Chapter XXVII

Separation from those who are "dead" had melted from me. Separation from those who are living I saw to be a phantasm. It would last as long as we chose to let it last; it would go away when we chose that it should go away. Separation from those to come--they are ourselves! We returning, we continuing, we the world's future as we are its present and its past.

The task was for the small city, the small country, at present calling itself Michael Forth, to realize into all that it yet held to be without, into all that it must hold to be above. That was the task, that was the desire ... desire that all cities and countries waken to the mounting interest, the song, the lovers' meeting of reality.

"Journeys end in lovers' meetings
Every wise man's son doth know--"

The rains were past. We were gone from the stream and the Pygmies' village, and the grave of Mannheim beneath the palm. Maxwell and Ferraro undertook care and furtherance of the naturalist's collection, and, later, Llewellyn and I brought "Mannheim's Notes" into order, and later yet saw to their publication.

We journeyed on through middle Africa. We encountered heated, endless forests, and tribes, much alike, of men near the foot of the ladder. Some had an uneasy stirring, looking toward the rung above. We saw individuals who were climbing thither. And never, in Africa nor anywhere else, did I see, have ever I seen, anything save climbing stuff!

Time passed. At a certain village--capital of a king named Tamewa--we were made and held prisoners for seven weeks. There were days here when we confidently looked for death. There was a night when we white men, and with us Ahasuerus, were bound with withes and heard without the hut savage preparations for an execution, and saw red, darting light of kindled fires. But when the cocks were crowing came rescue. A man from among our carriers, stealing away, had gone leagues through the forest, back to a friendly people from whose village we had come to Tamewa's--had gone and come again with chiefs and a considerable company of men and loud representations to Tamewa. At last, after enormous discussion, entered agreement. Released from bonds, we became fantastically honored guests--and yet might not go from Tamewa's town until that seven weeks had passed.

The night that we were tied within the hut, seeing that there could be no sleeping, and it was best there be no talking, each went, doubtless, according to his own drawing into the inner country. I was thinking....

A fact of communication between minds at a distance--space distance, time distance, state of consciousness distance. An over-voice, as written or printed words, as telephone or telegraph were over-voices--but without pen, paper, mail-trains, poles and wires. Transmitters and receivers, each both ... vastly subtler telegraphing, telephoning, interhearing, interseeing, interknowing.... Circulation of thought, circulation of emotion, sensation; circulation of experience, understanding--forever flowing, forever, as it turned upon itself, richer, wiser, than it had been before. So, though it turned, it was not the same; so it became a spiral movement, concentric rings, each including the earlier turnings, each, in the long run, bettering those before.... Shoreless sea of energy, refining itself, transmuting forever its own cold into fervor, its dark into light, changing forever less knowledge for more, less love for more, less power and joy for more.

I thought it an absurdity if there be no deepening speech, no farther-carrying vision, between part and part of a thing that as a whole perpetually changed state for better state. As the whole grew more richly conscious, every part must do so, too.... Or as every part grew more richly conscious the whole must do so, too.... Put it as you choose!

The immediate sharing of sensation or of knowledge.... In strong concentration, in contemplation, there was no thought given to the field through which, from "far" points, perception flashed. All was lost in I-ness--One-ness--Continuousness. Distance in space--distance in time--partialness in event--ceased their troubling.

By the light passage we were but ten minutes from the sun. The universal draw of attraction took no time at all. Ethereal--perfectly penetrative and penetrable.... Learn to use the ether!

My mother spoke to me. "Michael, they are coming through the forest--men to help. They will be here in an hour."

I said to the others: "The Bangala that we left are coming through the forest. Zurti persuaded them. They will be here in an hour."

It happened so.... Sir Charles spoke to me, aside, the next day. "How did you know that, Michael?"

"How do we know anything? It's all of a piece that can be unrolled, which is to say, understood, further and further.... My mother told me."

"Within you? You said on the mountain that all that was within you."

"Yes. But 'within you' opens into a great land. 'The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.' It isn't a small kingdom."

"Tell me plainly," he said. "Do you think that your mother lives?"

"I do."

"But conscious--remembering--able to act?"

"Yes. Able to grow--that is, to increase in consciousness and power."

"And you expect to meet her?"

"I do meet her. I expect to meet her more completely. Far more completely."

"I wish that I knew!" he said. "There are persons with whom I wish to live again."

The time-water flowed over the time-wheel. This tribe, uncertain between slaying and saving, let us go. We went on. Sometimes we traveled through the forest. Sometimes--often indeed--we went in boats, long distances down the full river in native boats. We tarried in villages; we left the rubbing and beating of drums, the chanting, the dancing, and we came in little time again to rubbing and beating of drums, to chanting and dancing. We left idols and came to idols. I felt no contemptuousness toward these. Idols are divinities and have a kinship, or in their stage of True-God-on-High, or in their stage of relegation.

Middle Africa--Africa sloping to the west, country of the Congo with all its ancestors gathered in its bosom.... There began, as it were, an inward murmuring of ocean, of England--America.

The ancient, imperfect, compounded ideation that we call these bodies, these purposes and acts, this environment, situation, circumstance, this earth under our poor two eyes, all the accustomed, remembered, repeated, "living," flowed or stumbled quite enough as usual. I was aware of certain differences. All outward matters must finally change as changes the inward star. If the center strongly shines the circumference will know it. If the center grows lethargic, all the outland stiffens, darkens. I was aware that there must be shining all along the way from the star. Light grew intenser, colors more brilliant. Thorn hedges and hard walls vanished, and there were richer wholes. There was sense of the in-ness of things, and sometimes cause and effect were seen as one form. The time sense, too, was changing.... But yet it was all but one taste of the honey--

Llewellyn and I were moving in a boat up some arm of Congo, volunteers to discover what lay beyond a certain sharp point of shore. The negroes who rowed us had their own preoccupations. The banks were somber, the stream deep and still and darkened by overhanging clouds. We had been sitting in silence. Llewellyn broke it. "I, too, have the historic sense," he said. "When you have that very thoroughly you assume an individual and his acts. You can't say him or her; it's both. Hermaphrodite, or some better word than that, if you please! It is all right as long as you know that all sex and no sex is there. You may call it This World, or Earth, or Planetary Being, or Man, or what you please. But the inorganic must go in as well as the organic, plant as well as animal, animal as well as human, one kind as well as another kind! All the classes and castes. Then This World thinks itself out, changing from power to power. Hence Drama--its own. Narratives, Epics, Tragedies, Comedies, and the hair balance between. Lyrical outbursts ... Mnemosyne--Pythoness--Dionysos --Aphrodite--Apollo--Pallas--Zeus! The wildest, greatest, most abandoned, most controlled drama in three dimensions.... This world's a Genius!"

"More light than dark."

"I should hope so. At any rate, the light must be growing.... I seem to see that it's had its infancy and childhood, and that now it's in the strangest turmoil of adolescence. But infancy and childhood--! My God! What resumes of what in our little way we call Ancient Sin, Adult Wrong!"

We went on in silence for a time. I looked at the leaden sky. Llewellyn had been thinking aloud, and now I, too, thought aloud. "In the Confessions of Saint Augustine there is a page that well gives what is coiled up, remembered, stored, in one's self as little infant in a little cradle. It runs like this. 'Was it then good, even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to resent that persons, free and its own elders, yea, the very authors of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt because commands were not obeyed which had been obeyed to its hurt? The weakness of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.... Is that, too, innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need? ... This age I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I live in this world. For no less than that which I spent in my mother's womb is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness.... But, I beseech thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I guiltless?'"

The banks were somber, the sky was a roof of whirling vapor. "And elsewhere he says, 'Did my infancy succeed another age of mine that died before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb ... and what before that life again, O God my joy! was I anywhere or anybody? For this I have none to tell me, neither father nor mother nor experience of others, nor mine own memory.'"

The boat moved on. The forest was still, but the river voice carried fathomless undertones. "What do you think there?" said Llewellyn.

"I think that some day we will take, unravel, and look at our cell life, embryonic life, child life. Then will we know in our own proper person, plane after plane, that past living that at each point we called adult. Species-mind cognizing species-life. World-mind cognizing world-life. Then shall we see where came in the lethargies, mistakes, self-limitations, inhibitions, perversions, mislikes, recoils, fears--that at last we must call thick ignorance, hatred, terror, guilt..."

Beyond the point of shore we found a long, narrow reach of water, and upon one bank a diminutive settlement, a very few thatched huts dwelt in by a remnant of a tribe, wasted apparently by disease and war. By now the clouds had broken in a downpour. The day was advanced and our rowers unwilling to turn down-stream into wet and night. We were armed, and we had with us beads and cloth for purposes of propitiation and exchange. Standing off the bank, we made due explanations and proffers of friendship to the men who had run from the huts with bows and arrows and menacing shouts. Reassured, they let us land. The shining beads and scarlet cloth worked as almost always they worked. Presently we had food and shelter for the night.

Llewellyn and I lay in a fairly clean hut in thick darkness, with river and wind for lullaby. We lay wakeful, in silence. "Well! Let us go to sleep," he said at last, and turned.

I addressed myself to sleep--but instead of entering that land a curtain parted and I was in another. Before I crossed the frontier I was re-aware of a day at Restwell, two years ago. The river there--a boat--Dorothea and I rowing beneath the willows. That hour had extension and volume it had not seemed then to possess.... That scene closed. I was over the frontier--no longer Michael Forth only, but many-folded sensation, knowledge, passion, life.

Without more warning than the mood of this place and that flash of association, I stumbled into the woe of the world.

"_So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun._"

It seemed to me that I should die....

The oppressions and the woe were my own. _Peine forte et dure_--and I was the victim under the stone, and I was the weight that crushed, and I was they who stretched me there and put the millstone on me. And the misery of all three was the same.

"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain--"

Woe and woe and double woe!

Into me drew, around, within me, whirled pain and guilt, the great maelstrom.

Over and over the brain gave images--but it was that which touch gave me, not that which sight gave.... Oh, God in me--my own hope in me--raise hell to purgatory, purgatory to the beginning of wisdom!

Woe of the world--light-lack, love-lack.... As there can be no going out, as never, never can we go out--where they lack, what can be but aching want?

I ached--I ached.

It seemed recapitulation, it seemed also lateral sharing. All of us down there in those moments--and all of us now in these moments. All of us from pole to pole. All of us that were one and are one. Mankind is one being. It feels the woe of head and the woe of foot, the woe of the one hand and of the other hand. It is the worse for the ice-bound heart, and the worse for the tattered, lack-thrift brain that will not learn to use its wealth.

It longed for health--poor Mankind--poor God-that-would-be! with all its members warring, with hardly a piece of tissue glimpsing the truth!

Oh, long woe and sickness! Oh, tatters and dungeon of ignorance! Oh, hearth where the fire is but a spark! ... Where shall we get fuel?

_Lay the little self there for fuel_.

... Time passed, though time passed slowly.... The wind and the rain outside had ceased, there fell a great hush. In me, too, was now a stillness. It was dark, but the air of it was not heavy--a clear darkness, clean, with a taste of myrrh. This enlarged--there seemed a firmament very deep and vast, still, pure, ineffable, though still dark.... Then gathered from somewhere the sense of truth--and there was a white and splendid star in the dark.