Ogde, peering downward as far as might be. “I consider it improbable,
dear wife, that the Zhar-Ptitza, who is everywhere known to be the most
wise and most ancient of birds and of all living creatures, would select
such a cheerless looking hole to live in. Still, you never can tell: the
wise affect profundity; and this well is known to be deep beyond the
knowledge of man. Now nature, as Cicero informs us, _in profundo
veritatem penitus abstruserit_—”
“Good Lord!” said Saraïde again, but with more emphasis. “Do you slip
down there, then, like a dear fellow, and find the truth for me.”
Saying this, she clapped both hands to his backside, and she pushed her
husband into the great and bottomless Well of Ogde.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_43._
_Prayer and the Lizard Maids_
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THE unexpectedness of it all, alike of Saraïde’s assault and of the
astonishing discovery that you could fall for hundreds after hundreds of
feet, full upon your head, without getting even a bruise, a little
bewildered Kerin when he first sat up at the bottom of the dry well. He
shouted cheerily, “Wife, wife, I am not hurt a bit!” because the fact
seemed so remarkably fortunate and so unaccountable.
But at once large stones began to fall everywhere about him, as though
Saraïde upon hearing his voice had begun desperately to heave these
stones into the well. Kerin thought this an inordinate manner of
spurring him onward in the quest of knowledge and truth, because the
habitual impetuosity of Saraïde, when thus expressed with cobblestones,
would infallibly have been his death had he not sought shelter in the
opening he very luckily found to the southwest side. There was really no
understanding these women who married you, Kerin reflected, as after
crawling for a while upon hands and feet, he came to a yet larger
opening, in which he could stand erect.
But this passage led Kerin presently to an underground lake, which
filled all that part of the cavern, so that he could venture no farther.
Instead, he sat down upon the borders of these gloomy and endless
looking waters. He could see these waters because of the many ignes
fatui, such as are called corpse candles, which flickered and danced
above the dark lake’s surface everywhere.
Kerin in such dismal circumstances began to pray. He loyally gave
precedence to his own faith, and said, first, all the prayers of his
church that he could remember. He addressed such saints as seemed
appropriate, and when, after the liveliest representation of Kerin’s
plight, sixteen of them had failed, in any visible way to intervene,
then Kerin tried the Angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions,
Virtues, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels.
Yet later, when no response whatever was vouchsafed by any member of
this celestial hierarchy, Kerin inferred that he had, no doubt, in
falling so far, descended into heretical regions and into the nefarious
control of unchristian deities. So he now prayed to all the accursed
gods of the heathen that he could remember as being most potent in dark
places. He prayed to Aïdoneus the Laughterless, the Much-Receiving, the
People-Collecting, the Invincible and the Hateful; to the implacable
Kerês, those most dreadful cave-dwellers who are nourished by the blood
of slain warriors; to the gloom-roaming Erinnyes, to the Gray-Maids, to
the Snatchers, and, most fervently, to Korê, that hidden and very lovely
sable-vested Virgin to whom belonged, men said, all the dim underworld.
But nothing happened.
Then Kerin tried new targets for his praying. He addressed himself to
Susanoö, that emperor of darkness who was used to beget children by
chewing up a sword and spitting out the pieces; to Ekchuah, the Old
Black One, who at least chewed nothing with his one tooth; to the red
Maruts, patched together from the bits of a shattered divine embryo; to
Onniont, the great, horned, brown and yellow serpent, whose lair might
well be hereabouts; to Tethra, yet another master of underground places;
to Apep also, and to Set, and to Uhat, the Chief of Scorpions; to
Camazotz, the Ruler of Bats; to Fenris, the wolf who waited somewhere in
a cave very like this cave, against the oncoming time when Fenris will
overthrow and devour God the All-Mighty Father; and to Sraosha, who has
charge of all worlds during the night season.
And still nothing happened: and Kerin could see only endless looking
waters and, above them, those monotonously dancing corpse candles.
Kerin nevertheless well knew, as a loyal son of the Church, the efficacy
of prayer; and he now began, in consequence, to pray to the corpse
candles, because these might, he reflected, rank as deities in this
peculiarly depressing place. And his comfort was considerable when,
after an ave or two, some of these drifting lights came flitting toward
him; but his surprise was greater when he saw that each of the ignes
fatui was a living creature like a tiny phosphorescent maiden in
everything except that each had the head of a lizard.
“What is your nature?” Kerin asked, “and what are you doing in this cold
dark place?”
“Should we answer either of those questions,” one of the small monsters
said, in a shrill little voice, as though a cricket were talking, “it
would be the worse for you.”
“Then, by all means, do not answer! Instead, do you tell me if knowledge
and truth are to be found hereabouts, for it is of them that I go in
search.”
“How should we know? It was not in pursuit of these luxuries that we
came hither, very unwillingly.”
“Then, how does one get out of this place?”
Now they all twittered together, and they flitted around Kerin with
small squeakings. “One does not get out of this place.”
Kerin did not cry pettishly, as Saraïde would have done, “Good Lord!”
Instead, he said, “Dear me!”
“Nor have we any wish to leave this place,” said the small lizard-women.
“These waters hold us here with the dark loveliness of doom; we have
fallen into an abiding hatred of these waters; we may not leave them
because of our fear. It is not possible for any man to imagine the
cruelty of these waters. Therefore we dance above them; and all the
while that we dance we think about warmth and food instead of about
these waters.”
“And have you no food here nor any warmth, not even brimstone? For I
remember that, up yonder in Poictesme, our priests were used to
threaten—”
“We do not bother about priests any longer. But a sort of god provides
our appointed food.”
“Come, come now, that is much better. For, as I was just saying to my
wife, supper is a matter of vital importance, after a rather hard day of
it— But who is this sort of god?”
“We do not know. We only know that he has nineteen names.”
“My very dear little ladies,” said Kerin, “your information appears so
limited, and your brightness so entirely physical, that I now hesitate
to ask if you know for what reason somebody is sounding that far-off
gong which I can hear?”
“That gong means, sir, that our appointed food is ready.”
“Alas, my friends, but it is quite unbearable,” declared Kerin, “that
food should be upon that side of the dark water, and I, who have had
rather a hard day of it, should be upon this side!”
“No, no!” they reassured him, “it is not unbearable, for we do not mind
it in the least.”
Then the squeaking little creatures all went away from Kerin, flitting
and skimming and twinkling over broad waters which seemed repellently
cold and very dreadfully deep. Nevertheless, Kerin, in his
desperation,—now that no god answered his prayer, and even the ignes
fatui had deserted him, and only a great hungering remained with Kerin
in the darkness,—Kerin now arose and went as a diver speeds into those
most unfriendly looking waters.
The result was surprising and rather painful: for, as Kerin thus
discovered, these waters were not more than two feet in depth. He stood
up, a bit sheepishly, dripping wet, and rubbing his head. Then Kerin
waded onward in a broad shallow puddle about which there was no
conceivable need to bother any god.
Kerin thus came without any hindrance to dry land, and to a place where
the shining concourse of lizard-women had already begun to nibble and
tug and gulp. But Kerin, after having perceived the nature of their
appointed food, and after having shivered, walked on beyond this place,
toward the light he detected a little above him.
“For supper,” he observed, “is a matter of vital importance; and it
really is necessary to draw the line somewhere.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_44._
_Fine Cordiality of Sclaug_
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NOW Kerin seemed in the dark to be mounting a flight of nineteen stairs.
He came thus into a vast gray corridor, inset upon the left side with
nineteen alcoves: each alcove was full of books, and beside each alcove
stood a lighted, rather large candle as thick about as a stallion’s
body. And Kerin’s surprise was great to find, near the first alcove,
that very Sclaug with whom Kerin pleasurably remembered having had so
much chivalrous trouble and such fine combats before, some years ago,
this Sclaug had been killed and painstakingly burned.
Nevertheless, here was the old yellow gentleman intact and prowling
about restively on all fours, in just the wolflike fashion he had
formerly affected. But after one brief snarl of surprise he stood erect;
and, rubbing together the long thin hands which were webbed between the
fingers like the feet of a frog, Sclaug asked whatever could have
brought Kerin so far down in the world.
For Kerin this instant was a bit awkward, since he knew not quite what
etiquette ought to govern re-encounters with persons whom you have
killed. Yet Kerin was always as ready as anybody to let bygones be cast
off. So Kerin frankly told his tale.
Then Sclaug embraced Kerin, and bade him welcome, and Sclaug laughed
with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.
“As for what occurred at Lorcha, dear Kerin, do not think of it any more
than I do. It was in some features unpleasant at the time: but, after
all, you burned my body without first driving a stake through my
rebellious and inventive heart, and so since then I have not lacked
amusements. And as for this knowledge and truth of which you go in
search, here is all knowledge, in the books that I keep watch over in
this Naraka,—during the intervals between my little amusements,—for a
sort of god.”
Kerin scratched among the wiry looking black curls of Kerin’s hair, and
he again glanced up and down the corridor. “There are certainly a great
many of them. But Saraïde desired, I think, all knowledge, so near as I
could understand her.”
“Let us take things in the order of their difficulty,” replied Sclaug.
“Do you acquire all knowledge first, and hope for understanding later.”
The courteous old gentleman then provided Kerin with white wine and with
food very gratefully unlike that of the ignes fatui, and Sclaug placed
before Kerin one of the books.
“Let us eat first,” said Kerin, “for supper, in any event, is a matter
of vital importance, where knowledge and truth may turn out to be only a
womanish whim.”
He ate. Then Kerin began comfortably to read, after, as he informed
Sclaug, rather a hard day of it.
Now the book which Kerin had was the book written by the patriarch
Abraham in the seventy-first year of his age: and by and by Kerin looked
up from it, and said, “Already I have learned from this book one thing
which is wholly true.”
“You progress speedily!” answered Sclaug. “That is very nice.”
“Well,” Kerin admitted, “such is one way of describing the matter. But
no doubt other things are equally true: and optimism, anyhow, costs
nothing.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_45._
_The Gander Also Generalizes_
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SO began a snug life for Kerin. The nineteen candles remained always as
he had first seen them, tranquilly lighting the vast windless corridor,
burning, but not ever burning down, nor guttering, nor even needing to
be snuffed: and Kerin worked his way from one candle to another, as
Kerin read each book in every alcove. When Kerin was tired he slept: all
the while that he waked he gave to acquiring knowledge: he had no method
nor any necessity of distinguishing between his daily and his nocturnal
studies.
Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin.
Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug
was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the
garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.
Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women,
would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some
reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander,
and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could
not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these
ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such
interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put
an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most
distracting singing.
And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to
interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon
singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually
checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about
beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a
variety of other unscientific matters.
“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to
the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”
“Well, I would not say that, precisely,” Kerin would reply,
good-temperedly looking up for the while from his book, “because geology
has made great progress of late. And so, Messire Gander, I would not say
quite that. Rather, I would say that Earth is a planet infested with the
fauna best suited to survive in this particular stage of the planet’s
existence. In any case, I finished long ago with earth, and with all
ordinary terrestrial phenomena, such as earthquakes, and the formation
of continents, and elevation of islands, and with stars and meteorics
and with cosmography in general.”
“—And of all creatures man is the most miraculous—”
“The study of anthropology is of course important. So I have learned too
about man, his birth and organization, his invention and practice of the
arts, his polities at large, and about the sidereal influences which
control the horoscope and actions of each person as an individual.”
“—A child of god, a brother to the beasts—!”
“Well, now, I question too the scientific value of zoömorphism: yet the
facts about beasts, I admit, are interesting. For example, there are two
kinds of camels; the age of the stag can be told by inspection of his
horns; the period of gestation among sheep is one hundred and fifty
days; and in the tail of the wolf is a small lock of hair which is a
supreme love charm.”
“You catalogue, poor Kerin,” said the gander; “you collect your bits of
knowledge as a magpie gathers shining pebbles; you toil through one book
to another book as methodically as a worm gnaws out the same advance:
but you learn nothing, in the wasted while that your youth goes.”
“To the contrary, I am at this very moment learning,” replied Kerin. “I
am learning about the different kinds of stone and marble, including
lime and sand and gypsum. I am learning that the artists who excelled in
sculpture were Phidias, Scopas and Praxiteles. The last-named, I have
just learned also, left a son called Cephisodotos, who inherited much of
his father’s talent, and made a notably fine Group of Wrestlers.”
“You and your wrestlers,” said the gander, “are profoundly absurd! But
time is the king of wrestlers; and he already prepares to try a fall
with you.”
“Now, indeed, those Wrestlers were not absurd,” replied Kerin. “And the
proof of it is that they were for a long while the particular glory of
Pergamos.”
At that the gander seemed to give him up, saying, after a little
hissing: “Very well, then, do you catalogue your facts about Pergamos
and stag-horns and planets! But I shall sing.”
Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild
disapproval. And Kerin said:
“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you,
who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely
corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and
mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people
in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and
raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.
“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And
in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create
to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to
destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very
potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they
are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like
that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of
their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their
destinies.”
“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools
of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor
shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all
truth which can content my Saraïde. And she, Messire Gander, is a
remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions
which you provide could be of no least importance.”
“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of
importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions
of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These
axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable
for being quoted.”
“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted
for being bosh.”
With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.
And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come
into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling
bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly,
passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count
Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked
bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the
legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone.
Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their
shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by
a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless
miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox
spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate
the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of
patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel
and the transcending future of Poictesme.
The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a
troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as
clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements
of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all
unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be
permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal
souls’ pollution and ruin.
Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin
read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the
while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet
and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to
interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing
infirmities of his age.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_46._
_Kerin Rises in the World_
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THEN old Sclaug said to Kerin, who now seemed so much older than Sclaug
seemed: “It is time for you and me to cry quits with studying: for you
have worked your way as a worm goes through every alcove in this place,
you have read every book that was ever written; and I have seen that
vigor which destroyed me destroyed. I go into another Naraka: and you
must now return, omniscient Kerin, into the world of men.”
“That is well,” said Kerin, “because, after all, I have been away from
home a long while. Yes, that is well enough, although I shall regret to
leave the books of that god of whom you told me,—and whom, by the way, I
have not yet seen.”
“I said, of a sort of god. He is not worshiped, I must tell you, by the
very learned nor by the dull. However!” Sclaug said, after a tiny
silence, “however, I was wondering if you have found in these books the
knowledge you were looking for?”
“I suppose so,” Kerin answered, “because I have acquired all knowledge.”
“And have you found out also the truth?”
“Oh, yes!” said Kerin, speaking now without hesitancy.
Kerin took down from its place the very first book which Sclaug had
given him to read, when Kerin was yet young, the book which had been
written—upon leaves of tree bark, with the assistance of a divine
collaborator,—by the patriarch Abraham when an horror of great darkness
fell upon him in the plain of Mamrê. This book explained the wisdom of
the temple, the various master-words of chance, the seven ways of
thwarting destiny, and one thing which is wholly true. And Kerin half
opened this book, at the picture of an old naked eunuch who with a
scythe was hacking off the feet of a naked youth gashed everywhere with
many small wounds; then turned to a picture of a serpent crucified; and,
shrugging, put by the book.
“—For it appears,” said Kerin, “that, after all, only one thing is
wholly true. I have found nowhere any other truth: and this one truth,
revealed to us here, is a truth which nobody will blame the patriarch
for omitting from his more widely circulated works. Nevertheless, I have
copied out every word of it, upon this bit of paper, to show to and make
glad the dear bright eyes of my young wife.”
But Sclaug replied, without looking at the proffered paper, “The truth
does not matter to the dead, who have done with all endeavor, and who
can change nothing.”
Then he told Kerin good-by; and Kerin opened the door out of which
Sclaug was used to go in search of Sclaug’s little amusements. When
Kerin had passed through this door he drew it to behind him: and in that
instant the door vanished, and Kerin stood alone in a dim winter-wasted
field, fingering no longer a copper door-knob but only the chill air.
Leafless elder-trees rose about him, not twenty paces before Kerin was
the Well of Ogde: and beyond its dilapidated curbing, a good half of
which somebody had heaved down into the well, he saw, through wintry
twilight, the gray eight-sided house in which he had been used to live
with the young Saraïde whom many called a witch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_47._
_Economics of Saraïde_
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KERIN went forward, beneath naked elder boughs, toward his dear home;
and he saw coming out of the door of the gray house the appearance of a
man who vaguely passed to the right hand of Kerin in the twilight. But a
woman’s figure waited at the door; and Kerin, still going onward, came
thus, in the November twilight, again to Saraïde.
“Who is that man?” said Kerin, first of all. “And what is he doing
here?”
“Does that matter?” Saraïde answered him, without any outcry or other
sign of surprise.
“Yes, I think it matters that a naked man with a red shining about his
body should be seen leaving here at this hour, in the dead of winter,
for it is a thing to provoke great scandal.”