Текст книги "Summon the Bright Water "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Plato’s Atlantis is far older. We can date it – so far as one can date a myth – to 8/9000 B.C. A thousand years earlier, as the ice retreated, temperatures had begun to go up and thereafter sea levels were steadily rising about three feet every century, putting the fear of the gods into every settlement by the shore. Geologists can’t place the lost low-lying land, yet there must have been a dozen such along the Atlantic coasts which were happy isles until overwhelmed, like the green meadows on the English Stones. At least one of them could have preceded Egypt in its civilisation, its temples and its harbours.

By God, I can see the fugitives pulling up the long river, too narrow perhaps to use the square lugsail which had brought them in from the ocean, and entering the gorge against the powerful current from the last glaciers on the Welsh mountains, too strong for broken oars and weary arms; but here was a beach for the keel, a platform of rock on which to unload the cargo and stretch their limbs and a cave for shelter. Upstream beyond the gorge they could see the blue river running through open, friendly woodland with deer drinking in the shallows. The voyage was over.

Gold. Can we accept that a high and isolated stone-age culture, practising agriculture and possessing sea-going ships, could have discovered gold before any other metal? Easily! Geology alone is enough to account for the absence of tin and copper but the presence of plentiful gold. In the Empire of the Incas that useful and malleable material had no exaggerated value. The best jugs and bowls were of gold, not of earthenware or bronze (though by then they had discovered it), and the most deadly weapons were still of stone. For how long had such a culture, there or elsewhere, been in existence? There is no evidence. But if you sailed off from such a land into the unknown, you would assume that other societies were much like your own and take with you gold for gifts and for trading.

‘We shall go back this evening and have another look at slack water,’ I told the major.

‘Useless, old boy! You said so yourself. And bloody dangerous!’

‘I’ve eaten armadillo and it was quite good.’

‘You’re in one of your dreams, come off it!’ Elsa said.

‘I am, but you started it. Glyptodont was a cousin of the armadillo.’

The major pointed out that there would be no bones left.

‘Nor of its master. Nor of his ship,’ I said. ‘Nor of Nodens nor Arthur nor the quick-witted Odysseus. But bones are not the only memorial.’

In the afternoon we had to leave earlier than I intended in order to get off the mud. The ebb was still rolling down the river in a yellow flood, and Marrin’s dinghy had not enough power to cross the tideway to the English Stones before we were carried down the Shoots. I was afraid that the first place we could put in to would be the port of Avonmouth, but managed to bear away to starboard and anchor in the shelter of Gruggy Island which formed the right-hand bank of the gorge and was partly showing. There we had to stay for two more hours in full view of the Welsh coast until slack water. A passing coaster hailed us to know if we wanted help. I understood why Marrin only went out when low water was at night and kept his rowing boat in the mouth of the pill at New Passage.

When the force of the tide died away, we crossed to the inlet in the Stones where we had been the night before and where I could change into full gear for the dive unobserved. At about seven the Shoots became as motionless as a pond and I went in carrying a small bag of stout canvas. The cave was not easy to find again, for I had been carried past it at speed and surfaced well to the north. When at last I saw it a good ten minutes of slack water had been wasted.

I swam into the mouth, keeping well clear of the bottom though it was the usual Severn mixture of mud and sand and probably safe. Ahead of me my light showed a vertical face of rock, about the height of a man, which at first I thought was the end of the cave, but it wasn’t. On the top of this little cliff was a flat ledge running back a few yards, with a slope to the right of it which ended in a nearly perpendicular funnel. It occurred to me even then that if this fissure carried on as it started it might end in a blowhole at the surface of the Stones.

The ledge had a floor of fine silt which did not appear to have been disturbed. I swept it away to reveal the bare rock beneath, but at the expense of being half blinded by the cloud I created. Below the cleft I touched something which I thought was an oddly shaped shell and pulled it out. It was encrusted with sea growths but so exactly ring-shaped that it had to be a man-made object. Time was forgotten. I was wild with excitement. I wriggled over the silt, swashing a space all round me like a cock salmon looking for eggs to fertilise in the bed of a stream. I don’t know what Marrin was after when he first entered the cave. It would not have been salmon but doubtless had something to do with life in the dark deep. He was very much in my mind, but without fear. I was conscious that I must be imitating all his movements. And then his hand had struck, as mine did, little flat pebbles which slid easily upon each other, scoured clean by the gentle wash of the silt.

I took two of them in my hand and sank down to the mouth of the cave where I was clear of the haze of silt and had a faint sheen of evening light from the surface. They were gold ingots, roughly the size and shape of a beech leaf and a quarter of an inch thick. Putting them in my bag along with the ring, I returned to the back of the ledge where I had found them and cleared three neat blocks of ingots which suggested that they had been tied together or packed in a wooden case. The outer surfaces of each block were heavily encrusted with marine growth, which had held it together.

With the thoughtless greed of gold fever I filled the bag, and of course found that the load and I could never reach the surface; so I put back a few ingots and then discarded the lead weights of my belt to the approximate equivalent of what was left in the bag. On swimming to the mouth of the cave I found that the tide had turned and was running more strongly than the day before. I was still below neutral buoyancy but able to come up then and there if I dropped either gold or lead. I chose lead rather than to lose forever several thousand pounds at the bottom of the Shoots. I came up all right but to the roof of the cave, carried by a surge running into it. Back to the ledge I went, scraping along the roof and, lacking the experience of a professional diver, confused by the weight being in my hand, not round my waist.

Obviously I needed to be heavier in order to get clear of the cave mouth, and was about to add three or four ingots to my belt – since there was no hope of finding the discarded lead weights – when another of the intermittent surges caught me and washed me into the funnel. I could see through the water that far above me there was light. I could also see that the cleft was not nearly wide enough for my body to go through. Panic-stricken scrapings with knees and elbows got me clear, and by the time the next surge arrived I was firmly anchored to the floor of the ledge, one hand in a deep crack and the other feeling for more gold to fill the bag and keep me down. I no longer cared how much of it was lost for good when I was safely out of the cave and could throw it away. Marrin’s treasure had seemed likely to do a better job than he had done.

This time I was able to walk beyond the mouth of the cave and hung there pitching ingots into the interior until I was buoyant. Then the face of the gorge began to rush past and I surfaced at much the same point as the day before. The dinghy was too near the current of the flowing tide to be reached by swimming, so I came ashore at the nearest outcrop of the Stones and walked and waded to Elsa and our little harbour.

She was less alarmed than the previous evening, assuming that what I had done once so easily I could do again. As for me, I had had enough and was determined not to dive in the Shoots again for all the gold of the Americas. I dropped the bag on the bottom of the dinghy and showed her the contents.

‘So this is where the golden cauldron came from!’ she exclaimed.

I replied that I was fairly sure it had not. All Marrin’s deceptions were at last clear to me. He could not sell the ingots as they were without giving some explanation of the origin, and so he melted them down and made them into brooches, ashtrays and the rest, which dealers would accept without question as the output of Broom Lodge.

‘But then why the pretence of alchemy?’ she asked.

‘Well, you once told me that he knew a lot about it and used to experiment at home. I think he used the mysterious origin of the gold to increase his hold on the inner circle, encouraging them to believe whatever they liked. He made the cauldron and it was for use at the ceremonies, not for sale. Even Sir Anthony Aslington was astonished by its strange beauty, and the major considers the damned thing is holy.’

‘Any more glyptodonts?’

A wild but just possible guess occurred to me.

‘No. But I may have found the pet’s collar.’

‘I think it was for a woman’s hair,’ she said, chipping away a crust. ‘The ends don’t meet.’

‘They don’t on a dog collar either.’

‘But they must have taken their wives on the ship.’

‘They took their wives and children to the highest ground and left them. And I’m not going back there to look for tiaras.’

Elsa shuddered. My description must have been vivid.

‘No! That horrible funnel!’

‘There’s just time to see if it comes to the surface,’ I said.

We left the dinghy and walked across the Stones to a point a little way back from the edge of the Shoots where a blowhole should appear if the cleft went right up through the rock. All the pools were motionless except one where the water and the floating weed pulsated up and down with an occasional spurt of foam.

It was now obvious to me why Marrin had never cleared the lot out at one go. Weight was the answer. He had no one to help him; he could never be dead sure of his time of arrival; and he would have found the same problem that I had – too heavy or too light and the fast tide ready to punish any miscalculation. So he decided to take no risks, leaving his treasure where it was and drawing on it in small quantities as required.

But I did have a helper. My determination never to dive again vanished. I had asked for trouble by arriving too late and staying too long. Provided I plunged in at the first sign of slack water and remained below for not more than ten minutes, there was little danger.

‘If we had some sort of smooth cylinder that won’t catch on the rock and lowered it down the blowhole at the end of a rope…’

‘You are not to, Piers. You said you wouldn’t.’

‘But this is easy. You at the top. Me at the bottom filling the cylinder. We can collect the lot in one dive, or two if the weight is too much.’

‘What are we to do with them?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll work it out. There are so many duties.’

The pools were filling now, and we had a longer and more devious walk back to our harbour, often with the rising tide rippling round our ankles. The dinghy was not there. I could see it a quarter of a mile away on its course for Gloucester.

It was my fault. I should have foreseen it. The dinghy was moored with the painter coiled round a large boulder at the far end of the inlet. Rendered half-witted by tiredness, excitement and the safe return to Elsa, I had never looked at the mooring when we walked off to find the pool. Meanwhile the rising tide had lifted the painter off the boulder.

Swimming was quicker than walking. I told Elsa to stay on a ridge of the Stones which would be the last to be covered, and struck out for the New Passage pill and Marrin’s rowing boat. It was where the ebb had left it, high above the water on a slope of mud, fortunately steep. I was nearly up to my waist in it before my feet touched a strip of gravel at the bottom of the stream and the boat slid into the water.

‘We’ll never catch up the dinghy,’ she said when I had rescued her.

‘No. But wherever the tide takes her, it ought to take us.’

She was no longer in sight, for it was after sunset. I rowed out to the point where I reckoned she would have been when we last saw her, shipped the oars and allowed the Severn to take over.

More embarrassment was to come. Evidently we had been watched for some time from the Welsh coast and when the dinghy was seen floating away we were taken for two very foolish tourists stranded on the Stones and in danger of drowning. A boat was racing out and came alongside.

‘That your dinghy what’s gone up river?’ the boatman asked.

The last thing we wanted was for him to chug up-river ahead of us, overtake the dinghy and find out what I had been diving for. How right Marrin had been to confine his explorations to the hours of darkness!

‘Don’t you bother!’ I said cheerfully. ‘We’ll catch her up in Slime Road.’

I think he was impressed that I knew the name of the main channel on the right bank.

‘If she don’t go up Oldbury and come to grief on the rocks. I wouldn’t bet on it. And what the goodness were ‘ee doing on the Stones with all that underwater rubber on ‘ee?’

‘Fishing,’ I answered and was searching for the least improbable lie when Elsa piped up in a sweet little-girl voice:

‘I wanted a swim and there wasn’t anywhere else.’

I took my cue and added apologetically, ‘You know what women are.’

‘Serve you right! Where you from?’

‘Chepstow. Came down on the tide.’

‘And that there boat?’

He couldn’t possibly have seen me take it out from New Passage.

‘Towing it, in case the girl wanted to go and bask on a sandbank.’

‘What she want to do that for?’

‘You see, I do love to sunbathe with nothing on,’ Elsa said.

The boatman must have been a good Welsh methodist, for he sheered off at once. If we were bound for hell anyway, it didn’t make much difference when we drowned.

‘Good night!’ Elsa called. ‘And thank you for wanting to help us.’

The fast flood had now swept us under Severn Bridge and into Slime Road, so it had probably done the same for the dinghy. She’d be pretty safe there, bumping her way up from soft bank to soft bank. The tide was not yet high enough for shipping to be proceeding up-channel. That was lucky. If the dinghy were picked up by some enterprising mariner and natural curiosity led him to see what was in the bag, we were not likely to hear any more of her – especially as my clothes were in the bottom indicating that the owner might have gone for a swim which was his last.

Twice we nosed into shore to examine possible dinghies; one turned out to be a stranded log and the other a drowned cow. We left it to the tide to do what it wished with us until we came to the tip of the Shepherdine Sands and had to make up our minds between the main channel and the Lydney channel. The boat, caught by a swirl, twisted round uncertainly three times until I back-watered and directed us, stern foremost, into the Lydney channel. Elsa, watching the wide and promising expanse of water the other side of the sands, protested. I replied that the dinghy might have been caught by a similar whirlpool and that we should put our trust in Nodens and the Roman Manual for pilots.

Neither let us down. The dinghy was aground, heeling over but still dry, just behind the Guscar Rocks, her ghostly helmsman trying to make the vanished port of Woolaston.

There was nothing we could do but wait alongside her for the tide to rise, and ensure that she remained on an even keel until she was on the shale beach where Marrin and I had come ashore from the rocks. It was after midnight and there was not a sound but the suckings and splashings of the river. The dim line of the railway embankment cut us off from the world.

Meanwhile, we discussed what should be done with the twenty or so pounds of gold which we had and the much larger quantity which remained in the cave.

‘What do you think happened to them?’ she asked.

‘All we know is that the tribes of the marshes did not know what gold was and had no use for it. My guess is that the adventurers never returned to the cave or the ship, and that the pet of the voyage died there.’

‘Perhaps they were taken away and worshipped like the gods which Uncle Simeon was training the colonists to be.’

‘Or made the common mistake of the half-civilised in taking a dance of welcome for a war dance and opening fire with whatever weapons they had.’

We moored the boats – safely this time – to a bush overhanging the bank, and slept a little in each other’s arms on the short, sheep-nibbled grass of a Severn lawn.

‘I could stay here for ever,’ she said.

An express from South Wales hurtled past on the embankment, the roar and the lights reminding us that we were not on a private planet of green earth and salt water orbiting the Milky Way overhead, but in a demanding modernity from which relief could only be obtained by labour on the land and by pretences, like those of Broom Lodge, that the world of machines did not or in the future would not exist.

First light was showing in the east and a cock broke the silence.

‘Where do we go now?’

There at least I could answer her with certainty.

‘Down on the ebb. We can’t do anything else. We might try New Passage. Your uncle knew what he was doing, and if we pick up his mooring we can get off at half tide.’

‘You’re going to try again?’

‘We have two more days when the Stones will be well above water and it will be late dusk. After that we might have to wait a fortnight or a month to get it right.’

True enough. But I was impatient to find more evidence, if there was any, rather than more ingots.

So New Passage it was. Dead tired and hungry, we took an early bus to Bristol where I bought an old army valise to carry the aqualung and the rest. That was enough to persuade a hotel to accept two very shabby travellers whose only other possession was a bag containing enough wealth to buy the place.

Bathed, clean and breakfasted some energy returned, and we wandered through the town searching antique shops in the hope of finding such a cylinder as I had in mind. Old leather buckets there were, but too wide. Umbrella stands of china, but they might break. A wooden roller of God knows what use, but the hollow centre was not big enough. Eventually I bought the brass case of – I think – a six-inch naval shell which had been polished up and had an ashtray to match, fitted to the top. I got the reluctant proprietor, proud of his ingenuity, to remove the ashtray and to bore three equidistant holes in the top to which the end of the rope could be attached. After that, fifty feet of rope was easy enough to find in a seaport, and we returned with our purchases to the curious glances of a hotel porter who must have thought them odd for a pair of lovers.

Next day we went by train to Gloucester and by bus to Bullo, where we recovered my car and returned to Bristol. In the late afternoon we drove out to New Passage, took both boats off Marrin’s mooring and anchored off the rippling dark water which covered the Stones to wait for the bottom of the tide in the late dusk. This time there was no risk of being watched from the Welsh coast, but while picnicking in the dinghy we were hailed three times to warn us of the invisible rocks.

They emerged from the sea like a herd of slow monsters, quickly uniting to become the flat and weedy desert of the English Stones. We made our usual inlet, then walked out to the blowhole where we lowered the shell case on the end of its rope. It was checked only once, easily clearing the obstruction, and we could feel it hit the bottom at a depth of forty feet.

As soon as there was no perceptible current in the Shoots I went in. No adventures or dangers of any sort this time. Our cylinder was resting on the slope which led up to the funnel. I loaded it with the remaining ingots and watched it disappear as Elsa pulled it up. That done, I searched the terrace for any other evidence of man, sweeping the silt gently and methodically away with my eyes and my torch so close that I could miss nothing. I found only two flint arrowheads of early neolithic type: one close under the back wall, the other more or less in line and two yards out. That only proved that one or both parties had discovered the bow. I should have expected the immigrants to have it, but not necessarily the fishers and hunters along Severn banks. Apart from the gold, there was no sign that the cave had ever sheltered man.

I came up before the turn of the tide. Elsa was staring at the pile of ingots she had emptied out of the shell case, their colour still faintly showing gold in the starlight. I knew that my first haul had weighed about twenty pounds. This lot was double as much. So we had sixty pounds in all.

‘Broom Lodge must have some of it,’ she murmured, ‘since that was what Uncle Simeon wanted and so do I. But I’m damned if they get the lot! Have you got everything you have been risking your life for?’

‘I’ve got everything I could want, my darling.’

‘I didn’t mean a tall bit of nonsense with fair hair. Are you going to add a chapter to history and tell them seamen got here with gold soon after the melting of the ice?’

I said that I had not had time to think about it.

‘Piers, who knows where our world is going? We too might have to sail off to the unknown with this as cargo.’

‘And sell it for half a deer and some sausages. Or shall we start up the first bank and credit ourselves with £600 a troy ounce?’

‘Is that what it’s worth?’

‘Roughly £432,000.’

I had intended to take both boats up to Bullo with the tide. One reason was that the dinghy belonged to the commune and Dunwiddy would want to know what had happened to it; another reason was that the rowing boat could not remain much longer at New Passage without arousing curiosity. But when it came to the point, I funked the voyage to Bullo. With a five-knot tide under me and as much again from the engine it could easily be done in four hours by any fisherman who knew the river, but I disliked the thought of navigating the channel in the dark and I was not at all sure whether I should reach the horseshoe bend before or after the bore. So I decided to put into Sharpness where Elsa would meet me with the car and the gold, and leave Bullo for another day.

That run to Sharpness with the boat in tow was, I think, the most melancholy hour of my life. Yet so black a mood should have been impossible when I loved and was loved in return and had no financial worries. I foresaw the betrayal which I mentioned at the outset of this report. A professional betrayal. I was bound in honour to put the ingots on show and publish the story of the find. But if I did so, my reputation as a serious scholar would be ruined. Despondency was of course affected by the high, black banks on both sides of the channel, cutting out all sight of the land and filling me with apprehension as if I were a shade alone in Charon’s boat taking the ferry over to hell.

Science and folk memories agree that a great flood was fact, but the very reasonable assumption that some community progressing towards urban civilisation might have been drowned is considered fantasy. Why? After all, London and New York within a few millennia will with absolute certainty be under either ice or the sea. Fantasy would be the accusation against me. An accusation powered by jealousy perhaps, but unanswerable.

What was I to publish? What proof had I? I remember saying that bones were not the only memorial, but bones and artefacts, decently packed in the earth, at least give dates. I had found only two arrowheads and had no evidence at all to prove that they were contemporary with the ingots, though I believe they were. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the seamen took to the country fully armed. After the massacre, two of the mortally wounded struggled back to the landing place and died side by side. The arrowheads in their bodies are all that remained. Laughable!

All laughable. I could hear the learned voices. In the patterns of the chop of the tide I could read the reviews. ‘Mere conjecture.’ ‘I am sorry that a man like Colet should have fallen for Atlantis.’ ‘All mixed up with a bunch of latter-day prophets he was.’ ‘Yes, I’ve been shown the ingots but I’m not impressed. Peruvian probably and from a wreck.’ ‘The glyptodont? Well, I’m told it’s possible that the carapace could be preserved under the silt, while the bones had of course disappeared. Pickled in salts, if I understood it. But what proof have we that Colet didn’t find it among some curios in a shop?’ ‘I hear he had the impudence to go to the British Museum with a gold bowl which was made yesterday.’

I decided that I could not publish, that I must leave my proofs – which are not proofs – to some later time when other discoveries may incline archaeologists to accept my story.

I swear that my motives were not hypocritical. I am not in the least afraid of giving the details of how I was led to the Shoots; it would be easy to leave out the irrelevancies of the den and of the deaths of Marrin and Evans. And I did not decide to keep my mouth shut because my wife would be stinking rich if I did. I kept it shut because I had nothing to add to history, and belief in my adventurers from the ocean would be damaged rather than confirmed.

Elsa was at Sharpness and ran down the water steps to greet my arrival.

‘You met a bit of spray,’ she said as she kissed me.

Running with the tide, there was no spray. It seems that I can become overwrought when forced to choose, so much alone, between two alternatives equally detestable.

We had to wait till dawn for the dinghy to enter the canal behind a little freighter with a sweet-smelling cargo of timber. Then we set off for London, placed our wealth in a metal deed box which had belonged to my grandfather and deposited it to join the cauldron in the bank, devoid of any idea what to do with either.

After a day’s rest in the flat with my delicious girl, so level-headed in all but love, we drove down to Sharpness again to take the boats up to the Bullo mooring on the morning tide. While we were sitting in the sun on that lawn, exclaiming like a pair of children at the lovely product of nothing but silt and sheep, she asked, ‘Do you think we could go and see what’s happened at Broom Lodge?’

‘You, but not me. They mustn’t see any connection between you and me and Wigpool.’

‘Suppose the major has been chucked out?’

‘If he has been, take care that you are never alone and get out quick!’

I didn’t like it, but I knew that the commune was still a part of her life. When we first fell in love she had protested at being considered ‘maternal’. But in fact her feeling towards Broom Lodge was inevitably maternal. She could not be expected to keep away.

‘It will be all right. I’m still St Elsa,’ she said.

‘But St Elsa has the cauldron.’

‘That’s why I ought to show myself. And I have a good excuse – I need my clothes and things.’

I stopped close to the colony, and she walked the rest of the way as if she had just come down from Gloucester by bus. Then I concealed the car under the oaks – I was getting quite good at that – and took up my old post in the foxgloves where I could watch the back of the house.

The major had not been chucked out. She led him round the west wing where I could see him. To my amazement he had adopted the tonsure of the druidicals. Was he following the practice of the Celtic church and had Arthur gone pagan? No doubt he had a good reason and no doubt I should not be able to understand it.

She took my advice and did not stay long. When she returned, with a suitcase in each hand, she told me that she had not seen any of the six but had been received with touching affection by all the ordinary members of the commune whom she had met. Denzil had warned her that affairs were critical but that he would not give up. ‘Give up what?’ she asked, and only received the typical reply that he was not worthy. She tried to tell him that we knew the origin of her uncle’s gold and had the lot. He was not interested. She had the impression that he was busy with some spiritual awakening of the colonists and that finance was of no importance. Nothing was yet safe, he told her, and the pagans must be delivered from temptation, so she had better clear off. He would come to the den in the afternoon. Choice of the den seemed to indicate that the druidicals were wandering through the bracken as irresponsibly as frightened pigs and might interrupt us at the old rendezvous of the sapling stump.

After a quick lunch we went up to the den. It was much as I had left it. Again I was threatened by the melancholy of disappointment and had to shake it off. I had spent so long there, hot on the track of the mysterious cauldron. It had indeed been a Grail for me, to be revealed through danger, discomfort and the reverence of the seeker. Perhaps that is the essential mystery of any Grail. It exists but, when you know it exists, it exists no longer.

The major turned up, climbing the slope in the heat of the afternoon with the determination of the wandering friar he called himself. In the depths of his eyes, somewhat fish-like in his club, shining in the forest, I could see that he was carrying the shield of Arthur into battle.

‘I need a miracle, old boy,’ he said.

I answered that I had run through several miracles in the last few days and hadn’t one left.

‘Do they still believe I pinched the ornaments?’ Elsa asked.

‘Doesn’t matter. Executor chap called Dunwiddy has been after me. I told him how we’d found the bag digging out a new rubbish pit and were short of cash. Right, he says, we’ll sell ’em, major. He knew the name of the firm which bought from Simeon, so we took the bag up to town. Glad to see us, they were. Weighed. Assayed. Paid by cheque to late Mr Marrin’s executors. No questions asked. Broom Lodge products well known. Clever devil, Simeon was.’