_THE PRISONER_
When I staggered back to my cabin through the snow-storm in the
November dusk, I could not realize the ghastliness of my misfortune.
My mind seemed powerless before the bleak reality; it was not until I
had re-entered the cabin that I began to look the terror in the face.
Then, when I had slammed the door behind me and stood silently in
that frigid place, all my dread and loneliness and foreboding became
concentrated in one point of acute agony. The shadows deepening within
that dingy hovel seemed living, evil things; the wind that hissed and
screeched without, with brief lulls and swift crescendos of fury, was
like a chorus of demons; and such desolation of spirit was upon me that
I could have rushed out into the storm, and delivered myself up to its
numbing, fatal embrace.
It was long before, conscious of the increasing chill and the coaly
darkness, I went fumbling about the room to make a light. Fortunately,
I still had a half-used box of matches, vestiges of the world I had
lost; and with their aid, I contrived to light a little wax candle.
But as I watched the taper fitfully burning, with sputtering yellow
rays that only half revealed the bare walls of the room and left eerie
shadows to brood in the corners, I almost wished that I had remained in
darkness. How well I remembered Yasma's teaching me to make the candle;
to melt the wax; to pour it into a little wooden mould; to insert the
wick in the still viscid mass! Could it be but a month ago when she had
stood with me in this very room, so earnestly and yet so gaily giving
me instructions? Say rather that it was years ago, eons ago!--what
relation could there be between that happy self, which had laughed
with Yasma, and this forlorn self, which stood here abandoned in the
darkness and the cold?
And as I thought of Yasma, and gazed at her handiwork, the full
sense of my wretchedness swept over me. Could she really be gone,
mysteriously gone, past any effort of mine to bring her back? Was it
possible that many a long bitter day and cold lonely night would pass
before I could see her again? Or, for that matter, how did I know that
she would ever return?--How attach any hope to her vague promises? What
if she could not keep those promises? What if calamity should overtake
her in her hiding place? She might be ill, she might be crippled, she
might be dead, and I would not even know it!
While such thoughts blundered through my mind, I tried to keep occupied
by kindling some dry branches and oak logs in the great open fireplace.
But my broodings persisted, and would not be stilled even after a
wavering golden illumination filled the cabin. Outside, the storm still
moaned like a band of driven souls in pain; and the uncanny fancy came
to me that lost spirits were speaking from the gale; that the spirits
of the Ibandru wandered homelessly without, and that Yasma, even Yasma,
might be among them! Old folk superstitions, tales of men converted
into wraiths and of phantoms that appeared as men, forced themselves
upon my imagination; and I found myself harboring--and, for the moment,
almost crediting--notions as strange as ever disturbed the primitive
soul. What if the Ibandru were not human after all? Or what if, human
for half the year, they roamed the air ghost-like for the other half?
Or was it that, like the Greek Persephone, they must spend six months
in the sunlight and six months in some Plutonian cave?
Preposterous as such questions would formerly have seemed, they did not
impress me as quite absurd as I sat alone on the straw-covered floor
of my log cave, gazing into the flames that smacked their lean lips
rabidly, and listening to the gale that rushed by with a torrential
roaring. Like a child who fears to have strayed into a goblin's den,
I was unnerved and unmercifully the prey of my own imagination; I
could not keep down the thought that there was something weird about
my hosts. Now, as rarely before during my exile, I was filled with
an overpowering longing for home and friends, for familiar streets,
and safe, well-known city haunts; and I could almost have wept at the
impossibility of escape. Except for Yasma--Yasma, whose gentleness held
me more firmly than iron chains--I would have prayed to leave this
dreary wilderness and never return.
Finally, in exhaustion as much of the mind as of the body, I sank
down upon my straw couch, covered myself with my goatskin coat, and
temporarily lost track of the world and its vexations. But even in
sleep I was not to enjoy peace; confused dreams trailed me through
the night; and in one, less blurred than the others, I was again
with Yasma, and felt her kiss upon my cheek, wonderfully sweet and
compassionate, and heard her murmur that I must not be sad or impatient
but must wait for her till the spring. But even as she spoke a dark
form intruded between us, and sealed our lips, and forced her away
until she was no more than a specter in the far distance. And as in
terror I gazed at the dark stranger, I recognized something familiar
about her; and with a cry of alarm, I awoke, for the pose and features
were those of Yulada!
Hours must have passed while I slept; the fire had smoldered low,
and only one red ember, gaping like a raw untended wound, cast its
illumination across the cabin. But through chinks in the walls a
faint gray light was filtering in, and I could no longer hear the wind
clamoring.
An hour or two later I arose, swallowed a handful of dried herbs by way
of breakfast, and forced open the cabin door. It was an altered world
that greeted me; the clouds had rolled away, and the sky, barely tinged
with the last fading pink and buff of dawn, was of a pale, unruffled
blue. But a white sheet covered the ground, and mantled the roofs of
the log huts, and wove fantastic patterns over the limbs of leafless
bushes and trees. All things seemed new-made and beautiful, yet all
were wintry and forlorn--and what a majestic sight were the encircling
peaks! Their craggy shoulders, yesterday bare and gray and dotted with
only an occasional patch of white, were clothed in immaculate snowy
garments, reaching far heavenward from the upper belts of the pines,
whose dark green seemed powdered with an indistinguishable spray.
But I tried to forget that terrible and hostile splendor; urged by a
hope that gradually flickered and went out, I made a slow round of
the village. At each cabin I paused, peering through the window or
knocking at the unbolted door and entering; and at each cabin I sank an
inch nearer despair. As yet, of course, I had had no proof that I was
altogether abandoned--might there not still be some old man or woman,
some winter-loving hunter or doughty watchman, who had been left behind
until the tribe's return in the spring? But no man, woman or child
stirred in the white spaces between the cabins; no man, woman or child
greeted me in any of the huts.... All was bare as though untenanted for
months; and here an empty earthen pan or kettle hanging on the wall,
there a dozen unshelled nuts forgotten in a corner, yonder a half-burnt
candle or a cracked water jug or discarded sandal, were the only tokens
of recent human occupancy.
It was but natural that I should feel most forlorn upon entering
Yasma's cabin. How mournfully I gazed at the walls her eyes had beheld
a short twenty-four hours before! and at a few scattered trifles that
had been hers! My attention was especially caught by a little pink
wildflower, shaped like a primrose, which hung drooping in a waterless
jar; and the odd fancy came to me that this was like Yasma herself.
Tenderly, urged by a sentiment I hardly understood, I lifted the
blossom from the jar, pressed it against my bosom, and fastened it
securely there.
The outside world now seemed bright and genial enough. From above the
eastern peaks the sun beamed generously upon the windless valley; and
there was warmth in his rays as he put the snow to flight and sent
little limpid streams rippling across the fields. But to me it scarcely
mattered whether the sun shone or the gale dashed by. Now there was
an irony in the sunlight, an irony I resented even as I should have
resented the bluster of the storm. Yet, paradoxically, it was to
sunlit nature that I turned for consolation, for what but the trees
and streams and soaring heights could make me see with broader vision?
Scornful of consequences, I plodded through the slushy ground to the
woods; and roaming the wide solitudes, with the snow and the soggy
brown leaves beneath and the almost denuded branches above, I came to
look upon my problems with my first trace of courage.
"This too will pass," I told myself, using the words of one older and
wiser than I. And I pictured a time when these woods would be here, and
I would not; pictured even a nearer time when I should roam them with
laughter on my lips. What after all were a few months of solitude amid
this magnificent world?
In such a mood I began to warm my flagging spirits and to plan for
the winter. I should have plenty to occupy me; there were still many
cracks and crannies in my cabin wall, which I must fill with clay;
there was still much wood to haul from the forest; there were heavy
garments to make from the skins supplied by the natives; and there
would be my food to prepare daily from my hoard in the cabin, and my
water to be drawn from the stream that flowed to the rear of village.
Besides, I might be able to go on long tours of exploration; I might
amuse myself by examining the mountain strata, and possibly even make
some notable geological observations; and I might sometime--the thought
intruded itself slyly and insidiously--satisfy my curiosity by climbing
to Yulada.
Emboldened by such thoughts, I roamed the woods for hours, and returned
to my cabin determined to battle unflinchingly and to emerge triumphant.
* * * * *
It will be needless to dwell upon the days that followed. Although the
moments crawled painfully, each week an epoch and each month an age,
very little occurred that is worthy of record. Yet somehow I did manage
to occupy the time--what other course had I, this side of suicide or
madness? As in remembrance of a nightmare, I recall how sometimes I
would toil all the daylight hours to make my cabin snug and secure;
how at other times I would wander across the valley to the lake shown
me by Karem, catching fish with an improvised line, even though I had
first to break through the ice; how, again, I would idly follow the
half-wild goat herds that browsed in remote corners of the valley; how
I would roam the various trails until I had mapped them all in my mind,
and had discovered the only outlet in the mountains about Sobul--a
long, prodigiously deep, torrent-threaded ravine to the north, which
opened into another deserted valley capped by desolate and serrated
snowpeaks. The discovery of this valley served only to intensify
my sense of captivity, for it brought me visions of mountain after
mountain, range after range, bleak and unpopulated, which stretched
away in frozen endless succession.
But the days when I could rove the mountains were days of comparative
happiness. Too often the trails, blocked by the deep soft drifts or
the ice-packs, were impassable for one so poorly equipped as I; and
too often the blizzards raged. Besides, the daylight hours were but
few, since the sun-excluding mountain masses made the dawn late and
the evening early; and often the tedium seemed unendurable when I sat
in my cabin at night, watching the flames that danced and crackled in
the fireplace, and dreaming of Yasma and the spring, or of things still
further away, and old friends and home. At times, scarcely able to
bear the waiting, I would pace back and forth like a caged beast, back
and forth, from the fire to the woodpile, and from the woodpile to the
fire. At other times, more patient, I would amuse myself by trying to
kindle some straw with bits of flint, or by returning to the ways of my
boyhood and whittling sticks into all manner of grotesque designs. And
occasionally, when the mood was upon me, I would strain my eyes by the
flickering log blaze, confiding my diary to the notebook I had picked
up in our old camp beyond the mountain. For the purposes of this diary,
I had but one pencil, which gradually dwindled to a stub that I could
hardly hold between two fingers--and with the end of the pencil, late
in the winter, the diary also came to a close.
Although this record was written merely as a means of whiling away the
hours and was not intended for other eyes, I find upon opening it again
that it describes my plight more vividly than would be possible for
me after the passage of years; and I am tempted to quote a typical
memorandum.
As I peer at that curiously cramped and tortured handwriting, my eyes
pause at the following:
"Monday, December 29th. Or it may be Tuesday the 30th, for I fear
I have forgotten to mark one of the daily notches on the cabin
walls, by which I keep track of the dates. All day I was forced
to remain in my cabin, for the season's worst storm was raging.
Only once did I leave shelter, and that was to get water. But the
stream was frozen almost solid, and it was a task to pound my way
through the ice with one of the crude native axes. Meanwhile the
gale beat me in the face till my cheeks were raw; the snow came
down in a mist of pellets that half blinded me; and a chill crept
through my clothes till my very skin seemed bared to the ice-blast.
I was fifteen minutes in thawing after I had crept back to the
cabin. But even within the cabin there seemed no way to keep warm,
for the wind rushed in through cracks that I could not quite fill;
and the fire, though I heaped it with fuel, was feeble against the
elemental fury outside.
"But the cold would be easier to bear than the loneliness. There is
little to do, almost nothing to do; and I sit brooding on the cabin
floor, or stand brooding near the fire; and life seems without aim
or benefit. Strange thoughts keep creeping through my mind--visions
of a limp form dangling on a rope from log rafters; or of a
half-buried form that the snow has numbed to forgetfulness. But
always there are other visions to chide and reproach; I remember
a merry day in the woods, when two brown eyes laughed at me from
beneath auburn curls; and I hear voices that call as if from the
future, and see hands that take mine gently and restrain them from
violence. Perhaps I am growing weak of mind and will, for my
emotions flow like a child's; I would be ashamed to admit--though
I confess it freely enough to the heedless paper--that more than
once, in the long afternoon and the slow dismal twilight, the tears
rolled down from my eyes.
"As I write these words, it is evening--only seven o'clock, my
watch tells me, though I might believe it to be midnight. The
blazes still flare in the fireplace, and I am stretched full-length
on the floor, trying to see by the meager light. The storm has
almost died down; only by fits and starts it mutters now, like a
beast whose frenzy has spent itself. But other, more ominous sounds
fill the air. From time to time I hear the barking of a jackal, now
near, now far; while louder and more long-drawn and mournful, there
comes at intervals the fierce deep wailing of a wolf, answered
from the remote woods by other wolves, till all the world seems to
resound with a demoniac chorus. Of all noises I have ever heard,
this is to me the most terrorizing; and though safe within pine
walls, I tremble where I lie by the fire, even as the cave-man may
have done at that same soul-racking sound. I know, of course, how
absurd this is; yet I have pictures of sly slinking feet that pad
silently through the snow, and keen hairy muzzles that trail my
footsteps even to this door, and long gleaming jaws that open. Only
by forcing myself to write can I keep my mind from such thoughts;
but, even so, I shudder whenever that dismal call comes howling,
howling from the dark, as if with all the concentrated horror and
ferocity in the universe!"