"... And then suddenly,--
While perhaps twice my heart was dutiful
To send my blood upon its little race--
I was exalted above surety,
And out of Time did fall."
--LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, _Poems and Interludes_
This, then, was one of the "hints" by which O'Malley knew that he
was not alone and that the mind of his companion was stretched out
to find him. He became aware after it of a distinct guidance, even of
direction as to his route of travel. The "impulse came," as one says, to
turn northwards, and he obeyed it without more ado. For this "dream"
had come to him when camped upon the slopes of Ararat, further south
toward the Turkish frontier, and though all prepared to climb the
sixteen-thousand foot summit, he changed his plans, dismissed the local
guide, and turned back for Tiflis and the Central Range. In the wilder,
lonelier mountains, he felt strongly, was where he ought to be.
Another man, of course, would have dismissed the dream or forgotten
it while cooking his morning coffee; but, rightly or wrongly, this
divining Celt accepted it as real. He held an instinctive belief, that in
dreams of a certain order the forces that drive behind the soul at a
given moment, may reveal themselves to the subconscious self, becoming
authoritative in proportion as they are sanely encouraged and
interpreted. They dramatize themselves in scenes that are open to
intuitive interpretation. And O'Malley, it seems, possessed, like the
Hebrew prophets of old, just that measure of judgment and divination
which go to the making of a true clear-vision.
Packing up kit and dunnage, he crossed the Georgian Military Route
on foot to Vladikavkaz, and thence with another horse and a Mohammedan
Georgian as guide, Rostom by name, journeyed _via_ Alighir and Oni up a
side valley of unforgettable splendor toward an Imerethian hamlet where
they meant to lay-in supplies for a prolonged expedition into the
uninhabited wilderness.
And here, the second occurrence he told me of took place. It was more
direct than the first, yet equally strange; also it brought a similar
authority--coming first along the deep mysterious underpaths of
sleep--sleep, that short cut into the subconscious.
They were camped among low boxwood trees, a hot dry night, wind soft and
stars very brilliant, when the Irishman turned in his sleeping-bag
and abruptly woke. This time there was no dream--only the certainty that
something had wakened him deliberately. He sat up, almost with a cry. It
was exactly as though he heard himself called by name and recognized the
voice that spoke it. He looked quickly round. Nothing but the crowding
army of the box-trees was visible, some bushy and round, others
straggling in their outline, all whispering gently together in the night.
Beyond ran the immense slopes, and far overhead he saw the gleaming snow
on peaks that brushed the stars.
No one was visible. This time no flying figures danced beneath the
moon. There was, indeed, no moon. Something, however, he knew had
come up close and touched him, calling him from the depths of a
profound and tired slumber. It had withdrawn again, vanished into the
night. The strong certainty remained, though, that it lingered near about
him still, trying to press forwards and outwards into some kind of
objective visible expression that _included himself_. He had responded
with an effort in his sleep, but the effort had been unsuccessful. He had
merely waked ... and lost it.
The horse, tethered a few feet away, was astir and troubled, straining
at the rope, whinnying faintly, and Rostom, the Georgian peasant, he
saw, was already up to quiet it. A curious perfume passed him through
the air--once, then vanished; unforgettable, however, for he had known
it already weeks ago upon the steamer. And before the gardened woods
about him smothered it with their richer smells of a million flowers
and weeds, he recognized in it that peculiar pungent whiff of horse that
had reached him from the haunted cabin. This time it was less fleeting--a
fine, clean odor that he liked even while it strangely troubled him.
Kicking out of his blankets, he joined the man and helped to
straighten out the tangled rope. Rostom spoke little Russian, and
O'Malley's knowledge of Georgian lay in a single phrase, "Look sharp!"
but with the aid of French the man had learned from shooting-parties,
he gathered that some one had approached during the night and
camped, it seemed, not far away above them.
Though unusual enough in so unfrequented a region, this was not
necessarily alarming, and the first proof O'Malley had that the man
experienced no ordinary physical fear was the fact that he had left both
knife and rifle in his blankets. Hitherto, at the least sign of danger,
he changed into a perfect arsenal; he invariably slept "in his weapons";
but now, even in the darkness, the other noted that he was unarmed, and
therefore it was no attempt at horse-stealing or of assault upon
themselves he feared.
"Who is it? What is it?" he asked, stumbling over the tangle of
string-like roots that netted the ground. "Natives, travelers like
ourselves, or--something else?" He spoke very low, as though aware that
what had waked him still hovered close enough to overhear. "Why do you
fear?"
And Rostom looked up a moment from stooping over the rope. He stepped a
little nearer, avoiding the animal's hoofs. In a confused whisper of
French and Russian, making at the same time the protective signs of his
religion, he muttered a sentence of which the other caught little more
than the unassuring word that something was about them close--something
"_méchant_." This curious, significant word he used.
The whispered utterance, the manner that went with it, surely the dark
and lonely setting of the little scene as well, served to convey the
full suggestion of the adjective with a force the man himself could
scarcely have intended. Something had passed by, not so much evil,
wicked, or malign as strange and alien--uncanny. Rostom, a man utterly
careless of physical danger, rising to it, rather, with delight, was
frightened--in his soul.
"What do you mean?" O'Malley asked louder, with an air of impatience
assumed. The man was on his knees, but whether praying, or merely
struggling with the rope, was hard to see. "What is it you're talking
about so foolishly?" He spoke with a confidence he hardly felt himself.
And the involved reply, spoken with lips against the earth, the head
but slightly turned as he knelt, again smothered the words. Only the
curious phrase came to him--"_de l'ancien monde_--_quelque-chose_--"
The Irishman took him by the shoulders. Not meaning actually to shake
him, he yet must have used some violence, for the fact was that he did
not like the answers and sought to deny some strong emotion in himself.
The man stood up abruptly with a kind of sudden spring. The expression of
his face was not easily divined in the darkness, but a gleam of the eyes
was clearly visible. It may have been anger, it may have been terror;
vivid excitement it certainly was.
"Something--old as the stones, old as the stones," he whispered,
thrusting his dark bearded face unpleasantly close. "Such things are in
these mountains.... _Mais oui! C'est moi qui vous le dis!_ Old as the
stones, I tell you. And sometimes they come out close--with sudden wind.
_We_ know!"
He stepped back again sharply and dropped upon his knees, bowing
to the ground with flattened palms. He made a repelling gesture as
though it was O'Malley's presence that brought the experience.
"And to see them is--to die!" he heard, muttered against the ground
thickly. "To see them is to die!"
The Irishman went back to his sleeping-bag. Some strange passion of
the man was deeply stirred; he did not wish to offend his violent beliefs
and turn it against himself in a stupid, scrambling fight. He lay and
waited. He heard the muttering of the deep voice behind him in the
darkness. Presently it ceased. Rostom came softly back to bed.
"_He_ knows; _he_ warned me!" he whispered, jerking one hand toward the
horse significantly, as they at length lay again side by side in their
blankets and the stars shone down upon them from a deep black sky.
"But, for the moment, they have passed, not finding us. No wind has
come."
"Another--horse?" asked O'Malley suggestively, with a sympathy
meant to quiet him.
But the peasant shook his head; and this time it was not difficult to
divine the expression on his face even in the darkness. At the same
moment the tethered animal again uttered a long whinnying cry, plaintive,
yet of pleasure rather than alarm it seemed, which instantly brought
the man again with a leap from the blankets to his knees. O'Malley did
not go to help him; he stuffed the clothes against his ears and waited;
he did not wish to hear the peasant's sentences.
And this pantomime went on at intervals for an hour or more, when
at length the horse grew quiet and O'Malley snatched moments of
unrefreshing sleep. The night lay thick about them with a silence like
the silence of the sky. The boxwood bushes ran together into a single
sheet of black, the far peaks faded out of sight, the air grew keen and
sharp toward the dawn on the wave of wind the sunrise drives before it
round the world. But to and fro across the Irishman's mind as he lay
between sleep and dozing ran the feeling that his friends were close, and
that those dancing forms of cosmic life to which all three approximated
had come near once more to summon him. He also knew that what the
horse had felt was something far from terror. The animal instinctively
had divined the presence of something to which it, too, was remotely
kin.
Rostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time
apparently praying. Not once did he touch the weapons that lay ready
to hand upon the folded burka ... and when at last the dawn came, pale
and yellow, through the trees, showing the outlines of the individual box
and azalea bushes, he got up earlier than usual and began to make the
fire for coffee. In the fuller light which soon poured swiftly over the
eastern summits and dropped gold and silver into the tremendous valley at
their feet, the men made a systematic search of the immediate
surroundings, and then of the clearings and more open stretches beyond.
In silence they made it. They found, however, no traces of another
camping-party. And it was clear from the way they went about the search
that neither expected to find anything. The ground was unbroken, the
bushes undisturbed.
Yet still, both knew. That "something" which the night had brought
and kept concealed, still hovered close about them.
And it was at this scattered hamlet, consisting of little more than
a farm of sorts and a few shepherds' huts of stone, where they stopped
two hours later for provisions, that O'Malley looked up thus suddenly
and recognized the figure of his friend. He stood among the trees a
hundred yards away. At first the other thought he was a tree--his
stalwart form the stem, his hair and beard the branches--so big and
motionless he stood between the other trunks. O'Malley saw him for a full
minute before he understood. The man seemed so absolutely a part of the
landscape, a giant detail in keeping with the rest--a detail that had
suddenly emerged.
The same moment a great draught of wind, rising from depths of the
valley below, swept overhead with a roaring sound, shaking the beech
and box trees and setting all the golden azalea heads in a sudden
agitation. It passed as swiftly as it came. The peace of the June morning
again descended on the mountains.
It was broken by a wild, half-smothered cry,--a cry of genuine terror.
For O'Malley had turned to Rostom with some word that here, in this
figure, lay the explanation of the animal's excitement in the night,
when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black
hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth
was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same
direction as himself. The next instant he was on his knees, bowing and
scraping toward Mecca, groaning, hiding his eyes with both hands. The
sack he held had toppled over; the cheese and flour rolled upon the
ground; and from the horse came that long-drawn whinnying of the
night.
There was a momentary impression--entirely in the Irishman's mind, of
course,--that the whole landscape veiled a giant, rushing movement that
passed across it like a wave. The surface of the earth, it seemed, ran
softly quivering, as though that wind had stirred response together with
the trembling of the million leaves ... before it settled back again to
stillness. It passed in the flash of an eyelid. The earth lay tranquil in
repose.
But, though the suddenness of the stranger's arrival might conceivably
have startled the ignorant peasant, with nerves already overwrought
from the occurrence of the night, O'Malley was not prepared for the
violence of the man's terror as shown by the immediate sequel. For after
several moments' prayer and prostration, with groans half smothered
against the very ground, he sprang impetuously to his feet again, turned
to his employer with eyes that gleamed wildly in that face of chalk,
cried out--the voice thick with the confusion of his fear--"It is the
Wind! _They_ come; from the mountains _they_ come! Older than the stones
they are. Save yourself.... Hide your eyes ... fly...!"--and was gone.
Like a deer he went. He waited neither for food nor payment, but flung
the great black burka round his face--and ran.
And to O'Malley, bereft of all power of movement as he watched in
complete bewilderment, one thing seemed clear: the man went in this
extraordinary fashion because he was afraid of something he had _felt_,
not seen. For as he ran with wild and leaping strides, he did not run
away from the figure. He took the direction straight toward the spot
where the stranger still stood motionless as a tree. So close he passed
him that he must almost have brushed his very shoulder. He did not
see him.
The last thing the Irishman noted was that in his violence the man
had dropped the yellow bashlik from his head. O'Malley saw him stoop
with a flying rush to pick it up. He seemed to catch it as it fell.
And then the big figure moved. He came slowly forward from among
the trees, his hands outstretched in greeting, on his great visage a
shining smile of welcome that seemed to share the sunrise. In that moment
for the Irishman all was forgotten as though unknown, unseen, save the
feelings of extraordinary happiness that filled him to the brim.