The Lion that Mr. Talbot had seen could not be discerned from the Tor, for he lay on the slope of the hills opposite Somerton; but now the doctor could make out Virgo, toward the east, outlined by the black and silver penstroke of the Cary River – Virgo, like his Queen, with her staff, and the wide panniers of her skirts. East of her, the Scorpion lay curled by the river Brue, the sting in his tail an outcrop of bright stone.
The Centaur next awoke, who was Hercules too, hero and horse in one, made of the Pennard Hills or himself making them or both; West Pennard church steeple the arrow in his bow. And north of him the Goat, and the old fortification they called Ponter’s Ball making the Goat’s horn. Doctor Dee went on walking sunwise around the cone of the Tor. Figure by figure the Twelve came forth, from the Ram in Wilton and Street with the corn on his back green now that would be golden fleece come harvest time, all around to the two Fishes tied together at the tail: one being the great whale of Weary-all Hill, the other lying in the village of Street, its round eye the old round churchyard there. A huge nativity which no one who did not know it was there could ever see, not even from the top of the Tor, though it might be discerned – it might be – by one who flew overhead, hovered overhead like that hawk, and looked down.
If it had not been a dream, who had carried him?
Doctor Dee had reached the precincts of the tower. In its height the wind hooted, the freshening wind that plucked at the doctor’s beard and at the hem of his coat. Now the land lay open all around, and Doctor Dee stood in the center as though at a gnomon and looked out over Logres.
Kingdoms had been smaller then: and yet when the sea had filled the low places and covered the sands between the isles and high places which formed these figures, figures of the starry universe above them, then Arthur and his knights had had kingdom upon kingdom hereabouts, land upon land to travel in. For one kingdom is all kingdoms: a hill, a road, a dark wood; a castle to come to; a perilous bridge to cross.
Avalon was the isle where Arthur was borne away to die or sleep: and yet the same isle was Camelot where he reigned. And Avalon was Perceval’s island too, by right from his father King Pelles who had his seat there: so some old books had it. It was the place from which Perceval set out to seek the Grail: that Grail sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone, sometimes a dish, which was not different from the cup that blessed Joseph brought to this septentrional isle, which poured good water still: had poured water into Doctor Dee’s hands this very day.
By Michael’s tower Doctor Dee sat down, and drew his coat around him. Clouds lifting from the Severn Sea like winged creatures showed him a white bar and a gray line that was his own land of Wales far to the West, the West into which the Druids had gone away, bearing the past with them.
There was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were Grails of earth, water, fire, air: there was a stone, a cup, a crater or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintessence. Unless that Grail be not truly the whole seven-ringed cup of heaven itself, containing all things, contained within all things, the cup from which, willy-nilly, every soul must drink.
He thought: Is the universe one thing? And is the whole of it contained in every part?
Years ago, long years ago, he had discovered what might be a sign for the one thing the universe is. He had drawn it with rule and compass, and for a year he had bent his mind upon it to see if it would grow, to see if it would begin to draw to itself like a lodestone more and more of what the world is made of: fire, air, earth, water; numbers, stars, souls. The more he regarded it, the more it did so. It became a glyph like the holy glyphs of Ægypt that contain knowledge otherwise inexpressible, words too long to speak. He carried his sign with him as a woman carries a child, until one week in Antwerp (he was a fire of knowledge in that week, a burning bush) he had committed his sign to a little book, and belched out all that he knew about it, wrote without knowing what he wrote, until he was empty.
He had written it; he had had it set in type, and printed.
And it might still be that the sign which he had made was a sign for the one thing that the universe is. But it was a seal over secrecies now. It had passed from him, and he no longer knew what it pictured; he could not understand the book he had written.
He might come to know again and understand. He might, now. Not any answer withheld from you. The hawk that hung in the middle of the air, looking down, began to fall in a long gyre. The sun was setting in the sea: Doctor Dee could almost hear it hiss.
To go about Logres, as the sun goes about the year; to search the circle of creation, and find in a castle that is your own the Grail, long-sought, long-hungered-for, that belongs to you. In the High History which Doctor Dee had read in the old language, King Perceval’s name is construed Par lui fet: made by himself.
And the cup that he sought, wounded, in the castle of his wounded father, what was it but this cup Aquarius which Doctor Dee looked down on in the star temple laid out in Somerset-shire below?
And though it might be only here that such figures of earth (now darkening, and closing great eyes in sleep) had been cut by wizards’ hands, still the stars shine everywhere; and so it must be that in every place there is a star temple, impressed upon circles of earth, large or small. And inside every one of them must a Grail be hidden.
Doctor Dee raised his eyes to the heavens, whose stairs were swept of cloud now, and Tell me, he said: Tell me: Is the universe one thing? Is it, after all?
The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his question to: they saw him, for this ring of earth is a place they often stop by, to gaze into it, as into a mirror, or through it, as through a keyhole. They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, to look over their shoulders – for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind.
TWO
All on an April morning, Pierce Moffett walked out of his apartment and down Maple Street toward town. In the yards along his way householders were digging, planting, freeing shrubs of winter garb and cutting their ragged hair. Some turned to watch Pierce go by, and most greeted him. ‘Morning!’ Pierce said heartily, grinning inwardly to be hailed in this way, it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn’t imagine how odd it was for him to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. He blessed them, blessed their big fannies protruding as they bent over their pots and borders, blessed their hedges and the lemony blossoms of their springing black bushes, now what was that stuff called again, was that forsythia?
There was so much to learn, or to relearn, the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citizens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history. Pierce sighed deeply. The world is so full of a number of things, he thought, that I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
As happy as kings. He had turned from Maple Street down River Street (had the founding families pondered a long time before choosing these simple self-evident names, Maple, River, Hill?) and then down to where River Street meets Bridges Street, and the town’s chief buildings faced the fast brown river and the spring sky. There on the corner he went into a small store whose red-and-white tin sign said VARIETIES. He asked for a pouch of his usual cheap tobacco, and noticed that there were magazines here as well as candy, gum, and cigarettes, a good selection in fact in a tall wooden rack, including one or two fairly abstruse journals Pierce had supposed he would now have to subscribe to, but no. Good. He wandered farther down the dim length of the shop. There was a brief soda fountain with a real marble top and three or four stools, he turned one with a hand as he passed and it grumbled as such stools should. There was a notice posted beside the stacks of today’s newspap
ers, stating that those who wanted a Sunday New York Times must sign up for one in advance.
Well.
For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday the particular character it had for him – a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality – was not Jehovah claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday Times, a gas with the acrid smell of printer’s ink, a narcotizing, sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized. How anyway were Sundays spent here? Maybe he’d have to start going to church.
Still farther along (the shop was longer and more full of a number of things than it had seemed from the street) there were counters of stationery and school supplies, pens and pencils, tape, glue, and stacks of long pads just the yellow of those flowers he had seen. There were typewriter ribbons too, and small bottles of white paint for painting out errors; there were erasers, both rhomboid and cockade style. There were in fact all the tools of his new trade, everything seeming to be of the best quality and just unwrapped.
‘Anything I can help you with, there, sir?’ asked the lady at the front counter, whose cat’s-eye glasses were fitted with a beaded chain that hung down behind, and swung when she turned her head.
‘Oh, just looking.’ From a row of different-sized account books, he pulled a tall slim one, its corners and spine bound in maroon leather or leatherette, and the word RECORD in tall serif letters impressed on its gray buckram cover. How was it that antique designs like this continued to be produced? Perhaps only to keep the accounts of stores like this one. The edges of its pages were marbled, and it was surprisingly expensive.
He decided to buy it, and to record in it his new life in the country. He was not as certain of his prose as he ought to be now that his living would be depending on it, and he had often heard that keeping a diary was a way of keeping the tools edged. And he might welcome something to do, these long evenings after they rolled up the sidewalks of Blackbury Jambs.
Outside again in the pale sunlight, he looked up and down the street, toward the Shadow River bridge one way (narrow and of stone) and the Blackbury River bridge the other way (wide, black iron). The broad water out beyond sparkled and shivered; it almost seemed to Pierce that he could see, if he half-closed his eyes, the different waters of the two commingling rivers, cold and clear, slow and dull – an illusion, doubtless. Just behind him, when he turned away, was the library.
All right.
It was a sort of shingle-style Romanesque concoction, surely the most inefficient style ever adopted for public buildings; quite a bit of it went to hold up a large and functionless cupola. There was a piece of native slate embedded in the wall of the foyer, with a leaf and possibly an animal track impressed on it.
Inside was cool and bright, that cupola in fact let in the sun pleasingly; the oddly shaped wings and galleries had each a function; it was a nice place. Another old woman with a chain to her glasses (they would be important, apparently, to his life here, these women; he had already been served by one at the bank) presided at the central desk. He would ask her for a card. If for nothing but to pick up the odd entertainment: for here close by the door, for those who didn’t care or dare to penetrate farther, was a rack of current best-sellers, colorful blocks wrapped in plastic like chocolate boxes.
One among them was the book Phaeton’s Car, whose huge success Julie thought might presage the success of his own. Pierce pulled it out. A paper strip inside the plastic said it was a ONE WEEK BOOK, not nice for an author to be told that even if it was true.
He knew the book, of course, its contents were mostly containable in its blurbs and its premises were unavoidable on talk shows. Once long ago starships from Elsewhere had landed here, and alien intelligences had dwelt among us; they were responsible not only for most of the titanic and inexplicable earthworks of prehistory (Stonehenge, etc.) but had also left traces of their visit in the corpus of world myth, and even their portraits on cave walls and tombs. A bizarre kind of euhemerism. The old gods weren’t really gods, no that was silly; what they were, really, were folks from outer space.
A lot of his students had liked this explanation for history too.
He opened the book to the middle. There was a photograph of a bare tor surmounted by a tower. Glastonbury ‘lighthouse’? asked the caption. The ley-lines from all over Britain center on ‘Avalon’ (p. 195). Pierce flipped through to that page.
‘The fact that mappable straight lines of enormous length traverse the whole of the British Isles, connecting churches, old standing stones, mountain peaks, and “holy” sites of all kinds, was first established by researchers in the 1920s.’ Pierce always enjoyed the ‘researchers’ and ‘investigators’ of books like this one; readers were to imagine disinterested scientists, possibly in lab coats, and not the collection of cranks and odd numbers who actually compiled ‘research’ like this. ‘At the same time, in the neighborhood of Glastonbury, gigantic astral figures were discovered in the earth, forming a circle many miles in diameter, and unable to be perceived except from the air. What purpose could the “Star Temple of Glastonbury” serve? A sort of star map, guiding visitors who came by other means than land or sea . . . ?’
Good lord, Pierce thought, snapping shut the book and reinserting it in its row. Star temples and ley-lines, UFOs and landscape giants, couldn’t they see that what was really, permanently astonishing was the human ability to keep finding these things? Let anyone looking for them be given a map of Pennsylvania or New Jersey or the Faraways, and he will find ‘ley-lines’; let human beings look up long enough on starry nights and they will see faces looking down at them. That’s the interesting thing, that’s the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them; not what plan the aliens had for us, but why we think there must, somehow, always have been a plan.
Julie would get it. She must. She had to.
He turned away into the central atrium (irritated, excited, seeing in his mind green hills and blue streams as from a height). Fiction, biography, science branched away. Meaning. He thought there were five basic needs a human being had: for food, and shelter; clothing, if that wasn’t shelter; for sex, or love, if that was different; and for Meaning. Deprived of meaning a man might wither and die as surely as if deprived of food or water.
Not noticing where he walked, he had gone into the fiction stacks, casting his eyes over those mostly unwanted things, they seemed sadder somehow than neglected science or thought. Down the way a young woman pulled one out, glanced within it, smiled, and carried it away; what, he wondered. Norton. Norris. Nofzinger. The Way’s Far Turning, by Helen Niblick. Mitchell, well that one of course, in many copies. Mackenzie, Macauley, Macdonald. Ross Lockridge. Joseph Lincoln.
And well look at this.
When, just out of curiosity, he had gone to the New York branch library nearest him, he hadn’t found a single one. And here were dozens, or a dozen anyway at least. The Complete Works. How do you like that.
Here was Bitten Apples, wasn’t that the one about Shakespeare? And here was The Book of a Hundred Chapters, that had frightened and awed him as an adolescent. And a bunch more that he had not read, or didn’t remember having read. Now why, he wondered, would a little library like this one have all these? Kraft had never, after all, been a Shellabarger, or a Costain. He touched one or two spines, drew out a volume, remembering the rich anticipation the arrival of one of them would start up in him when it showed up in the monthly box from the state library; how he would settle to it, as to a long meal, accompanied by milk and cookies.
Somewhere in these too, as in the book on Bruno, he might have come across matter, surely must have come across matter, that he had used to make Ægypt. Though he felt pretty sure that whatever he had found in them had
only confirmed the existence of that country, and his discovery of it predated his discovery of Kraft. He was pretty sure.
How anyway had he discovered Kraft?
Once, one of these books had got into the box, filling some request of his or Sam’s or Winnie’s, though Winnie’s taste was for escapes of a different order. What had he asked for, ‘stories of history,’ that had brought him Kraft? And which had been the first he got, was it Bruno or one of these fictions, that caused him to ask for more? Had he asked for more, or had they just arrived?
He pushed back the one he had drawn out.
When he had a card.
There were other resources he discovered; this cupcake building was raisined with good things. The DNB. Cambridge Modern History. Catholic Encyclopedia, a good old one filled with oddities that later editions were ashamed of or knew better than to include; a fine field for browsing in. And there were many huge and lavish old folios of prints and albums of pictures, multivolume botanical atlases and bird books bound in leather – the wealthy summer residents of other days must have bequeathed these things to their local library. The tall shelves around the reading room were full of them. Pierce was standing at the entrance of this pleasant room (tables of light wood, green lamps, dark portraits) when a woman who had been kneeling at a case on the far side rose, a thick volume in her arms, and turned to see him, or rather turned her dark eyes his way unseeing, and went to sit with her book at a table spread about with other books and papers.
Could it be? Of course that night had been dark and brief, and months ago. And it would be strange if very nearly the first person he came across in this town were one of the only two or three he had already met. But it seemed to be her. He went on looking at her, and when she glanced at him again, he smiled, but she made no sign of recognition.
Got to be her.
He made his way around the room’s perimeter, and came up near her table. Besides the book – it was a biographical dictionary, open at Emerson – she was equipped with graph paper and pencils, and a calculator; she seemed to be casting curves of some kind, one axis of which was marked off in years.