Effigies of meal and honey: mock-men, that is to say; proxies for the actual humans once actually sacrificed and eaten; the pagan Goths were barbarians, they were not savages. And ... but... effigies of meal and honey... though it was level daylight and no actual lightnings flashed, something like a stroke of lightning now certainly flashed enlightment upon him: it was not alone in ancient Gothic times that such “effigies of meal and honey” had been made and eaten, but they had been made and eaten ever since; were still being made and eaten right down to the present day, though no doubt the actual recipe had undergone change, changes. The Christian Church had tried to abolish, but had finally accepted this practice, for You can’t stop me, said the gingerbread man . . . !
What had lain slumbering in the groves and woods and waters for centuries, perhaps millennia? Had anything? Had not... something? Had it or had they been created out of a sort of spiritual effluvium? as the result of immemorial worship, and the rites thereof? or had worship (and its rites) resulted because Something was already there? Chamibog, for instance, the so-called Dark God of the ancient Slovatchkoes? or Byellibog, their so-called Bright one? But this was infinitely simplistic, and, perhaps, after all, nothing was there. “Nothingis there!”he cried aloud. And, “There is nothing!’’Echo answered, Nothing. . . . Nothing. . . .
But something else answered, as though out of the mist and rain and sunshine and spray: You can’t catch me, said the —
“There is a spirit in this man,” Tanta Tina’s old nurse had said.
It was very suddenly that he saw Engineer Brozz. The man was floating in a new-made backwater, floating on his back, so it seemed; but in fact only partly floating. In pan something held him up, held him fast; and this gave a slight illusion to the scene: if one had known nothing else one might have wondered why the man had chosen to float, fully clothed, slightly moving his arms and legs.
Much mud and earth and gravel and sand must indeed have flowed upon and lodged upon him, one saw it lying in deposits all around. But, caught as the back of his belt was by the broken point of a limb of a half-sunken tree, suspended from the muck and mirk at the bottom, all debris and detritus had been washed away by the flowing waters, and only some specks of mica glittered and glistened on him here and there. Eszterhazy remembered and spontaneously cried aloud the man’s own words:
“So clean! So clean! And all so clean!”
Though the flood was over, there was still an immense quantity of water which lay impounded by banks and shores and tangled masses of trees and other debris — “jams” or “rafts” this was termed in Northamerica; it had not been common enough in this country to take a name — and not far off this water formed a mere. Birds, attracted from far away, rested in flocks on the surface of the mere and flew off now and then, but always returned. Lines from a late Roman Latin poet, the buxom Good, repeated themselves endlessly. The waters of this mere now came up within a spit of the road and seemed to swell the landscape: buxom flood indeed! Where had these birds all come from? Some of them from the immeasurable willow-thickets of the Ister, some perhaps from lakes in the lower Balkans. Others? Perhaps some infecundation of the waters had created them by spontaneous generation, though this was hardly a modern concept. The mere would soon enough subside, it would all ebb, the scene return to normal; meanwhile one might forget death and terror and avalanches and boulders ripped and trundled; here was green grass, green trees, blue skies, birds of many colors, ripple and lap . . .
Buxom flood.
The waters reflected the sky and the sky was an incredible blue, bluer than cornflowers or the blossoms of the chicory (why were all images of it suddenly botanical?), and all nature lay spent, as though after some episode of great passion.
Buxom flood.
“The late deceased learned Engineer was of the Reformed, that is to say, the Calvinist, faith?”
“Yes, Minister.”
“Was there not perhaps some line or lines of Holy Scripture to which he was particularly attached? which I might mention in my brief address?”
No one had any reply; then an elderly man in old-fashioned clothing half- livery and half-uniform cleared his throat. “As an Under-sheriff, it’s my duty, your reverence, to examine the contents of the clothing of the late deceased. And I find this in his little leather budget as he have in his pocket, wrappit in a piece of oiled cloth. This piece paper, I mean. Ben’t it Scripture?”
The minister — he was young and had yet to learn he might not dawdle whilst the impetuous dead were waiting — took the slip of paper and solemnly read it aloud. “ ‘ Water is thy greater fortune; and water, thy greater infortune.’ Hem. This may be Apocrypha, I cannot say; it is certainly not Scripture as defined by the Reformed, or Calvinist, faith. Hem. I shall briefly speak on the versicle, Above the voice of many waters, mighty waters, breakers of the sea, mightier by far is the Lord on high. Briefly.”
But when he saw how many graves had been dug, and how many were waiting to get into them, he was very brief indeed.
