CHAPTER XVII
THE MIDNIGHT ASCENT AND FLIGHT
THE darkness at first set the whole sense of touch on the alert; it seemed black and solid as a prison wall. But the eyes soon focussed the sparse rays of starlight and massed objects into clots of night. The shadow of dreams still hung about my senses, as if sleep had not wholly fled. The trees and rocks we passed seemed rather to move past me. I was weary and languid, and every object and motion took feverish proportions. It was a world as strange and gruesome as if I had followed Dante into hell.
On I stumbled after my guide. I scarcely knew how or whither we went, nor cared I much. It was a life drugged with night that I was living. Between thick walls of darkness faintly parted overhead by a dim line of starshot grey we filed; ghosts we might have been but for the clang of stones beneath our feet, or the screech of some night-bird startled from his nest. There was little underlife in these islands to fear lurking in the shadows or thickets; they had too recently purged themselves of monstrous or snaky traces of the earlier features of the world in the all-cleansing bosom of the ocean. Only winged existence or human with its trans-elemental powers had found its way into these secluded survivals of an ancient world baptised and rebaptised in the obliterative sea.
Thoughts like these chased from sense to sense the dreamy fears of shapes and noises that formed and vanished in the night. Monsters crept back and forth out of the caverns of the blackness. Low yells and shrieks and groans just eluded the power of hearing; echoes of them faintly haunted the silences. Dim foreshadowings of horrors about to be born struck my senses with obscene wing; ghostly adumbrations of forms I had seen in dreams floated round me. Phantoms of the dead and of the unborn filled the hollows of my brain. I had no safety but in madly rushing on in the footsteps of my guide.
He doubtless heard the ringing echo of my advance, for he never turned to look, athirst though I was for a human word or the glance of an eye. He seemed to know every step of the labyrinthian path. Upwards did it climb at last; I grew giddy as it snaked and twisted and spiralled athwart the face of former landslips, along the edge of cliffs, beneath it Avernian gloom yawning, up the rugged bed of hissing streams, across the bouldered blackness of still pools, or the shifting gleam of a hoarse torrent, ever up with forests here and there or great walls of rock shouldering the starlight from them.
Sneekape never rested or stayed; ahead of me he darkened or vanished like a spirit of the night. My imaginary fears gave me speed and endurance and a lightning-swift instinct to shun real dangers. By day I should have been drunk with the dizzy steeps or black-hearted chasms we skirted.
Hours must have passed in this terror-goaded ascent, when suddenly we stood on a broad platform that overhung the sea. Far below us as it pulsed I could see the phosphoric shimmer of its discontent. In the shadow of a clump of trees we sat down to rest on a fallen giant of the woods. I was conscious of human life upon the level; the air was restless with sounds and motion it but half absorbed; and, when the eyes grew accustomed to the half-light of the stars hoarded between sea and sky, they discerned dark masses shift, and vanish against the stellar distance.
We had our backs to the cone of Klimarol, and by degrees I came to feel that there was other light in the air than that of the sky or sea. I looked up and saw the stars blotted out above the peak and in their place a lurid gleam that threw the unearthly glimmer, which I had been conscious of for some time, into the interjacent night. And up the slope between the broad ledge we sat on and the cloud reflector, there rushed like a funeral car a gloomy mass lit with the murky wind-sucked flame of a torch. I saw it reach the lip of the broken cone and disappear. This was the nocturnal incineration of Tirralarian débris and dead.