And, sometimes, he moved. I was aware of gestures. His head was
raised to listen. One arm swung shadowy across the sea of broken
ridges. From leagues away a line of sand rose slowly. There was a
rustling. Another--an enormous--arm emerged to meet his own, and two
stupendous figures drew together. Poised above Time, yet throned upon
the centuries, They knew eternity. So easily they remained possessors
of the land. Facing the east, they waited for the dawn. And their
marvellously forgotten singing poured across the world....
WAYFARERS
I missed the train at Evian, and, after infinite trouble, discovered a
motor that would take me, ice-axe and all, to Geneva. By hurrying, the
connection might be just possible. I telegraphed to Haddon to meet me
at the station, and lay back comfortably, dreaming of the precipices of
Haute Savoie. We made good time; the roads were excellent, traffic of
the slightest, when--crash! There was an instant’s excruciating pain,
the sun went out like a snuffed candle, and I fell into something as
soft as a bed of flowers and as yielding to my weight as warm water....
It was _very_ warm. There was a perfume of flowers. My eyes opened,
focused vividly upon a detailed picture for a moment, then closed
again. There was no context--at least, none that I could recall--for
the scene, though familiar as home, brought nothing that I definitely
remembered. Broken away from any sequence, unattached to any past,
unaware even of my own identity, I simply saw this picture as a camera
snaps it off from the world, a scene apart, with meaning only for those
who knew the context:
The warm, soft thing I lay in was a bed--big, deep, comfortable; and
the perfume came from flowers that stood beside it on a little table.
It was in a stately, ancient chamber, with lofty ceiling and immense
open fireplace of stone; old-fashioned pictures--familiar portraits
and engravings I knew intimately--hung upon the walls; the floor was
bare, with dignified, carved furniture of oak and mahogany, huge chairs
and massive cupboards. And there were latticed windows set within deep
embrasures of grey stone, where clambering roses patterned the sunshine
that cast their moving shadows on the polished boards. With the perfume
of the flowers there mingled, too, that delicate, elusive odour of
age--of wood, of musty tapestries in spacious halls and corridors, and
of chambers long unopened to the sun and air.
By the door that stood ajar far away at the end of the room--very far
away it seemed--an old lady, wearing a little cap of silk embroidery,
was whispering to a man of stern, uncompromising figure, who, as he
listened, bent down to her with a grave and even solemn face. A wide
stone corridor was just visible through the crack of the open door
behind her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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