroyer
of cities, by what bribe I know not averted. Nevertheless they often
wept in Never for change and passing away, mourning catastrophes in
other worlds, and they built temples sometimes to ruined stars that had
fallen flaming down from the Milky Way, giving them worship still when
by us long since forgotten. Other temples they have--who knows to what
divinities?
And he that was destined alone of men to come to the City of Never was
well content to behold it as he trotted down its agate street, with
the wings of his hippogriff furled, seeing at either side of him
marvel on marvel of which even China is ignorant. Then as he neared
the city's further rampart by which no inhabitant stirred, and looked
in a direction to which no houses faced with any rose-pink windows, he
suddenly saw far-off, dwarfing the mountains, an even greater city.
Whether that city was built upon the twilight or whether it rose from
the coasts of some other world he did not know. He saw it dominate the
City of Never, and strove to reach it; but at this unmeasured home of
unknown colossi the hippogriff shied frantically, and neither the
magic halter nor anything that he did could make the monster face it.
At last, from the City of Never's lonely outskirts where no
inhabitants walked, the rider turned slowly earthward. He knew now why
all the windows faced this way--the denizens of the twilight gazed at
the world and not at a greater than them. Then from the last step of
the earthward stairway, like lead past the Under Pits and down the
glittering face of Toldenarba, down from the overshadowed glories of
the gold-tipped City of Never and out of perpetual twilight, swooped
the man on his winged monster: the wind that slept at the time leaped
up like a dog at their onrush, it uttered a cry and ran past them.
Down on the World it was morning; night was roaming away with his
cloak trailed behind him, white mists turned over and over as he went,
the orb was grey but it glittered, lights blinked surprisingly in
early windows, forth over wet, dim fields went cows from their houses:
even in this hour touched the fields again the feet of the hippogriff.
And the moment that the man dismounted and took off his magic halter
the hippogriff flew slanting away with a whirr, going back to some
airy dancing-place of his people.
And he that surmounted glittering Toldenarba and came alone of men to
the City of Never has his name and his fame among nations; but he and
the people of that twilit city well know two things unguessed by other
men, they that there is another city fairer than theirs, and he--a
deed unaccomplished.