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THE GREEN BOOK
The morocco binding of the book was faded, and the colour had grown faint,
but there were no stains nor bruises nor marks of usage. The book looked
as if it had been bought "on a visit to London" some seventy or eighty years
ago, and had somehow been forgotten and suffered to lie away out of sight.
There was an old, delicate, lingering odour about it, such an odour as sometimes
haunts an ancient piece of furniture for a century or more. The end-papers,
inside the binding, were oddly decorated with coloured patterns and faded
gold. It looked small, but the paper was fine, and there were many leaves,
closely covered with minute, painfully formed characters.
I found this book (the manuscript began) in a drawer in the old bureau that
stands on the landing. It was a very rainy day and I could not go out, so
in the afternoon I got a candle and rummaged in the bureau. Nearly all the
drawers were full of old dresses, but one of the small ones looked empty,
and I found this book hidden right at the back. I wanted a book like this,
so I took it to write in. It is full of secrets. I have a great many other
books of secrets I have written, hidden in a safe place, and I am going
to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some
I shall not put down at all. I must not write down the real names of the
days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo
letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the
Mao Games, nor the chief songs. I may write something about all these things
but not the way to do them, for peculiar reasons. And I must not say who
the Nymphs are, or the Dôls, or Jeelo, or what voolas mean. All these are
most secret secrets, and I am glad when I remember what they are, and how
many wonderful languages I know, but there are some things that I call the
secrets of the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of unless I
am quite alone, and then I shut my eyes, and put my hands over them and
whisper the word, and the Alala comes. I only do this at night in my room
or in certain woods that I know, but I must not describe them, as they are
secret woods. Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important,
but some are more delightful than others--there are the White Ceremonies,
and the Green Ceremonies, and the Scarlet Ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies
are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly,
though there is a very nice imitation which I have done in other places.
Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy
sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything
about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things.
When I was very small, and mother was alive, I can remember remembering
things before that, only it has all got confused. But I remember when I
was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not
noticing. They were saying how queer I was a year or two before, and how
nurse had called my mother to come and listen to me talking all to myself,
and I was saying words that nobody could understand. I was speaking the
Xu language, but I only remember a very few of the words, as it was about
the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle.
They used to talk to me, and I learnt their language and talked to them
in it about some great white place where they lived, where the trees and
the grass were all white, and there were white hills as high up as the moon,
and a cold wind. I have often dreamed of it afterwards, but the faces went
away when I was very little. But a wonderful thing happened when I was about
five. My nurse was carrying me on her shoulder; there was a field of yellow
corn, and we went through it, it was very hot. Then we came to a path through
a wood, and a tall man came after us, and went with us till we came to a
place where there was a deep pool, and it was very dark and shady. Nurse
put me down on the soft moss under a tree, and she said: "She can't get
to the pond now." So they left me there, and I sat quite still and watched,
and out of the water and out of the wood came two wonderful white people,
and they began to play and dance and sing. They were a kind of creamy white
like the old ivory figure in the drawing-room; one was a beautiful lady
with kind dark eyes, and a grave face, and long black hair, and she smiled
such a strange sad smile at the other, who laughed and came to her. They
played together, and danced round and round the pool, and they sang a song
till I fell asleep. Nurse woke me up when she came back, and she was looking
something like the lady had looked, so I told her all about it, and asked
her why she looked like that. At first she cried, and then she looked very
frightened, and turned quite pale. She put me down on the grass and stared
at me, and I could see she was shaking all over. Then she said I had been
dreaming, but I knew I hadn't. Then she made me promise not to say a word
about it to anybody, and if I did I should be thrown into the black pit.
I was not frightened at all, though nurse was, and I never forgot about
it, because when I shut my eyes and it was quite quiet, and I was all alone,
I could see them again, very faint and far away, but very splendid; and
little bits of the song they sang came into my head, but I couldn't sing
it.
I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure, so
strange that the day on which it happened is always called the White Day.
My mother had been dead for more than a year, and in the morning I had lessons,
but they let me go out for walks in the afternoon. And this afternoon I
walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new country, but I tore
my frock getting through some of the difficult places, as the way was through
many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets
on the hills, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long,
long way. It seemed as if I was going on for ever and ever, and I had to
creep by a place like a tunnel where a brook must have been, but all the
water had dried up, and the floor was rocky, and the bushes had grown overhead
till they met, so that it was quite dark. And I went on and on through that
dark place; it was a long, long way. And I came to a hill that I never saw
before. I was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore
me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all over,
and then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long way, till
at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of
a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on the
grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree came out from under
a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a long way. I never
saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the earth some of them,
and some looked as if they had been rolled to where they were, and they
went on and on as far as I could see, a long, long way. I looked out from
them and saw the country, but it was strange. It was winter time, and there
were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like
seeing a large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees
seemed quite different from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then
beyond the woods there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had
never seen any of them; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over
it. It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad,
like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo. I went on into the dreadful rocks.
There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning
men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the stone,
and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that
I should always be there. And there were other rocks that were like animals,
creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like
words that I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass.
I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of
wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist
myself about in the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at
last I liked the rocks, and they didn't frighten me any more. I sang the
songs I thought of; songs full of words that must not be spoken or written
down. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself
about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the
dead ones, and I went up to one that was grinning, and put my arms round
him and hugged him. And so I went on and on through the rocks till I came
to a round mound in the middle of them. It was higher than a mound, it was
nearly as high as our house, and it was like a great basin turned upside
down, all smooth and round and green, with one stone, like a post, sticking
up at the top. I climbed up the sides, but they were so steep I had to stop
or I should have rolled all the way down again, and I should have knocked
against the stones at the bottom, and perhaps been killed. But I wanted
to get up to the very top of the big round mound, so I lay down flat on
my face, and took hold of the grass with my hands and drew myself up, bit
by bit, till I was at the top Then I sat down on the stone in the middle,
and looked all round about. I felt I had come such a long, long way, just
as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other country, or in
one of the strange places I had read about in the "Tales of the Genie" and
the "Arabian Nights," or as if I had gone across the sea, far away, for
years and I had found another world that nobody had ever seen or heard of
before, or as if I had somehow flown through the sky and fallen on one of
the stars I had read about where everything is dead and cold and grey, and
there is no air, and the wind doesn't blow. I sat on the stone and looked
all round and down and round about me. It was just as if I was sitting on
a tower in the middle of a great empty town, because I could see nothing
all around but the grey rocks on the ground. I couldn't make out their shapes
any more, but I could see them on and on for a long way, and I looked at
them, and they seemed as if they had been arranged into patterns, and shapes,
and figures. I knew they couldn't be. because I had seen a lot of them coming
right out of the earth, joined to the deep rocks below, so I looked again,
but still I saw nothing but circles, and small circles inside big ones,
and pyramids, and domes, and spires, and they seemed all to go round and
round the place where I was sitting, and the more I looked, the more I saw
great big rings of rocks, getting bigger and bigger, and I stared so long
that it felt as if they were all moving and turning, like a great wheel,
and I was turning, too, in the middle. I got quite dizzy and queer in the
head, and everything began to be hazy and not clear, and I saw little sparks
of blue light, and the stones looked as if they were springing and dancing
and twisting as they went round and round and round. I was frightened again,
and I cried out loud, and jumped up from the stone I was sitting on, and
fell down. When I got up I was so glad they all looked still, and I sat
down on the top and slid down the mound, and went on again. I danced as
I went in the peculiar way the rocks had danced when I got giddy, and I
was so glad I could do it quite well, and I danced and danced along, and
sang extraordinary songs that came into my head. At last I came to the edge
of that great flat hill, and there were no more rocks, and the way went
again through a dark thicket in a hollow. It was just as bad as the other
one I went through climbing up, but I didn't mind this one, because I was
so glad I had seen those singular dances and could imitate them. I went
down, creeping through the bushes, and a tall nettle stung me on my leg,
and made me burn, but I didn't mind it, and I tingled with the boughs and
the thorns, but I only laughed and sang. Then I got out of the thicket into
a close valley, a little secret place like a dark passage that nobody ever
knows of, because it was so narrow and deep and the woods were so thick
round it. There is a steep bank with trees hanging over it, and there the
ferns keep green all through the winter, when they are dead and brown upon
the hill, and the ferns there have a sweet, rich smell like what oozes out
of fir trees. There was a little stream of water running down this valley,
so small that I could easily step across it. I drank the water with my hand,
and it tasted like bright, yellow wine, and it sparkled and bubbled as it
ran down over beautiful red and yellow and green stones, so that it seemed
alive and all colours at once. I drank it, and I drank more with my hand,
but I couldn't drink enough, so I lay down and bent my head and sucked the
water up with my lips. It tasted much better, drinking it that way, and
a ripple would come up to my mouth and give me a kiss, and I laughed, and
drank again, and pretended there was a nymph, like the one in the old picture
at home, who lived in the water and was kissing me. So I bent low down to
the water, and put my lips softly to it, and whispered to the nymph that
I would come again. I felt sure it could not be common water, I was so glad
when I got up and went on; and I danced again and went up and up the valley,
under hanging hills. And when I came to the top, the ground rose up in front
of me, tall and steep as a wall, and there was nothing but the green wall
and the sky. I thought of "for ever and for ever, world without end, Amen";
and I thought I must have really found the end of the world, because it
was like the end of everything, as if there could be nothing at all beyond,
except the kingdom of Voor, where the light goes when it is put out, and
the water goes when the sun takes it away. I began to think of all the long,
long way I had journeyed, how I had found a brook and followed it, and followed
it on, and gone through bushes and thorny thickets, and dark woods full
of creeping thorns. Then I had crept up a tunnel under trees, and climbed
a thicket, and seen all the grey rocks, and sat in the middle of them when
they turned round, and then I had gone on through the grey rocks and come
down the hill through the stinging thicket and up the dark valley, all a
long, long way. I wondered how I should get home again, if I could ever
find the way, and if my home was there any more, or if it were turned and
everybody in it into grey rocks, as in the "Arabian Nights." So I sat down
on the grass and thought what I should do next. I was tired, and my feet
were hot with walking, and as I looked about I saw there was a wonderful
well just under the high, steep wall of grass. All the ground round it was
covered with bright, green, dripping moss; there was every kind of moss
there, moss like beautiful little ferns, and like palms and fir trees, and
it was all green as jewellery, and drops of water hung on it like diamonds.
And in the middle was the great well, deep and shining and beautiful, so
clear that it looked as if I could touch the red sand at the bottom, but
it was far below. I stood by it and looked in, as if I were looking in a
glass. At the bottom of the well, in the middle of it, the red grains of
sand were moving and stirring all the time, and I saw how the water bubbled
up, but at the top it was quite smooth, and full and brimming. It was a
great well, large like a bath, and with the shining, glittering green moss
about it, it looked like a great white jewel, with green jewels all round.
My feet were so hot and tired that I took off my boots and stockings, and
let my feet down into the water, and the water was soft and cold, and when
I got up I wasn't tired any more, and I felt I must go on, farther and farther,
and see what was on the other side of the wall. I climbed up it very slowly,
going sideways all the time, and when I got to the top and looked over,
I was in the queerest country I had seen, stranger even than the hill of
the grey rocks. It looked as if earth-children had been playing there with
their spades, as it was all hills and hollows, and castles and walls made
of earth and covered with grass. There were two mounds like big beehives,
round and great and solemn, and then hollow basins, and then a steep mounting
wall like the ones I saw once by the seaside where the big guns and the
soldiers were. I nearly fell into one of the round hollows, it went away
from under my feet so suddenly, and I ran fast down the side and stood at
the bottom and looked up. It was strange and solemn to look up. There was
nothing but the grey, heavy sky and the sides of the hollow; everything
else had gone away, and the hollow was the whole world, and I thought that
at night it must be full of ghosts and moving shadows and pale things when
the moon shone down to the bottom at the dead of the night, and the wind
wailed up above. It was so strange and solemn and lonely, like a hollow
temple of dead heathen gods. It reminded me of a tale my nurse had told
me when I was quite little; it was the same nurse that took me into the
wood where I saw the beautiful white people. And I remembered how nurse
had told me the story one winter night, when the wind was beating the trees
against the wall, and crying and moaning in the nursery chimney. She said
there was, somewhere or other, a hollow pit, just like the one I was standing
in, everybody was afraid to go into it or near it, it was such a bad place.
But once upon a time there was a poor girl who said she would go into the
hollow pit, and everybody tried to stop her, but she would go. And she went
down into the pit and came back laughing, and said there was nothing there
at all, except green grass and red stones, and white stones and yellow flowers.
And soon after people saw she had most beautiful emerald earrings, and they
asked how she got them, as she and her mother were quite poor. But she laughed,
and said her earrings were not made of emeralds at all, but only of green
grass. Then, one day, she wore on her breast the reddest ruby that any one
had ever seen, and it was as big as a hen's egg, and glowed and sparkled
like a hot burning coal of fire. And they asked how she got it, as she and
her mother were quite poor. But she laughed, and said it was not a ruby
at all, but only a red stone. Then one day she wore round her neck the loveliest
necklace that any one had ever seen, much finer than the queen's finest,
and it was made of great bright diamonds, hundreds of them, and they shone
like all the stars on a night in June. So they asked her how she got it,
as she and her mother were quite poor. But she laughed, and said they were
not diamonds at all, but only white stones. And one day she went to the
Court, and she wore on her head a crown of pure angel-gold, so nurse said,
and it shone like the sun, and it was much more splendid than the crown
the king was wearing himself, and in her ears she wore the emeralds, and
the big ruby was the brooch on her breast, and the great diamond necklace
was sparkling on her neck. And the king and queen thought she was some great
princess from a long way off, and got down from their thrones and went to
meet her, but somebody told the king and queen who she was, and that she
was quite poor. So the king asked why she wore a gold crown, and how she
got it, as she and her mother were so poor. And she laughed, and said it
wasn't a gold crown at all, but only some yellow flowers she had put in
her hair. And the king thought it was very strange, and said she should
stay at the Court, and they would see what would happen next. And she was
so lovely that everybody said that her eyes were greener than the emeralds,
that her lips were redder than the ruby, that her skin was whiter than the
diamonds, and that her hair was brighter than the golden crown. So the king's
son said he would marry her, and the king said he might. And the bishop
married them, and there was a great supper, and after- wards the king's
son went to his wife's room. But just when he had his hand on the door,
he saw a tall, black man, with a dreadful face, standing in front of the
door, and a voice said--
Continue
'The White People'
Bonnie
Mercure, your Fiction
Guide at the dowse Fiction
Hub, is a dark fantasy author.
Visit her website
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