Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of the Pathfinder, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven, casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese, butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of the Pathfinder came to his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr. Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.” Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.

He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale. When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must be some way through the mountains there.

He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags, but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water. Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.

It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone. Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.

He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone that had ceased to be stone.

In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in that waste.

He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake, and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake, found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep has no cause to grumble.”

He slept until the sun went down. He was wakened by the crying of the hawk. Rousing up from his lair, he saw the bird perched on the tree with his wings spread, crying what seemed to be a curse upon all that desolation. Hope suddenly came into Sard, for perhaps there was a nest with eggs within the tree. He had been too tired to think of it before, but now the very thought gave him life. He shook with excitement. He went out and swarmed up the tree, found a nest, and though the hawks beat at him and struck him with wings and talons, he took the two eggs, each bigger than a duck’s egg and of a mottled reddish colour. In the nest was half of a large lizard which the hawk had brought thither. At other times he would have shrunk from such meat, but now he judged that if it would nourish the hawk, it would nourish him. He ate it with the eggs and wished that it had been ten times its size. Having sucked the eggs, he broke and licked the eggshells. He found that he was not thinking of the wilderness. His thoughts were almost continually in a little English country town, at a grocer’s shop, where there were boxes of eggs at the door. He kept thinking of those boxes of hundreds of eggs together, perhaps a thousand eggs in one shop, and of rounds of cheese, weighing a stone apiece. But the eggs were what stirred him most.

Thinking of these eggs, he stumbled and scrambled back over the eleven miles of rock to the pinewood. From his childhood he had been accustomed to take bearings wherever he went, and he had little difficulty in finding his way. In the moonlight he saw the tree with the cut rope still dangling from the bough. Under the tree was the body of the dead man, which had been roughly buried where Sard had laid him. His feet stuck up out of the earth, one bare and one slippered foot. Sard did not think of him, but of the bits of tamale that had been scattered there the day before. To his intense joy they were there still; altogether there were enough bits of tamale and bean pulp to outweigh a ship’s biscuit. Hungry as he was, he determined to save half of his find for the next day. He thought, “I depend on a bandit’s hanging for to-day’s food: to-morrow I need not expect to be so lucky: ‘it is not always May’: still, ‘God will provide.’ ”

He followed the tracks of the bandits till he heard a wolf howling, with a dog answering him howl for howl. Presently, as he went on, he heard horses squealing at each other: he smelt horses. Next he heard a man singing in a shrill falsetto, with many shakes, to the twangle of a guitar.