A Voyage to Arcturus Part 37

"A tragical look," said Polecrab. He never even glanced at Maskull, but was gazing at a fixed spot on the water with unblinking eyes.

"What lies beyond Lichstorm?" asked Maskull, after a minute or two.

"Barey, where you have two suns instead of one--but beyond that fact I know nothing about it.... Then comes the ocean."

"And what's on the other side of the ocean?"

"That you must find out for yourself, for I doubt if anybody has ever crossed it and come back."

Maskull was silent for a little while.

"How is it that your people are so unadventurous? I seem to be the only one travelling from curiosity."

"What do you mean by 'your people'?"

"True--you don't know that I don't belong to your planet at all. I've come from another world, Polecrab."

"What to find?"

"I came here with Krag and Nightspore--to follow Surtur. I must have fainted the moment I arrived. When I sat up, it was night and the others had--vanished. Since then I've been travelling at random."

Polecrab scratched his nose. "You haven't found Surtur yet?"

"I've heard his drum taps frequently. In the forest this morning I came quite close to him. Then two days ago, in the Lusion Plain, I saw a vision--a being in man's shape, who called himself Surtur."

"Well, maybe it was Surtur."

"No, that's impossible," replied Maskull reflectively. "It was Crystalman. And it isn't a question of my suspecting it--I know it."

"How?"

"Because this is Crystalman's world, and Surtur's world is something quite different."

"That's queer, then," said Polecrab.

"Since I've come out of that forest," proceeded Maskull, talking half to himself, "a change has come over me, and I see things differently.

Everything here looks much more solid and real in my eyes than in other places so much so that I can't entertain the least doubt of its existence. It not only looks real, it is real--and on that I would stake my life.... But at the same time that it's real, it is false."

"Like a dream?"

"No--not at all like a dream, and that's just what I want to explain.

This world of yours--and perhaps of mine too, for that matter--doesn't give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it's really here at this moment, and it's exactly as we're seeing it, you and I. Yet it's false. It's false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing."

"Perhaps there is such another world," said Polecrab huskily. "But did that vision also seem real and false to you?"

"Very real, but not false then, for then I didn't understand all this.

But just because it was real, it couldn't have been Surtur, who has no connection with reality."

"Didn't those drum taps sound real to you?"

"I had to hear them with my ears, and so they sounded real to me. Still, they were somehow different, and they certainly came from Surtur. If I didn't hear them correctly, that was my fault and not his."

Polecrab growled a little. "If Surtur chooses to speak to you in that fashion, it appears he's trying to say something."

"What else can I think? But, Polecrab, what's your opinion--is he calling me to the life after death?"

The old man stirred uneasily. "I'm a fisherman," he said, after a minute or two. "I live by killing, and so does everybody. This life seems to me all wrong. So maybe life of any kind is wrong, and Surtur's world is not life at all, but something else."

"Yes, but will death lead me to it, whatever it is?"

"Ask the dead," said Polecrab, "and not a living man."

Maskull continued. "In the forest I heard music and saw a light, which could not have belonged to this world. They were too strong for my senses, and I must have fainted for a long time. There was a vision as well, in which I saw myself killed, while Nightspore walked on toward the light, alone."

Polecrab uttered his grunt. "You have enough to think over."

A short silence ensued, which was broken by Maskull.

"So strong is my sense of the untruth of this present life, that it may come to my putting an end to myself." The fisherman remained quiet and immobile.

Maskull lay on his stomach, propped his face on his hands, and stared at him. "What do you think, Polecrab? Is it possible for any man, while in the body, to gain a closer view of that other world than I have done?"

"I am an ignorant man, stranger, so I can't say. Perhaps there are many others like you who would gladly know."

"Where? I should like to meet them."

"Do you think you were made of one stuff, and the rest of mankind of another stuff?"

"I can't be so presumptuous. Possibly all men are reaching out toward Muspel, in most cases without being aware of it."

"In the wrong direction," said Polecrab.

Maskull gave him a strange look. "How so?"

"I don't speak from my own wisdom," said Polecrab, "for I have none; but I have just now recalled what Broodviol once told me, when I was a young man, and he was an old one. He said that Crystalman tries to turn all things into one, and that whichever way his shapes march, in order to escape from him, they find themselves again face to face with Crystalman, and are changed into new crystals. But that this marching of shapes (which we call 'forking') springs from the unconscious desire to find Surtur, but is in the opposite direction to the right one.

For Surtur's world does not lie on this side of the one, which was the beginning of life, but on the other side; and to get to it we must repa.s.s through the one. But this can only be by renouncing our self-life, and reuniting ourselves to the whole of Crystalman's world.

And when this has been done, it is only the first stage of the journey; though many good men imagine it to be the whole journey.... As far as I can remember, that is what Broodviol said, but perhaps, as I was then a young and ignorant man, I may have left out words which would explain his meaning better."

Maskull, who had listened attentively to all this, remained thoughtful at the end.

"It's plain enough," he said. "But what did he mean by our reuniting ourselves to Crystalman's world? If it is false, are we to make ourselves false as well?"

"I didn't ask him that question, and you are as well qualified to answer it as I am."

"He must have meant that, as it is, we are each of us living in a false, private world of our own, a world of dreams and appet.i.tes and distorted perceptions. By embracing the great world we certainly lose nothing in truth and reality."

Polecrab withdrew his feet from the water, stood up, yawned, and stretched his limbs.