That woodman friend of mine proved so engaging it was difficult to get
away, and thus when, dusk upon us, and my object still a long distance
off, he asked me to spend the night at his hut, I gladly assented.
We soon reached the cabin where the man lived by himself whilst working
in the forest. It was a picturesque little place on a tree-overhung
lagoon, thatched, wattled, and all about were piles of a
pleasant-scented bark, collected for the purpose of tanning hides, and
I could not but marvel that such a familiar process should be practised
identically on two sides of the universal ether. But as a matter of
fact the similarity of many details of existence here and there was the
most striking of the things I learned whilst in the red planet.
Within the hut stood a hearth in the centre of the floor, whereon a
comfortable blaze soon sparkled, and upon the walls hung various
implements, hides, and a store of dried fruits of various novel kinds.
My host, when he had somewhat disdainfully watched me wash in a rill of
water close by, suggested supper, and I agreed with heartiest good will.
"Nothing wonderful! Oh, Mr. Blue-coat!" he said, prancing about as he
made his hospitable arrangements. "No fine meat or scented wine to
unlock, one by one, all the doors of paradise, such as I have heard
they have in lands beyond the sea; but fare good enough for plain men
who eat but to live. So! reach me down yonder bunch of yellow aru
fruit, and don't upset that calabash, for all my funniest stories lurk
at the bottom of it."
I did as he bid, and soon we were squatting by the fire toasting arus
on pointed sticks, the doorway closed with a wattle hurdle, and the
black and gold firelight filling the hut with fantastic shadows. Then
when the banana-like fruit was ready, the man fetched from a recess a
loaf of bread savoured with the dust of dried and pounded fish, put the
foresaid calabash of strong ale to warm, and down we sat to supper with
real woodman appetites. Seldom have I enjoyed a meal so much, and when
we had finished the fruit and the wheat cake my guide snatched up the
great gourd of ale, and putting it to his lips called out:
"Here's to you, stranger; here's to your country; here's to your girl,
if you have one, and death to your enemies!" Then he drank deep and
long, and, passed the stuff to me.
"Here's to you, bully host, and the missus, and the children, if there
are any, and more power to your elbow!"--the which gratified him
greatly, though probably he had small idea of my meaning.
And right merry we were that evening. The host was a jolly good
fellow, and his ale, with a pleasant savour of mint in it, was the
heartiest drink I ever set lips to. We talked and laughed till the
very jackals yapped in sympathy outside. And when he had told a score
of wonderful wood stories as pungent of the life of these fairy forests
as the aromatic scent of his bark-heaps outside, as iridescent with the
colours of another world as the rainbow bubbles riding down his starlit
rill, I took a turn, and told him of the commonplaces of my world so
far away, whereat he laughed gloriously again. The greater the
commonplace the larger his joy. The humblest story, hardly calculated
to impress a griffin between watches on the main-deck, was a
masterpiece of wit to that gentle savage; and when I "took off" the
tricks and foibles of some of my superiors--Heaven forgive me for such
treason!--he listened with the exquisite open-mouthed delight of one
who wanders in a brand-new world of mirth.
We drank and laughed over that strong beer till the little owls outside
raised their voice in combined accord, and then the woodman, shaking
the last remnant of his sleepy wits together, and giving a reproachful
look at me for finally passing him the gourd empty to the last drop,
rose, threw a fur on a pile of dead grass at one side of the hut, and
bid me sleep, "for his brain was giddy with the wonders of the
incredible and ludicrous sphere which I had lately inhabited."
Slowly the fire died away; slowly the quivering gold and black
arabesques on the walls merged in a red haze as the sticks dropped into
tinder, and the great black outline of the hairy monster who had thrown
himself down by the embers rose up the walls against that flush like
the outline of a range of hills against a sunset glow. I listened
drowsily for a space to his snoring and the laughing answer of the
brook outside, and then that ambrosial sleep which is the gentle
attendant of hardship and danger touched my tired eyelids, and I, too,
slept.
My friend was glum the next morning, as they who stay over-long at the
supper flagon are apt to be. He had been at work an hour on his
bark-heaps when I came out into the open, and it was only by a good
deal of diplomacy and some material help in sorting his faggots that he
was got into a better frame of mind. I could not, however, trust his
mood completely, and as I did not want to end so jovial a friendship
with a quarrel, I hurried through our breakfast of dry bread, with
hard-boiled lizard eggs, and then settling my reckoning with one of the
brass buttons from my coat, which he immediately threaded, with every
evidence of extreme gratification, on a string of trinkets hanging
round his neck, asked him the way to Ar-hap's capital.
"Your way is easy, friend, as long as you keep to the straight path and
have yonder two-humped mountain in front. To the left is the sea, and
behind the hill runs the canal and road by which all traffic comes or
goes to Ar-hap. But above all things pass not to the hills right, for
no man goes there; there away the forests are thick as night, and in
their perpetual shadows are the ruins of a Hither city, a haunted fairy
town to which some travellers have been, but whence none ever returned
alive."
"By the great Jove, that sounds promising! I would like to see that
town if my errand were not so urgent."
But the old fellow shook his shaggy head and turned a shade yellower.
"It is no place for decent folk," he growled. "I myself once passed
within a mile of its outskirts at dusk, and saw the unholy little
people's lanterned processions starting for the shrine of Queen Yang,
who, tradition says, killed herself and a thousand babies with her when
we took this land."
"My word, that was a holocaust! Couldn't I drop in there to lunch? It
would make a fine paper for an antiquarian society."
Again the woodman frowned. "Do as I bid you, son. You are too young
and green to go on ventures by yourself. Keep to the straight road:
shun the swamps and the fairy forest, else will you never see Ar-hap."
"And as I have very urgent and very important business with him,
comrade, no doubt your advice is good. I will call on Princess Yang
some other day. And now goodbye! Rougher but friendlier shelter than
you have given me no man could ask for. I am downright sorry to part
with you in this lonely land. If ever we meet again--" but we never
did! The honest old churl clasped me into his hairy bosom three times,
stuffed my wallet with dry fruit and bread, and once more repeating his
directions, sent me on my lonely way.
I confess I sighed while turning into the forest, and looked back more
than once at his retreating form. The loneliness of my position, the
hopelessness of my venture, welled up in my heart after that good
comradeship, and when the hut was out of sight I went forward down the
green grass road, chin on chest, for twenty minutes in the deepest
dejection. But, thank Heaven, I was born with a tough spirit, and
possess a mind which has learned in many fights to give brave counsel
to my spirit, and thus presently I shook myself together, setting my
face boldly to the quest and the day's work.
It was not so clear a morning as the previous one, and a steamy wind on
what at sea I should have called the starboard bow, as I pressed
forward to the distant hill, had a curiously subduing effect on my
thoughts, and filled the forest glades with a tremulous unreality like
to nothing on our earth, and distinctly embarrassing to a stranger in a
strange land. Small birds in that quaint atmospheric haze looked like
condors, butterflies like giant fowl, and the simplest objects of the
forest like the imaginations of a disordered dream. Behind that gauzy
hallucination a fine white mist came up, and the sun spread out flat
and red in the sky, while the pent-in heat became almost unendurable.
Still I plodded on, growling to myself that in Christian latitudes all
the evidences would have been held to betoken a storm before night,
whatever they might do here, but for the most part lost in my own
gloomy speculations. That was the more pity since, in thinking the
walk over now, it seems to me that I passed many marvels, saw many
glorious vistas in those nameless forests, many spreads of colour, many
incidents that, could I but remember them more distinctly, would supply
material for making my fortune as a descriptive traveller. But what
would you? I have forgotten, and am too virtuous to draw on my
imagination, as it is sometimes said other travellers have done when
picturesque facts were deficient. Yes, I have forgotten all about that
day, save that it was sultry hot, that I took off my coat and waistcoat
to be cooler, carrying them, like the tramp I was, across my arm, and
thus dishevelled passed some time in the afternoon an encampment of
forest folk, wherefrom almost all the men were gone, and the women shy
and surly.
In no very social humour myself, I walked round their woodland village,
and on the outskirts, by a brook, just as I was wishing there were some
one to eat my solitary lunch with, chanced upon a fellow busily engaged
in hammering stones into weapons upon a flint anvil.
He was an ugly-looking individual at best, yet I was hard up for
company, so I put my coat down, and, seating myself on a log opposite,
proceeded to open my wallet, and take out the frugal stores the woodman
had given me that morning.
The man was seated upon the ground holding a stone anvil between his
feet, while with his hands he turned and chipped with great skill a
spear-head he was making out of flint. It was about the only pastime
he had, and his little yellow eyes gleamed with a craftsman's pleasure,
his shaggy round shoulders were bent over the task, the chips flew in
quick particles, and the wood echoed musically as the artificer watched
the thing under his hands take form and fashion. Presently I spoke,
and the worker looked up, not too pleased at being thus interrupted.
But he was easy of propitiation, and over a handful of dried raisins
communicative.
How, I asked, knowing a craftsman's craft is often nearest to his
heart, how was it such things as that he chipped came to be thought of
by him and his? Whereon the woodman, having spit out the raisin-stones
and wiped his fingers on his fur, said in substance that the first
weapon was fashioned when the earliest ape hurled the first stone in
wrath.
"But, chum," I said, taking up his half-finished spear and touching the
razor-fine edge with admiring caution, "from hurling the crude pebble
to fashioning such as this is a long stride. Who first edged and
pointed the primitive malice? What man with the soul of a thousand
unborn fighters in him notched and sharpened your natural rock?"
Whereon the chipper grinned, and answered that, when the woodmen had
found stones that would crack skulls, it came upon them presently that
they would crack nuts as well. And cracking nuts between two stones
one day a flint shattered, and there on the grass was the golden secret
of the edge--the thing that has made man what he is.
"Yet again, good fellow," I queried, "even this happy chance only gives
us a weapon, sharp, no doubt, and calculated to do a hundred services
for any ten the original pebble could have done, but still unhandled,
small in force, imperfect--now tell me, which of your amiable ancestors
first put a handle to the fashioned flint, and how he thought of it?"
The workman had done his flake by now, and wrapping it in a bit of
skin, put it carefully in his belt before turning to answer my question.
"Who made the first handle for the first flint, you of the many
questions? She did--she, the Mother," he suddenly cried, patting the
earth with his brown hand, and working himself up as he spoke, "made it
in her heart for us her first-born. See, here is such as the first
handled weapon that ever came out of darkness," and he snatched from
the ground, where it had lain hidden under his fox-skin cloak, a heavy
club. I saw in an instant how it was. The club had been a sapling, and
the sapling's roots had grown about and circled with a splendid grip a
lump of native flint. A woodman had pulled the sapling, found the
flint, and fashioned the two in a moment of happy inspiration, the one
to an axe-head and the other to a handle, as they lay Nature-welded!
"This, I say, is the first--the first!" screamed the old fellow as
though I were contradicting him, thumping the ground with his weapon,
and working himself up to a fury as its black magic entered his being.
"This is the first: with this I slew Hetter and Gur, and those who
plundered my hiding-places in the woods; with this I have killed a
score of others, bursting their heads, and cracking their bones like
dry sticks. With this--with this--" but here his rage rendered him
inarticulate; he stammered and stuttered for a minute, and then as the
killing fury settled on him his yellow teeth shut with a sudden snap,
while through them his breath rattled like wind through dead pine
branches in December, the sinews sat up on his hands as his fingers
tightened upon the axe-heft like the roots of the same pines from the
ground when winter rain has washed the soil from beneath them; his
small eyes gleamed like baleful planets; every hair upon his shaggy
back grew stiff and erect--another minute and my span were ended.
With a leap from where I sat I flew at that hairy beast, and sinking my
fists deep in his throttle, shook him till his eyes blazed with
delirious fires. We waltzed across the short greensward, and in and
about the tree-trunks, shaking, pulling, and hitting as we went, till
at last I felt the man's vigour dying within him; a little more
shaking, a sudden twist, and he was lying on the ground before me,
senseless and civil! That is the worst of some orators, I thought to
myself, as I gloomily gathered up the scattered fragments of my lunch;
they never know when they have said enough, and are too apt to be
carried away by their own arguments.
That inhospitable village was left behind in full belief the mountain
looming in the south could be reached before nightfall, while the road
to its left would serve as a sure guide to food and shelter for the
evening. But, as it turned out, the morning's haze developed a strong
mist ere the afternoon was half gone, through which it was impossible
to see more than twenty yards. My hill loomed gigantic for a time with
a tantalising appearance of being only a mile or two ahead, then
wavered, became visionary, and finally disappeared as completely as
though the forest mist had drunk it up bodily.
There was still the road to guide me, a fairly well-beaten track
twining through the glades; but even the best of highways are difficult
in fog, and this one was complicated by various side paths, made
probably by hunters or bark-cutters, and without compass or guide marks
it was necessary to advance with extreme caution, or get helplessly
mazed.
An hour's steady tramping brought me nowhere in particular, and
stopping for a minute to consider, I picked a few wild fruit, such as
my wood-cutter friend had eaten, from an overhanging bush, and in so
doing slipped, the soil having now become damp, and in falling broke a
branch off. The incident was only important from what follows. Picking
myself up, perhaps a little shaken by the jolt, I set off again upon
what seemed the plain road, and being by this time displeased by my
surroundings, determined to make a push for "civilization" before the
rapidly gathering darkness settled down.
Hands in pockets and collar up, I marched forward at a good round pace
for an hour, constantly straining eyes for a sight of the hill and ears
for some indications of living beings in the deathly hush of the
shrouded woods, and at the end of that time, feeling sure habitations
must now be near, arrived at what looked like a little open space,
somehow seeming rather familiar in its vague outlines.
Where had I seen such a place before? Sauntering round the margin, a
bush with a broken branch suddenly attracted my attention--a broken
bush with a long slide in the mud below it, and the stamp of Navy boots
in the soft turf! I glared at those signs for a moment, then with an
exclamation of chagrin recognised them only too well--it was the bush
whence I had picked the fruit, and the mark of my fall. An hour's hard
walking round some accursed woodland track had brought me exactly back
to the point I had started from--I was lost!
It really seemed to get twenty per cent darker as I made that
abominable discovery, and the position dawned in all its uncomfortable
intensity. There was nothing for it but to start off again, this time
judging my direction only by a light breath of air drifting the mist
tangles before it; and therein I made a great mistake, for the breeze
had shifted several points from the quarter whence it blew in the
morning.
Knowing nothing of this, I went forward with as much lightheartedness
as could be managed, humming a song to myself, and carefully putting
aside thoughts of warmth and supper, while the dusk increased and the
great forest vegetation seemed to grow ranker and closer at every step.
Another disconcerting thing was that the ground sloped gradually
downwards, not upwards as it should have done, till it seemed the path
lay across the flats of a forest-covered plain, which did not conform
to my wish of striking a road on the foot-hills of the mountain.
However, I plodded on, drawing some small comfort from the fact that as
darkness came the mist rose from the ground and appeared to condense in
a ghostly curtain twenty feet overhead, where it hung between me and a
clear night sky, presently illumined by starlight with the strangest
effect.
Tired, footsore, and dejected, I struggled on a little further. Oh for
a cab, I laughed bitterly to myself. Oh for even the humble necessary
omnibus of civilisation. Oh for the humblest tuck-shop where a mug of
hot coffee and a snack could be had by a homeless wanderer; and as I
thought and plodded savagely on, collar up, hands in pockets, through
the black tangles of that endless wood, suddenly the sound of wailing
children caught my ear!
It was the softest, saddest music ever mortal listened to. It was as
though scores of babes in pain were dropping to sleep on their mothers'
breasts, and all hushing their sorrows with one accord in a common
melancholy chorus. I stood spell-bound at that elfin wailing, the
first sound to break the deathly stillness of the road for an hour or
more, and my blood tingled as I listened to it. Nevertheless, here was
what I was looking for; where there were weeping children there must be
habitations, and shelter, and--splendid thought!--supper. Poor little
babes! their crying was the deadliest, sweetest thing in sorrows I ever
listened to. If it was cholic--why, I knew a little of medicine, and in
gratitude for that prospective supper, I had a soul big enough to cure
a thousand; and if they were in disgrace, and by some quaint Martian
fashion had suffered simultaneous punishment for baby offences, I would
plead for them.
In fact, I fairly set off at the run towards the sobbing, in the black,
wet, night air ahead, and, tripping as I ran, looked down and saw in
the filtering starlight that the forest grass had given place to an
ancient roadway, paved with moss-grown flag-stones, such as they still
used in Seth.
Without stopping to think what that might mean I hurried on, the
wailing now right ahead, a tremulous tumult of gentle grief rising and
falling on the night air like the sound of a sea after a storm; and so,
presently, in a minute or two, came upon a ruined archway spanning the
lonely road, held together by great masses of black-fingered creepers,
gaunt and ghostly in the shadows, an extraordinary and unexpected
vision; and as I stopped with a jerk under that forbidding gateway and
glared at its tumbled masonry and great portals hanging rotten at their
hinges, suddenly the truth flashed upon me. I had taken the forbidden
road after all. I was in the ancient, ghost-haunted city of Queen Yang!