certainly no desert Indian, would speak when on a war-party, except by
signs. There was something there that he did not understand. He crept
very cautiously towards the noise, and presently was able to peer
between boulders, at the hillside whence the noise came. It was not
perfect darkness; he could see an open space where the brush was low. In
this space, moving about exactly as though they had dropped something,
which they were trying to pick up or hoping to find, were some gigantic
men. One of them was standing not far from him. He was not very tall,
less tall, perhaps, than Sard himself, but in bulk and bigness like a
gorilla. They were going slowly over the ground in a suspicious way,
muttering to each other. They were uneasy about something for which they
were looking. Sard felt that they knew that he was there, and that they
were looking for him. Then he felt that though they were men, they
wanted some of the senses of men; they were like some race of men born
blind, who felt for their enemies by some sense which men no longer
have. They went very slowly over the ground across which he had
certainly passed some hours before. They seemed to feel the ground and
lift samples of it, then they muttered remarks about the samples. One of
them, away to the right, the one furthest from Sard, seemed to be the
captain. When this man reached the point where Sard had stumbled on his
way to his lair, he paused and felt the ground and gave a little cry, at
which all the others hurried to him. Sard could hear their mutterings
and a discussion going on among them. Evidently they had come upon his
trail and were puzzled about it.
For a few moments the thought of dealing with a race of giants was
unnerving. He saw how such a race could live in that land in the great
caves of the limestone, coming out only at night into the wilder places
of the hills, taking their prey and going back before dawn. Then he
thought, “They cannot be men, they must be bears. But if they are bears,
it won’t be any better. They can only be grizzly bears who attack any
man on sight.”
He kept still as a mouse for half an hour, while the bears loitered
about and muttered among themselves and rummaged in the earth and seemed
to find food, though he couldn’t think what. One of them came lumbering
quite close to where he crouched. He saw him stand and look up at the
stars, in an attitude exactly like that of one of the seamen in the
_Pathfinder_, at the wheel. While he was standing thus, he seemed to be
conscious of some scent that was not usual. Sard could see his head tip
up and down in an attempt to get the stray wafts, to give some certain
evidence, one way or the other. He moved away a little and repeated the
process, and then moved back, moving with his head exactly like a
questing hound and peering sometimes in Sard’s direction, yet not seeing
him. At last he seemed to be satisfied, and went shambling off to his
fellows. They moved off into the thickets and he saw them no more.
When he felt that they were out of earshot and smell of him, he turned
his back upon that place and went on through the scrub up a hill that
went up and up, yet never came to any summit. He must have walked for
about two hours when he stopped suddenly, hearing a woman singing. It
sounded like an Indian woman with a very sweet voice, singing one of the
tuneless Indian songs. A little listening showed him that it was not a
woman, but a little hidden spring of water, gurgling from a pipe to a
trough. The air came with a waft of sweetness upon his face, as of
azaleas in blossom and oranges in fruit growing together in a thicket.
He said, “There’s a house here.” He called aloud in Spanish, “Is anybody
there? I am a friend. Is anybody there?” In front of him he could see
this thicket, which smelled so sweet, all starred either with blossoms
or with fruits. He knew from the look and feel of the place that it had
been made by good people and was good, and that the people were there,
watching him, to see what he would do.
“I am not armed,” he said. “I am an English sailor going to the coast.
Don’t turn your dogs at me, but let me have shelter.”
Nobody answered, but he felt quite certain that the thicket was full of
people looking at him.
He said, “Don’t shoot. You see I put my hands up. I am alone.”
He went forward to the thicket and there saw that there was no one, only
a profusion of creeping flowers that looked at him like eyes, out of the
darkness of the hedge. It must have been years since anybody had lived
there. The hedge, which had been planted, had gone back to jungle. He
walked round it till he came to what had been the gate. There he could
see within a little ruined chapel with one bell. As he came through the
gateway in the first of the dusk, a bird, perhaps an owl, which had been
perched beneath the bell, flew out with a cry. Her wings struck the
bell, which jangled a little. It was exactly as though Sard had rung the
door-bell. He drew his breath and stood still in the court, wondering
who would answer the bell.
It was still not more than twilight, but birds were stirring in the
scrub, and colours could be seen. Some blue birds with orange breasts
came wavering down among the bushes, tore a few petals apart, from
wantonness, and flew on, talking to each other.
Sard stepped across the courtyard and looked in at the deserted chapel’s
western door. It must have been built very soon after the Conquest. It
had been deserted for perhaps half a century, which in that dry climate
had not been enough to destroy it. The roof had gone, except over the
altar. From the wall-plate of the falling roof great strings of flowers
hung. Many flowers and grasses had sprouted among the stones. Just over
the altar a bough had thrust through the wall, and had blossomed there
with a white clustered blossom which smelled sweeter than honeycomb. The
wall above the altar had once been painted in fresco. Most of the
paintings were now gone, but Sard saw, as it were, the heads of men,
eagerly looking upward. To right and to left of the door within the
enclosure there were marks in the earth which showed where the mission
huts had once stood. But monks, converts, mission, and the very memory
of their dealings were utterly gone. Sard might well have been the first
man to have stood there, since the mission ended. It ended in
pestilence, he thought; nobody was left alive here for the mission to
save. He judged that the pestilence which had destroyed the mission
might still be there, in the air, the earth, the water. Yet the place
seemed good, it was unvisited, it seemed sheltered, and there were no
scorpions nor snakes.
He lay down in the shelter of the altar, and instantly fell asleep. He
had not slept long before he became aware that somebody was calling him
by name from infinitely far away, in a voice which was familiar and yet
strange. The voice called, “Harker! Sard Harker! Sard!” from a distance
so great that it seemed like another continent. He knew, in his sleep,
that the voice wanted him to wake. He woke and sat up and found it still
twilight there in the chapel, with the stars not yet gone from the hole
in the roof. No one was calling, the blue birds were back again, tearing
the blossoms, no call had disturbed them. He thought, “I wonder whose
voice that was. I seem to know the voice”; and while he wondered, he
fell asleep.
In his sleep he saw the owner of the voice, a boy called Peter Maxwell,
who had been dead eleven years. He saw Peter, not as he had ever known
him, but eager, like the faces in the fresco. He knew that Peter had
some message for him, yet could not say it, having no longer any human
tongue or any use for human thought. He saw Peter leaning out of the
altar wall from the place where the branch was blossoming. Peter was
stretching out his right hand to him, but what he wanted he could not
tell. He cried out, “Peter, old man, is that you?” and in his gladness
at seeing Peter so near, he woke up and saw the blossoming branch
shaking, as though someone had brushed it by. It was daylight but not
sunlight as he rose up. No one was there, no one had been there; the
birds were still tearing the blossoms, uttering little cries. No man
could have been within a mile of them, probably no human being was
within ten miles, and yet he expected to see Peter Maxwell.
“Peter,” he said, “Peter.”
When he saw that there was no Peter, he thought, “That was a strange
dream. Peter Maxwell has been dead since 1886. He died of yellow fever
in the _Cliomene_. Yet that was Peter in my dream.”
He walked round the little enclosure. There was nothing to alarm him,
except the sense that he was more alone than he had ever been in his
life. He was weary from his tramp and his hard day. He returned to the
chapel and presently slept again. This time he slept for some hours, but
towards noon, at about the time when his watch would be drawing to an
end, he was aware that a trumpet was being blown and that armed figures
were there, wanting him to go. With a little effort he cleared his eyes,
so that he could see these figures. There were three: two women and a
man. The man was standing between the women and raised above them. He
was standing on the altar blowing a blast upon the trumpet, and the
notes of the trumpet came out like flames, so that Sard could see them
as well as hear them. The women were looking at him with faces so calm
that they could not have been mortal, yet when they saw that he saw
them, their faces became alive and incredibly eager. They both turned to
him and bent to raise him, and with their free hands they pointed at the
trumpeter, who shone in all his being and pointed the way to go, and
blew upon his trumpet a blast like a cock-crow: “Get you gone out of
here, get you gone out of here!”
In his dream Sard called to the trumpeter: “What is it, Peter, what is
it? What is it, you great spirits?”
But the women faded from him, Peter faded from him into the wall, but he
could still see the shining trumpet and notes like flakes of fire
failing all around him. The trumpet dwindled slowly and resolved itself
into the blossoming branch that had grown through a crack in the wall.
The figures were gone, the fiery notes had vanished, only as Sard stood
up he smelled very faintly a smell of burning. He walked to the altar
and felt along the wall. It was a wall of perishing plaster. No one had
been there. He went out into the enclosure, and as he passed through the
door, he smelled again the smell of burning. “Get you gone out of here,”
he repeated. “Get you gone out of here! What is that smell of burning?”
Once long before, far out at sea in the Pacific, he had smelled a smell
of burning during the night-watch and had reported it to his mate. The
mate said, “Yes, you often smell that here, at this season of the year.
They are burning the scrub on the mountains four hundred miles away.” He
thought of that remark now. Looking out of the enclosure at the thickets
beyond, he saw a faint trail of smoke curling among some dwarf oaks.
“I believe this scrub’s on fire,” he said. “I’d better get me gone out
of here, or I’ll be burnt like a rat in a trap.”
As near as he could judge, the wind was blowing from the north-west, and
his course was to the east of north. If the scrub were on fire, as he
supposed, he would have to get across its path. He left the enclosure of
the ruined chapel and set off further up the hill to a clear space among
the scrub, where he could see. The foothill on which he stood looked
like a moraine across the track of some ancient glacier. From the top of
it he could look right up the valley down which the glacier may once
have flowed. The wind was blowing straight down this valley, driving a
line of fire behind a wall of smoke, which was beaten down below the
tops of the dwarf oaks. Suckers and snakes of flame ran out along the
sides of the valley and over its summit. From time to time these suckers
seemed to die out, but others always leaped up in front of them. It was
advancing in a ragged line, coming pretty fast, with a crackling,
hissing, sighing noise that sounded very terrible. Sard judged that it
might be, at the furthest, a mile from him. It died down and glittered
up like a living thing. At that distance it did not look like a raging
fire, but it was laying all things dead behind it.
Sard could not see how far it stretched on the side towards which he was
going, but he judged that he would have to hurry to get round it, so he
set off at his best pace along the ridge of what might have been the
moraine. As he went along, the air thickened with intensely bitter smoke
from the burnt bush. Little floating fiery particles came flying past
and settled on his clothes. Every now and then some streamer of flame
would blow down on something dry, set it on fire and blow out. He ran
for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and he reached the top of that
side of the valley to which he ran. He found that on the other side of
the hill the ground tipped very sharply down into a rocky chasm. Beyond
this rocky chasm, which contained water, was a hillside covered with
scrub, blazing like the Day of Judgment. There was no possibility of
getting round the fire. He was shut in on that side, and he hadn’t time
to get back. His only chance was to get down to the water.
There was a place where the crag had fallen in a scree of big pieces of
stone. He scrambled down this towards the water, but the scrub burning
on the other side of the stream was so bright and hot that he had to
cover his eyes as he slithered down. Quite close to the lip of the water
there was a big shelving stone, worn smooth by floods. It was so hot
from the blaze that he could hardly bear his hand upon it. He slithered
into the water from it, just as a flame seized the scrub upon the
opposite bank, and scorched it into nothing.
In a minute the fury of the fire had passed, and it was running up the
hillside away from him, leaving a blackened earth, covered with glowing
stalks, which hissed and sighed. It went on, he could see it running up
the hill, licking down the scrub and leaving blackness. The wind blew
over the burnt tract, bringing soft ash, little fiery particles, and a
breath as from a furnace door.
Sard clambered out of the water, which was brackish and quite unfit to
drink, and set off upon his course again. He walked, like Satan, on the
burning marl, in a desert which had been grim before, but was now
terrible. He followed along the course of the chasm for half a mile, and
came out above on to a sort of tableland of rock, where the fire had
ceased. He paused here to take his bearings, and noticed, for the first
time, that a house or hut had been destroyed by the fire, close to where
he stood. It must have been almost the last thing burned; so he went to
it, thinking that perhaps somebody had been burnt in it. On a sort of
shelf at one end of it was a skeleton of a man, gripping a crucifix. It
might have been there fifty years. The only other remains were a couple
of earthenware ollas of a good size. These were Indian pots of a dull
yellow colour, with decorations of black and red. One of them had a
thong about its mouth, and had been used as a waterbucket; the other,
which was still covered with its earthenware lid, contained parched
corn, shrivelled to the dryness and toughness of split peas, but still
food. There was nothing to show what the man had been. He was tall for
an Indian; the crucifix seemed against his being a miner or prospector.
He may have been some hermit, or contemplative.
Sard removed the ollas into the open. After a little search he found the
spring where the hermit had got his drinking water. He made a fire and
cooked what was left of the woodchuck with the parched corn, and took
his bearings while the meal was cooking. In front of him the path of the
fire still ran on along the valley. It was already far away, running in
little bright flickers of flame, under driven-down smoke. To his left,
on the line of his course, there was a mile of scrubless desert of sand
and rock, without even a cactus or a prickly pear, stretching to the
rocky bulk of the Sierra. By the Sierra, in the direction in which he
wished to go, was a chasm or cleft or cañon, it could hardly be called a
glen. It ran into the very heart of the hills, for a mile or two, as far
as he could see, but beyond it there were crags with pine trees, and
beyond those more crags, and beyond those, crags with snow and more
crags. To his right he could see very little. Foothills shut in the line
of sight on that side. Wherever he looked there was no sign of the works
of man, there was desert, rock, desolation and death. Between sixty and
seventy miles of unknown country still lay between him and the coast.
With some tough tendrils which had escaped the fire he contrived slings
for the two ollas. He was now equipped with bread and water for two
days.
As he judged that the chasm or cleft would give him an easier path into
the hills, he set off towards it. As he drew near to its entrance, it
looked like the entrance to hell. He remembered that he had read
somewhere, or somebody had told him, that the Indians dreaded these
clefts in the mountains, and said that unspeakable things lived in them.
Now as he drew near the mouth, he heard far up the cañon something like
a voice, which was not a voice, crying in the heart of the rocks. It was
a strange, metallic cry of “Ohoy!” The echoes repeated it. It was no
beast that he knew. It was not like a beast. It was like the voice of
the rock itself. He stopped at the very mouth of the cañon, trying to
think what that voice could be. It was not any human voice, and yet it
had a human ring. It was not the voice of any beast, and yet it came, as
it were, from the strength of a beast. It could not be the voice of a
bird, no bird could be big enough, and yet there was something birdlike
in its tone. If it were not the voice of a man, beast or bird, what
could it be? Though it could not be a bird, it was likest to a bird;
there was something spiritual and birdlike about it. It gave him the
impression of some giant bird, some bird of poetry, some phœnix or roc,
crying from a full heart. Then in its deeper notes it sounded like the
voice of some giant who was beating on an anvil, and crying as he struck
the blows, “Ohoy!” At these times it came with a pure metallic clang,
which thrilled him to the marrow. He stood still to listen to it.
Whatever it was, it came from some living thing, it had not the rhythm
of any machine. It was not any drill or pile-driver beating into the
heart of the rock. Sard’s mind offered many suggestions, one after the
other. Now it was like some great bell, but it was not a bell. Now it
was like some ringing true blow struck by a gigantic tuning-fork, or
like the blow of an axe upon a gong, or like the drilling of some
gigantic woodpecker into a musical wood. He could not think what it was.
It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange.
It came from the heart of the wilderness of rock, miles from any human
dwelling. It was like the rock speaking. Into his mind there came again
those words which he had read or heard, “The Indians do not go into the
Sierra, nobody goes into the Sierra; there are strange things in the
Sierra which do not want to be known.”
He asked himself whether he were not delirious and imagining this noise.
But it rang clearly and made an echo.
The cañon was paven with clean dry desert sand. It led into the heart of
the hills. The side of the mountain had been snapped asunder there and
torn fifty yards apart. Sard could see a great black boulder midway up
the cliff, on his right hand, and its other half on his left hand. He
saw the patterns of veins and lines, where they once had joined each
other. It needed some little resolution to go on towards that noise, but
he repeated his proverb, “A danger met is less than a danger expected,”
and went forwards toward it.
There were no tracks in the sand, perhaps no human foot had trodden that
path for fifty years or five hundred years. “Here,” he thought, “I may
come upon some unknown beast or bird or race of men or giants, for there
may be anything in a place like this.” Half a mile up the cañon he
stopped, for in front of him the walls of the cañon drew together, and
there at each side of the chasm the rock had been hewn into a semblance
of columns, a hundred feet high. Drawing a little nearer, he saw that
the heads of the columns were carven with the heads of monsters which
were crushing human skulls between their teeth; blood seemed to be
flowing from their mouths; blood spattered the columns; as he drew near,
he could hear it dripping on the rocks below. The noise of the great
bird, or whatever it was, had been silent for some time; now he heard it
much nearer and with a new note, not of joy nor of sorrow, but of
laughter that had no feeling in it. Sard stopped; he felt his hair stand
on end, while his heart seemed to come up into his throat and thump
there till it was as dry as bone.
“All the same, I’ll go on,” he said; “there’s no going back. That thing
knows that I’m here. If I’ve got to die, I’ll die, and I may as well get
it over.”
All the time the great figures on the columns seemed to chew their quids
and the blood spattered down upon the rocks.
“They’re only those streams,” he said, “with iron ore or with red
pigment in them, and they’ve led them in channels to those figures’
mouths. That’s all it is.”
It was all that it was, but in the dusk of the cañon and of the day, to
one very weak and weary as well as feverish, it was enough. He walked
boldly up to the feet of the figures. They stood in blood, like
butchers, and the red water splashed Sard as he stood there. Though he
had expected much, he had not expected what he saw. The two great
columns stood one on each side of a narrow pass, not more than four feet
across. Within the pass the cañon widened out again, but not very far.
On both sides of it the rocks had been carven into gigantic shapes. It
was an avenue of the gods, all of them terrible; they seemed to turn
their heads and look at him; the wardens at the gate seemed to turn
round upon him after he had passed them. Into his mind, from some
forgotten book or speaker, came the phrase of what the Indians in that
country had said of these old temples, that their gods come to life at
dusk, and are alive all night, and live on men. They seemed to gnash
their teeth and lick their lips, and to tremble as he drew near.
He would have thought nothing of it had he had so much as a dog beside
him. A lunatic, even a village idiot, would have seemed a comrade and a
backing to him. But he had to face it alone. He backed into the rock of
the pass and tried to reassure himself, but he kept telling himself, “It
was one of these things whom I heard singing. They do come to life at
dusk.”
Then he said, “It isn’t so. If these things were beautiful, I would fear
them, but they are not, and there is nothing in them that I will
recognise as gods. These things are all over this land: I have heard of
them. I’ll go on, and if they kill me, they’ll get little glory by it.”
He went on, and as he went a strange moaning music seemed to wind from
one god to another. It was the wind striking sharp angles in the rocks
at the chasm top, but it sounded like the song of the figure of Memnon
in Egypt. Just in such a way should the thoughts of the gods pass to
each other, without a movement of the lips.
“Those Indians spoke the truth,” he thought, “when they said that the
gods speak in music from dusk to dawn.”
At the head of the cañon was a small stone temple, high up at the top of
a flight of steps. The columns and the walls were brightly painted with
images of terror and of power, in war and triumph. Bats were flickering
out from the temple door. They were the first living things that he had
seen since he entered the cañon. They made him feel that he was coming
back to life, after walking in the kingdom of death. As he went up the
temple steps, which were as perfect as when they had been laid down,
centuries before, the voice of the bird, or whatever it was, rose up
from somewhere in the mountain not far ahead. It rose up with a new
note, it was like laughter with exultation. He could see nothing because
the temple shut away all that was in front of him, but he heard above
the noise of the laughter the clanking as of enormous wings, slowly
rising from the ground and gathering power and moving away and away.