And as he watched, body wet and cold and numb, repeatedly dashing the rain from his forehead, again and again mopping his smarting eyes with his sodden sleeves, he saw the ranks ... Deucalion’s Flood? who had thrown the stones from which this race had sprung? or sown the dragon’s teeth? . . . saw the ranks waver, saw them tremble. Saw them melt, melting away. Ebb. Fade. Vanish. Gone.
Had he seen it? How could he have seen it? He could not have seen it, therefore he had not seen it. Not.
But how close it had seemed to come to him ... as close as ... as that tree. His eyes sank from the rain-soaked bark and bole of the ancient oak (surely of course not one of those there during the ancient days: but how far removed? perhaps grown of an acorn of an oak of an acorn from one of the pagan oaks: only three removes; what said Solomon? a three-fold cord is not easily broken), his eyes sank to the ground. He took a step forward, and another, through the quaggy mud and mire. A brown mass overlay the rain-flattened grass. Mud. Merely mud? Ginger-red-brown mud, where all other mud was black? Did it not look rather like melted meal and spice and —? And another flash, and on the ground something sparkled, sparkling here and sparkling there: mica, it was surely mica, small deposits of it lay all about here and there in this region. Mica. Was it? Heedless of the sheets of rain pelting his back, he bent, almost knelt, and picked something up. And another. And another. Incredulous, he felt something a moment later sting his spasmodically closing hand. He forced his fist to open. There among the muck and grass and blood he saw, by lightning flashes, tiny points of sharp flint. Sharpened flint. Flints. He turned and fled, tottering and slipping; he turned and fled.
Then he turned around again. Turned again, saw again, screamed again, fled again. Turned again. There in the gloom, half dark air and half dark water, he saw them again. Them: Again they surged forward, again their stone weapons threatened and glistened: again they seemed to melt. He now knew that, whatever they threatened, they did not threaten him. He waited and he waited and the lightnings flashed quite nearby and it was as though — had a signal been given? — had the electric surges animated something inanimate? that which is formless giving form to that which becomes formed? To some sort of primal slime, out of some sort of primal sludge? The them were larger now, ever so much larger, they were human-sized now, their weapons were larger, still they came on, as rough-shaped, still, as (indeed) the gingerbread-men for ages eaten in this grove, parts of them always left uneaten. An arm. A hand. Head. Leg. He followed, stumbling. Warning himself. Must watch himself. Watch yourself, man. Watch your step. Don’t fall or
slip. The river. The lake.
(Where, now, were the herdsmen, housemen, huntsmen of Prince Preez? And if they had been here, what might they do? Pursue? The words rang in Eszterhazy’s ears, You can’t catch me, said the gingerbread man!)
Once again the crude Them sank sodden and collapsed. Once more he waited, while the river and (he must suppose) the spillway of the dam roared and thundered. And once more he saw the Figures rise and take form out of the earth, wavering, become firm. Their faces no longer toy-like, doll-like, their faces giant-like. But they were now ruinous and eroded faces; their forms?
Male, female, sexless, androgynous, furious, faceless (now), huge and vast: and the rains came down and the water roared — the Figures leaped forward into the rain and mirk and were lost to sight. And then the almost allembracing noise for one horrible moment became utterly all-embracing indeed, something like a cataract in reverse heaved up in torrent, the fountains of the deep were truly broken, the saturated earth trembled and quaked; he sank upon his knees.
When he had recovered and was able to stand, though the rains had dwindled to drizzles, though still the waters rushed and foamed, they had ceased to roar and now they only loudly groaned and droned. Thick mud such as might have greeted the eyes of Noah lay all about the Sacred Grove, where ... long and long ago . . . the ancient Avars and Slovatchkoes and Goths, sometimes together and sometimes apart, had come to perform their heathen rituals, to honor God in the plural before ever they had ever learned to honor God in the singular . . . and, before, even, then, whatever ancient-most kiths and races had dwelt here then: proto-Pelasgians, perhaps, or ur-Hyperboreans and paleo-pagans whose very names were lost... but only mud lay round about the giant oak-trees now. The lake was gone. The pond below was gone. The millrace was gone. Save for a shattered stone groin, the dam was gone. The factory was entirely gone. Stripped of limbs and branches, trunks of trees lay here and there in heaps like giant jackstraws. It was far later and far downstream that, the sun shining as though there had never been rain, Eszterhazy encountered a broken (broken? shattered !) piece of machinery which he did not at first recognize. By and by he saw that it had belonged to one of the sluices. The sluices! Why had not the sluices been opened to relieve the enormous pressure of the waters inside the dam? He saw the answer to the question which not he alone had raised. The smashed joint or whatever it was had not been opened because it could not have been opened because, doubtless they had tried, but it was jammed shut. And with what, Dr. Eszterhazy now saw.
Aloud he repeated the words, once, long long ago (it seemed now) of Engineer Brozz: repeated them aloud: “ ‘Stone, pebbles, fragments of splints’ ” For there they were indeed, there (jammed, crammed) the stones, there the pebbles, and there the — “ ‘Fragments of splints’?” he cried. What had that meant? Nothing; it was gibberish; his ears had deceived themselves and him. Fragments of flints, was what the man had said. Fragments of flints. Had, simply, the encroaching waters simply opened up and washed down the remnants of some Stone Age encampment or workshop, or — No. He knew what he had seen.
He looked at the flints. Some of the fracture-lines were new, others as clearly not. What trove, troves, of Neolithic, perhaps even Paleolithic weaponry of chipped stone, flaked flint, had lain in the Scared Grove? as though ancient sacrificers and sacrificial victims had taken once and again, time and again, need never take again, an immense and ultimate revenge against the immolation of that gateway between Gods and men, the Sacred Grove.
Was that what had happened? What had happened? What had he seen? Well, he knew of course what he had seen. But what did it mean? Unbidden, words, entire lines, from the Addendum to Procopius, came to his mind as he stood there in the drying mud.
Another reason which justified Justinian’s waging war upon the Goths was their savage rites and customs, totally against religion and morality. For example, in the mountains of Eastern Scythia in a sacred grove by a sacred well or spring, the barbaric Goths are wont to select certain prisoners by lot and to let them loose and to pursue after them. The wretches unfortunate enough to be captured are not alone immolated to the demons who dwelt in the place sacred to them, but portions of their flesh are cooked and eaten. Others say, eaten raw. It is true that some so- called Christians who should know better maintain that though such a cruel rite once pertained there, it had been abolished after the Gothic incursion, and that the Goths themselves merely made effigies of meal and honey and it is these which they consume.