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FOREWORD (#ulink_bed7e434-f40f-51c6-b586-77cdd3ccb496)
BY DOUGLAS E. WINTER (#ulink_bed7e434-f40f-51c6-b586-77cdd3ccb496)
‘The Worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail …’
I FIRST read these words more than twenty years ago. They seemed magical, an invocation of something locked deep inside me – something dark and dangerous, and yet desperately alive. They intrigue me, uplift me, haunt me, even today; and I introduce them to you with the anxious delight of a child who wishes to share a special secret. You hold in your hands the best single novel of fantasy ever written in the English language.
Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945) was a civil servant at the British Board of Trade, sometime Icelandic scholar, devotee of Homer and Sappho, and mountaineer. Although by all accounts a bowler-hatted and proper English gentleman, Eddison was an unmitigated dreamer who, in occasional spare hours over some thirty years, put his dreams to paper. In 1922, just before his fortieth birthday, a small collector’s edition of The Worm Ouroboros was published; larger printings soon followed in both England and America, and a legend of sorts was born. The book was a dark and blood-red jewel of wonder, equal parts spectacle and fantasia, labyrinthine in its intrigue, outlandish in its violence. It was also Mr Eddison’s first novel.
After writing an adventure set in the Viking age, Styrbiorn the Strong (1926), and a translation of Egil’s Saga (1930), Eddison devoted the remainder of his life to the fantastique in a series of novels set, for the most part, in Zimiamvia, the fabled paradise of The Worm Ouroboros. The Zimiamvian books were, in Eddison’s words, ‘written backwards’, and thus published in reverse chronological order of events: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). (The final book was incomplete when Eddison died, but his notes were so thorough that his brother, Colin Eddison, and his friend George R. Hamilton were able to assemble the book for publication.) Although the books are known today as a trilogy, Eddison wrote them as an open-ended series; they may be read and enjoyed alone or in any sequence. Each is a metaphysical adventure, an intricate Chinese puzzle box whose twists and turns reveal ever-encircling vistas of delight and dread.
Eddison’s four great fantasies are linked by the enigmatic character of Edward Lessingham – country gentleman, soldier, statesman, artist, writer, and lover, among other talents – and his Munchausen-like adventures in space … and time. Although he disappears after the early pages of The Worm Ouroboros, Lessingham is central to the books that follow. ‘God knows,’ he tells us, ‘I have dreamed and waked and dreamed till I know not well which is dream and which is true.’ One of the pleasures of reading Eddison is that we, too, are never certain. Perhaps Lessingham is a man of our world; perhaps he is a god; perhaps he is only a dream … or a dream within a dream. And perhaps, just perhaps, he is all of these things, and more.
Eddison was exceptional in his embrace of the fantastique; in his fiction there are no logical imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years, and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.
‘There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale …’ Thus The Worm Ouroboros introduces Lessingham and his lady, Mary, the first glimpse of the tragic romance that will haunt the Zimiamvian novels. Lessingham retires, alone, to the mysterious Lotus Room, a place of contemplation and opiate calm – there to sleep, perchance to dream. ‘Time is,’ speaks a little black bird, and a shining chariot, drawn by a hippogriff, arrives to fetch Lessingham to Mercury. His destination is not the first planet from the sun, but a medieval Norseman’s nightmare of our own Earth, ‘all grey and cold, the warm colours burnt to ashes’, save one: the crimson of blood. It is a grim world, peopled by Demons and Witches, Imps and Pixies, Goblins and Ghouls – all of them human, and all of them at war. Swordplay and sorcery and Machiavellian intrigue are the order of the day; vengeance and feuds, betrayal and bloodletting, as common as the dawn.
The heroes of this majestic Romance are the Demons, ruled and captained by the three brothers – Lords Juss and Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco – and their cousin Brandoch Daha. Valiant in war, courtly in speech and stance, these are heroes in the classical sense, superhuman, violent, passionately alive, with the ferocious good looks and fate of fallen angels; if there is a single certainty, it is that those who befriend them will die. The Demonlords are demigods who struggle for a kind of savage nobility, forever pursuing a sentimental, romantic code that places word before deed, death before dishonour. Their trials are many, and painted brightly with blood.
Arrayed against the Demonlords are the Witches of Carcë, purveyors of a blackness ‘which no bright morning light might lighten’. Their king is the crafty warlock Gorice XII, an egromancer ‘full of guiles and wiles’. Skilled in grammarie, he lurks forever in his citadel, which stands ‘like some drowsy dragon of the elder slime, squat, sinister, and monstrous’. At his side are his warlords: brave Corund, the bearish Corsus, the insolent Corinius, and ‘the landskip of iniquity’, the renegade Goblin Gro – philosopher, schemer, and traitor by nature. No blacker and more dastardly crew of scoundrels could be found; yet Eddison’s passion for them is obvious and intense.
The struggle between the Demons and Witches is nothing less than epic; the battles of this modern Iliad rage on land, sea, and air, taking us from the ocean depths to the lofty pinnacles of heaven. Among its finer episodes are the ‘wrastling for Demonland’, which pits Goldry Bluzco against the King of the Witches and sets an entire world aflame; the fog-clouded siege at Eshgrar Ogo; the harrowing ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the struggle there with the beast mantichora; the bloody battle at Krothering Side; the flight of the hippogriff to the gaunt peak of Zora Rach; and the playing of the final trumps at the dark citadel of Carcë.
Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’. In his finest moments Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the Goblin Gro:
‘in my sleep about the darkest hour, a dream of the night came to my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that the hairs of my head stood up and pale terror gat hold upon me. And methought the dream smote up the roof above my bed, and the roof yawned to the naked air of the midnight that laboured with fiery signs, and a bearded star travelling in the houseless dark. And I beheld the roof and the walls one gore of blood. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, crying, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’
At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.
The Worm Ouroboros inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s later and more popular Lord of the Rings trilogy; apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.’ But, as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)
If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).
Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.
You hold in your hands a masterpiece.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
1990
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_71090920-2a2c-5c12-a336-1c29db042b59)
BY ORVILLE PRESCOTT (#ulink_71090920-2a2c-5c12-a336-1c29db042b59)
IT IS thirty years since The Worm Ouroboros was first published in England and twenty-six since I first succumbed to its potent magic. Since then I have reread it several times, always finding new evidence for my belief that this majestic romance is an enduring masterpiece, although a peculiar and imperfect one, and that Eric Eddison is a great master of English prose and a greatly neglected one. His rediscovery is long overdue. Perhaps it will come with the republication of this book.
E. R. Eddison was a successful English civil servant, the author of several minor works and of three of the most remarkable romances in the English language, The Worm Ouroboros, Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. When he died in 1945 he left uncompleted a large fragment of still a fourth [The Mezentian Gate, published after this Introduction was written]. The three completed novels are loosely linked together as separate parts of one vast romantic epic; but the connection of The Worm Ouroboros with the others is remote. And it is unique in the simplicity of its theme, which is heroic adventure. The other two books have double themes, heroic adventure and the symbolical presentation of a moderately abstruse philosophy. For this reason it is best to read The Worm first. It makes an easier introduction into the splendid cosmos of Eddison’s imagination. And anyone who has once savoured the rare delights to be found there will not be content without exploring the uttermost reaches, metaphysical as well as fanciful.
What are the reasons for considering this flawed masterpiece (so noble in concept and so mighty in scope and yet marred with a few irksome failings) worthy of the attention of serious students of literature? First of all, there is the lordly narrative sweep of it, the pure essence of storytelling for its own sake such as has become increasingly rare in our introspective modern world. Second is the splendour of the prose, the roll and swagger and reverberating rhythms and the sheer gorgeousness of much of its deliberate artifice. And third is the blessed sense of vicarious participation in a simpler, more primitive world where wonders still abound and glory is still a word untarnished by the cynical tongues of small-minded men. Before elaborating a little on each of these qualities of The Worm Ouroboros, it seems wise to indicate what Eddison’s story is actually about.
Since this is a romantic epic about an imaginary world, Eddison felt it necessary to set his stage and explain things before launching into his story proper. This he did awkwardly, by sending an English gentleman in a magic dream to the planet Mercury to observe events there. It is a distracting and clumsy notion; but since Eddison forgot all about his earthborn observer after the first 20 pages, no prospective reader should allow himself to be troubled by his fleeting presence. And in Mercury, Eddison chose to call the people of the various nations Witches, Demons, Goblins, Imps, Pixies. This, too, is distracting, but only temporarily. The great war between the Demons and the Witches is the theme of this modern Iliad.
Never has such a war been chronicled before. Suggestions of it may be found in Homer, in the Icelandic sagas and in the Morte D’Arthur. Here are battles on sea and land, perilous journeys, base treacheries and mighty deeds performed by authentic heroes and majestic villains. Scene after scene achieves a pitch of excitement that engraves them indelibly on the memory: the great wrestling match between Lord Goldry Bluszco of Demonland and the monstrous Gorice XI, King of Witchland; the fight between Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha and the horrid beast mantichora; the ascent of the fabulous mountain Koshtra Pivrarcha; the wonderful crimes of those evil dukes of Witchland, Corsus and Corinius; the betrayals of the brave and intelligent Goblin, Lord Gro, doomed by some curse to perpetual treasons.
These heroes and villains, and the beautiful queens and princesses who make brief decorative appearances, are not subtly portrayed individuals. They are epic heroes like Achilles or Roland, colourful, picturesque, unreal and charming, the villainous Witches even more charming than the heroic Demons. It’s their adventures which count, not their minds, which is eminently proper in a romantic epic. And Eddison forged a unique style with which to tell their story.
The prose of The Worm Ouroboros resembles nothing written since the seventeenth century. It is as elaborate as Sir Thomas Browne’s, but far more flexible and various. Rich, repetitious (sometimes too much so), ornate, it can gleam with a suddenly brilliant phrase or lull the mind with rippling rhythms. Eddison lavished his verbal magic on mountains and scenery as well as on heroic action. And sometimes he wasted it on the fantastic splendours of over-decorated palaces (another of his small flaws). To enjoy such writing the reader must cast aside all preconceived ideas about style and adjust himself to something strange and foreign, just as he does when he reads The Song of Solomon or Urn Burial.
Here is just a taste of the haunting rhythms of Eddison’s style, from one of his simpler passages:
‘Now they rose up and took their weapons and muffled themselves in their great campaigning cloaks and went forth with torch-bearers to walk through the lines, as every night ere he went to rest it was Spitfire’s wont to do, visiting his captains and setting the guard. The rain fell gentlier. The night was without a star. The wet sands gleamed with the lights of Owlswick Castle, and from the castle came by fits the sound of feasting heard above the wash and moan of the sullen sleepless sea.’
And here is an example of Eddison’s almost boyish delight in his inventive coining of proper names:
‘before them the mountains of the Zia stood supreme: the white gables of Islargyn, the lean dark finger of Tetrachnampf nan Tshark lying back above the Zia Pass pointing to the sky, and west of it, jutting above the valley, the square bastion of Tetrachnampf nan Tsurm. The greater mountains were for the most part sunk behind this nearer range, but Koshtra Belorn still towered above the Pass.’
If The Worm Ouroboros were only a glorious adventure story beautifully written it would be a notable achievement. But the fresh wind that blows through it from another world and another system of values gives it an added dimension. Eddison himself, who had no love for the twentieth century, believed passionately in the ideals which inspired Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha, those very great warriors and gallant gentlemen. So in these ringing pages courage and nobility and loyalty are almost taken for granted; women are beautiful and to be served; and glory is worth striving for.
There are no complications, no reservations and no excuses here. Pagan these warriors may be and semi-barbarous, but they are not oppressed by weasel-faced doubts or whining uncertainties. Even the villains are heroic in their monumental villainy. And life itself is joyful and wonderful. The magical spells and supernatural marvels which abound only make living more exciting. When one has to cross the wide Bhavinan river riding on a crocodile or hatch out a hippogriff’s egg to find a new Pegasus, life can only be a glorious adventure.
We who live in a far more prosaic but no less dangerous world should rejoice at the opportunity to venture into many-mountained Demonland and to penetrate the sinister fortress of Gorice XII at Carcë in Witchland. This republication of The Worm Ouroboros is a literary event of the first importance.
ORVILLE PRESCOTT
1952
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_6b3464c7-99ed-54ae-97cc-19f241e113b8)
BY JAMES STEPHENS (#ulink_6b3464c7-99ed-54ae-97cc-19f241e113b8)
THE Worm Ouroboros, no worm, but the Serpent itself, is a wonderful book. As a story or as prose it is wonderful, and, there being a cause for every effect, the reason for writing it should be as marvellous again.
Shelley had to write the Prometheus Unbound, he was under compulsion; for a superhuman energy had come upon him, and he was forced to create a matter that would permit him to imagine, and think, and speak like a god. It was so with Blake, who willed to appear as a man but existed like a mountain; and, at their best, the work of these poets is inhuman and sacred. It does not greatly matter that they had or had not a message. It does not matter at all that either can be charged with nonsense or that both have been called madmen – the same charge might be laid against a volcano or a thunderbolt – or this book. It does not matter that they could transcend human endurance, and could move tranquilly in realms where lightning is the norm of speed. The work of such poets is sacred because it outpaces man, and, in a realm of their own, wins even above Shakespeare.
An energy such as came on the poets has visited the author of this book, and his dedicatory statement, that ‘it is neither allegory nor fable but a story to be read for its own sake’, puts us off with the assured arrogance of the poet who is too busy creating to have time for schoolmastering. But, waking or in dream, this author has been in strange regions and has supped at a torrent which only the greatest know of.
The story is a long one – this reader would have liked it twice as long. The place of action is indicated, casually, as the planet Mercury, and the story tells of the wars between two great kingdoms of that planet, and the final overthrow of one.
Mr Eddison is a vast man. He needed a whole cosmos to play in, and created one; and he forged a prose to tell of it that is as gigantic as his tale. In reading this book the reader must a little break his way in, and must surrender prejudices that are not allowed for. He may think that the language is more rotund than is needed for a tale, but, as he proceeds, he will see that only such a tongue could be spoken by these colossi; and, soon, he will delight in a prose that is as life-giving as it is magnificent.
Mr Eddison’s prose never plays him false; it rises and falls with his subject, and is tender, humorous, sour, precipitate and terrific as the occasion warrants. How nicely the Cat-bears danced for the Red Foliot,
‘foxy-red above but with black bellies, round furry faces, and innocent amber eyes, and great soft paws … On a sudden the music ceased, and the dancers were still, and standing side by side, paw in furry paw, they bowed shyly to the company, and the Red Foliot called them to him, and kissed them on the mouth, and sent them to their seats …’
‘Corund leaned on the parapet and shaded his eyes with his hand that was broad as a smoked haddock and covered on the back with yellow hairs growing somewhat sparsely, as the hairs on the skin of a young elephant.’
‘A dismal tempest suddenly surprised them. For forty days it swept them in hail and sleet over wide-wallowing ocean, without a star, without a course.’
‘Night came down on the hills. A great wind moaning out of the hueless west tore the clouds as a ragged garment, revealing the lonely moon that fled naked betwixt them.’
‘Dawn came like a lily, saffron-hued, smirched with smoke-grey streaks that slanted from the north.’
‘He was naked to the waist, his hairy breast and arms to the armpits clotted and adrip with blood, and in his hands two bloody daggers.’
Quotation can give some idea of the rhythm of his sentences, but it can give none of the massive sweep and intensity of his narrative. Milton fell in love with the devil because the dramatic action lay with him, and, in this book, Mr Eddison trounces his devils for being naughty (the word ‘bad’ has not significance here), but he trounces the Wizard King and his kingdom with affection and delight. What gorgeous monsters are Gorice the Twelfth and Corund and Corinius. The reader will not easily forget them; nor Gorice’s great antagonist Lord Juss; nor the marvellous traitor, Lord Gro, with whom the author was certainly in love; nor the great fights and the terrible fighters Lords Brandoch Daha and Goldry Bluszco, and a world of others and their wives; nor will he forget the mountain Koshtra Pivrarcha, that had to be climbed, and was climbed – as dizzying a feat as literature can tell of.
‘So huge he was that even here at six miles’ distance the eye might not at a glance behold him, but must sweep back and forth as over a broad landscape from the ponderous roots of the mountain where they sprang black and sheer from the glacier, up the vast face, where buttress was piled upon buttress and tower upon tower in a blinding radiance of ice-hung precipice and snowfilled gully, to the lone heights where like spears menacing high heaven the white teeth of the summit-ridge cleft the sky.’
Mr Eddison’s prose does not derive from the English Bible. His mind has more affinities with Celtic imaginings and method, and his work is Celtic in that it is inspired by beauty and daring rather than by thoughts and moralities. He might be Scotch or Irish: scarcely the former, for, while Scotland loves full-mouthed verse, she, like England, is prose-shy. But, from whatever heaven Mr Eddison comes, he has added a masterpiece to English literature.
JAMES STEPHENS
1922
THE INDUCTION (#ulink_eb985fcf-f4cc-5588-bda1-fe8ae5fa3356)
THERE was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale, set in a grey old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time. Lily and rose and larkspur bloomed in the borders, and begonias with blossoms big as saucers, red and white and pink and lemon-colour, in the beds before the porch. Climbing roses, honeysuckle, clematis, and the scarlet flame-flower scrambled up the walls. Thick woods were on every side without the garden, with a gap north-eastward opening on the desolate lake and the great fells beyond it: Gable rearing his crag-bound head against the sky from behind the straight clean outline of the Screes.
Cool long shadows stole across the tennis lawn. The air was golden. Doves murmured in the trees; two chaffinches played on the near post of the net; a little water-wagtail scurried along the path. A French window stood open to the garden, showing darkly a dining-room panelled with old oak, its Jacobean table bright with flowers and silver and cut glass and Wedgwood dishes heaped with fruit: greengages, peaches, and green muscat grapes. Lessingham lay back in a hammock-chair watching through the blue smoke of an after-dinner cigar the warm light on the Gloire de Dijon roses that clustered about the bedroom window overhead. He had her hand in his. This was their House.
‘Should we finish that chapter of Njal?’ she said.
She took the heavy volume with its faded green cover, and read: ‘“He went out on the night of the Lord’s day, when nine weeks were still to winter; he heard a great crash, so that he thought both heaven and earth shook. Then he looked into the west airt, and he thought he saw thereabouts a ring of fiery hue, and within the ring a man on a grey horse. He passed quickly by him, and rode hard. He had a flaming firebrand in his hand, and he rode so close to him that he could see him plainly. He was black as pitch, and he sung this song with a mighty voice—
Here I ride swift steed,
His flank flecked with rime,
Rain from his mane drips,
Horse mighty for harm;
Flames flare at each end,
Gall glows in the midst,
So fares it with Flosi’s redes
As this flaming brand flies;
And so fares it with Flosi’s redes
As this flaming brand flies.
‘“Then he thought he hurled the firebrand east towards the fells before him, and such a blaze of fire leapt up to meet it that he could not see the fells for the blaze. It seemed as though that man rode east among the flames and vanished there.
‘“After that he went to his bed, and was senseless for a long time, but at last he came to himself. He bore in mind all that had happened, and told his father, but he bade him tell it to Hjallti Skeggi’s son. So he went and told Hjallti, but he said he had seen ‘the Wolf’s Ride, and that comes ever before great tidings’.”’
They were silent awhile; then Lessingham said suddenly, ‘Do you mind if we sleep in the east wing tonight?’
‘What, in the Lotus Room?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m too much of a lazy-bones tonight, dear,’ she answered.
‘Do you mind if I go alone, then? I shall be back to breakfast. I like my lady with me; still, we can go again when next moon wanes. My pet is not frightened, is she?’
‘No!’ she said, laughing. But her eyes were a little big. Her fingers played with his watch-chain. ‘I’d rather,’ she said presently, ‘you went later on and took me. All this is so odd still: the House, and that; and I love it so. And after all, it is a long way and several years too, sometimes, in the Lotus Room, even though it is all over next morning. I’d rather we went together. If anything happened then, well, we’d both be done in, and it wouldn’t matter so much, would it?’
‘Both be what?’ said Lessingham. ‘I’m afraid your language is not all that might be wished.’
‘Well, you taught me!’ said she; and they laughed.
They sat there till the shadows crept over the lawn and up the trees, and the high rocks of the mountain shoulder beyond burned red in the evening rays. He said, ‘If you like to stroll a bit of way up the fell-side, Mercury is visible tonight. We might get a glimpse of him just after sunset.’
A little later, standing on the open hillside below the hawking bats, they watched for the dim planet that showed at last low down in the west between the sunset and the dark.
He said, ‘It is as if Mercury had a finger on me tonight, Mary. It’s no good my trying to sleep tonight except in the Lotus Room.’
Her arm tightened in his. ‘Mercury?’ she said. ‘It is another world. It is too far.’
But he laughed and said, ‘Nothing is too far.’
They turned back as the shadows deepened. As they stood in the dark of the arched gate leading from the open fell into the garden, the soft clear notes of a spinet sounded from the house. She put up a finger. ‘Hark,’ she said. ‘Your daughter playing Les Barricades.’
They stood listening. ‘She loves playing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m glad we taught her to play.’ Presently he whispered again, ‘Les Barricades Mystérieuses. What inspired Couperin with that enchanted name? And only you and I know what it really means. Les Barricades Mystérieuses.’
That night Lessingham lay alone in the Lotus Room. Its casements opened eastward on the sleeping woods and the sleeping bare slopes of Illgill Head. He slept soft and deep; for that was the House of Postmeridian, and the House of Peace.
In the deep and dead time of the night, when the waning moon peered over the mountain shoulder, he woke suddenly. The silver beams shone through the open window on a form perched at the foot of the bed: a little bird, black, round-headed, short-beaked, with long sharp wings, and eyes like two stars shining. It spoke and said, ‘Time is.’
So Lessingham got up and muffled himself in a great cloak that lay on a chair beside the bed. He said, ‘I am ready, my little martlet.’ For that was the House of Heart’s Desire.
Surely the martlet’s eyes filled all the room with starlight. It was an old room with lotuses carved on the panels and on the bed and chairs and roof-beams; and in the glamour the carved flowers swayed like waterlilies in a lazy stream. He went to the window, and the little martlet sat on his shoulder. A chariot coloured like the halo about the moon waited by the window, poised in air, harnessed to a strange steed. A horse it seemed, but winged like an eagle, and its fore-legs feathered and armed with eagle’s claws instead of hooves. He entered the chariot, and that little martlet sat on his knee.
With a whirr of wings the wild courser sprang skyward. The night about them was like the tumult of bubbles about a diver’s ears diving in a deep pool under a smooth steep rock in a mountain cataract. Time was swallowed up in speed; the world reeled; and it was but as the space between two deep breaths till that strange courser spread wide his rainbow wings and slanted down the night over a great island that slumbered on a slumbering sea, with lesser isles about it: a country of rock mountains and hill pastures and many waters, all a-glimmer in the moonshine.
They landed within a gate crowned with golden lions. Lessingham came down from the chariot, and the little black martlet circled about his head, showing him a yew avenue leading from the gates. As in a dream, he followed her.
I (#ulink_efed506c-7d1c-501e-b138-fb2d40106adf)
THE CASTLE OF LORD JUSS (#ulink_efed506c-7d1c-501e-b138-fb2d40106adf)
Of the rarities that were in the lofty presencechamber fair and lovely to behold, and of thequalities and conditions of the lords ofDemonland: and of the embassy sent unto them byKing Gorice XI, and of the answer thereto.
THE eastern stars were paling to the dawn as Lessingham followed his conductor along the grass walk between the shadowy ranks of Irish yews, that stood like soldiers mysterious and expectant in the darkness. The grass was bathed in night-dew, and great white lilies sleeping in the shadows of the yews loaded the air of that garden with fragrance. Lessingham felt no touch of the ground beneath his feet, and when he stretched out his hand to touch a tree his hand passed through branch and leaves as though they were unsubstantial as a moonbeam.
