Sard Harker: A novel

by John Masefield

“So you’re waiting for me to die, are you?” he said. “I’m not dead yet.” They craned and sidled with their bald heads. “Get out of this,” he said, smiting at one. It went sidelong off the ledge, and the others with it. They beat with their wings, recovered their poise, and sailed out into the air. An instant before, they had been squalid, stinking, huddled creatures; now they were floating in the majesty of beauty. Two hovered at a little distance from the ledge, the third rose above it in a short spire. He had never seen any bird of prey circling at such close quarters. He watched the great pinions soar up above him, while the others hovered away and mewed and cried. Suddenly the bird above him launched itself down upon him and beat him with its great wings, so that he was almost over the ledge. Instantly it was up in the air and repeated its swoop. It came down sighing and struck and hissed at Sard, and immediately the two birds who had been waiting, swooped and struck at him. “So you’re going to get me down into the valley and pick my bones,” Sard said. He lay flat down upon the ledge, face upwards, and drew his other revolver. The bird came down on him again, crying and smiting. He fired; the bird went up, poised, went up a few feet further, beat with its wings, mounted yet a little further like a towering partridge, then crumpled up and dropped. Sard saw it strike and roll and lie still. Its companions swayed away to look at it and then descended to the body.

Sard looked down and wondered how he could ever have climbed that crag at night without falling. He knew that he could not go down it by daylight. He looked at the crag which rose up above him from the ledge, and felt that he could not climb it. He had reached a point from which he could neither go nor come. He ate and drank and then thought, “Perhaps when I’m rested I will be able to try this rock. If not, I shall end here.”

He slept on the rock until the beating of the midday sun became unbearable. He twisted to an angle where his head could lie in some shade, and slept again. He was aware in his sleep that someone stood upon that ledge and told him to come on. He sat up, looked at this figure and knew that it was only partly human. In his dream, or fever, it seemed like the spirit of the Pathfinder, fierce, hard, and of great beauty. He told himself, “This is all nonsense. The Pathfinder is a ship, she has not even a figurehead, but a fiddle-head; this is a woman.”

But the figure said, “I am the Pathfinder. I can find a path for you.” She lead on up the rock and Sard followed. He could see her in front of him; he followed where she trod. There was a great star above the crags. The crags were thick with greenish ice, the star shone upon the ice, till it glittered like a crown. Sard said, “I’ll put my hand on the crown of the mountain.”

At daybreak he came out on a wild place near a brook.

There was grass there whistling in the wind. There was a little bird somewhere, not far away, crying a double note that sounded like a curse, continually repeated. Sard drank of the brook, sheltered from the wind and slept; nor did he know when the woman had passed from there. Afterwards, he was puzzled about that part of his march; sometimes it was in his mind all blurred, like the events of a fever, sometimes it seemed the only reality among things dreamed.

When he woke he was out in the snowfields. He thought that he had reached the summit, but he found that he was only on the top of a small shoulder. Beyond and above him were crags, sprinkled, heaped or overwhelmed with snow, some of it dirty from fallings of rock, some of it violet from shadow, the rest of it glittering. There was no sign of any living thing. If he looked up, there were peaks glittering against the sky; if he looked down, there were glittering snowfields, crags and chasms.

He could not see the country from which he had come, because greyness was hiding it from him. Grey shapes, like the leaders of a herd, were moving into it. A herd of mists followed their leaders, so like oxen that he expected them to bellow. They jostled on in myriads till all the lower slopes of the mountains were blotted out. Soon a sea of mist washed all about those miles of Sierras; the peaks stood out of this sea like islands. “If that sea rises,” Sard thought, “I shall be drowned up here. I must move while I have light.”

He had his direction from the sun. He pushed on, now up, now down, over snow of every degree of rottenness. He had a little food left in his wallet. He guarded this, but slaked his thirst with snow and chewed upon a piece of his belt.

In the evening it began to blow bitterly cold with a small snow. In one of the whirls of the gale he found himself upon a piece of a made road. He could hardly believe his eyes; but there was no doubt: it had been made by men. It had been cut out of the side of the crag; the crag at its side had been carven with the figures of the gods. A tall god with his tongue transfixed by a bramble was pouring libation on an altar; beyond the altar was a door leading into the crag. As he stood there, the sun shone out through a rift to light the eyrie he was perched upon. Used as he was to heights, it made him sick to think of the will that had spent men, like water, to hew that rock at that height. The sun shone into the doorway. Looking within, he saw two figures upon a throne. They sat side by side, holding each other’s hands. They were staring straight at him.