Devil's Tor (14 page)

Her bones were long since crumbled, and their dust dispersed. The ancient dreaming that had dreamt this woman had wiped its tablets quite clean, so that not the cleverest brain of the coming future would be able from the tiniest bit of yellow cranium to reconstruct another cruder Helen or Cleopatra. Her jewels could scarcely similarly have melted with the ages, yet none such were visible. Perhaps there had been priestly trickery at the interment; or perhaps the times had been greedy and matter-of-fact: or her tribe had obeyed other superstitions. It was little likely to have been so advanced in culture as to prefer spiritual to bodily adornment as the chief treasure for its women.

And God knew what horrid rites of a cruel faith might have been enacted here! Conceivably an entire train of luckless female attendants had been clubbed, choked, or left entombed, to breathe out the last of their warm breath in the icy society of a mistress who was no more able to guide and protect them, but who had suddenly been made awful by the withdrawal of her flame. A dizzy, endless chain of blurred intervening lives, generations, centuries, was suggested.

Without warning the mental overtaking passed into a physical giddiness, obliging him to catch blindly for support at the archway upright at his elbow. As quickly he recovered and the stumble had been only momentary; but he was impressed that the imprisoned atmosphere, so deep down as it was, must be foul with its thousands of years of exhalations; and thought that he had dreamed here long enough. Now he had better be quick to see at closer quarters what else to see there was; then go at once. Unnerving was it merely to be standing rigid and hunterlike thus alone, exploring all with the suspicious eyes of a foe, listening to the beating of his own heart, and imagining throughout as a background the beginning appearance of spectral shapes, always just beyond the range of his circle of torchlight, that but served to make the contrasting blackness fitter for the breaking of such wraiths upon him. Fifty feet of granite roofed him in. No human soul was near the hill.

He moved forward into the death-chamber. The ensuing accident happened so swiftly that he never rightly understood what, had caused it. He believed he had been directing his light and looking towards the pedestal, on which had been nothing at all, when possibly a trailing end of the mackintosh over his arm had caught under his foot, and tripped him. At least he did trip; and fell. But in falling, he had naturally tried to save himself by catching at the nearest solid thing, which in his case was the pedestal; and that had not quite stopped the fall, but had broken it, so that he had reached the ground indeed and was shaken and angry, but had not been so badly hurt as he otherwise might have been. Only the bulb of his electric torch had struck the granite floor, and was hopelessly shattered. Instantly he was plunged into night.

The torch in hitting the ground had escaped from his hand, so, staying down, he began to grope for it, but could not immediately find it. Then, as he proceeded to crawl here and there with lightly feeling fingers, they encountered something else small and hard on the rock floor, which was not the torch. Doubtless it was some tomb treasure that he had overlooked—it surely felt like a precious stone or talisman, half-round, half-flat. Out of the question it was to examine it there and then, so he slipped the thing into his coat pocket. A moment later the torch met his fingers.

He stupidly worked the switch up and down, but the smash had been effective. And so he got up again, bruised, wrathful, sightless, and having completely lost his bearings, though since there was but the one way out to above, he need not fear to miss it. He fancied he was by the arch once more—his hand could circle round an upright granite shaft. He had no matches.

Was he inside or outside the burial chamber? He might blindly have repassed through the gap. While he still stood feeling the wall behind him in hesitation, an optical phenomenon began, that quite nonplussed him, although it brought with it no new alarm.

The cavern's blackness was being replaced by a dusky grey, like that of earliest dawn. It revealed nothing, yet neither did it ever give way again to night; on the contrary it seemed if anything to grow brighter. Something apparently was affecting his optic nerves in the way of light, which was not light. There was nothing in this subterranean dungeon from which light could be derived. Cynically, he found it very appropriate to the whole general eccentricity of his being's conduct during this last time.

But then the grey steadily intensified to true light, until he could very dimly discern that he stood just inside the doorway of the extreme chamber, facing the corpse-table from his original post. It was yards away, yet loomed through the luminous grey a solid shape of black, scarcely separable from the other blackness of the wall behind it.

He forgot to breathe, for all at once it was seeming to him that some supernatural thing was about to happen.

He could have declared that a dark recumbent shape, a wrapped human form, was consolidating upon that ancient table of death. If a ghost indeed, it was of quite incomprehensible length.

Also there were associated mysteries. How came the table to look so much further off than he knew it to be in reality? And since there was nothing visible from which to gauge the human length of that phantom shape upon it, what could be his grounds for pronouncing it prodigious? The table itself was no measure, for both ends beyond the shape remained merged in the night of the wall at the back. Yet the impression of a marvellous stature persisted; and his sense of an unreal distance persisted. Thus he must be seeing this wonder with other eyes.

Definitely now the dead form assumed appearance. Its wrapping was a shroud, that yet left parts of the flesh revealed. The drapery continued as black as the table beneath, while the greyness of the intervening air became no brighter, but where there was flesh, it was shining faintly now like a silver moon; with the same white gleaming purity, though far more dimly. It was a woman.

She reposed on her side at full length, her back towards him. One entire arm, from shoulder to finger-tips, the neck, both feet and ankles, nothing else, glimmered there in that distance as if lighted from within; exactly like a lunar lamp shining through the gloom. So might show the after-glory of the dead physical case of a blessed saint.

He found in himself no hardihood to advance in order to view her face.

The stature was incredible, while everything besides that he could distinguish of her was sacred, proud and exquisite. The upper arm, dropped behind her towards the floor, with relaxed taper fingers suspended in air, resembled less a physiological member than a lovely fall of music. The feet were not rigidly set together as in the conventional preparation of the dead, but rested with lifelike naturalness the one above the other; the over one arched; its beautiful and undistorted toes slightly curling. She should be young. He could not question the nobility of her birth. … Yet was she not more of the nature of the angels?

The pale shine of her flesh dulled and faded. So slow was the vanishing, however, that his deep sense of that height of vividness could continue for long moments to reinforce the remaining vision before he grew aware of it. But then the phantasm went in again to nothingness the more swiftly for him; and in the shortest time was no longer there. The table too departed, with the repassage of the cavern's dusk to night. Absolute blackness reigned once more.

He stole bare-headed forth, as from the celebration of a sacrament. He now knew the archway to be at his back.

And as, with feeling outstretched hand and unseeing eyes, he trod unsteadily through the rugged outer cave and succeeding tunnel, he felt that he had laid down his citizenship of the world indeed. Such visitations were not vouchsafed to men having long lives before them.

It was the fourth and last of his strangenesses, and perhaps, when it was granted him to meditate upon it, it would explain the earlier three; and they, it. … Or perhaps he was to be told no more on this side of death. It was significant that her face had been hidden. The possibility of a repetition of the adventure did not as yet occur to him. Afterwards, however, it was too late.

Above, he consulted his watch, to find it not yet seven o'clock.

This upper scene of last evening's destruction recalled Ingrid to his mind. She would want to know what the tomb contained. Yes, she deserved to be informed, for her queer psychic gift. The uneasy presence of that queenly ghost had thrilled the fineness of her nature—but let her go down herself to see. Of the table perhaps he might speak. Of his accident with the torch, certainly; and that would cover all the imperfections of his explanation. He had nearly forgotten, as well, the treasure in his pocket. …

He drew it out. A shock of surprise left him staring at it stupidly, there in his palm.

It was Arsinal's flint—that which he had shown to Helga last night! Yet he had picked it up from the rocky floor in that darkness down below.

His mind travelled without delay to a common-sense explanation of this new mystery, so suddenly sprung upon him on the heels of all the rest; and found one that might pass. The coat he was wearing he had had on with Helga those few hours ago. He was under the strong impression that he had then replaced the stone in its box, but now that could not be so, and he must have slipped it into the side-pocket of this coat. Then when he had stumbled, twisted and come to earth down there just now, the object had jumped from his pocket, and he had refound it, imagining it to be a new find. But the fact could easily be tested when he should get home. If the box were empty then of course it must have happened so. … But if his stone were in the box, this in his hand was its fellow and counterpart!

A train of mental consequences began to spring from both alternatives. If the stone were his own, it was not he that had brought it out to the Tor this morning, but it had brought itself; his accident below was the hand of fate; in retrieving the stone, he had frustrated that mystical purpose. Ought not he to go down again, and restore it to the tomb? ... And then surely he would gain at last his release of death.

It did look so exactly like his own, that if in truth it were not his own, then it must surely be its other half. Thus the attraction across half the world would be explained. The attraction would be occult. The rejoining of the two halves of one original whole must be followed by an incalculable consequence. … It was quite too fantastic to be credited—and yet what could be thought impossible, after the great ghostly glory he had just witnessed?

When, in three-quarters of an hour, he should get back to his room, it would be shown him to which of these two weird lines of imagination he must devote the striving of his remaining understanding. Never had a dawn for him been richer in philosophy, miracle and utter bewilderment than this one. All life, and supersensual life, seemed fast closing in upon him; yet if it were destined that he was by his poverty of nature and world-insignificance to be but the blind instrument of activities lying outside himself, for that too he was prepared.

He returned the flint to his pocket.

So this ancient stairway, lying here at his feet, crowned by the moving white wreaths of the morning, remained open for the visiting of all the vulgar. Advertised conducted trips would appear outside the shop-fronts of the neighbouring towns! It was the ultimate desecration, which nothing that he could do might prevent. A charge of dynamite should wreck it, but how to set about that he knew not; and there was not time. Men, women and children should begin to flock up to-day.

A prolonged low roar of thunder penetrated to his inattentive consciousness—which was not thunder. It came from under the earth, and seemed especially to sound by way of the crack of the stairs. It was an ominous heavy, deep-down rumble, very much like the noise of an express train that should be rushing through a profound tunnel beneath the whole mass of Devil's Tor. He recognised it almost instantly for an earthquake.

Without any sort of alarm, but quietly and quickly, he transferred himself from the immediate vicinity of the stack's torn bed to some little distance away; then sat down on the ground, to await the ensuing physical shock. In England it could not be much.

Five seconds later the hill trembled, just as though heavy seas were bombarding its base, and next began to sway as if he were on the deck of a ship riding on a gentle swell. At so mild a case he smiled unconsciously. Then, however, to rebuke his sapience, came a sharp, vicious stomach-lifting wrench, that was like nothing else than some subterranean attempt to split the Tor. He was sent sprawling. A visible fissure in the earth north and south of the staircase aperture, extending it at both ends by yards long and inches wide, was celebrated by such a terrific din inside the bowels of the hill, that he could have imagined all the damned in hell to be in mutiny! ...

He pulled himself to his feet, retreated further still from the seat of the shock, and again sought the ground.

The second wave came from the reverse direction. In place of worsening the fissure already broken, it again hurled its sides together, to form a new continuity of earth and rock. Nor had its violence ceased at that, for where originally, but those few minutes ago, there had been level ground, was now a raised ridge. The stairway itself seemed intact, as he could best make it out while once more rising to his height to look. He had been rolled over again, but not hurt. The shocks should be ended. Peace had returned to the Tor.

He moved over to the stairs, to satisfy himself that they were still serviceable. The first drop remained good; below that, all was so tightly jammed by the coming together of the granite walls, that not a mouse could have got through to underneath. Indeed it was impossible that there could still be a tomb to reach, for those caverns and their approach must surely have been flattened out of existence by a force that could clap together solid upper walls of rock like so much pulp. The interior shock would not be less, but greater. An engineer, with drills, explosive, and a gang of men, could never undertake the hopeless folly of a penetration along the line of the chimney. It was a marvellous interposition.