The Womb of Time, page 4
“The whole point of studying literature,” Rylands observed, “is to gain the benefit of the key experiences of fine minds without having to pay the full cost of their accumulation. Don’t you agree, Dr. Halsted?
“Of course,” Halsted agreed. “Sometimes, though, one has to exert oneself a little, in order to cultivate a better empathetic connection with the work.”
“And an excursion into a littoral desert of damp mud has exactly the right piquancy about it,” Ridpath said, blithely. “I take it that we’re all on board for today’s practice run?” As he asked the last question, he glanced at Giles Crome.
“The trap’s ready,” the innkeeper confirmed. He turned to Halsted. “I didn’t have time to tell you last night, Professor, but we’re all set up here to cater for tide-followers. I have a cocklers’ trap with wheels adapted for the mudflats, and a pony with seven years’ experience following the ebb. I’ll rent you Wellington boots as well, of course. You’d be wise to take advantage of the cart sir, for the mud can be treacherous even at normal low tide, and when the sea retreats over unfamiliar ground—even if it’s only a matter of an extra fifty paces or so—people can get into trouble. I’ll take you out today so that you can see how the land lies, so to speak, and then again tomorrow, when the full force of the cosmic alignment takes effect. No obligation, of course, sir, but I’d advise you to take up the offer.”
“You’re very kind,” Halsted said. “Yes, I will join you, if there’s still room for me in your trap—tomorrow as well as today, unless something happens in the interim to change my mind.”
Crome addressed the entire group again. “In that case, sirs, you might want to hasten your breakfast slightly. I’ll wait for all four of you out front for as long as necessary, but it would be best not to tarry too long, for the tide has its own timetable, and we’re already past still water on the high tide. We have some leeway, but my pony’s at her best when she takes things steady, and she can’t trot very much faster than the tide retreats and advances, given that the average slope of the shore is so shallow.”
“Message understood,” Rylands was quick to say. “We’ll get a move on.” Wychelow and Ridpath were quick to nod in agreement.
“Me too,” Halsted added, helping himself to anther hard-boiled egg for immediate consumption, and taking the liberty of slipping two more into his pocket. He finished off his tea rapidly, finding that easy to do now that it had cooled and the conversation had lapsed; then he hurried back upstairs to put on his expeditionary outfit, which consisted of a canvas “safari jacket” and sturdy trousers, completed by a broad-brimmed felt hat that would be equally adept at protecting him from the sun’s rays or the rain—although the latter seemed the more likely contingency at present—and leather gloves. He had hung his overcoat on a peg beside the door but he left it where it was, having only brought it in case he had occasion to take a stroll in the cool night air.
This time, he was not the last one down—only Ridpath was ahead of him in climbing into the two-wheeled cart—and he was glad to feel that he was edging ahead of the game, after a slow start that had not been his fault. Ridpath was dressed in tweeds—which seemed to annoy Rylands when the latter appeared in a very similar outfit, which did not look as well on his lanky frame as it did on the biologist’s sturdier figure.
Who would have thought that having laid hands on the Necronomicon would win me such interested attention so far from home? Halsted wondered, as he offered Martin Rylands a hand to help him into the vehicle. And who could have imagined that my De Quincey studies might get tangled up with the esoterica of Arthurian legendry? This excursion is shaping up to be even more interesting than I had hoped, albeit in a fashion that seems rather baffling at present.
Chapter Four
Creative States of the Eye
Dunwich by day seemed far less sinister in its half-heartedness than it had seemed by night, and might have seemed endearingly cheerful had the sun been shining brightly. Unfortunately, the sky was carpeted with grey cloud from horizon to horizon, lending a sense of depression to land and sea alike.
Had Halsted not been so keenly aware of the fact that he was looking at a mere echo of past greatness, contained in a scattering of lately-erected or recently-reconstructed buildings in which the remnants of a few families displaced by the sea’s secular attrition mingled with what Giles Crome had called “incomers”, he might have thought Dunwich a pleasant enough seaside village, albeit underdeveloped and torpid. Given what he knew about the widely-spaced stages of its destruction and gradual removal, however, he could only see it through the lenses of a regretful imagination. He was startled to see how near the cliff had now come to the Cromes’ Old Forge, and judged that it would take more than a talismanic remembrance of the lost Holy Crown to hold it back for another century. In time, perhaps while the present landlord was still incumbent, the inn would topple over the crumbling cliff like so many other hostelries before it. That might explain why the recent remodeling had not extended to such seemingly-basic matters as fitting the inn out with electric lighting. The new furniture, and even the new carpets, could be removed when the threat became imminent, and nothing recent would be left to the unmerciful sea but a layer of cheap paint.
In daylight, it was easy to see what the inn’s outbuildings had been in times past. The stables that had once had comfortable accommodation for more than a dozen horses now gave a home to one alone, and that a mere pony—but the outlines of the old stalls could still be seen, all the more easily because so many walls and roofs had been removed or left to ruin. The site of the old forge was evident enough, although no crucible stood on the granite block that had housed its furnace, and the anvil was long gone, along with the smithy’s tools. There were still scorch-marks in the stone, though, and streaks of smoke-soot on the crumbling brickwork, which the rain was impotent to wash away.
All this Halsted could see from the bench fitted into the cockle-cart—and once the pony set off, he was glad to have had a little leisure in which to study it, for the zigzag journey down to the beach seemed unwontedly hectic and vertiginous. The pony was at full trot all the way, and would surely have cantered had her gait not been trained, for the slope was often steep enough for the trap’s momentum to be pushing her rather than its load being effortfully hauled.
Halsted would have liked a little more time to study the cliff-face itself, and was slightly disappointed to find it soon reduced to a mere blur, but Graham Ridpath, who was sitting next to him, said: “Don’t worry, Dr. Halsted—there’ll be time enough when the cart returns for a stroll along the beach, where you can see the parts of the cliff that have been more recently cut. There’s been no rain here for weeks, so the face exposed by the last of the winter’s storms has dried out considerably and it’s very friable. If there’s a summer storm today or tomorrow, as the combination of heat and cloud suggest there might be, there could easily be more falls—and new exposures.”
Halsted was curious to know what sort of exposures Ridpath was anticipating, but had no chance to ask. Rylands, who was sitting opposite on the other bench, was quick to say: “But it would be disastrous if there were a storm tomorrow, would it not? If we were caught in heavy rain while chasing the tide, we’d have to turn back, and then we’d miss the once-in-a-century phenomenon.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Giles Crome, the cockle-cart’s worthy Automedon, who was perched on a tiny platform in front of the main hull. “Summer storms blow over quickly enough, and no matter how heavy the rain may seem, the mud soaks it up easily enough. It’s steady rain that causes problems, if it falls for a long time on the retreating tide and continues falling until the ebb turns to flow—but even then, Gwendolaine knows her business, far better than the callow colts pulling those.”
He pointed toward the retreating sea as he spoke, and Halsted saw a ragged line of carts, similar to the one in which he was riding, dutifully following the retreating water-line. They, he assumed, would be fully laden with professional cockle-fishers and their baskets.
Behind and beyond the line of carts there were other ragged lines, made up of a modest throng of walkers, some of them in groups. When he squinted and made a more careful count, Halsted realized that Ridpath’s estimate of “half a hundred” was almost spot on. Even in the Fordian age of popular automobilism, Dunwich still qualified as remote within England, and it probably had only a handful of hotels in addition to the Hidden Crown. On a “normal” twentieth-century day there would probably be no more than a handful of curiosity-seekers accompanying the cockle-fishers, and in August 1821 there had surely been no more than that. In 2149, things might be different—if there were anything of Dunwich left at all, after a further century of coastal erosion.
Even though they were still some way ahead of the sure-footed Gwendolaine, Halsted could see that many of the half-hundred were carrying spades, and some were unfolding unwieldy sheets of paper that must be maps of some sort.
“Ours is not an exclusive company, by any means,” Wychelow murmured.
“Indeed not,” Rylands agreed. “But we, at least, are not treasure-seeking fools searching for Hidden Crowns, or phantom bells, or Templar treasure.”
Halsted knew that there had been a Templar House in Dunwich, which had survived the Great Storm of 1287 only to be abolished in the wake of Philippe le Bel’s persecution, and handed over to the Hospitallers before being lost in its turn as the sea’s raids continued. As with every other Templar House in Europe, its memory had become associated with rumors of buried treasure. As the trap moved across the expanse of mud, though, it was difficult to imagine that maps and spades would be of much practical use. The ground was not firm enough to allow the digging of substantial holes, even if there were time enough to do so before the tide returned, and the maps would surely give no guidance in the absence of recognizable reference-points.
“Some few of them might be paleontologists in search of relics of far older eras,” Ridpath suggested, seemingly trying to blunt the professor’s hostility by appealing to a sense of academic fellowship, “and some for relics of Medraut’s legendary era. But one and all—including ourselves, my friends—are really in search of romance: the margin between the known and the unknown.” His tone was a little forced, as if the effort of putting on a show of bonhomie were challenging his conversational resources. Rylands’ blatant disapproval of his profession had obviously rattled him, but his desire to repair the deficit seemed likely to be futile.
“A margin measured in filthy mud,” Rylands remarked, peering over the edge of the swiftly-moving cart. The Cambridge man seemed disappointed with what he saw there.
The yellow sand of the beach had been streaked with grey and peppered with pebbles even in the shadow of the cliff, but almost as soon as Gwendolaine had moved past the high-water mark the cart had entered an expanse of uniformly dark and glutinous substance, which had a faint distinctive reek, presumable that of vegetable decay. There were few rocks scattered along the route that Crome was taking, so there was little seaweed, but Halsted knew that the seabed is never dead in the littoral shallows, where it is always exposed to sunlight. The mud hereabouts was presumably full of diatoms and single-celled algae that had reproduced abundantly in the summer months, but were now beginning to die back, as well as providing a rich harvest for the fish that came and went with the tide, and for the annelid worms and mollusks that hid from its retreat by burrowing. Although it gave every appearance of death and putrescence, the mud was actually a rich organic soup fecund with life, which did not deserve to be dismissed as simply “filthy” in Halsted’s estimation. On the other hand, it was by no means attractive to the eye or the nose, and offered scant reward to an imagination bent on forging an empathetic link with Thomas De Quincey, the great eccentric and dope-fiend.
The cart had passed over the flattest part of the expanse now, and was heading into more undulating territory, following a sort of low ridge that ran almost straight in an easterly direction—although there did not appear to be any hollows or ridges so deep that any of the valiant explorers could actually be lost to sight, provided that they remained standing. Halsted noticed that most of the walkers were concentrating in the shallow valleys between such ridges, or focusing their attention on the slopes.
“They’re wasting their time,” Giles Crome commented, as they overtook some of these assiduous seekers. “There were buildings here once, to be sure, but the spur that was abruptly destroyed by the Great Storm is quite a way further out. The Templar House might have been hereabouts, but those charts they’re consulting so eagerly are worthless in the absence of reliable landmarks, and there’s none left on shore. Medraut’s capital was even further out than the thirteenth-century sea-port, built atop the Roman Sinomagus, but whether a tide—even one as low as tomorrow’s—can reach its site, no one knows. If we could trace the bed of the river as it once was, we’d have a better idea of how things used to lie, but the mud shifts far too readily for that—the crests and hollows as they now extend bear no resemblance to the crests and hollows of my grandfather’s time, let alone those in the remote past.”
By now, the trap was overtaking groups of walkers on a regular basis, and several stationary carts had been left behind as their crews got down to business raking the sand for living treasure, sometimes attended by gawkers who hoped that they might rake up more than lugworms and shellfish. Sometimes pedestrians turned faintly envious eyes toward Crome’s cart and raised their hats to its passengers, but more often than not they ignored it, intent on their own private and mysterious projects.
When Gwendolaine finally caught up with the retreating water, Giles Crome took a turnip watch out of his waistcoat pocket. Rylands and Wychelow did likewise, while Ridpath caught Halsted’s eye and held up his left arm, letting his sleeve fall back to expose a wristwatch. Halsted smiled, and matched the gesture, but then turned his wrist to look at the time. An interval of nearly forty minutes remained before low water.
Gwendolaine was walking now. Her padded hooves were only sinking into the mud a little way, while the cart’s broad-rimmed and sackcloth-wrapped wheels were making ruts some two or three inches deep. Now that the other tourists and laborers had been left behind, the grey expanses of the mud and the sea seemed truly vast and alarmingly featureless, as empty of meaning as they were of visual stimulus.
Halsted felt a thrill of anxiety as his imagination produced an irrepressible image of the cart sinking into the mud, trapping them all, and of the incoming tide advancing slowly upon them, swallowing them like crumbs left over from all the meals it had made in the past, of Medieval Domnoc, Roman Sinomagus and even-more-ancient settlements whose names were long forgotten. It’s pure Romance, though, he thought. However black and sticky the mud might seem, it’s evidently solid enough to support the pony, the trap, and the pedestrians. If we were foolish enough to want to, we could safely go paddling.
“Might as well get down now, gentlemen,” Crome said—and then went on, as if to give the lie to Halsted’s mundane optimism: “If you stick close to the cart you shouldn’t run into trouble, but the mud shifts, as I say, and there are no guarantees. There are no quicksands here, strictly speaking, for there are no springs bubbling up under the surface, but there are pits of softer and slicker mud, into which you might sink to your waist or your neck if you’re not careful. I’ve plenty of rope, but if we have to stop to haul someone out of a sticky trap, we’ll miss the low-water mark. Please don’t stray too far. Shout if you need assistance.”
The passengers jumped down one by one, and tested the mud beneath their Wellington boots. The place where Halsted had landed seemed solid enough, although it was slightly difficult to pull his foot free in order to take each further step. Walking in this environment was a new skill that needed to be acquired, he realized; he was thankful for Crome’s consideration in arranging the practice run. He would certainly not be a veteran when he returned the following day to celebrate the once-in-a-lifetime occasion, but he would not be a total novice either.
∴
For several minutes, the American’s concentration was totally absorbed by contemplation of the art and practice of mud-walking, and he paid little attention to his companions or his broader surroundings. When he looked up again, the trap had drawn some way ahead, and both Wychelow and Rylands had moved sideways so as to be able to stare past it at the sullen grey waves. Ridpath was still close at hand, though, performing slow pirouettes as he studied the whole visible expanse and the crowds distributed behind them.
“Fascinating,” the biologist said, when he became conscious of Halsted’s eyes upon him. “We’re still within a whisker of the shoreline, by comparison with the breadth of the North Sea, but you’d hardly believe it. The cliff’s reduced to a mere hairline in the field of vision, and the dark stinking mud adds a certain distinctive cachet to the abomination of desolation, don’t you find? This was part of the continent of Europe once, forested and teeming with herds, including human tribes—but look at it now! Flattened, pulverized, and returned to something as closely akin to primordial clay as anything you can see in England…or America, I dare say.”
Halsted performed a slow pirouette of his own, drinking in the scenery with his eyes and his imagination, as Thomas De Quincey must have done a hundred and fourteen years before and a dozen other notable writers had evidently done in the interim. Algernon Swinburne had visited this shore several times, Halsted knew, and had recorded his own impressions of its desolation in “By the North Sea.” There had been no redecoration here of the sort that had tried so valiantly to remake the Old Forge Inn as the Hidden Crown, a hostelry more-or-less appropriate to twentieth-century expectations. The mud must be very much as De Quincey had seen it, and if he too had come this far in a cockle-cart, that vehicle would have looked almost exactly similar to Gwendolaine’s slightly-modified device, hauled by a similar beast, and similarly crewed by a Crome. Only the clothing that the tourists were wearing would have been different—and the timepieces with which they calculated the propitious moment of still water.
