The Inner Landscape Read online

  Then he remembered his motive, his reason for being where he was: lost in a fastness; he remembered the endless ritual of his primordial home; he remembered his anger and how he was determined to defy the sacred laws of liis family and his kingdom, and he stamped his feet on the ground. For in spite of all this he was frightened at what he had done and frightened of the night and he begun to run, his footsteps sounding loud upon the stones, until he came to a great stretch of land where only a few trees grew with their arms flung out as though in exasperation, and as he ran the moon slid out of the thick clouds and he saw, ahead of him, a river.

  A river! What river could this be? There was, it is true, a river that wound about his home, but this was something quite different—a wide sluggish waterway with no trees upon its banks, a featureless, slow-moving stretch of sullen water with the bilious moonlight glowing on its back.

  He had come to a halt on seeing this, and as he stood he felt the darkness close in behind him so that he turned his head and saw the dogs.

  Out of nowhere, it seemed, these hounds had gathered themselves together. Never in his life had the Boy seen so many. There had been, of course, the scavengers, flitting from time to time down, the corridors of his home, hugging the walls, baring their fangs—the shadow, the yelp, and a scuffle in the darkness and then the silence again. But this was something very different, where the dogs seemed to be a part of the day and night, cocksure of themselves, their lean grey heads held high in the air. Hounds out of somewhere else—they lived in forsaken halls and lay down all together in a single blot of darkness, or in the glaring heat they covered the stone floors of cloisters as thick on the ground as autumn leaves.

  They gathered themselves in a half-moon and, without touching him, seemed yet to urge him eastwards to the bank of the great river.

  The breath from their lungs was deep and fierce, but there seemed to. be no immediate menace in it. Not by the merest graze did the fanged horde of these hounds touch the Boy, who was yet impelled to go forward inch by inch until he stood on the brink of the great waterway where a shallow skiff lay moored. With the breathing of the beasts all about him he stepped down into the skiff and, with shaking hands, untied the painter. Then grabbing a kind of punting pole he pushed off into the sluggish stream. But he was not free of the dogs who, leaping into the water, surrounded him so that a great flotilla of canine heads bobbed up and down in the moon-glazed water, their ears pointed, their fangs bright in the light of the moon. But it was their eyes that were appalling, for they were that kind of bright and acid yellow that allowed no ' - 14 other colour alongside and, if a colour can have any moral value, was ineradicably wicked.

  Fearful as he was, and amazed as he was to find himself in this strange predicament, yet in spite of the pack he was less ill with terror than he might have been, utterly alone. The dogs were, unwittingly, his companions. They, unlike the iron and the stone, were alive and had in common with him the throb of life in their breasts and he threw up a prayer of gladness as he dug the long pole into the mud of the river bed.

  But he was deadly tired, and his weariness joined with the easing of his loneliness to the point where he all but fell asleep. But he kept his eyelids open and the time came when he reached the opposite bank and stepped out over the side into the warm moonlit water and the hounds turned about and drifted away, like a dark carpet.

  So he was alone again and his terror might have returned had he not been so tired. As it was he crawled up a shallow bank until he reached dry ground and then, curling up, he fell inconveniently asleep.

  How long he slept was difficult for him to estimate, but when he woke it was broad daylight, and as he raised himself on one arm he knew that all was ill. This was not the air of his own country. This was foreign air. He looked about and nothing was familiar. He had known on the previous night that he was lost, but this was another kind of sensation, for it seemed that he was not only far from home but that some new quality hovered between him and the sun. It was not, not that something had gone that in his heart of hearts he wanted back, but that something lay ahead of him that he had no wish to meet. What it could be he had no inkling. All he knew was that it would be different. The sun upon his face felt hot and very dry. His sight appeared to be keener than ever, as though a film had been taken away from his eyes, and an odour quite unlike any other began to force itself upon his notice.

  It was not unpleasant in itself. In fact there was a trace of sweetness inextricably tangled with the menace.

  He turned his back upon the wide and creeping river and, leaving the skiff in the shallow water, clenched his hands together. Then he started to walk with quick, nervous steps towards the low hills that lay over the skyline where walls and rooftops were intermixed with trees .and the branches of trees.

  As he went on there were indications, at first hardly recognisable, that he was on evil ground. Tinges of glaucous colour, now here, now there, appeared before his eyes. There lay things like snail-slime, or glistened from the occasional stone or along a blade of grass or spread like a blush over the ground.

  But a blush that was grey. A wet and slippery tiling that moved hither and thither over the foreign ground. It shone with a horrible light upon the dark earth—and then was gone and the reverse took its place, for the blush was now the dark and slithering thing and the terrain all about it shone like the skin of a leper.

  The Boy turned his head from something he could not understand in order to rest his eyes upon—the river, for even that ghastly waterway was some kind of a comfort for it was in the past and the past can do no further harm. It had done him none. As for the dogs, not one had harmed him, though the panting of their lungs was frightful. It was their eyes that had been more devilish.

  There was no such colour, now that the daylight had returned. The sun, for all its strength, gave out the kind of light that sucked out every hue. For the moon to have done this would have been in keeping with the baleful light she casts, but in her case something of the reverse had happened, for the eyes were lemon yellow.

  But when the Boy turned to the waterway behind him, as though for comfort, he saw how changed it was. Whatever it had been like on that previous night, it was no friend to him now. The water under the sun’s rays was like grey oil that heaved as though with a voluptuous sickness. The Boy turned his head back again and ran a little way as though from some vile beast.

  In contrast to the oleaginous river the harsh outline of the wooded hill was crusty like bread, and with never a glance behind him he made in that direction.

  It was now many hours since he had last had a meal and his hunger was becoming almost unbearable. The level ground was thick with dust.

  Perhaps it was this soft white dust that killed the soimd of approaching footsteps: for the Boy had no suspicion that something was approaching him. It was not until a waft of sour breath touched him that he started and leapt to one side and faced the newcomer.

  The face was unlike anything the Boy had ever seen before. It was too big. Too long. Too shaggy. Too massive altogether for decency, for there is a kind of malproportion that is best kept away from public view.

  The figure who stood so upright (even to the extent of appearing to lean backward a little as though recoiling) was dressed in a dark and ridiculously voluminous suit of some thick material. The starched cuffs which had once been white were so long and loose that they completely covered up his hands.

  He wore no hat, but had a mass of dusty little curls that covered his cranium and spread down the back of his neck.

  The protruding and osseous temples appeared to be thrusting their way through the wig-like hair. The eyes were horribly pallid and glassy with such small pupils as to be virtually invisible.

  If the Boy was not able to take in everything at a glance, he was at least able to know that he was facing something that could never have been discovered in the precincts of his home. It was in some way of another order. And yet what was it that made this gentleman so di
fferent? His hair was curly and dusty. This was somehow revolting but there was nothing monstrous about it. The head was long and huge. But why should that, in itself, be repellent, or impossible? The eyes were pale, and almost pupil-less, but what of that? The pupil was there, though tiny, and there was obviously no need for its enlargement.

  The Boy dropped his eyes for the merest fraction of a second, for one of the feet had raised itself into the air and was scratching the thigh of the opposite leg with horrid deliberation.

  The Boy shuddered a little, but why? The gentleman had done nothing wrong.

  Yet all was different. All was wrong, and the Boy, whose heart was beating thick and fast, watched the newcomer with apprehension. It was then that the long hirsute head lowered itself and rolled a little from side to side.

  “What do you want?” said the Boy. “Who are you?”

  The gentleman ceased to swing his head about and, looking fixedly at the Boy, bared his teeth in a smile.

  “Who are you?” the Boy repeated. “What is your name?”

  The black-coated figure leaned back in his tracks, so that there was something pompous about him. But the smile was still spread across his face like a dazzling wound.

  “I am Goat,” he said, and the noise of it came thickly from between his shining teeth. “I have come to welcome you, child. Yes ... yes ... to welcome you . . .”

  The man who called himself Goat then took a sidelong step towards the Boy—a vile and furtive step which, when it had reached its limit of extension, began to oscillate a hoof-like shoe that, as it dropped the white dust to and fro in an almost prudish way, revealed a central crack along the welt. The Boy retreated involuntarily but could not help staring at the beastly terminal as he did so. This cracked foot was not of the kind of thing that any right-minded man would care to exhibit to a stranger. But the Goat did nothing but shift to and fro, only ceasing from time to time to watch the soft, caught sand as it poured back from the split and onto the ground again.

  “Child,” he said (still scraping the sand about), “wince not away from me. Shall I carry you?”

  “No!” cried the Boy in so quick and loud a voice that the smile of the Goat went off and on again like a light.

  “Very well,” said the Goat, “then you must walk.”

  “Where to?” said the Boy. “I think I would like to go home.”

  “That is just where you are going, child,” said the Goat, and then in a kind of ruminative afterthought he repeated the words. “That is just where you are going.”

  “To the castle?” said the Boy. “To my room? Where I can rest?”

  “Oil no, not there,” said the Goat. “Nothing to do with any castle.”

  “Where I can rest,” repeated the Boy, “and have something to eat. I am very hungry,” and then a fit of temper ran through him and he shouted at the black-suited, longheaded Goat, “Hungry! Hungry!” and he stamped his foot on the ground.

  “There will be a banquet for you,” said the Goat. “It will be held in the Iron Room. You are the first.”

  “The first what?” said the Boy.

  “The first visitor. You are what we have been waiting for so long. Would you like to stroke my beard?”

  “No,” said the Boy. “Get away from me.”

  “Now, that’s a cruel tiling to say to me,” said the Goat, “especially as I’m the kindest one of all. You wait till you see the others. You are just what they want.”

  Then the Goat began to laugh and his large, loose white cuffs flipped to and fro as he beat his arms at his sides.

  “I tell you what,” he said. “If you tell me things, then I’ll tell you things. How would you like that?” The Goat leaned forward and gazed at the Boy with his empty-looking eyes.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” whispered the Boy, “but find me food or I will never do anything for you, I will hate you even more—and I will kill you—yes, kill you because of my hunger. Get me bread! Get me bread!” “Bread is not good enough for you,” said the Goat. “Oh dear, no. What you need are things like figs and rushes.” He bent over the Boy and his black greasy coat smelt faintly of ammonia. “And another thing you need is . . .”

  He did not finish his sentence because the Boy gave at the knees and slumped to the ground in a dead faint.

  'The long hairy jaws of the Goat fell open like those of a mechanical toy, and dropping to his knees he shook his head in an inane way, so that the dry dust that covered the curls on his head rose and drifted away in the joyless sunlight. When the Goat had stared for some time he rose to his feet and sidled away for perhaps twenty or thirty paces, looking over his shoulder every so often to make sure that he was not mistaken. But no. There was the Boy where he left him, motionless as ever. Then the Goat turned in his tracks and gazed at the rough horizon where trees and hills were knotted together in a long string. And as he watched he saw a long way off something no larger than an insect running. It seemed at times to be on all fours, but then to change and run almost upright, and the effect upon the Goat was immediate.

  A gleam of dull light that had both fear and vengeance in it flickered for a moment across the blank of the Goat’s eyes and he began to paw the ground, sending up spurts of white gravelly dust. Then he returned at a trot to the Boy and, lifting him with an ease that suggested that a terrible strength lay hidden within the loose jacket, he slung him like a sack over , his shoulder and then began to make for the horizon with a kind of awkward sideways run.

  And as he ran on and on over the white dust he muttered to himself:

  “First of all, our sovereign of the white head, the Lamb, and there is only the Lamb, for he is the heart of life and love and that is true because he tells us so, so first of all I call to him through darkness. To be received. And I will be rewarded, it may be, by the soft vice in his voice. And that is true because he told me so. And it is very secret and Hyena must not know . . . Hyena must not know . . . because I found him on my very own. So Hyena must not see me or the creature . . . the hungry creature . . . the creature we have waited for so long. . . . My present to the Lamb . . . the Lamb, his master . . . Lord of the snow-white face . . . the very Lamb.”

  As he ran in that sideways manner, he continued to pour out the thoughts as they bubbled up confusedly at the brink of his poor deluded brain. His power of running seemed to have no bounds. He did not pant or gasp for air. Only once did he stop, and that was in order to scratch his head deep down in the undergrowth of his dusty verminous curls where his forehead and his crown were itching as though his head was on fire. To do this he had to place the Boy on die ground and it was at about this point that a few grass-blades could be seen pushing up through the dust. The wooded hills were by now appreciably closer, and as the Goat scratched his head and while this operation was sending up clouds of dust, that hung in the air, the creature who had been observed in the distance once again made its appearance.

  But the Goat had his head turned away from that direction and it was the Hyena who, loping back from some wickedness or other, suddenly saw his colleague and froze on the instant where he stood, like a thing of metal, its almost animal ears pricked forward sharply. Its protruding eyes were filled with the Goat and with something else. What was that shape that lay on the dust at the Goat’s feet?

  For some while he could not make it out, even with his acute and comprehensive eyesight—but then, as the Goat turned to the Boy, shaking down his long cuffs still further as he did so, and as he picked the Boy up with his forearm and slung him over his back, Hyena could see the outline of a human face, and as he saw this he began to tremble with so terrible a vitality of the blood that the distant Goat stared about him as though there was a change in the weather, or as though the sky had altered colour.

  Feeling the change but not knowing what to do about it for nothing was to be seen or heard, the Goat began to run again, his black cloak-like coat flopping out behind him and the Boy over his shoulder.

  Hyena watched carefully,
for the Goat was by now within a few hundred yards of the periphery of the wooded hills. Once in the shadow of the trees it was not easy to track down a foe, or find a friend.

  But Hyena, although noting with care the direction of the Goat’s progress, was nevertheless pretty sure of his route and his destination. For, as Hyena knew, the Goat was a lickspittle and a toady, who would never dare to risk the wrath of the Lamb. That was where he would be going. To the heart of the terrain where deep in the silence stood the Mines.

  So the Hyena waited a little while and, as he watched, the air around him was loud with the sound of bones being cracked, for Hyena was fond of marrow and kept a quiver full of bones in his pocket. His jaws were very powerful and, as he crunched, the muscles could be seen working between his ears and his jaw; and this was made all the more apparent by the fact that Hyena in contrast to the Goat was something of a dandy, shaving himself with a cut-throat razor with great care every five or six hours. For the bristles on his jowl were tough and rapid and had to be dealt with. His long forearms were another matter. Thickly covered with a brindled growth they were something to be proud of, and for this reason Hyena was never to be seen in a jacket. The shirt he wore was cut off very short in the sleeves so that his long spotted arms could be readily appreciated. But by far the most impressive thing about him was his mane that billowed down through a vent in the shirt between the shoulder-blades. His trousered legs were very narrow and very short so that his back, as a result, was at a very steep incline. So much so, in fact, that he was often to be seen dropping his long-armed forelegs to the ground.

  There was about him something very foul. As with the Goat it was difficult to pin this foulness down to any particular feature, horrid enough as that may have been. But there was a kind of menace all the same about Hyena; a menace very different from the vague beastliness of the Goat. Less unctuous, less stupid, less dirty than the Goat, but bloodier, crueller and with a fiercer blood-drive, and for all the case with which the Goat had shouldered the Boy, a bestial strength of quite a different order. That clean white shirt, wide open at the front, disclosed a hinterland, black and rock-like.