‘Yes,’ answered Marco. ‘We are not as high as the Buddhist was, but it seems like the top of the world.’
‘There is a light on the side of the mountain yonder which is not a star,’ The Rat whispered.
‘It is a light in a hut where the guides take the climbers to rest and to spend the night,’ answered Marco.
‘It is so still,’ The Rat whispered again after a silence, and Marco whispered back: ‘It is so still.’
They had eaten their meal of black bread and cheese after the setting of the sun, and now they lay down on their backs and looked up until the first few stars had multiplied themselves into myriads. They began a little low talk, but the soundlessness was stronger than themselves.
‘How am I going to hold on to that second law?’ The Rat said restlessly. ‘“Let pass through thy mind only the image thou wouldst see become a truth.” The things that are passing through my mind are not the things I want to come true. What if we don’t find him – don’t find the right one, I mean!’
‘Lie still – still – and look up at the stars,’ whispered Marco. ‘They give you a sure feeling.’
There was something in the curious serenity of him which calmed even his aide-de-camp. The Rat lay still and looked – and looked – and thought. And what he thought of was the desire of his heart. The soundlessness enwrapped him and there was no world left. That there was a spark of light in the mountain-climbers’ rest-hut was a thing forgotten.
They were only two boys, and they had begun their journey on the earliest train and had been walking about all day and thinking of great and anxious things.
‘It is so still,’ The Rat whispered again at last.
‘It is so still,’ whispered Marco.
And the mountains rising behind each other and beside each other and beyond each other in the night, and also the myriads of stars which had so multiplied themselves, looking down knew that they were asleep – as sleep the human things which do not watch forever.
‘Someone is smoking,’ Marco found himself saying in a dream. After which he awakened and found that the smoke was not part of a dream at all. It came from the pipe of a young man who had an alpenstock and who looked as if he had climbed to see the sun rise. He wore the clothes of a climber and a green hat with a tuft at the back. He looked down at the two boys, surprised.
‘Good day,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep here so that you could see the sun get up?’
‘Yes,’ answered Marco.
‘Were you cold?’
‘We slept too soundly to know. And we brought our thick coats.’
‘I slept half way down the mountains,’ said the smoker. ‘I am a guide in these days, but I have not been one long enough to miss a sunrise it is no work to reach. My father and brother think I am mad about such things. They would rather stay in their beds. Oh! He is awake, is he?’ turning toward The Rat, who had risen on one elbow and was staring at him. ‘What is the matter? You look as if you were afraid of me.’
Marco did not wait for The Rat to recover his breath and speak.
‘I know why he looks at you so,’ he answered for him. ‘He is startled. Yesterday we went to a hairdresser’s shop down below there, and we saw a man who was almost exactly like you – only –’ he added, looking up, ‘his eyes were grey and yours are brown.’
‘He was my twin brother,’ said the guide, puffing at his pipe cheerfully. ‘My father thought he could make hairdressers of us both, and I tried it for four years. But I always wanted to be climbing the mountains and there were not holidays enough. So I cut my hair, and washed the pomade out of it, and broke away. I don’t look like a hairdresser now, do I?’
He did not. Not at all. But Marco knew him. He was the man. There was no one on the mountain top but themselves, and the sun was just showing a rim of gold above the farthest and highest giant’s shoulders. One need not be afraid to do anything, since there was no one to see or hear. Marco slipped the sketch out of the slit in his sleeve. He looked at it and he looked at the guide, and then he showed it to him.
‘That is not your brother. It is you!’ he said.
The man’s face changed a little – more than any other face had changed when its owner had been spoken to. On a mountain top as the sun rises one is not afraid.
‘The Lamp is lighted,’ said Marco. ‘The Lamp is lighted.’
‘God be thanked!’ burst forth the man. And he took off his hat and bared his head. Then the rim behind the mountain’s shoulder leaped forth into a golden torrent of splendour.
And The Rat stood up, resting his weight on his crutches in utter silence, and stared and stared.
‘That is three!’ said Marco.
chapter twenty-three
the silver horn
During the next week, which they spent in journeying towards Vienna, they gave the Sign to three different persons at places which were on the way. In a village across the frontier in Bavaria they found a giant of an old man sitting on a bench under a tree before his mountain ‘Gasthaus’ or inn; and when the four words were uttered, he stood up and bared his head as the guide had done. When Marco gave the Sign in some quiet place to a man who was alone, he noticed that they all did this and said their ‘God be thanked’ devoutly, as if it were part of some religious ceremony. In a small town a few miles away he had to search some hours before he found a stalwart young shoemaker with bright red hair and a horseshoe-shaped scar on his forehead. He was not in his workshop when the boys first passed it, because, as they found out later, he had been climbing a mountain the day before, and had been detained in the descent because his companion had hurt himself.
When Marco went in and asked him to measure him for a pair of shoes, he was quite friendly and told them all about it.
‘There are some good fellows who should not climb,’ he said. ‘When they find themselves standing on a bit of rock jutting out over emptiness, their heads begin to whirl round – and then, if they don’t turn head over heels a few thousand feet, it is because some comrade is near enough to drag them back. There can be no ceremony then and they sometimes get hurt – as my friend did yesterday.’
‘Did you never get hurt yourself?’ The Rat asked.
‘When I was eight years old I did that,’ said the young shoemaker, touching the scar on his forehead. ‘But it was not much. My father was a guide and took me with him. He wanted me to begin early. There is nothing like it – climbing. I shall be at it again. This won’t do for me. I tried shoemaking because I was in love with a girl who wanted me to stay at home. She married another man. I am glad of it. Once a guide, always a guide.’ He knelt down to measure Marco’s foot, and Marco bent a little forward.
‘The Lamp is lighted,’ he said.
There was no one in the shop, but the door was open and people were passing in the narrow street; so the shoemaker did not lift his red head. He went on measuring.
‘God be thanked!’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Do you want these shoes really, or did you only want me to take your measure?’
‘I cannot wait until they are made,’ Marco answered. ‘I must go on.’
‘Yes, you must go on,’ answered the shoemaker. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do – I’ll make them and keep them. Some great day might come when I shall show them to people and swagger about them.’ He glanced round cautiously, and then ended, still bending over his measuring. ‘They will be called the shoes of the Bearer of the Sign. And I shall say, “He was only a lad. This was the size of his foot.”’ Then he stood up with a great smile.
‘There’ll be climbing enough to be done now,’ he said, ‘and I look to see you again somewhere.’
When the boys went away, they talked it over.
‘The hairdresser didn’t want to be a hairdresser, and the shoemaker didn’t want to make shoes,’ said The Rat. ‘They both wanted to be mountain climbers. There are mountains in Samavia and mountains on the way to it. You showed them to me on the map.
‘Yes; and secret messengers who can climb anywh
ere, and cross dangerous places, and reconnoitre from points no one else can reach, can find out things and give signals other men cannot,’ said Marco.
‘That’s what I thought out,’ The Rat answered. ‘That was what he meant when he said, “There will be climbing enough to be done now.”’
Strange were the places they went to and curiously unlike each other were the people to whom they carried their message. The most singular of all was an old woman who lived in so remote a place that the road which wound round and round the mountain, wound round it for miles and miles. It was not a bad road and it was an amazing one to travel, dragged in a small cart by a mule, when one could be dragged, and clambering slowly with rests between when one could not: the tree-covered precipices one looked down, the tossing whiteness of waterfalls, or the green foaming of rushing streams, and the immensity of farmand village-scattered plains spreading themselves to the feet of other mountains shutting them in were breathtaking beauties to look down on, as the road mounted and wound round and round and higher and higher.
‘How can anyone live higher than this?’ said The Rat as they sat on the thick moss by the wayside after the mule and cart had left them. ‘Look at the bare crags looming up above there. Let us look at her again. Her picture looked as if she were a hundred years old.’
Marco took out his hidden sketch. It seemed surely one of the strangest things in the world that a creature as old as this one seemed could reach such a place, or, having reached it, could ever descend to the world again to give aid to any person or thing.
Her old face was crossed and recrossed with a thousand wrinkles. Her profile was splendid yet and she had been a beauty in her day. Her eyes were like an eagle’s – and not an old eagle’s. And she had a long neck which held her old head high.
‘How could she get here?’ exclaimed The Rat.
‘Those who sent us know, though we don’t,’ said Marco. ‘Will you sit here and rest while I go on further?’
‘No!’ The Rat answered stubbornly. ‘I didn’t train myself to stay behind. But we shall come to bare-rock climbing soon and then I shall be obliged to stop,’ and he said the last bitterly. He knew that, if Marco had come alone, he would have ridden in no cart but would have trudged upward and onward sturdily to the end of his journey.
But they did not reach the crags, as they had thought must be inevitable. Suddenly half way to the sky, as it seemed, they came to a bend in the road and found themselves mounting into a new green world – an astonishing marvel of a world, with green velvet slopes and soft meadows and thick woodland, and cows feeding in velvet pastures, and – as if it had been snowed down from the huge bare mountain crags which still soared above into heaven – a mysterious, ancient, huddled village which, being thus snowed down, might have caught among the rocks and rested there through all time.
There it stood. There it huddled itself. And the monsters in the blue above it themselves looked down upon it as if it were an incredible thing – this ancient, steep-roofed, hanging-balconied, crumbling cluster of human nests, which seemed a thousand miles from the world. Marco and The Rat stood and stared at it. Then they sat down and stared at it.
‘How did it get here?’ The Rat cried.
Marco shook his head. He certainly could see no explanation of its being there. Perhaps some of the oldest villagers could tell stories of how its first chalets had gathered themselves together.
An old peasant driving a cow came down a steep path. He looked with a dull curiosity at The Rat and his crutches; but when Marco advanced and spoke to him in German, he did not seem to understand, but shook his head saying something in a sort of dialect Marco did not know.
‘If they all speak like that, we shall have to make signs when we want to ask anything,’ The Rat said. ‘What will she speak?’
‘She will know the German for the Sign or we should not have been sent here,’ answered Marco. ‘Come on.’
They made their way to the village, which huddled itself together evidently with the object of keeping itself warm when through the winter months the snows strove to bury it and the winds roared down from the huge mountain crags and tried to tear it from among its rocks. The doors and windows were few and small, and glimpses of the inside of the houses showed earthen floors and dark rooms. It was plain that it was counted a more comfortable thing to live without light than to let in the cold.
It was easy enough to reconnoitre. The few people they saw were evidently not surprised that strangers who discovered their unexpected existence should be curious and want to look at them and their houses.
The boys wandered about as if they were casual explorers, who having reached the place by chance were interested in all they saw. They went into the little Gasthaus and got some black bread and sausage and some milk. The mountaineer owner was a brawny fellow who understood some German. He told them that few strangers knew of the village but that bold hunters and climbers came for sport. In the forests on the mountain sides were bears and, in the high places, chamois. Now and again, some great gentlemen came with parties of the daring kind – very great gentlemen indeed, he said, shaking his head with pride. There was one who had castles in other mountains, but he liked best to come here. Marco began to wonder if several strange things might not be true if great gentlemen sometimes climbed to the mysterious place. But he had not been sent to give the Sign to a great gentleman. He had been sent to give it to an old woman with eyes like an eagle which was young.
He had a sketch in his sleeve, with that of her face, of her steep-roofed, black-beamed, balconied house. If they walked about a little, they would be sure to come upon it in this tiny place. Then he could go in and ask her for a drink of water.
They roamed about for an hour after they left the Gasthaus. They went into the little church and looked at the graveyard and wondered if it was not buried out of all sight in the winter. After they had done this, they sauntered out and walked through the huddled clusters of houses, examining each one as they drew near it and passed.
‘I see it!’ The Rat exclaimed at last. ‘It is that very old-looking one standing a little way from the rest. It is not as tumbled down as most of them. And there are some red flowers on the balcony.’
‘Yes! That’s it!’ said Marco.
They walked up to the low black door and, as he stopped on the threshold, Marco took off his cap. He did this because, sitting in the doorway on a low wooden chair, the old, old woman with the eagle eyes was sitting knitting.
There was no one else in the room and no one anywhere within sight. When the old, old woman looked up at him with her young eagle’s eyes, holding her head high on her long neck, Marco knew he need not ask for water or for anything else.
‘The Lamp is lighted,’ he said, in his low but strong and clear young voice.
She dropped her knitting upon her knees and gazed at him a moment in silence. She knew German it was clear, for it was in German she answered him.
‘God be thanked!’ she said. ‘Come in, young Bearer of the Sign, and bring your friend in with you. I live alone and not a soul is within hearing.’
She was a wonderful old woman. Neither Marco nor The Rat would live long enough to forget the hours they spent in her strange dark house. She kept them and made them spend the night with her.
‘It is quite safe,’ she said. ‘I live alone since my man fell into the crevasse and was killed because his rope broke when he was trying to save his comrade. So I have two rooms to spare and sometimes climbers are glad to sleep in them. Mine is a good warm house and I am well known in the village. You are very young,’ she added shaking her head. ‘You are very young. You must have good blood in your veins to be trusted with this.’
‘I have my father’s blood,’ answered Marco.
‘You are like someone I once saw,’ the old woman said, and her eagle eyes set themselves hard upon him. ‘Tell me your name.’
There was no reason why he should not tell it to her.
‘It is Marco Lorist
an,’ he said.
‘What! It is that!’ she cried out, not loud but low.
To Marco’s amazement she got up from her chair and stood before him, showing what a tall old woman she really was. There was a startled, even an agitated, look in her face. And suddenly she actually made a sort of curtsey to him – bending her knee as peasants do when they pass a shrine.
‘It is that!’ she said again. ‘And yet they dare let you go on a journey like this! That speaks for your courage and for theirs.’
But Marco did not know what she meant. Her strange obeisance made him feel awkward. He stood up because his training had told him that when a woman stands a man also rises.
‘The name speaks for the courage,’ he said, ‘because it is my father’s.’
She watched him almost anxiously.
‘You do not even know!’ she breathed – and it was an exclamation and not a question.
‘I know what I have been told to do,’ he answered. ‘I do not ask anything else.’
‘Who is that?’ she asked, pointing to The Rat.
‘He is the friend my father sent with me,’ said Marco smiling. ‘He called him my aide-de-camp. It was a sort of joke because we had played soldiers together.’
It seemed as if she were obliged to collect her thoughts. She stood with her hand at her mouth, looking down at the earth floor.
‘God guard you!’ she said at last. ‘You are very – very young!’
‘But all his years,’ The Rat broke in, ‘he has been in training for just this thing. He did not know it was training, but it was. A soldier who had been trained for thirteen years would know his work.’
He was so eager that he forgot she could not understand English. Marco translated what he said into German and added: ‘What he says is true.’
She nodded her head, still with questioning and anxious eyes.
‘Yes. Yes,’ she muttered. ‘But you are very young.’ Then she asked in a hesitating way: ‘Will you not sit down until I do?’
‘No,’ answered Marco. ‘I would not sit while my mother or grandmother stood.’