A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay [guided reading books TXT] 📗

four full paces. Spadevil confronted him, erect, and waited tranquilly.

The huge stone hurtled through the air. Its flight looked like a dark shadow. It struck Spadevil full in the face, crushing his features, and breaking his neck. He died instantaneously.

Tydomin looked away from the fallen man.

“Be very quick, Maskull, and don’t let me keep him waiting.”

He panted, and raised the second stone. She placed herself in front of Spadevil’s body, and stood there, unsmiling and cold.

The blow caught her between breast and chin, and she fell. Maskull went to her, and, kneeling on the ground, half-raised her in his arms. There she breathed out her last sighs.

After that, he laid her down again, and rested heavily on his hands, while he peered into the dead face. The transition from its heroic, spiritual expression to the vulgar and grinning mask of Crystalman came like a flash; but he saw it.

He stood up in the darkness, and pulled Catice toward him.

“Is that the true likeness of Shaping?”

“It is Shaping stripped of illusion.”

“How comes this horrible world to exist?”

Catice did not answer.

“Who is Surtur?”

“You will get nearer to him tomorrow; but not here.”

“I am wading through too much blood,” said Maskull. “Nothing good can come of it.”

“Do not fear change and destruction; but laughter and joy.”

Maskull meditated.

“Tell me, Catice. If I had elected to follow Spadevil, would you really have accepted his faith?”

“He was a great-souled man,” replied Catice. “I see that the pride of our men is only another sprouting-out of pleasure. Tomorrow I too shall leave Sant, to reflect on all this.”

Maskull shuddered. “Then these two deaths were not a necessity, but a crime!”

“His part was played and henceforward the woman would have dragged down his ideas, with her soft love and loyalty. Regret nothing, stranger, but go away at once out of the land.”

“Tonight? Where shall I go?”

“To Wombflash, where you will meet the deepest minds. I will put you on the way.”

He linked his arm in Maskull’s, and they walked away into the night. For a mile or more they skirted the edge of the precipice. The wind was searching, and drove grit into their faces. Through the rifts of the clouds, stars, faint and brilliant, appeared. Maskull saw no familiar constellations. He wondered if the sun of Earth was visible, and if so which one it was.

They came to the head of a rough staircase, leading down the cliffside. It resembled the one by which he had come up; but this descended to the Wombflash Forest.

“That is your path,” said Catice, “and I shall not come any farther.”

Maskull detained him. “Say just this, before we part company⁠—why does pleasure appear so shameful to us?”

“Because in feeling pleasure, we forget our home.”

“And that is⁠—”

“Muspel,” answered Catice.

Having made this reply, he disengaged himself, and, turning his back, disappeared into the darkness.

Maskull stumbled down the staircase as best he could. He was tired, but contemptuous of his pains. His uninjured probe began to discharge matter. He lowered himself from step to step during what seemed an interminable time. The rustling and sighing of the trees grew louder as he approached the bottom; the air became still and warm.

He at last reached level ground. Still attempting to proceed, he began to trip over roots, and to collide with tree trunks. After this had happened a few times, he determined to go no farther that night. He heaped together some dry leaves for a pillow, and immediately flung himself down to sleep. Deep and heavy unconsciousness seized him almost instantly.

XIII The Wombflash Forest

He awoke to his third day on Tormance. His limbs ached. He lay on his side, looking stupidly at his surroundings. The forest was like night, but that period of the night when the grey dawn is about to break and objects begin to be guessed at, rather than seen. Two or three amazing shadowy shapes, as broad as houses, loomed up out of the twilight. He did not realise that they were trees, until he turned over on his back and followed their course upward. Far overhead, so high up that he dared not calculate the height, he saw their tops glittering in the sunlight, against a tiny patch of blue sky.

Clouds of mist, rolling over the floor of the forest, kept interrupting his view. In their silent passage they were like phantoms flitting among the trees. The leaves underneath him were sodden, and heavy drops of moisture splashed onto his head from time to time.

He continued lying there, trying to reconstruct the events of the preceding day. His brain was lethargic and confused. Something terrible had happened, but what it was he could not for a long time recollect. Then suddenly there came before his eyes that ghastly closing scene at dusk on the Sant plateau⁠—Spadevil’s crushed and bloody features and Tydomin’s dying sighs.⁠ ⁠… He shuddered convulsively, and felt sick.

The peculiar moral outlook that had dictated these brutal murders had departed from him during the night, and now he recognised what he had done! During the whole of the previous day he seemed to have been labouring under a series of heavy enchantments. First Oceaxe had enslaved him, then Tydomin, then Spadevil, and lastly Catice. They had forced him to murder and violate; he had guessed nothing, but had imagined that he was travelling as a free and enlightened stranger. What was this nightmare journey for⁠—and would it continue, in the same way?⁠ ⁠…

The silence of the forest was so intense that he heard no sound except the pumping of blood through his arteries.

Putting his hand to his face, he found that his remaining probe had disappeared and that he was in possession of three eyes. The third eye was on his forehead, where the old sorb had been. He could not guess its use. He still had his third arm, but it was nerveless.

Now he puzzled his head for a long time, trying unsuccessfully to recall that name which had been