The treeless plateau, littered with enormous boulders, stretched for
miles to right and left, grey in the dusk of very early morning. Behind
him dropped thick guardian pine-woods into the sleeping valley that
still detained the darkness of the night. Here and there lay patches
of deep snow, gleaming faintly through thin rising mist; singing
streams of icy water spread everywhere among the stones, soaking the
coarse rough grass that was the only sign of vegetation. No life was
visible; nothing stirred; nor anywhere was movement, but of the quiet
trailing mist and of his own breath that drifted past his face like
smoke. Yet through the splendid stillness there _was_ movement; that
sense of absolute movement which results in stillness--it was owing
to the stillness that he became aware of it--so vast, indeed, that
only immobility could express it. Thus, on the calmest day in summer,
may the headlong rushing of the earth through space seem more real
than when the tempest shakes the trees and water on its surface; or
great machinery turn with such vertiginous velocity that it appears
steady to the deceived function of the eye. For it was not through the
eye that this solemn Movement made itself known, but rather through
a massive sensation that owned his entire body as its organ. Within
the league-long amphitheatre of enormous peaks and precipices that
enclosed the plateau, piling themselves upon the horizon, Limasson felt
the outline of a Ceremony extended. The pulses of its grandeur poured
into him where he stood. Its vast design was knowable because they
themselves had traced--were even then tracing--its earthly counterpart
in little. And the awe in him increased.
‘This light is false. We have an hour yet before the true dawn,’ he
heard the younger man say lightly. ‘The summits still are ghostly. Let
us enjoy the sensation, and see what we can make of it.’
And Limasson, looking up startled from his reverie, saw that the
far-away heights and towers indeed were heavy with shadow, faint still
with the light of stars. It seemed to him they bowed their awful heads
and that their stupendous shoulders lowered. They drew together,
shutting out the world.
‘True,’ said his companion, ‘and the upper snows still wear the
spectral shine of night. But let us now move faster, for we travel very
light. The sensations you propose will but delay and weaken us.’
He handed a share of the burdens to his companion and to Limasson.
Slowly they all moved forward, and the mountains shut them in.
And two things Limasson noted then, as he shouldered his heavier pack
and led the way: first, that he suddenly knew their destination though
its purpose still lay hidden; and, secondly, that the porter’s leaving
before the ascent proper began signified finally that ordinary climbing
was not their real objective. Also--the dawn was a lifting of inner
veils from off his mind, rather than a brightening of the visible earth
due to the nearing sun. Thick darkness, indeed, draped this enormous,
lonely amphitheatre where they moved.
‘You lead us well,’ said the priest a few feet behind him, as he
picked his way unfalteringly among the boulders and the streams.
‘Strange that I do so,’ replied Limasson in a low tone, ‘for the way is
new to me, and the darkness grows instead of lessening.’ The language
seemed hardly of his choosing. He spoke and walked as in a dream.
Far in the rear the voice of the younger man called plaintively after
them:
‘You go so fast, I can’t keep up with you,’ and again he stumbled and
dropped his ice-axe among the rocks. He seemed for ever stooping to
drink the icy water, or clambering off the trail to test the patches of
snow as to quality and depth. ‘You’re missing all the excitement,’ he
cried repeatedly. ‘There are a hundred pleasures and sensations by the
way.’
They paused a moment for him to overtake them; he came up panting and
exhausted, making remarks about the fading stars, the wind upon the
heights, new routes he longed to try up dangerous couloirs, about
everything, it seemed, except the work in hand. There was eagerness in
him, the kind of excitement that saps energy and wastes the nervous
force, threatening a probable collapse before the arduous object is
attained.
‘Keep to the thing in hand,’ replied the priest sternly. ‘We are not
really going fast; it is you who are scattering yourself to no purpose.
It wears us all. We must husband our resources,’ and he pointed
significantly to the pyramid of the Tour du Néant that gleamed above
them at an incredible altitude.
‘We are here to amuse ourselves; life is a pleasure, a sensation, or it
is nothing,’ grumbled his companion; but there was a gravity in the
tone of the older man that discouraged argument and made resistance
difficult. The other arranged his pack for the tenth time, twisting
his axe through an ingenious scheme of straps and string, and fell
silently into line behind his leaders. Limasson moved on again ... and
the darkness at length began to lift. Far overhead, at first, the snowy
summits shone with a hue less spectral; a delicate pink spread softly
from the east; there was a freshening of the chilly wind; then suddenly
the highest peak that topped the others by a thousand feet of soaring
rock, stepped sharply into sight, half golden and half rose. At the
same instant, the vast Movement of the entire scene slowed down; there
came one or two terrific gusts of wind in quick succession; a roar like
an avalanche of falling stones boomed distantly--and Limasson stopped
dead and held his breath.
For something blocked the way before him, something he knew he could
not pass. Gigantic and unformed, it seemed part of the architecture
of the desolate waste about him, while yet it bulked there, enormous
in the trembling dawn, as belonging neither to plain nor mountain.
Suddenly it was there, where a moment before had been mere emptiness of
air. Its massive outline shifted into visibility as though it had risen
from the ground. He stood stock still. A cold that was not of this
world turned him rigid in his tracks. A few yards behind him the priest
had halted too. Farther in the rear they heard the stumbling tread of
the younger man, and the faint calling of his voice--a feeble broken
sound as of a man whom sudden fear distressed to helplessness.
‘We’re off the track, and I’ve lost my way,’ the words came on the
still air. ‘My axe is gone ... let us put on the rope!... Hark! Do you
hear that roar?’ And then a sound as though he came slowly groping on
his hands and knees.
‘You have exhausted yourself too soon,’ the priest answered sternly.
‘Stay where you are and rest, for we go no farther. This is the place
we sought.’
There was in his tone a kind of ultimate solemnity that for a moment
turned Limasson’s attention from the great obstacle that blocked his
farther way. The darkness lifted veil by veil, not gradually, but by a
series of leaps as when some one inexpertly turns a wick. He perceived
then that not a single Grandeur loomed in front, but that others of
similar kind, some huger than the first, stood all about him, forming
an enclosing circle that hemmed him in.
Then, with a start, he recovered himself. Equilibrium and common sense
returned. The trick that sight had played upon him, assisted by the
rarefied atmosphere of the heights and by the witchery of dawn, was no
uncommon one, after all. The long straining of the eyes to pick the way
in an uncertain light so easily deceives perspective. Delusion ever
follows abrupt change of focus. These shadowy encircling forms were but
the rampart of still distant precipices whose giant walls framed the
tremendous amphitheatre to the sky.
Their closeness was a mere gesture of the dusk and distance.
The shock of the discovery produced an instant’s unsteadiness in him
that brought bewilderment. He straightened up, raised his head, and
looked about him. The cliffs, it seemed to him, shifted back instantly
to their accustomed places; as though after all they _had_ been close;
there was a reeling among the topmost crags; they balanced fearfully,
then stood still against a sky already faintly crimson. The roar he
heard, that might well have seemed the tumult of their hurrying speed,
was in reality but the wind of dawn that rushed against their ribs,
beating the echoes out with angry wings. And the lines of trailing
mist, streaking the air like proofs of rapid motion, merely coiled and
floated in the empty spaces.
He turned to the priest, who had moved up beside him.
‘How strange,’ he said, ‘is this beginning of new light. My sight went
all astray for a passing moment. I thought the mountains stood right
across my path. And when I looked up just now it seemed they all ran
back.’ His voice was small and lost in the great listening air.
The man looked fixedly at him. He had removed his slouch hat, hot
with the long ascent, and as he answered, a long thin shadow flitted
across his features. A breadth of darkness dropped about them. It
was as though a mask were forming. The face that now was covered had
been--naked. He was so long in answering that Limasson heard his mind
sharpening the sentence like a pencil.
He spoke very slowly. ‘_They_ move perhaps even as Their powers move,
and Their minutes are our years. Their passage ever is in tumult. There
is disorder then among the affairs of men; there is confusion in their
minds. There may be ruin and disaster, but out of the wreckage shall
issue strong, fresh growth. For like a sea, They pass.’
There was in his mien a grandeur that seemed borrowed marvellously
from the mountains. His voice was grave and deep; he made no sign
or gesture; and in his manner was a curious steadiness that breathed
through the language a kind of sacred prophecy.
Long, thundering gusts of wind passed distantly across the precipices
as he spoke. The same moment, expecting apparently no rejoinder to his
strange utterance, he stooped and began to unpack his knapsack. The
change from the sacerdotal language to this commonplace and practical
detail was singularly bewildering.
‘It is the time to rest,’ he added, ‘and the time to eat. Let us
prepare.’ And he drew out several small packets and laid them in a
row upon the ground. Awe deepened over Limasson as he watched, and
with it a great wonder too. For the words seemed ominous, as though
this man, upon the floor of some vast Temple, said: ‘Let us prepare a
sacrifice...!’ There flashed into him, out of depths that had hitherto
concealed it, a lightning clue that hinted at explanation of the entire
strange proceeding--of the abrupt meeting with the strangers, the
impulsive acceptance of their project for the great ascent, their grave
behaviour as though it were a Ceremonial of immense design, his change
of position, the bewildering tricks of sight, and the solemn language,
finally, of the older man that corroborated what he himself had deemed
at first illusion. In a flying second of time this all swept through
him--and with it the sharp desire to turn aside, retreat, to run away.
Noting the movement, or perhaps divining the emotion prompting it, the
priest looked up quickly. In his tone was a coldness that seemed as
though this scene of wintry desolation uttered words:
‘You have come too far to think of turning back. It is not possible.
You stand now at the gates of birth--and death. All that might hinder,
you have so bravely cast aside. Be brave now to the end.’
And, as Limasson heard the words, there dropped suddenly into him a new
and awful insight into humanity, a power that unerringly discovered
the spiritual necessities of others, and therefore of himself. With
a shock he realised that the younger man who had accompanied them
with increasing difficulty as they climbed higher and higher--was
but a shadow of reality. Like the porter, he was but an encumbrance
who impeded progress. And he turned his eyes to search the desolate
landscape.
‘You will not find him,’ said his companion, ‘for he is gone. Never,
unless you weakly call, shall you see him again, nor desire to hear his
voice.’ And Limasson realised that in his heart he had all the while
disapproved of the man, disliked him for his theatrical fondness of
sensation and effect, more, that he had even hated and despised him.
Starvation might crawl upon him where he had fallen and eat his life
away before he would stir a finger to save him. It was with the older
man he now had dreadful business in hand.
‘I am glad,’ he answered, ‘for in the end he must have proved my
death--our death!’
And they drew closer round the little circle of food the priest had
laid upon the rocky ground, an intimate understanding linking them
together in a sympathy that completed Limasson’s bewilderment. There
was bread, he saw, and there was salt; there was also a little flask
of deep red wine. In the centre of the circle was a miniature fire of
sticks the priest had collected from the bushes of wild rhododendron.
The smoke rose upwards in a thin blue line. It did not even quiver, so
profound was the surrounding stillness of the mountain air, but far
away among the precipices ran the boom of falling water, and behind it
again, the muffled roar as of peaks and snow-fields that swept with a
rolling thunder through the heavens.
‘They are passing,’ the priest said in a low voice, ‘and They know
that you are here. You have now the opportunity of a lifetime; for, if
you yield acceptance of your own free will, success is sure. You stand
before the gates of birth and death. They offer you life.’
‘Yet ... I denied Them!’ He murmured it below his breath.
‘Denial is evocation. You called to them, and They have come. The
sacrifice of your little personal life is all They ask. Be brave--and
yield it.’
He took the bread as he spoke, and, breaking it in three pieces, he
placed one before Limasson, one before himself, and the third he laid
upon the flame which first blackened and then consumed it.
‘Eat it and understand,’ he said, ‘for it is the nourishment that shall
revive your fading life.’
Next, with the salt, he did the same. Then, raising the flask of wine,
he put it to his lips, offering it afterwards to his companion. When
both had drunk there still remained the greater part of the contents.
He lifted the vessel with both hands reverently towards the sky. He
stood upright.
‘The blood of your personal life I offer to Them in your name. By
the renunciation which seems to you as death shall you pass through
the gates of birth to the life of freedom beyond. For the ultimate
sacrifice that They ask of you is--this.’
And bending low before the distant heights, he poured the wine upon the
rocky ground.
For a period of time Limasson found no means of measuring, so terrible
were the emotions in his heart, the priest remained in this attitude of
worship and obeisance. The tumult in the mountains ceased. An absolute
hush dropped down upon the world. There seemed a pause in the inner
history of the universe itself. All waited--till he rose again. And,
when he did so, the mask that had for hours now been spreading across
his features, was accomplished. The eyes gazed sternly down into his
own. Limasson looked--and recognised. He stood face to face with the
man whom he knew best of all others in the world ... himself.
There had been death. There had also been that recovery of splendour
which is birth and resurrection.
And the sun that moment, with the sudden surprise that mountains only
know, rushed clear above the heights, bathing the landscape and the
standing figure with a stainless glory. Into the vast Temple where he
knelt, as into that greater inner Temple which is mankind’s true House
of Royalty, there poured the completing Presence which is--Light.
‘For in this way, and in this way only, shall you pass from death to
life,’ sang a chanting voice he recognised also now for the first time
as indubitably his own.
It was marvellous. But the birth of light is ever marvellous. It
was anguish; but the pangs of resurrection since time began have
been accomplished by the sweetness of fierce pain. For the majority
still lie in the pre-natal stage, unborn, unconscious of a definite
spiritual existence. In the womb they grope and stifle, depending
ever upon another. Denial is ever the call to life, a protest against
continued darkness for deliverance. Yet birth is the ruin of all that
has hitherto been depended on. There comes then that standing alone
which at first seems desolate isolation. The tumult of destruction
precedes release.
Limasson rose to his feet, stood with difficulty upright, looked about
him from the figure so close now at his side to the snowy summit of
that Tour du Néant he would never climb. The roar and thunder of
_Their_ passage was resumed. It seemed the mountains reeled.
‘They are passing,’ sang the voice that was beside him and within him
too, ‘but They have known you, and your offering is accepted. When
They come close upon the world there is ever wreckage and disaster in
the affairs of men. They bring disorder and confusion into the mind, a
confusion that seems final, a disorder that seems to threaten death.
For there is tumult in Their Presence, and apparent chaos that seems
the abandonment of order. Out of this vast ruin, then, there issues
life in new design. The dislocation is its entrance, the dishevelment
its strength. There has been birth....’
The sunlight dazzled his eyes. That distant roar, like a wind, came
close and swept his face. An icy air, as from a passing star, breathed
over him.
‘Are you prepared?’ he heard.
He knelt again. Without a sign of hesitation or reluctance, he bared
his chest to the sun and wind. The flash came swiftly, instantly,
descending into his heart with unerring aim. He saw the gleam in the
air, he felt the fiery impact of the blow, he even saw the stream gush
forth and sink into the rocky ground, far redder than the wine....
* * * * *
He gasped for breath a moment, staggered, reeled, collapsed ... and
within the moment, so quickly did all happen, he was aware of hands
that supported him and helped him to his feet. But he was too weak to
stand. They carried him up to bed. The porter, and the man who had
reached across him for the matches five minutes before, intending
conversation, stood, one at his feet and the other at his head. As he
passed through the vestibule of the hotel, he saw the people staring,
and in his hand he crumpled up the unopened letters he had received so
short a time ago.
‘I really think--I can manage alone,’ he thanked them. ‘If you will set
me down I can walk. I felt dizzy for a moment.’
‘The heat in the hall----’ the gentleman began in a quiet, sympathetic
voice.
They left him standing on the stairs, watching a moment to see that he
had quite recovered. Limasson walked up the two flights to his room
without faltering. The momentary dizziness had passed. He felt quite
himself again, strong, confident, able to stand alone, able to move
forward, able to _climb_.