Selected Stories of H. G. Wells (44 page)

“Stop!” he cried. “Stop!” and put out his hands as if to thrust back that slow deliberate catastrophe. It is preposterous but he believes he said, “Wait one minute!”

He ran headlong to the little bridge and the gate and rushed down towards the houses, waving his arms and shouting. “The mountain is falling,” he screamed. “The whole mountain is falling upon you all. Medina-saroté! Medina-saroté!”

He clattered to the house of old Yacob and burst in upon the sleepers. He shook them and shouted at them, going from one to the other.

“He’s gone mad again,” they cried aghast at him and even Medina-saroté cowered away from his excitement.

“Come,” he said. “Come. Even now it is falling. The mountain is falling.” And he seized her wrist in a grip of steel. “Come!” he cried so masterfully that in terror she obeyed him.

But outside the house there was a crowd that his shouts and noise had awakened, and a score of men had run out already and assembled outside the house and stood in his way.

“Let me pass,” he cried. “Let me pass. And come with me—up the further slopes there before it is too late.”

“This is too much. This is the last blasphemy,” shrieked one of the elders. “Seize him. Hold him!”

“I tell you the mountain is falling. It is coming down upon you even now as you hold me here.”

“The Wisdom Above us that loves and protects us
cannot
fall.”

“Listen. That rumbling?”

“There has been rumbling like that before. The Wisdom is warning us. It is because of your blasphemies.”

“And the ground rocking?”

“Brothers cast him out! Cast him out of the valley. We have been foolish to harbour him so long. His sin is more than our Providence can endure.”

“But I tell you the rocks are falling. The whole mountain is coming down. Listen and you can hear the crashing and the rending of them.”

He was aware of a loud hoarse voice intoning through the uproar and drowning his own. “The Wisdom Above loves us. It protects us from all harm. No evil can touch us while the Wisdom is over us. Cast him forth! Cast him forth. Let him take our sins upon him and go!” “Out you go, Bogota,” cried a chorus of voices. “Out you go.”

“Medina-saroté! Come with me. Come out of this place!”

Pedro threw protective arms about his cousin.

“Medina-saroté!” cried Nunez. “Medina-saroté!”

They pushed him, struggling fiercely, up the path towards the boundaries. They showed all the cruelty now of frightened men. For the gathering noise of the advancing rocks dismayed them all. They wanted to out-do each other in repudiating him. They beat at his face with their fists and kicked his shins and ankles and feet. One or two jabbed at him with knives. He could not see Medina-saroté any longer and he could not see the shifting cliffs because of the blows and because of the blood that poured from a cut in his forehead, but the voices about him seemed to fade as the rumbling clatter of falling fragments wove together and rose into a thunderous roar. He shouted weeping for Medina-saroté to escape as they drove him before them.

They thrust him through a little door and flung him out on to a stony slope with a deliberate violence that sent a flock of llamas helter-skelter. He lay like a cast clout. “And there you stay—and starve,” said one. “You and your
—seeing.
”

He lifted his head for a last reply.

“I tell you. You will be dead before I am.”

“You fool!” said the one he had fought, and came back to kick him again and again. “Will you never learn reason?” But he turned hastily to join his fellows when Nunez struggled clumsily to his feet.

He stood swaying like a drunken man.

He had no strength in his limbs. He did his best to wipe the blood from his eyes. He looked at the impending mountain-fall, he looked for the high rocky ledge he had noted that morning and then he turned a despairful face to the encircling doom of the valley. But he did not attempt to climb any further away.

“What’s the good of going alone?” he said. “Even if I could, I shall only starve up there.”

And then suddenly he saw Medina-saroté seeking him. She emerged from the little door and she was calling his name. In some manner she had contrived to slip away and come to search for him. “Bogota my darling!” she cried. “What have they done to you? Oh
what
have they
done
to you?”

He staggered to meet her, calling her name over and over again.

In another moment her hands were upon his face and she was wiping away the blood and searching softly and skilfully for his cuts and bruises.

“You must stay here now,” she panted. “You must stay here for a time. Until you repent. Until you learn to repent. Why did you behave so madly? Why did you say those horrible blasphemies? You don’t know you say them, but how are they to tell that? If you come back now they will certainly kill you. I will bring you food. Stay here.”

“Neither of us can stay here.
Look
!”

She drew the air in sharply between her teeth at that horrible word “look” which showed that his madness was still upon him.

“There! That thunder!”

“What is it?”

“A stream of rocks are pouring down by the meadows and it is only the beginning of them.
Look
at them. Listen anyhow to the drumming and beating of them! What do you think those sounds mean?
That
and that! Stones! They are bouncing and dancing across the lower meadows by the lake and the waters of the lake are brimming over and rising up to the further houses. Come my darling. Come! Do not question, but come!”

She stood hesitating for a moment. There was a frightful menace now in the storm of sounds that filled the air. Then she crept into his arms. “I am afraid,” she said.

He drew her to him and with a renewal of strength began to climb, guiding her feet. His blood smeared her face and there was no time to remedy that. At first she dragged upon him and then, perceiving the strain she caused, she helped and supported him. She was sobbing but also she obeyed.

He concentrated himself now upon reaching that distant shelf, but presently he had to halt for breath, and then only was he free to look back across the valley.

He saw that the foot of the cliff was sliding now down into the lake, scooping its waters before it towards the remoter houses, and that the cascade of rocks was now swifter and greater. They drove over the ground in leaps and bounds with a frightful suggestion in their movements as though they were hunting victims. They were smashing down trees and bushes and demolishing walls and buildings, and still the main bulk of the creeping mountain, deprived now of its supports, had to gather momentum and fall. It was breaking up as it came down. And now little figures appeared from the houses and ran hither and thither . . .

For the first time Nunez was glad that Medina-saroté was blind.

“Climb! my darling,” he said. “Climb!”

“I do not understand.”

“Climb!”

A rush of terrified llamas came crowding up past them.

“It is so steep, so steep here. Why are these creatures coming with us?”

“Because they understand. Because they know we are with them. Push through them. Climb.”

With an effect of extreme deliberation that mountain-side hung over the doomed valley. For some tense instants Nunez did not hear a sound. His whole being was concentrated in his eyes. Then came the fall and then a stunning concussion that struck his chest a giant’s blow. Medina-saroté was flung against the rocks and clung to them with clawing hands. Nunez had an instant’s impression of a sea of rocks and earth and fragments of paths and walls and houses, pouring in a swift flood towards him. A spray of wind-driven water bedewed him; they were pelted with mud and broken rock fragments, the wave of debris surged and receded a little and abruptly came still, and then colossal pillars of mist and dust rose up solemnly and deliberately and mounted towering overhead and unfolded and rolled together about them until they were in an impenetrable stinging fog. Silence fell again upon the world and the Valley of the Blind was hidden from him for evermore.

Pallid to the centres of their souls, these two survivors climbed slowly to the crystalline ridge and crouched upon it.

And when some hour or so later that swirling veil of mist and dust had grown thinner and they could venture to move and plan what they would do, Nunez saw through a rent in it far away across a wilderness of tumbled broken rock and in a V-shaped cleft of the broken mountains, the green rolling masses of the foothills, and far beyond them one shining glimpse of the ocean.

Two days later he and Medina-saroté were found by two hunters who had come to explore the scene of this disaster. They were trying to clamber down to the outer world and they were on the verge of exhaustion. They had lived upon water, fern roots and a few berries. They collapsed completely when the hunters hailed them.

They lived to tell their tale, and to settle in Quito among Nunez’s people. There he is still living. He is a prosperous tradesman and plainly a very honest man. She is a sweet and gentle lady, her basket-work and her embroidery are marvellous, though of course she makes no use of colour, and she speaks Spanish with an old-fashioned accent very pleasant to the ear.

Greatly daring, I think, they have had four children and they are as stout and sturdy as their father and they can see.

He will talk about his experience when the mood is on him but she says very little. One day however when she was sitting with my wife while Nunez and I were away, she talked a little of her childhood in the valley and of the simple faith and happiness of her upbringing. She spoke of it with manifest regret. It had been a life of gentle routines, free from all complications.

It was plain she loved her children and it was plain she found them and much of the comings and goings about her difficult to understand. She had never been able to love and protect them as she had once loved and protected Nunez.

My wife ventured on a question she had long wanted to ask. “You have never consulted oculists,” she began.

“Never,” said Medina-saroté. “I have never wanted to
see.
”

“But colour—and form and distance!”

“I have no use for your colours and your stars,” said Medina-saroté. “I do not want to lose my faith in the Wisdom Above.”

“But after all that has happened! Don’t you want to see Nunez; see what he is like?”

“But I know what he is like and seeing him might put us apart. He would not be so near to me. The loveliness of
your
world is a complicated and fearful loveliness and mine is simple and near. I had rather Nunez saw for me—because he knows nothing of fear.”

“But the beauty!” cried my wife.

“It may be beautiful,” said Medina-saroté, “but it must be very terrible to see.”

ABOUT THE EDITOR

URSULA K. LE GUIN writes in various modes, including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, books for children and young adults, screenplays, essays, and poems. As of 2004 she has published nineteen novels, over a hundred short stories, twelve books for children, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry and four of translation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS—novelist, social critic, and visionary futurist who became one of the most prolific and widely read writers of his generation—was born in the London suburb of Bromley, Kent, on September 21, 1866. He came from a lower-middle-class background and grew up in circumstances of genteel poverty that would not have seemed out of place in a novel by Dickens. His father was at various times a gardener, professional cricket player, and shopkeeper; his mother was a housekeeper and former lady’s maid. The youngster, nicknamed Bertie, became an avid reader at the age of seven while lying bedridden with a broken leg.

Although he left school to become a draper’s apprentice at fourteen, Wells later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. There he studied zoology under T. H. Huxley, a noted disciple of Darwin who instilled in Wells a belief in social as well as biological evolution. Wells’s first prophetic work, “A Tale of the Twentieth Century,” was published in 1887 in the
Science Schools
Journal.
Upon graduation from the University of London in 1890 he was a tutor until chronic ill health made him decide to make a serious attempt at being a writer. He brought out A Text-Book of Biology (1893) and began contributing articles and fiction to magazines such as the
Pall Mall Gazette.
Impoverished and unhappily married, Wells eloped with Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins, a former student of his, whom he later married and by whom he had two sons.

The serialization of
The Time Machine
in 1895 made Wells famous overnight. A string of other scientific romances—including
The Island
of Dr. Moreau
(1896),
The Invisible Man
(1897),
The War of the Worlds
(1898),
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899), and
The First Men in the Moon
(1901)—consolidated his reputation.

A socialist who believed in the perfectibility of mankind, Wells focused on utopian social and political themes in works of nonfiction beginning with
Anticipations
(1901),
The Discovery of the Future
(1902),
Mankind in the Making
(1903),
A Modern Utopia
(1905), and
The Future in
America
(1906). Wells joined the Fabian Society in 1903 but left after fighting an unsuccessful war of wit and rhetoric over its policies with George Bernard Shaw.

Tired of being labeled “the English Jules Verne,” Wells wrote two popular comic novels featuring resilient Cockney heroes who triumph over adversity,
Kipps
(1905) and
The History of Mr. Polly
(1910). The latter underscored one of his most basic themes: “If the world does not please you,
you can change it.
” A liaison with the young Fabian Amber Reeves inspired the novel
Ann Veronica
(1909) and produced a daughter, Anna Jane. Also published in 1909 was
Tono-Bungay,
a panoramic if scathing view of Edwardian England that many regard as his greatest novel.

Wells’s later fiction became increasingly autobiographical.
The New
Machiavelli
(1911) and the best-selling
Mr. Bristling Sees It Through
(1916) were the most notable. Others, such as
Marriage
(1912), prompted a young journalist named Rebecca West to dismiss him as the “old maid among novelists.” Yet the two conducted a ten-year love affair and had a son, Anthony West. Wells continued to produce compelling prognostications. Despite having dubbed World War I “the war that will end war,” he wrote
The World Set Free
(1914), a speculative history of the future that predicted the coming age of nuclear warfare.

In 1920
The Outline of History,
an encyclopedic work written to further the cause of world peace, brought Wells to the height of his fame. An international best-seller, the book included this memorable saying: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The same year he traveled to Russia to meet Lenin and reported on the new Communist regime in
Russia in the Shadows
(1920).

In 1923 Wells ended his relationship with Rebecca West and later moved to the south of France with his new mistress, political exile Odette Keun. There he wrote
The World of William Clissold
(1926), his most ambitious novel of the period. Upon returning to London in 1930 Wells brought out
The Science of Life
(1930) and
The Work, Wealth and
Happiness of Mankind
(1932), two companion volumes to
The Outline of
History.

With the rise of fascism Wells became less optimistic about the future, and in
The Shape of Things to Come
(1933) he accurately predicted a second world war that would begin in 1939. However, he journeyed to the United States and Russia in 1934, attempting to promote global peace. Back in England he published his memoirs, the masterful two-volume
Experiment in Autobiography
(1934), and worked with Alexander Korda on a film version of
The Shape of Things to Come.
Though happily involved with Moura Budberg, the Russian spy who was his last companion, Wells remained fatalistic about mankind. The advent of World War II only heightened the author’s despondency as he lived to see many of his dire predictions come true. “Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me,” he bitterly observed. A final work,
Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945), bleakly foretold the destruction of civilization.

H. G. Wells died suddenly and peacefully on August 13, 1946, just a few weeks before turning eighty, at his home in Hanover Terrace, London. Three days later his body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the English Channel near the Isle of Wight. A third volume of autobiography,
H. G. Wells in Love,
appeared posthumously in 1984.