Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

Paul Armstrong had tracked memory from its earliest dawn till now. The pictured image of himself he had so long followed in fancy drew closer, until he and it merged into each other, and the shade and he were one.

He had listened all day for the accustomed clangour of the trains, and had heard nothing. The brown-red smoke-fog had grown denser and more dense, and now it stung throat and eyes with its acrid and pungent atoms. The air was thick and hot, and objects only a score of yards away were but just visible. The runnel at the tent-door had barely a voice of its own. Paul guessed rightly that its course lay through a tract of forest fire, and that the greater part of its volume had evaporated in the heat. The river in the gorge plunged and thundered. The night came down, and a blind glare of dull red seemed to show itself above, revealing nothing else. For the first time since the forest fires had begun to smoulder, the dead air took a sense of motion. It stirred with a long, sluggish heave, and brought with it a dreadful heat, and a noise altogether disproportionate to the pace at which it moved—the sound of a mighty tempest. It breathed fitfully, heavily, and as if with labour; but at every breath it blew a fervent heat along, and at every breath there rose the same threatening roar of sound. There was something massive and ponderous in this strange noise. It was as if a sea in unmeasured storm were billowing nearer and nearer. And surely that red glow was brightening. The trunks of giant trees were silhouetted on it.

Then with one slow heave, beginning like a sigh, but gathering in pace, the wind awoke, and in one minute it blew a hurricane. And with it came a voice—the voice of league on league of smouldering forest leaping into a roar of flame. The air burned with a sudden crimson. The monstrous noise of the torrent was drowned, and went unheard. The wind, with a sudden access of its force, was sucked along the valley by the amazing indraught of the fire, and it raged past him with such violence as to bring him to his knees. The smoke, which had hung without form through so many days, was ripped and twisted and dragged and beaten into a thousand writhing and tormented shapes. They went hurling down the wind as if that unspeakable voice of the parent fire had called them, and there were nothing for it but this mad answer to the appeal.

It seemed impossible that the roaring noise should augment itself, and yet it grew and grew and grew—Niagara twenty-fold, Niagara fifty-fold, Niagara a hundred-fold. The eye discerned more and more as the wind cleared the air, and at last the panorama stood revealed in horrid splendour. On either side the canon the lower hills were all aflame. They tossed aloft pyramids of brightness; they burned dull-red in sheltered hollows; they flared fantastically on open heights; they brightened and darkened with mile-long undulations, and swift shudderings from blind black to blinding white, and then from that supreme of light to black again. These changes were wrought with dazzling swiftness. A flame which writhed over many acres flapped like the loosened end of a sail and vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and before the watcher could have cried out that it was gone, flaunted itself again at the sky, which overhung it like an inverted bowl of red-hot copper.

The fire displayed a myriad inequalities in the landscape which were unseen in open day. It scaled ridge after ridge, and each in turn stood out against the blackness of the mountain on which an instant before it had seemed to nestle closely. It charged each acclivity with appalling strength, but there were times when the assaulting line wavered,-and retired as if the walls of darkness held a living force which had at times the power to beat it down. Then with a rush the height was carried; hell’s victorious banner floated over one more conquered citadel, and the roar of triumph deepened.

At times the fire seemed to carve the darkness like a knife wielded swiftly by some invisible giant hand. At times, catching the face of some lofty wooded cliff, it soared up like a rocket and left a trailing line which faded wholly as if the night had been triumphant there and had won back a portion of its invaded ground.

For hours there did not seem a moment at which the watcher’s life was worth purchase at a pin’s fee, but the wind flawed madly here and there, and as if by constantly recurring miracle he stood safe. Tarred on by the wind, the fire climbed from sunset to near dawn. It climbed until it reached the feet of the eternal snows. Then one insulted mountain loosed an avalanche, and then another and another, until the incredible cones of fire were ridged with black.

Paul Armstrong threw himself upon the ground and slept when the fires were miles and miles away. He awoke after many hours with an aching sense of light upon his eyes. The sun was high already, and the skies were clear. The valley and the mountains lay before him bare and black, with many spirals of dove-coloured smoke rising thinly here and there. And the man thought within himself:

‘After great mischief, peace. In a single year the fire-weed will have made this waste a fairy-land. The time will come when there will be left no token of this desolation. Nature endures no lasting loss, and is the soul less vital?’

And he believed the things it was ordained that he should believe, and he bowed his head in prayer with tears of penitence and self-abasement.