29
LYCHNIS, in the meanwhile, was off to the south-west with Yuan in the Dragon. The stars were on fire in heaven; there was a space of white light about the moon; far below slid the perfumed forest. She sat behind Yuan in the hollow body of the creature, and he, slung between the wings, bent this way and that, wheeling and dipping his fantastic chariot; and sometimes, when he had climbed the peak of the wind, he would fling himself forward, and she would see the dark, rushing world beyond the streak of moon on his shoulders as they swooped on a hundred miles through the night. Then, after a few moments of rest on some hill that loomed up out of the void, a soft purr of his mysterious engine or a beat of the wings and the chariot sprang up and forward like an eagle.
Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes, or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or, if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness. From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the midst of the sky, with their small heads so close.
Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon, very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals, a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The jungle,” he whispered.
There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far distance.
“They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.
Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen, and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time. There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange.
“Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.”
They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis, feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan, perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger, meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh.
They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted. The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it.
“You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice.
“Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?”
“The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all is well.”
“I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.”
“Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite perceives.”
“I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.
“Will you walk in the jungle under the cloak of my understanding?” he asked.
“Oh yes!” She was instant. How often, at night, one had heard some young man, or some older man, or even an aged man, say: Shall we walk in the wood a little? But this was to reenter the Garden by night, and walk in Eden with an archangel, or even with the Lord God. Possibly to see the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Looking at Yuan, to follow him, she asked herself: Are you the Serpent? He was leading her to knowledge, certainly, but not of good and evil, for he had said good and evil are local oppositions; in the unnameable they become one.
He was looking past her, boring into the reeds. She liked the dark, oblong eyes with their gimlet centres of blackness. She liked the imperious line of the cheek.
“We will not land here,” he said.
They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there. She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.) Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy, the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the sacred lilies of ice.
Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her, she felt he divined the whole secret of her.
“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious. Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.
She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently, as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”
“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone, and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”
“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”
“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”
Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.
“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.
He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”
It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them. Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts, the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.
But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted, she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”