Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

He would have thought nothing of it had he had so much as a dog beside him. A lunatic, even a village idiot, would have seemed a comrade and a backing to him. But he had to face it alone. He backed into the rock of the pass and tried to reassure himself, but he kept telling himself, “It was one of these things whom I heard singing. They do come to life at dusk.”

Then he said, “It isn’t so. If these things were beautiful, I would fear them, but they are not, and there is nothing in them that I will recognise as gods. These things are all over this land: I have heard of them. I’ll go on, and if they kill me, they’ll get little glory by it.”

He went on, and as he went a strange moaning music seemed to wind from one god to another. It was the wind striking sharp angles in the rocks at the chasm top, but it sounded like the song of the figure of Memnon in Egypt. Just in such a way should the thoughts of the gods pass to each other, without a movement of the lips.

“Those Indians spoke the truth,” he thought, “when they said that the gods speak in music from dusk to dawn.”

At the head of the cañon was a small stone temple, high up at the top of a flight of steps. The columns and the walls were brightly painted with images of terror and of power, in war and triumph. Bats were flickering out from the temple door. They were the first living things that he had seen since he entered the cañon. They made him feel that he was coming back to life, after walking in the kingdom of death. As he went up the temple steps, which were as perfect as when they had been laid down, centuries before, the voice of the bird, or whatever it was, rose up from somewhere in the mountain not far ahead. It rose up with a new note, it was like laughter with exultation. He could see nothing because the temple shut away all that was in front of him, but he heard above the noise of the laughter the clanking as of enormous wings, slowly rising from the ground and gathering power and moving away and away.

As he entered the temple there came a great rush of many hundreds of bats, whirling past his ears into the air. He passed between walls of carven and painted figures, which were still sharp and bright in detail. He went through a first room, as long as a cricket-pitch, into another, which was pleasant with the sound of water. A pool had been cut in the rock in the midst of this great room; water spouted into it from the tongues of grotesque heads. At the end of the room there were stairs leading up to an altar made of a piece of black obsidian chipped to a point. At the back of this altar there were rooms filled with the murmur of pigeons. These rooms must once have been the priests’ dwellings. They were now dovecotes for the blue rock-pigeons which flew out, on his approach. He clambered out after them on to a terrace cut upon the rock of the mountain for two hundred yards by a people who had no explosives save the will of their rulers. There was no green thing in sight, nothing but rocks and sand. The rocks were of every savagery of splinter, of savage colours, bright blue, yellow, red and black, all spiked and toppled and tumbled, and only brought into order upon this terrace by the unknown priests of dead gods.

He took what he could of the eggs of the rock-pigeons, then shaped his course and went on into the wilderness, until his way was barred by a cliff across his path, eight hundred feet high and more. He walked along it for over a mile, but found no scaling place. At the end of his walk the cliff bowed over so as to make a shelter or cave. Here in some remote time some forgotten tribe had built up a house for themselves by piling a wall of stones without mortar, between the hollow and the light. The path of these men still led to their entrance, a hole in the wall, just big enough for a small man to crawl through. Sard did not dare to try to enter by that door for fear of snakes. There was a sheltered place among the rocks where he lay down to rest. He fell into a deep sleep, and slept until the cold woke him. He felt something pressed against his chest which had not been there before. It was some snake which had crawled there for the warmth. Very cautiously he moved his stiff arms, until he could fling it from him, and leap up in the one motion. He leaped clear of it, and then leaped clear of the place.

It was then about four in the morning and intensely cold. The snake was perhaps too sluggish to attack. He was too miserable with cold to stay longer there. He ate a little of his food, and went on along the face of the cliff, until he found a place of fallen rocks where it was possible to climb.

It seemed to him that he had gone for hours out of his way trying to find a path, and that already he was weaker than he had been from want of proper food and rest. He knew now how easy it would be for him to die up there in the Sierra; why, he might wander for days trying to find food or drink, the way out or the way back. He knew now that he might have been wiser to risk the silver escorts, and follow the railway across the desert.

All that day he wandered on among the mountains, far to the west of his proper course. The crags of a great snowy peak were like a wall upon his right hand, they seemed to edge him off to the west at every point. He would walk for a mile and then think, “Now I can get across to the eastward,” but always when he had scrambled up the screes, he would come to some cliff which he could not climb. He saw no living thing in all this day, except two little birds running among the rocks, and the eagles quartering in the heaven.