Goose of Hermogenes (8 page)

I open my veins to the east I open the veins of my arm with the cut of a sliver of silicon. Blood pours out from the left flows out till it reaches the sea goes on flowing pours inexhaustible through the inexhaustible sea without chafe or pause till it surrounds the island a line veining marble a red line in the green sea taut from my arm making a long arm to his home circling the island a ribbon of stain in the foam unmixing like a rusty chain to bind him in binding his home so he never can go nor a boat’s prow cut through a crown renewed without end of mercurial metal from far-away gap whence it flows only his tooth could mend the gap whence it flows only his tongue lick up the stream at its source only his tooth and his tongue.

‘In the wood of wonder her fountain sings.’
The Magical Aphorisms of Eugenius Philalethes.

Next day I persuaded the Anchorite to come walking with me in the same neighbourhood. The coast-scenery was so fine that presently we stopped to look at it, gazing across a bay to the far side where a line of jagged cliffs rose against the horizon.

‘A year or two ago,’ said the Anchorite, ‘a girl and I were walking along this road. There was a springtide, gone down very low, as it has to-day; and as we looked across at that rocky shoal in the distance, we saw the towers and spires of a Gothic cathedral rising above it. The tide had gone out so far that this cathedral, normally submerged, was plainly visible.’

While the Anchorite was speaking I looked out over the expanse of the bay, and could almost behold the faintly-discernible architecture that he described. Outlined against the sky, it appeared distinctly to the mind’s eye at least; and I could imagine that it had taken but little carving of the rocks from which it grew, to turn nature into art.

The Anchorite did not tell me who the girl was.

‘Just where we are,’ he went on, ‘the coast is so formed that the water can’t ebb as far as it does from the opposite side of the bay. It’s about dead-low now, and as you can see, there are only two or three hundred yards of sand between the road and the water. Well, as I was telling you, we were staring at the cathedral, which is hardly ever uncovered, when a lady stepped out of the sea quite near us. She appeared just where the sand dividing us from the water was narrowest, that is, about opposite where we are now. She was tall and fair and dressed in a robe of yellow silk, the colour between orange and lemon. She came towards us, and we walked over the wet sand to meet her.’

My eyes had come back from across the bay and were now concentrated upon the waveless touch of the nearer sea and shore. I could all but see the yellow-clad figure standing at the water’s edge; and it seemed to me that there must have been other of her people – sea-men and sea-women, with her or not far behind, though the Anchorite said nothing about them.

‘She spoke to us,’ he continued (and I could almost hear the sea-woman’s voice), ‘telling us her name was Vellanserga, and inviting us to go with her into the cathedral. I refused; but the girl went, and was never heard of again.’

I knew that if the same invitation had been offered to me, I too would have accepted; and it showed how completely the Anchorite’s movements were in subjection to my Uncle’s service, that he had not done so.

Seeing that I was engrossed in meditation on his tale, the Anchorite withdrew.

Storm is in the air, but distant. Does it echo, or threaten? Is the air weighted by the melancholy of a tempest subsiding, or the anxious hush that precedes its first assault?

On the sea floats a head in profile, of heroic traits, a collar of violets encircling the severed neck. The flaxen hair, once looped-up, is now spread upon a watery surface, and tilted by recurring small waves. Some distant storm, surely, tore this head from a ship’s prow; and the wood still bleeds, oozing a purple growth.

The salty taste of blood, I mused, comes from the sea, which being without colour, reflects a tint from the air above while turning its red globes into sea-anemones; but blood has kept these as a dye.

Here is the end of the land and the beginning of a country under the sea; an impalpable region stretches over the last of the earth and extends a long way under water. It is said that our starvation is their plenty; that in time of war here, down there reigns the deepest peace.

In a douce air above stones and soil, one is not alone; mist is blown out towards a silvered horizon, nothing perishes. Sometimes there is a thickening, and a growing menace.

Round coastal rocks flows a true water, the authentic Atlantide. It is not the peacock that divides two continents, shrill-voiced but never terrible; nor that narrow and more deceptive iris strait; nor yet the electric blue sweeping from Teneriffe to Tory, though a swish from the tail of the same dragon.

Under granite the saints lie buried; here a monument measured to human form still stands, there a tree takes shape from the bones beneath, an honourable vessel. In yet earlier rock there pulses an ancient sensual life, but the saints must be roused up first. Their diadems are bright with Sunday flowers, already they lift head and shoulders from their covering slabs. When they come alive and walk their own realm, the kingdom of vegetation, then blood of beasts must warm the older stones and power will wake from a deeper cave.

Men must be sacrificed then, but those who feed upon them do not want their flesh – they are eaters of dreams. The powers of the sky are hungry and only men can fill them. They desire the direction of their four main streams.

I turn inland, not noticing where I go, and come suddenly upon a structure, half barn, half grotto, peopled with a pallid statuary, relict of ancient prows. Immediately before me rises a tall figure, a great woman, full Hesper, water in the curves of her heavy hair, in the massive folds of her clothing, in the acanthus-like foliage of the scrolls that support her – a wave breaking into leaf. Her eyes, hypnotised by the pole-star, see further than eyes with sight, for they meet both sky and ocean, empty of all but the moment that endures. Her gaze is intent upon an ever receding horizon, her posture stretches towards a region impossibly remote, an undiscoverable time. She is the type of the hero-woman, both mother and warrior, debased long since as Britannia, but stemming from the ancient line of foundered Atlantis.

Here in a sea-Valhalla, its walls encrusted with shells, are found her sisters; many are not heads merely, but forward-straining bodies too, mightily draped. All have a family resemblance, all reflect our sea-mother’s noble features.

Before one of them, the seared amazon of antiquity comes to mind, for hazard has shorn away one of her breasts, and the scar is whitened now like the rest of her body by recent painting. Another figure, the central one of the tableau, seems ready to take flight from between two carved winds who, crouching to her left and right on a throne of cloud, blow from distended cheeks, while above her hangs a frieze of lightning and cumulus. Some are fully-coloured, some altogether whitened, some white with faded washes of colour or traces of gold. Their dress recalls that of the queens on playing-cards, four directresses of destiny armed and resplendent. Some touch heart or brow with a rose, petals that resist both wind and tide. If it were not for the small feet or sometimes the shoulders – echo of mermaid-torso – which hold these figures of adventure back, attaching them to object and present – that unseen ship which yet moves, sways with the flux, disintegrated though seemingly solid – they would dash onwards in unending foam-like career. Head tossed upward, neck outstretched, and breast swelling with a double air – the lung’s breath and the oncoming breeze – all declare it. What vision has parted these eyelids, fixed these pupils, carved these smiles of ecstacy, dishevelled these massive tresses, filled these bosoms, bent these spines like a bow, frozen this whole?

The sea’s voice, almost out of earshot, is heard only as in the ear of a shell; and the sole water visible is an oblong tank, clear but black, which reflects a pod-like column bursting with strange fruit and unconcealing leaves. The women, their backs to the sea, look now towards that garden where trumpet-flowers and tree-labelias remind them of some exotic shore.

But I have explored it already, and though the other day I could not find it when I looked for it, to-day I have no desire to enter. Still bemused by the gaze of the statue-woman, I cannot but search for her everywhere; and I find her in the land’s own long memory.

She overthrew the Norsemen, she melted the Romans down. It was she who led the people. She fought on the hill of stones, she wore the tunic of battle, she wielded the sword, she rode. A breastplate of stone and glass covers her egg-ribs; and it is said that small living creatures dwell within, but she can scarcely comprehend their gnat-like life.

Vellanserga weeps, her valley fills. She comes from the land-under-wave remembering the summer fires lighted in her honour and her train of young worshippers, girls and boys with fiery hair. But at full moon she is delighted; stone maidens wake and dance, notes jet from two or three giant pipes to the south-east somewhere by her knees, and from the north-west near her elbows are answered. Her bones become flutes. On the anniversary of her feast she stirs, sighs, half turns over, struggles to awake.

At the dark of every moon Vellanserga bleeds. Her quick is hidden by a cloven bud overgrown with root-like tendrils, strawberry-red like a huge rose-gall; and by day an intoxicant juice is exuded drop by drop from the grotte below. Above the bush of rootlets a stem pushes up, with numbers of small tassels sprouting from it like greenish flowers, and by night this wick gives out an incandescent vapour – the colonist surmounting her left shoulder sees a distant glow in the hollow – and the organs are shaded by canopies of enormous leaves, each six-feet square and supported on a stalk scattered over with red barbs.

On a flat space of ground an oblong is marked out with sticks and a cord, a sacred enclosure. Phantom walls arise; her daughter dances there with a dark acrobat in magnetic embrace. Impalpable wires swing them out to the planets, cords and poles hang through space; and now, their breast-bones touching, they glide in the air, their limbs’ action springing from a single centre. On paths drawn by the sea-gull they plunge and sway.

The other daughter goes down to a beach made of broken shells; what strange light is there, it is neither day nor night. The sea is calm, stretches away; on the wet sand there stands the skeleton of a tower. A few scaffold-poles rise upward, and others are held across them with rope. They wait. She calls to the king of fishes.

On the slope of Vellanserga’s right thigh a ghost sometimes appears painfully at dusk, and horses shy on one of her arterial roads. Down the middle of her body goes a slim furrow furred with shrubs, marking the course of her stream towards the sea. Her navel is a pool of water-lilies; from her armpit evening-primroses sprout. On the haunted bend by the mill is shown the sanctuary where she lived as a saint, and on her demesne are found other view-cells and a healing well. Vellanserga sleeps; the thickening of her coma is mist.

From her left side juts one of her ribs, a headed stone; on the front is sketched a cross, on the back an indecipherable poem in ogham is inscribed. This marks the entrance to her chapel, now only foundations. Ferns cover the mouldered walls, a single column remains at the centre. The east is wanting the pelvic arch, the white egg-cell, the lamp-ichor; north and south lack aromatic fume and the candles’ waxen glow.

‘Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé
Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine
Avarement aura noyé
Le flanc enfant d’une siréne.’

–
Mallarmé.