Voss

In hopes that the river would be restored, it was thought to camp there where they were, and to beat a retreat if necessary to higher ground.

‘There are still the sheep, though,’ remembered Palfreyman.

Then, with his arm, Voss flung away the sheep.

‘We must abandon these,’ he frowned. ‘They do not keep up. They are costly in time.’

Because rain must fall at the expense of time, he frowned even at the clouds which would soon revive his own skin.

‘Given feed and water, the sheep will travel faster,’ Judd submitted.

‘No,’ said Voss. ‘No. There are too few. It is not worth it.’

A flash of green lightning cut the brown air.

‘All sheep must be sacrificed,’ shouted the German against the thunder, and inhaled until it began to appear he might burst. Then he added, more practically: ‘There is nothing to prevent Ralph and Turner from killing a couple for our own use. We will dry the mutton and carry it on.’

The hills were jumbling and rocking.

‘Somebody must inform Ralph,’ the German continued to shout, of necessity, at those others who were unbuckling girths, unknotting knots, hobbling horses, or stretching pathetic squares of canvas, to cover their unwillingness to return across the ridge.

‘Let me see,’ reflected the Voss who was as exultant as the storm.

He was never so hateful as when identifying weakness, and now, in this brown storm, almost anybody could have been accused.

Then, strangely, he altered his approach.

‘You, Frank, will better go,’ he ordered Le Mesurier, but making it a conspiracy between themselves.

For he had already sensed, early in their association, that the young man was possessed of a gristly will, or daemon, not unlike his own. Now, smiling his approval, the German’s lips were tinged with the green of lightning.

Le Mesurier, however, did not return the smile, but got upon his horse, which had remained saddled, in readiness, it seemed, and went.

From the beginning, the rider had to urge his horse. As the almost dislocated withers in front of him proceeded to toil back up the ridge, the mare’s ears remained sad, her body had become a slab, or muleflesh, for horses do associate themselves with the more rational behaviour of men, mules with none. Through the irrational, brown dusk, premature by two hours, man and horse were moving. Clouds were now so close their weave was visible, bundles of ever dirtier stuff, that were swirling and fraying, even tearing in places on the rock summit. Rocks of thunder were rolling together, so that at times the man did duck his head to avoid collision with the approaching storm, and in doing so, the brim of his hat became more ridiculously ineffectual, beating on his eyelids, and causing him pain.

Then he dragged the hat off, and stuffed it into his saddle-bag.

At once his matted hair began to stream out, and as the wind encircled the pale, upper half of his forehead, he seemed to be relieved of some of the responsibility of human personality. The wind was filling his mouth and running down through the acceptant funnel of his throat, till he was completely possessed by it; his heart was thunder, and the jagged nerves of lightning were radiating from his own body.

But it was not until the farther side of the ridge, going down, and he was singing the storm up out of him, that the rain came, first with a few whips, then with the release of cold, grey light and solid water, and he was immersed in the mystery of it, he was dissolved, he was running into crannies, and sucked into the mouths of the earth, and disputed, and distributed, but again and again, for some purpose, was made one by the strength of a will not his own.

Angus and Turner, who had crawled under a rock ledge, which provided almost a small, uncomfortable cave at the foot of the hills, looked out as darkness fell, and saw Frank Le Mesurier descending the slope. They called, and he headed towards them, the mare carefully picking her way.

The faces of the troglodytes were shiny like their own rock, as their skins had become soaked before reaching shelter. To the messenger who had just descended through the cloud, they also looked repulsively human. Sheep were huddling in the deluge, in which some of them had lain down with the obvious intention never to rise. Against rocks and scrub, lean goats were flattening their sides. The goats were most shocked by the uncompromising rain.

Le Mesurier delivered his message without dismounting.

‘Well, you had better hobble your nag, Frank, and come inside. It is good in here, and you will be one more to carry a supply of mutton in the morning.’

Thanks to their rock roof, and a handful of comparatively dry sticks, the drovers had even succeeded in starting a modest fire, and had begun to put away some stale damper and shreds of fibrous meat to the accompaniment of its sputtering. They were happy, their eyes suggested, but within human limits, so that Le Mesurier, who had been admitted to infinity at times, did not wish to enter their circle.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I shall go straight back.’

‘You are mad,’ shouted Angus, who had learnt to cherish his own limitations as a sure proof of sanity.

‘You will break your bally neck in the dark,’ shrieked Turner, hoping to encourage that possibility by his warning.

Then the lightning leapt again. For a moment the green horseman looked down at the faces of the two human animals in their kennel of rocks. However, as wind and rain were stopping mouths, he did not open his, but turned his spindly horse. Nor did he know how to address those individuals into whose souls he saw most clearly; he was too startled by them.

The mare was whinging but hopeful as she started back through the teeth of rocks. The rider gave her her head, and trusted to her instinct. By this time he was rather sunken, as if he had been so firmly contained by his envelope, that he had failed to burst out and rise to the heights of the storm. And now Voss began to go with him, never far distant, taunting him for his failures, for his inability to split open rock, and discover the final secret. Frank, I will tell you, said his mentor, you are filled with the hallucinations of intellectual power: I could assist you perhaps, who enjoy the knowledge that comes with sovereignty over every province of illusion, that is to say, spiritual power; indeed, as you may have suspected, I am I am I am …

But the young man had been submitted to such a tumult of the elements, and now, of his own emotions, he failed to catch the divine Word, only the roll of thunder departing upon the drums of wax. So he shook his numbed head, until his ears rattled.

Voss was grinning. The rider could see the mouth, for the rain had been folded away into the outer darkness. All around there was a sighing of wind, and a moon, the loveliest of all hallucinations, had slid into being. Its disc spun, and was buried, and recovered, cutting the mad, white hair of the clouds.

On the edge of the ridge, the mare paused for a while, and was swaying, and raising her head. Then she plunged down towards what, she knew, was certainty. But in that interval of rest upon the summit, Voss and the rider had touched hands, the same glint of decomposition and moonlight started from the sockets of their eyes and from their teeth, and their two souls were united in the face of inferior realities.

So like clings to like, and will be saved, or is damned.

Riding down the other side, the young man conceived a poem, in which the silky seed that fell in milky rain from the Moon was raised up by the Sun’s laying his hands upon it. His flat hands, with their conspicuously swollen knuckles, were creative, it was proved, if one dared accept their blessing. One did dare, and at once it was seen that the world of fire and the world of ice were the same world of light; whereupon, for the first time in history, the third, and dark planet was illuminated.

As he let himself be carried down the shining hillside, that was shown to be strewn with snares of jet now that the moon was fully risen, Le Mesurier was shivering. He who had carried the sun for a moment in his breast was frozen in his own moonlight. His teeth were tumbling like lumps of sugar. Any hope of salvation was, ironically, an earthly one, a little smudge of light from a candle-end, from behind a skin of canvas, at the foot of the hill.