The Silver Bough (10 page)

His heart was pounding so strongly that his chest could not expand enough to hold all the air it needed. It was getting on for midsummer, and the sun did set late, what with extra summer time. Despite a low bank of grey-blue cloud, edged with salmon-pink, he could in fact see that the sun had just set. Had it, for one moment, pierced a veil, an interstice, and cast a weak shadow, slantwise, towards the point they were working on?

He walked to the stone and stood beside it, staring at the colour from the vanished sun. Turning, he looked back. As a stone circle it wasn't impressive; little more indeed than a ghost-hedge of modest-sized stones except for the tall one in the south-west; but it, he decided as he was drawn towards it, must be all of ten feet high. Then suddenly he realised that when the sun was setting in the southwest, poised on the edge of the ocean, it should cast the shadow of this tall monolith so that its tip would land a little to the right of the upright in the peristalith where he had stopped working. Would the entrance be there? From the entrance, would the sun be seen, when about to set, as a great golden ball sitting on top of the stone—and sending its shadow like a phallic symbol, into the passage? Mid-winter and the dying Sun god—touching the Earth-goddess of fertility!

Gorged with excitement, he put a hand against the stone, and his fingers, pressing the hard gritty surface, brought the strength of the stone into him. Glancing up its breadth to the top, he then had another illusion; he thought that certain curves, whorls, had a human semblance. This, of course, was pure phantasy, because it was completely and obviously an undressed slab. There were whorls of lichen, and there were lines—perhaps weathered, flaked—but, as he faced the monolith squarely from a little distance, he recognised sensibly that there was nothing intentionally human about it, not even in the outward swelling into hump-like shoulders a few feet from the top. He swore that this was perfectly clear. He laughed—and was suddenly silenced by his own sound. He turned and walked back to the cairn. These intuitive glimpses that always landed him in a mess!

He sat down on the cairn by the covered cist. The reality of the cist should keep him sober! he thought, with erratic humour. He looked back at the monolith—and held its stare. Remarkable the power of a stone—for how many civilisations over what immense periods of time! It had never struck him as it did now how extraordinarily remarkable this was. He thought of the Maya civilisation, with its terrific stone monuments—the most advanced Stone Age culture that the world had known, now lost, overgrown, in the malarial jungles, the impassable forests, of Central America. Trust America to do things even then on a large scale! he thought in an effort to relieve his mental stress. And all at once he heard Sheena ask her granny if the Stone walked about at night. Looking at the monolith again he saw that it was not the stone that walked but the spirit which was locked up in it. The spirit left the stone and strode over the moors, through many places, past silent houses, came back and was locked up once more and inscrutably . . . Because this was an “impossible” notion, had they in time changed it to an urisk that lived in the cairn? The human accretion . . .

But this was too much, for whole theories now beset him of life, death and after-life in all the religions of the world. Out of this vast spirit jungle, the Maya jungle stood out as something physically clear and tangible, and then in a moment—as if Martin all the time had been pursuing him—he had again the concept of Martin's mind as a jungle, but now he saw that as a jungle it was not alive, it was dead; the contorted branches, the twisting creepers, the very snakes, were dead. He actually had a forest image of this, and it was strangely horrible. It was the end of mind, like an end of the world.

He stirred by the cist, put a hand over it to make a contact. He had seen the two figures, in sleep's illusion, on the floor of his bedroom, alive. Life. The sun and its long shadow from the stone. Sex as the sun's shadow. The sun's warmth and life . . . The warmth of Mrs Cameron, of the welcome he got, the care. That kind of eternal household where life was. Anna and Sheena . . . why had Mrs Sidbury walked out of the room?

In an instant, his mind intuitively encompassed inner meanings from the inflection of Mrs Cameron s voice to all the things he had never quite heard, and he knew, as clearly as though Mrs Cameron had just finished her interrupted story, that Martin was the father of Anna's child.

He stood quite still. Mrs Sidbury had abruptly left the room when he had drawn the parallel between the two skeletons in the cist and Anna and Sheena . . . She obviously was abnormally taken up with her brother's condition. She would not want him to marry Anna—possibly for more than social reasons. Yet if Anna and Sheena were to depart this life in the way he had suggested the two skeletons in the cist had done, the effect on Martin might be such that—she had not dared think of it, had got up and left the room . . . something really desperate must have happened to Martin . . . .

H
e struck the passage to the chambers in the cairn on Monday afternoon. On Sunday he had taken an imaginary line from the setting sun at mid-winter over the top of the standing stone with the shoulders to a spot on the cairn which did in fact prove to be the entrance. This culmination to an intense period of theoretic activity did not allay his excitement, and all unknowing he answered Andie in his own tongue when that ardent employee grew vocal at sight of the first flat slab. Besides, the dent in the curve of the orthostats was now beyond doubt, and though revealed only in one short section, it was yet enough for him to estimate the whole length of the dent. Moreover, the orthostats towards the centre of this inward curve grew taller and reached their greatest height in two that, like doorposts, flanked the passage. A fine symmetrical bit of work. No rushing now! He measured and jotted down findings and notes. The cultivated instincts of the field-worker held back the central attack on the passage with a self-denial that was an active delight.

At last everything was ready for the lifting of the flat slab that was the obvious cover or lintel to the low passage. All three of them got round it; heaved it up and over. Even Grant laughed at Andie's open-mouthed dismay, for there was nothing underneath but loose stones as if the cairn had poured in there. “No skeletons!” he rallied him with great jocularity. Andie's reactions were always slow, and now in his jerky way he looked at his employer and looked at his mother and couldn't quite make it all out. “Gu—gu—?” “Ga!” replied Grant; “You wait! We'll get some fine bright things for you yet!” Then Andie's face creased up in its silent laugh that all but closed the small round eyes and emphasised the pink in the lower eyelids.

When the loose stones, which the slab had covered, were removed Grant found on either side the coursed walls of dry-stone masonry upon which the outer edges of the slab had rested. The height of the passage was barely three feet and the width half-a-foot less, but he did not wait to measure, for the passage continued to be blocked, and the next lintel had actually fallen in. This meant a renewed attack on the cairn above; a long tedious job, at which all three of them worked until the archaeologist's fingers were on fire. But in the end they triumphed, and although they could not lift out the lintel, they were able so to angle it that Grant, flashing his torch up the dark hole of the passage, saw that he could go ahead.

“You wait here” he ordered them, “until I come back.” Then slipping down onto all fours, he left them a vision of his heels.

His beam of light shot along the dark low passage, but he went ahead slowly, examining the walls and particularly the lintels, with care. When he focused the slit between two uprights which must be the entrance to the chamber itself, his breathing grew more laboured and a trickle of sweat made him pause to clear his eyes, for he had fancied he saw a ghostly head guarding the doorway. But it was no ghost; it was a skull. He went on trying to keep his eye on it, but this was difficult, for the beam of light was continuously moving with the movement of his hand which had to act as a forefoot. But at last he was almost beneath it and as he stopped and angled the beam full upon it, it frowned at him with an almost visible gathering of eyebrows. The effect was striking. He had never seen a skull look with such concentrated anger. The beam of light travelled up; the roof had receded; he could stand. So he stood and put the beam fair on the skull at eye level. Then he smiled. The beam travelled down to the limb bones leaning against the wall. Extraordinary! he thought. For the skull had obviously been poised on an edging of stone to the right of the upright. On closer examination he saw that a piece of stone had been hacked off to give it room. Moreover it was tilted forward slightly, which explained its effect of meeting the living eye at a lower level. A real artist was on this job, he decided, careful not to touch anything, for a flashlight photograph from the spot where his eye had first encountered it should be decidedly interesting! After examining the bone structure of the eyebrows with particular care, he slowly flashed his light around, and then passed in between the uprights, which were hardly more than eighteen inches apart. But here was no more than a small ante-chamber, and only when he had again passed between uprights did he enter a chamber some twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and seven feet high. Its walls consisted of broad uprights with coursed masonry between, which supported a roof of three huge undressed slabs that seemed to bulge menacingly down on the slim figure who moved the questing beam of light.

A stillness, a faint charnel smell, and the beam was among the bones of the floor. They lay about in a riot. They had been trampled upon and scattered. The dome of a skull lay in a corner like a ball at rest. Picking his steps he moved to the centre of the chamber and, stooping, inspected the ashes of a wood fire. Slowly he cast about him, touching, picking up. Many animal bones. Two axes, one with a reground edge. A calcined flint barbed arrowhead. A spearhead of flint three inches long. Many of the bones were partly burnt. A thin disc of talc with two holes near the edge. A fragment of pottery with ornamentation—like thumbnail marks in a row. His fingers caressingly felt the texture of the dark-red gritty ware before putting the fragment in his pocket. Another fragment. A third, too large for a pocket . . . . But he had now passed outside time.

Erect again, he cast the beam around and saw, what he had already seen, that this was not the only chamber. Passing between the two uprights on the west side, he entered a shorter chamber narrowing slightly towards the end wall, below which three skeletons lay side by side, fully extended. There were few signs of disorder here, but again only fragments of pottery, like those already found. But there were a couple of scrapers, three bone implements which interested him closely, leaf-shaped arrowheads and flint flakes . . . .

He came back into the centre chamber with the solemn face of a sleepwalker whose eyes glittered and vanished as the beam swept upward and on. His feet followed the circle of light on the floor and he stood in the east chamber. At once, as if magically drawn to it, the beam shone full on a complete vase. Forgetting to pick his steps, he stumbled on a hammer stone and the light circled drunkenly, but it came back to the vase, before which he reverently got down on his knees. Because he was greatly moved now, he was careful, and unknowingly muttered, “Leathery Atlantic”, with that air of conviction which yet held a note of reservation finely responsible. He studied the ornamentation that went round the vase in bands. “Like the edge of a limpet shell,” he whispered. “Finger-nail again. . . .” Then he touched it, caught its rim, tilted it on its rounded bottom, and something rattled softly inside. The very sound of the rattle declared the vase to be whole. “It's whole,” he intoned. “It's intact.” The eye of the torch looked inside and white quartz pebbles looked back. Just pebbles, five white polished pebbles, and two with red markings. He looked at them in his cupped hands and shook his head. Merely mystery, pure mystery, and he was touched by an incommunicable grace of young womanhood in games, of bright young life . . . . He put the pebbles back, lifted his torch, and a skull smiled.

Simon Grant knew that at first there is always something sinister in the smile of a skull, but after a time, when the mind has got used to this sinister element that dogs our bones, it can penetrate beyond to the spirit behind the domino, the allure to that which is known but never quite found, however eager and bright the immortal glance.

The skull, cocked up on the leg bones, looked over the edge of the pelvic girdle not without a certain residual dignity, an element of guardianship, of surveying the scene. The humour of this was profound, and still, and almost questioning. Had the body been placed seated against the wall, and the skull, like a fallen fruit, taken up its new position in the potent centre of man's strange anatomy? The very stones behind threw a momentary suggestion of design, of an arched frame, before the beam moved and picked up five skulls in a row . . . .

He pulled himself erect outside and blinked in the astonishing brightness of the sun so that for a moment or two the world took on a peculiar arrestment, a knowingness that was not a smile but was for him alone. The idiot's gaping face was mythological, the woman's closed face was alone in time. Then Andie broke into shambling movement and sound, and Grant perceived that Mrs Mackenzie had had some trouble keeping him outside.

“Have I been long?” he asked and looked at his watch. “Half-past six!” He put his watch to his ear. “Good heavens!” He laughed.

“Gu—gu——?”

“Yes, yes! I'll take you in next time. Look, Mrs Mackenzie,” he said with impressive earnestness, “we must hide this opening somehow. There are days of work inside. Nobody must
ever
know, not until I'm finished . . . .”

They sealed it simply enough with a few artfully placed stones.

But at home, even after much writing, he could not subdue his excitement, his restlessness. The chambers were now in his brain as he moved about the floor, and when he stopped they swelled into their own size and he saw himself move about in them. They had the nature of a perfect illusion, yet they were real. He had come to Clachar thinking only in terms of a possible report for publication by a certain distinguished antiquarian society! For moments he was lost in a profound quietism.

It was out of one of those moments that he awoke to find himself regarding with a steady detachment the arch-like pattern of stones behind the skull in the east chamber. Had he been deceived? Stones took on such fantastic shapes in the travelling beam attended by its shadows, and his interest had been immediately taken up by that peculiar arrangement of skulls like an audience or bodyguard. Were they in fact guarding
something
? Had an intelligence so placed them . . . ?

His restlessness overcame him and, like a conspirator, he listened and peered out of the window. It was getting late and he must not be seen. Slipping the long torch into an inside pocket, he went quietly out and strolled towards the byre. From the byre he drifted away and crossed the stream, and, once round the rock, increased his pace.

The cairn was silent in the soft grey light. The wind had fallen. The sea was flat and vacant and the islands had settled down for the night. A gull cried from the cliffs, a sinking cavernous cry.

When he had removed the stones from the entrance to the passage, he paused to look around. Everything was quiet, including the monolith in the southwest, which was so still in its regard that he smiled back and even raised his hand a little way in salute. Then he disappeared.