Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

Sard clambered out of the water, which was brackish and quite unfit to drink, and set off upon his course again. He walked, like Satan, on the burning marl, in a desert which had been grim before, but was now terrible. He followed along the course of the chasm for half a mile, and came out above on to a sort of tableland of rock, where the fire had ceased. He paused here to take his bearings, and noticed, for the first time, that a house or hut had been destroyed by the fire, close to where he stood. It must have been almost the last thing burned; so he went to it, thinking that perhaps somebody had been burnt in it. On a sort of shelf at one end of it was a skeleton of a man, gripping a crucifix. It might have been there fifty years. The only other remains were a couple of earthenware ollas of a good size. These were Indian pots of a dull yellow colour, with decorations of black and red. One of them had a thong about its mouth, and had been used as a waterbucket; the other, which was still covered with its earthenware lid, contained parched corn, shrivelled to the dryness and toughness of split peas, but still food. There was nothing to show what the man had been. He was tall for an Indian; the crucifix seemed against his being a miner or prospector. He may have been some hermit, or contemplative.

Sard removed the ollas into the open. After a little search he found the spring where the hermit had got his drinking water. He made a fire and cooked what was left of the woodchuck with the parched corn, and took his bearings while the meal was cooking. In front of him the path of the fire still ran on along the valley. It was already far away, running in little bright flickers of flame, under driven-down smoke. To his left, on the line of his course, there was a mile of scrubless desert of sand and rock, without even a cactus or a prickly pear, stretching to the rocky bulk of the Sierra. By the Sierra, in the direction in which he wished to go, was a chasm or cleft or cañon, it could hardly be called a glen. It ran into the very heart of the hills, for a mile or two, as far as he could see, but beyond it there were crags with pine trees, and beyond those more crags, and beyond those, crags with snow and more crags. To his right he could see very little. Foothills shut in the line of sight on that side. Wherever he looked there was no sign of the works of man, there was desert, rock, desolation and death. Between sixty and seventy miles of unknown country still lay between him and the coast. With some tough tendrils which had escaped the fire he contrived slings for the two ollas. He was now equipped with bread and water for two days.

As he judged that the chasm or cleft would give him an easier path into the hills, he set off towards it. As he drew near to its entrance, it looked like the entrance to hell. He remembered that he had read somewhere, or somebody had told him, that the Indians dreaded these clefts in the mountains, and said that unspeakable things lived in them. Now as he drew near the mouth, he heard far up the cañon something like a voice, which was not a voice, crying in the heart of the rocks. It was a strange, metallic cry of “Ohoy!” The echoes repeated it. It was no beast that he knew. It was not like a beast. It was like the voice of the rock itself. He stopped at the very mouth of the cañon, trying to think what that voice could be. It was not any human voice, and yet it had a human ring. It was not the voice of any beast, and yet it came, as it were, from the strength of a beast. It could not be the voice of a bird, no bird could be big enough, and yet there was something birdlike in its tone. If it were not the voice of a man, beast or bird, what could it be? Though it could not be a bird, it was likest to a bird; there was something spiritual and birdlike about it. It gave him the impression of some giant bird, some bird of poetry, some phœnix or roc, crying from a full heart. Then in its deeper notes it sounded like the voice of some giant who was beating on an anvil, and crying as he struck the blows, “Ohoy!” At these times it came with a pure metallic clang, which thrilled him to the marrow. He stood still to listen to it. Whatever it was, it came from some living thing, it had not the rhythm of any machine. It was not any drill or pile-driver beating into the heart of the rock. Sard’s mind offered many suggestions, one after the other. Now it was like some great bell, but it was not a bell. Now it was like some ringing true blow struck by a gigantic tuning-fork, or like the blow of an axe upon a gong, or like the drilling of some gigantic woodpecker into a musical wood. He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It came from the heart of the wilderness of rock, miles from any human dwelling. It was like the rock speaking. Into his mind there came again those words which he had read or heard, “The Indians do not go into the Sierra, nobody goes into the Sierra; there are strange things in the Sierra which do not want to be known.”

He asked himself whether he were not delirious and imagining this noise. But it rang clearly and made an echo.

The cañon was paven with clean dry desert sand. It led into the heart of the hills. The side of the mountain had been snapped asunder there and torn fifty yards apart. Sard could see a great black boulder midway up the cliff, on his right hand, and its other half on his left hand. He saw the patterns of veins and lines, where they once had joined each other. It needed some little resolution to go on towards that noise, but he repeated his proverb, “A danger met is less than a danger expected,” and went forwards toward it.

There were no tracks in the sand, perhaps no human foot had trodden that path for fifty years or five hundred years. “Here,” he thought, “I may come upon some unknown beast or bird or race of men or giants, for there may be anything in a place like this.” Half a mile up the cañon he stopped, for in front of him the walls of the cañon drew together, and there at each side of the chasm the rock had been hewn into a semblance of columns, a hundred feet high. Drawing a little nearer, he saw that the heads of the columns were carven with the heads of monsters which were crushing human skulls between their teeth; blood seemed to be flowing from their mouths; blood spattered the columns; as he drew near, he could hear it dripping on the rocks below. The noise of the great bird, or whatever it was, had been silent for some time; now he heard it much nearer and with a new note, not of joy nor of sorrow, but of laughter that had no feeling in it. Sard stopped; he felt his hair stand on end, while his heart seemed to come up into his throat and thump there till it was as dry as bone.

“All the same, I’ll go on,” he said; “there’s no going back. That thing knows that I’m here. If I’ve got to die, I’ll die, and I may as well get it over.”

All the time the great figures on the columns seemed to chew their quids and the blood spattered down upon the rocks.

“They’re only those streams,” he said, “with iron ore or with red pigment in them, and they’ve led them in channels to those figures’ mouths. That’s all it is.”

It was all that it was, but in the dusk of the cañon and of the day, to one very weak and weary as well as feverish, it was enough. He walked boldly up to the feet of the figures. They stood in blood, like butchers, and the red water splashed Sard as he stood there. Though he had expected much, he had not expected what he saw. The two great columns stood one on each side of a narrow pass, not more than four feet across. Within the pass the cañon widened out again, but not very far. On both sides of it the rocks had been carven into gigantic shapes. It was an avenue of the gods, all of them terrible; they seemed to turn their heads and look at him; the wardens at the gate seemed to turn round upon him after he had passed them. Into his mind, from some forgotten book or speaker, came the phrase of what the Indians in that country had said of these old temples, that their gods come to life at dusk, and are alive all night, and live on men. They seemed to gnash their teeth and lick their lips, and to tremble as he drew near.