Strange News From Another Star Read online

  In the foothills of the mountain, a little higher than the city, lay a valley through which a broad stream with a smooth surface flowed between alders and willows. Thither went the young people who were in love and they learned from the mountain and the trees the marvel of the seasons. In another valley men trained with horses and weapons, and on a high steep promontory a mighty fire burned each year during the night of the summer solstice.

  Ages slipped by and the mountain safeguarded the lovers' valley and the field of arms, he gave a home to cowherds and woodsmen, hunters and lumbermen; he provided stone for building and iron for smelting. Indifferent and permissive, he watched the first summer fire blaze on the promontory and saw it return a hundred times and many hundred times again. He saw the city down below reach out with little stumpy arms and grow beyond its ancient walls. He saw the hunters discard their crossbows and take up firearms. The centuries ran past him like the seasons of the year, and the years like hours.

  It caused him no concern that in the long course of years a time came when the red solstice fire did not blaze on the smooth rock and from then on remained forgotten. He was not worried when in the march of the ages the field of arms was deserted and plantain and thistles overgrew the lists. And he did nothing to interfere when in the long course of the centuries a landslide altered his form and half the city of Faldum was reduced to rubble under the thundering rocks. He barely glanced down and did not even notice that the city lay there in ruins and no one rebuilt it.

  All this disturbed him not at all. But something else did begin to worry him. The ages had slipped by and, behold, the mountain had grown old. When he saw the sun rise and move across the sky and depart, it was not the way it had once been, and when he saw the stars reflected in the pale glaciers he no longer felt himself their equal. Neither the sun nor the stars were any longer especially important to him; what was important now was what was happening to himself and within himself. For he could feel deep beneath his cliffs and caverns an alien hand at work, hard primitive rock grew friable and weathered into flaky slates as streams and waterfalls ate their way deeper. The glaciers had disappeared, the lakes had broadened, forests had been transformed into boulder fields and meadows into black moors; the barren ribbons of his moraines extended vastly far out into the country in pointed tongues, and the landscape below was strangely altered, had become oddly stony, blasted and silent. The mountain withdrew more and more into himself. He was clearly no longer the equal of the sun and the stars, his equals were wind and snow, water and ice. Whatever seems eternal and yet slowly wears away and perishes, that was his equal.

  He began to guide his brooks more affectionately down into the valley, he rolled his avalanches with greater caution, he offered his flowery meadows more solicitously to the sun. And it happened that in his advanced age he also remembered men again. Not that he thought of men as equals, but he began to look about for them, he began to feel abandoned and to think about the past. But the city was no longer there, there were no songs in the valley of love, and no huts on the mountain peaks. There were no more men. All had gone. All had grown still, had become parched, a shadow lay in the air.

  The mountain shuddered when he realized what dissolution meant; and as he shuddered, his summit bent to one side and pitched down and the rocky fragments rolled after it across the valley of love, long since filled up with stones, down into the sea.

  Yes, times had changed. Why was it that just now he had to remember men and think about them continually? Had it not once been very beautiful when the fire on the promontory had burned and the young people in pairs had wandered through the valley of love? And oh, how sweet and warm their songs had sounded!

  The ancient mountain was wholly sunk in memories, he hardly noticed the centuries flowing by, how here and there in his caverns there was subsidence accompanied by collisions and a soft thundering. When he thought about men he was pained by a dull echo from past ages of the world, a not-understood inclination and love, a dim intermittent dream as though once he too had been a man or like men, had sung and heard others sing, as though the idea of mortality had once in his earliest days transfixed his heart.

  The ages flowed by. In collapse and surrounded by a barren wasteland of rubble, the dying mountain gave himself up to his dreams. How had that once been? Was there not still a resonance, a slender silver thread that united him with the bygone world? Laboriously he burrowed in the night of mouldering memories, groping ceaselessly for torn threads, repeatedly bending far out over the abyss of things past. - Had there not been for him too, in the very distant ages past, the glow of friendship, of love? Had not he too, the lonely one, the great one, once been an equal among equals? - Had not once at the beginning of the world a mother sung to him too?

  He brooded and brooded, and his eyes, the blue lakes, grew cloudy and dull and turned into moor and swamp, and over the strips of grass and little patches of flowers swept the rolling boulders. He continued to brood, and from an unimaginable distance he heard a chime ringing, felt the notes of music around him, a song, a human song, and he trembled with the painful joy of recognition. He heard the notes and he saw a man, a youth, wholly enveloped in music, poised in mid-air in the sunny sky, and a hundred buried memories were aroused and began to quiver and stir. He saw a human face with dark eyes, and the eyes asked commandingly: 'Do you not want to make a wish?'

  And he made a wish, a silent wish, and as he did so, he was freed from the torment of having to think about all those lost and distant things, and everything fell from him that had caused him pain. The mountain collapsed and with it the country, and where Faldum had been, the illimitable sea tossed and roared, and over it in steady alternation moved the sun and the stars.

  Iris

  In the springtide of his childhood Anselm used to run and play in the green garden. One of his mother's flowers called the sword lily was his special favourite. He used to press his cheek against the tall, bright-green leaves, touch their sharp points with exploratory fingers, deeply inhale the scent of the marvellous large blooms, and stare into them for minutes at a time. Within, there were long rows of yellow fingers rising from the pale blue floor of the flower, and between them ran a bright path far downward into the calyx and the remote blue mystery of the blossom. He had a great love for this flower and peering into it was his favourite pastime; sometimes he saw the delicate upright yellow members as a golden fence in a king's garden, sometimes as a double row of beautiful dream trees untouched by any breeze, and between them, bright and interlaced with living veins as delicate as glass, ran the mysterious path to the interior. There at the back the cavern yawned hugely and the path between the golden trees lost itself infinitely deep in unimaginable abysses, the violet vault arched royally above it and cast thin, magic shadows on the silent, expectant marvel. Anselm knew that this was the flower's mouth, that behind the luxuriant yellow finery in the blue abyss lived her heart and thoughts, and that along this lovely shining path with its glassy veins her breath and dreams flowed to and fro.

  Alongside the tall flower stood smaller ones which had not yet opened; they rose on firm, sap-filled stems in little chalices of brownish-yellow skin, out of which the new blossoms forced their way upward silently and vigorously, wrapped tight in bright-green and lilac, but at the very top the new deep violet, erect and neatly rolled, peered out in delicate points, and even these young, tight-rolled petals showed a network of veins and a hundred secret signs.

  In the morning when he came out of the house, fresh from sleep and dreams and strange worlds, there stood the garden waiting for him, never lost yet always new, and where yesterday there had been the hard blue point of a blossom tightly rolled, staring out of its green sheath, now hung thin and blue as air a young petal with a tongue and a lip, tentatively searching for the curving form of which it had long dreamed. At the very bottom where it was still engaged in a noiseless struggle with its sheath, delicate yellow growth was already in preparation, the bright veined path and the far
-off fragrant abyss of the soul. Perhaps as early as midday, perhaps by evening, it would open, the blue silk tent would unfold over the golden forest, and her first dreams, thoughts, and songs would be breathed silently out of the magical abyss.

  There came a day when the grass was full of blue bell-flowers. There came a day when suddenly there were new sounds and a new fragrance in the garden, and over the reddish, sun-drenched leaves hung the first tea rose, soft and golden red. There came a day when there were no more sword lilies. They were gone; there were no more gold-fenced paths leading gently down into fragrant mysteries, and the cool pointed leaves stood stark and unfriendly. But red berries were ripening in the bushes, and above the starflowers flew new, unheard-of butterflies, joyous and unconfined, reddish-brown ones with mother-of-pearl backs, and whirring, glassy-winged hawk moths.

  Anselm talked to the butterflies and the pebbles, he made friends with the beetles and lizards, birds told him bird stories, ferns secretly revealed to him under the roof of their giant fronds their stores of brown seeds; for him fragments of green and crystal glass, catching the sun's rays, turned into palaces, gardens, and sparkling treasure chambers. With the lilies gone, the nasturtiums bloomed; when the tea roses wilted, then brambles grew brown. Everything changed places, was always there and always gone, disappeared and came again in its season, and even those marvellous frightening days, when the wind whistled chilly through the pine forest and in the whole garden the wilted foliage rattled very sear and dead, brought still another song, a new experience, a story, until once more all subsided, snow fell outside the windows and palm forests grew on the panes, angels with silver bells flew through the evening, and hall and attic were redolent of dried fruit. Friendship and confidence never failed in that good world, and when snowdrops unexpectedly shone beside the black ivy leaves, then it was as though they had been there all the time. Until one day, never expected and yet always exactly the way it had to be and always equally welcome, the first pointed bluish bud peeped out again from the stem of the sword lily.

  To Anselm everything was beautiful, everything was delightful, friendly, and familiar, but his highest moment of magic and of grace came each year with the first sword lily. At some moment in his earliest childhood he had read in her chalice for the first time the book of marvels, her fragrance and changing, multifarious blue had been summons and key to the universe. Thus the sword lily had gone with him through all the years of his innocence, had become new with each new summer, richer in mystery and more moving. Other flowers too had mourns, others diffused fragrance and thoughts, others too enticed bees and beetles into their small sweet chambers. But to the boy the blue lily had become dearer and more important than any other flower, she was for him the symbol and example of everything worth contemplating and marvelling at. When he stared into her chalice and in absorption allowed his thoughts to follow that bright dreamlike path between the marvellous yellow shrubbery towards the twilight interior of the flower, then his soul looked through the gate where appearance becomes a paradox and seeing a surmise. Sometimes at night too he dreamed of this flowery chalice, saw it opening gigantically in front of him, like the gate of a heavenly palace, and through it he would ride on horseback, would fly on swans, and with him flew and rode and glided gently the whole world drawn by magic into the lovely abyss, inward and downward, where every expectation had to find fulfilment and every intimation came true.

  Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometime assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.

  Thus to the boy Anselm the chalice of his flower seemed to be the open, unvoiced question towards which his soul was striving in growing anticipation of a blessed answer. Then the lovely multiplicity of things drew him away again, in conversation and games with glass and stones, roots, bushes, animals, and all the friendly presences of his world. Often he was sunk in deep contemplation of himself, he would sit with closed eyes absorbed in the marvels of his own body, feeling as he swallowed, as he sang, as he breathed, strange sensations, impulses, and intimations in mouth and throat, groping too for the path and the gate by which soul can go to soul. With amazement he observed the coloured figures full of meaning which appeared to him out of the purple darkness when he closed his eyes, spots and half circles of blue and deep red with glassy-bright lines between. Sometimes Anselm realized with a happy start the subtle hundredfold interconnections between eye and ear, smell and taste; he felt for beautiful fleeting instants tones, noises, and letters of the alphabet related and very similar to red and blue, to hard and soft; or he marvelled, as he smelled some plant or peelings of green bark, at how strangely close smell and taste lie together and often cross over into one another and become one.

  All children feel this, although not all with the same intensity and delicacy, and with many the feeling is gone and as though it had never existed even before they have learned to read their first letters. Others retain the mystery of childhood for a long time and a vestige and echo of it stays with them into the days of white hair and weariness. All children, as long as they remain within this mystery, are uninterruptedly occupied in their souls with the single important thing, with themselves and their paradoxical relationship to the outside world. Seekers and wise men return to this preoccupation in their mature years; most people, however, forget and abandon, early and for good, this inner world of the truly important, and all their lives long wander about in the many-coloured mazes of wishes, worries, and goals, none of which has a place in their innermost being and none of which leads them back to their innermost being or to home.

  During Anselm's childhood, summers and autumns softy came and went, again and again the snowdrops, wallflowers, violets, lilies, periwinkles, and roses bloomed and faded, beautiful and luxuriant as always. He lived together with them; flower and bird, tree and spring listened to him, and he took his first written letters and the first woes of friendship in his old fashion to the garden, to his mother, to the many-coloured stones that bordered the beds.

  But then came a spring that did not sound and smell like all the earlier ones; the blackbird sang and it was not the old song, the blue iris bloomed and no dreams or fairy tales drifted out and in along the gold-fenced pathway of its chalice. Strawberries in hiding laughed from among the green shadows, butterflies tumbled magnificently above the woodbine, but nothing was any longer the way it had always been; the boy had other interests, and he was frequently at odds with his mother. He himself did not know what the trouble was or why it hurt so, why something was always bothering him. He only saw that the world had changed, that the friendships of earlier times had fallen away and left him alone.

  Thus a year passed, and then another, and Anselm was no longer a child. The coloured stones around the flower-beds bored him, the flowers were silent, and he kept the beetles in a case, impaled on pins. The old joys had dried up and withered, and his soul had begun the long hard detour.

  Boisterously the young man made his way into life, which seemed to him to have just begun. Blown away and forgotten was the world of allegory; new desires and new paths enticed him. The aura of childhood still lingered about him, in his blue eyes and soft hair, but he was irritated when reminded of it and had his hair cut short and adopted as bold and worldly an air as he could muster. Unpredictable, he stormed through the troubling secondary-school years, sometimes a good student and friend, sometimes alone and withdrawn, now buried in books until late at night, now wild and obstreperous at his first youthful drinking bouts. He had had to leave home and saw it only on very brief occasions when he came to visit his mother. Greatly
changed, grown tall, handsomely dressed, he would bring friends or books with him, always different ones, and when he walked through the old garden, it was small and silent under his distraught glance. He no longer read stories in the many-coloured veins of the stones and the leaves, he no longer saw God and eternity dwelling in the blue secrecy of the iris blossom.

  Anselm went to secondary school, then to college; he came home with a red cap and then with a yellow one, with fuzz on his upper lip and then with a youthful beard. He brought books in foreign languages with him and one time a dog, and in a letter case in his breast pocket he sometimes carried secret poems, the sayings of ancient wise men, or pictures of pretty girls and letters from them. He came back from travels in distant lands and from sea voyages on great ships. He came back again and was a young teacher, wearing a black hat and dark gloves, and his old neighbours tipped their hats to him and called him professor although he was not yet that. Once more he came, wearing black clothes, and walked slim and solemn behind the slowly moving hearse in which his old mother lay in a flower-covered coffin. And after that he seldom returned.