Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

When he saw that there was no Peter, he thought, “That was a strange dream. Peter Maxwell has been dead since 1886. He died of yellow fever in the Cliomene. Yet that was Peter in my dream.”

He walked round the little enclosure. There was nothing to alarm him, except the sense that he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. He was weary from his tramp and his hard day. He returned to the chapel and presently slept again. This time he slept for some hours, but towards noon, at about the time when his watch would be drawing to an end, he was aware that a trumpet was being blown and that armed figures were there, wanting him to go. With a little effort he cleared his eyes, so that he could see these figures. There were three: two women and a man. The man was standing between the women and raised above them. He was standing on the altar blowing a blast upon the trumpet, and the notes of the trumpet came out like flames, so that Sard could see them as well as hear them. The women were looking at him with faces so calm that they could not have been mortal, yet when they saw that he saw them, their faces became alive and incredibly eager. They both turned to him and bent to raise him, and with their free hands they pointed at the trumpeter, who shone in all his being and pointed the way to go, and blew upon his trumpet a blast like a cock-crow: “Get you gone out of here, get you gone out of here!”

In his dream Sard called to the trumpeter: “What is it, Peter, what is it? What is it, you great spirits?”

But the women faded from him, Peter faded from him into the wall, but he could still see the shining trumpet and notes like flakes of fire failing all around him. The trumpet dwindled slowly and resolved itself into the blossoming branch that had grown through a crack in the wall. The figures were gone, the fiery notes had vanished, only as Sard stood up he smelled very faintly a smell of burning. He walked to the altar and felt along the wall. It was a wall of perishing plaster. No one had been there. He went out into the enclosure, and as he passed through the door, he smelled again the smell of burning. “Get you gone out of here,” he repeated. “Get you gone out of here! What is that smell of burning?”

Once long before, far out at sea in the Pacific, he had smelled a smell of burning during the night-watch and had reported it to his mate. The mate said, “Yes, you often smell that here, at this season of the year. They are burning the scrub on the mountains four hundred miles away.” He thought of that remark now. Looking out of the enclosure at the thickets beyond, he saw a faint trail of smoke curling among some dwarf oaks.

“I believe this scrub’s on fire,” he said. “I’d better get me gone out of here, or I’ll be burnt like a rat in a trap.”

As near as he could judge, the wind was blowing from the north-west, and his course was to the east of north. If the scrub were on fire, as he supposed, he would have to get across its path. He left the enclosure of the ruined chapel and set off further up the hill to a clear space among the scrub, where he could see. The foothill on which he stood looked like a moraine across the track of some ancient glacier. From the top of it he could look right up the valley down which the glacier may once have flowed. The wind was blowing straight down this valley, driving a line of fire behind a wall of smoke, which was beaten down below the tops of the dwarf oaks. Suckers and snakes of flame ran out along the sides of the valley and over its summit. From time to time these suckers seemed to die out, but others always leaped up in front of them. It was advancing in a ragged line, coming pretty fast, with a crackling, hissing, sighing noise that sounded very terrible. Sard judged that it might be, at the furthest, a mile from him. It died down and glittered up like a living thing. At that distance it did not look like a raging fire, but it was laying all things dead behind it.

Sard could not see how far it stretched on the side towards which he was going, but he judged that he would have to hurry to get round it, so he set off at his best pace along the ridge of what might have been the moraine. As he went along, the air thickened with intensely bitter smoke from the burnt bush. Little floating fiery particles came flying past and settled on his clothes. Every now and then some streamer of flame would blow down on something dry, set it on fire and blow out. He ran for about ten minutes, mostly uphill, and he reached the top of that side of the valley to which he ran. He found that on the other side of the hill the ground tipped very sharply down into a rocky chasm. Beyond this rocky chasm, which contained water, was a hillside covered with scrub, blazing like the Day of Judgment. There was no possibility of getting round the fire. He was shut in on that side, and he hadn’t time to get back. His only chance was to get down to the water.

There was a place where the crag had fallen in a scree of big pieces of stone. He scrambled down this towards the water, but the scrub burning on the other side of the stream was so bright and hot that he had to cover his eyes as he slithered down. Quite close to the lip of the water there was a big shelving stone, worn smooth by floods. It was so hot from the blaze that he could hardly bear his hand upon it. He slithered into the water from it, just as a flame seized the scrub upon the opposite bank, and scorched it into nothing.

In a minute the fury of the fire had passed, and it was running up the hillside away from him, leaving a blackened earth, covered with glowing stalks, which hissed and sighed. It went on, he could see it running up the hill, licking down the scrub and leaving blackness. The wind blew over the burnt tract, bringing soft ash, little fiery particles, and a breath as from a furnace door.