We consulted together over the strange occurrence, and determined to search the fiord for traces of the winged thing that flashed out at our shots. Before we had gone far, we found a pair of huge fans that had drifted into one of the frequent channels amongst the rocks. They were not of feathers, but of some strong, transparent, and almost weightless material that did not wilt in the sun or the wet. We lifted them, and there hung by them dragging in the water filmy strings like the long tentacles of a medusa. We cut them adrift, and bore the strange wing-like floats up to our cliff. Each of them seemed to move on a pivot with ease, and almost rose on the gentle breeze into which the storm had now died. After full examination of them, we laid them far back in the cavern, which we used as our storehouse and larder, and thought no more about them.
We cooked and ate our morning meal, and then spread out over the bush that overlooked the waters of the sound, forgetful of the stranger whom we had left in one of our huts. We were in search of gold, and, having found faint traces of it on the small, fan-like beaches that intervalled the sheer precipices on our side, we had been prospecting several months for the alluvial pocket or the reef from which the glittering specks had wandered down. The following week we were rewarded with success; but, as we have no desire to have our noble solitude disturbed by the noise of a frenzied, gambling crowd,—we are but woodmen and sealers and photographers to the outside world when it intrudes in the shape of tourists,—I shall not mention at present the name of the New Zealand fiord in which we live.
I was working up a watercourse, panning the sand and dirt that lay in the crevices and occasional levels, at times startled by a weka that impudently slid through the undergrowth and eyed me close at hand, or by the harsh call of the kea, as it flew from some resting-place and circled in the air. Rudely awakened from my absorption, I looked out on the marvellous scene that lay at my feet; precipice towered over precipice, often forest-clad from base to summit. Almost sheer below me slept the waters of the sound, landlocked as if it were a lake. Only the indignant cry of the kea, or the weka’s raucous whistle, or the echo of a distant avalanche ever broke the silence of this solitary land. Never did it cease to throw its shadow on my thoughts or stir their sense of beauty or their sadness.
Absorbed in contemplation of its sublimity, I sat for a moment on a rock that rose out of the bush. I almost leapt from it, startled; a voice, unheralded, fell “like a falling star” through the soundless air. I had heard no footstep, no snap of trodden twig or rustle of reluctant branch. My senses were so thrilled with the sound that its purport shot past them. There at the base of the rock stood the strangest figure that ever met my eyes.
It was the sea-trove we had left sleeping in the hut—a small, well-knit frame like that of a north-country Englishman; but folded though it was in the slender gauzy garment we had unwound from it the night before, I felt conscious of a radiance that seemed to rid it of its opaque substantiality; it was as if lit from within; the face was luminous and clear, like the star-limpid waters of the fiord at night. My eyes were drawn to search the depths; yet the veil of flesh and blood still hid all but the aurora-like flashings of thought and feeling that swept in and out across the features. There was the play of some strong inward tumult, the revival, I soon found, of long-dead memories. I sat dumb as a stone, too much moved to break the silence, too much awed by the face to know what to say. It seems that my face too, with its weather-beaten vigour of northern life, had stirred the nature of the stranger to its depths; a long-forgotten existence had surged up in him from the darkness of the past, and he was recovering it feature by feature. I have often watched the conflict of cloud and wind, of light and gloom, across the torn azure of night’s infinity before the coming of a tempest; but the sight did not approach in intense magnetism the dizzy chase of shadow and gleam across this singular countenance.
At last the turmoil had passed its crisis. The memories had fallen into array. And, in slow but passionate northern English strangely shot with silvery rhythm, I was asked what country this was and whether I was not an Englishman. My palsy of speech vanished. And the familiar words, uttered though they were in new accents, led me back into the common world of question and answer. I found it was the Britain of a generation ago he knew, before the colonies of the Pacific had focussed her new spirit of enterprise, or transmuted their golden dreams. He remembered the mining fever of Australia, but it was news that it had smitten New Zealand too.
As I spoke with him, he seemed to be dragging his language out of the depths of sleep. His words and recognition of my meaning came half reluctantly. And through them wove fitfully hints and after-gleams of some intervening existence that had reached a higher plane than that of his youth. The ethereal ring would come into his voice, the translucent look into his face, and then vanish before the touch of those lower terrene reminiscences. Yet even amidst them there would appear at times the tremulous appeal of human pathos. As our words approached the memories of his childhood, they sounded from his lips like the funeral bells of a village folded in mist. The grosser humanity that seemed to come back to him from a buried past grew shadowed and mournful with piteous thoughts. There sighed out of his lost youth a winter wind that sounded through the crevices of ruined cities and over uncounted graves.
It took weeks for us to reach more familiar intercourse; and this alternation of a common and ethereal humanity in him continued to break the magnetism that often seemed about to bind us. We came from the same district of the North, although he evaded all questions as to the locality; and I came to know by instinct the topics to avoid with him. He would listen by the hour to stories and descriptions of the dales and hills; but he never permitted a reference that would fix his native place or time. One serious difficulty at first was his refusal of all our ordinary food; he would not touch the flesh of animal in any form, and we had to give up to him all our meal and flour and lentils. But, as we saw him at times grow faint, we introduced some of our animal soups into his food—for he refused all food that needed the use of teeth. A singular change seemed to come over him from this time; he began to grow more like our muscular, carnal humanity, and his moods of limpid ethereality were rarer and briefer. Thereafter he seemed to lower himself more to our plane of thought and life, though even then he rose long flights above us. Why he stayed with rough miners like us so long, when he might have shone in the most brilliant circles of Europe, was a mystery; but it became clear at a later stage. He worked with me and had a marvellous power of revealing the secrets of the rocks and the crust of the earth; like the fabulous divining rod he knew what metal lay below, and how far we should have to seek for it; and ten thousand times over he repaid all that his living cost. We offered him his share of our partnership; but our proposal was ever smiled aside as if it came from children in some childish play. He seemed to look years beyond our point of view.
How deep the debt we owe him when we think of all he taught us! Beside it all else sinks into nothingness. And there is no way in which we can vent our gratitude to him but by telling his story to other men as he told it to us. We could have spent all our days as well as all our nights in listening to him. But it was only now and then he fell into the mood of reminiscence. And so great a value did we attach to his every word that after each conversation or monologue we retired into our storehouse cave and wrote it down. We did our best to give his own language and form, but memory is treacherous, and we felt at each attempt that we had marred the beauty or nobleness of his utterances by phrases of our own or by the tinge of our personalities. He followed no sequence of time or circumstance; for he spoke as his own spirit or our themes moved him. But out of our rough jottings we have pieced together the following narrative, most of it our representation at the moment of his speech, some of it from the distant memory of incidental talks with him in the bush, when we were far from paper or pen. It is as close an approach to his very words as our love and reverence have been able to achieve.
Godfrey Sweven,