Buchan had always been attracted to old legends and secret places, whether in the Scottish Borders of his early childhood, the wilderness of Southern Africa, or the rolling Oxfordshire countryside in which he later settled. Buchan’s lifelong fascination with the mysterious, uncanny and inexplicable is most obviously seen in his many overtly supernatural short stories, but even his novels repeatedly reflect a core belief in the underlying fragility of our civilisation, and of other realities lurking in the chaos beyond.
“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.” Those words may have been put in the mouth of the principal villain of The Power-Room (1916) but the concept they describe echoes across most of Buchan’s fiction.
It’s a particularly brutish barbarism, for example, which we’re shown in No-Man’s Land (1899), in which an Oxford scholar discovers Ancient Picts living underneath some remote Scottish hills. Yet, keeping within those “borders of the possible”, Buchan ensures that their survival isn’t down to some fantastical device. His university education (first at Glasgow, then Oxford) may have been in the classics, but he was interested in the latest scientific ideas of his time: and, by implication, that meant writing what the American editor and scholar Everett F Bleiler described as “an early example of Science Fiction”.
Which brings us to Space. First published in May 1911, the story may now appear somewhat convoluted in its telling, but when you consider the quality of the prose and its core idea of strange and desolate alien dimensions barely glimpsed through mathematics, then it isn’t just among the purest examples of Buchan’s writing you can possibly read. It’s also, surprisingly perhaps, pure Science Fiction!
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Paul F Cockburn is a freelance magazine journalist specialising in arts & culture, equality issues, and popular science. Self-declared child of the Space Age, excited by science fiction from early childhood—he blames The Clangers, really. As far as this 21st century is concerned, would probably not swap his iPad for a jet-pack.
Space
John Buchan
Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correi na Sidhe. I had arrived that afternoon from the south, while he had been taking an off-day from a week’s stalking, so we had walked up the glen together after tea to get the news of the forest. A rifle was out on the Correi na Sidhe beat, and a thin spire of smoke had risen from the top of Sgurr Dearg to show that a stag had been killed at the burnhead. The lumpish hill pony with its deer-saddle had gone up the Correi in a gillie’s charge while we followed at leisure, picking our way among the loose granite rocks and the patches of wet bogland. The track climbed high on one of the ridges of Sgurr Dearg, till it hung over a caldron of green glen with the Alt-na-Sidhe churning in its linn a thousand feet below. It was a breathless evening, I remember, with a pale-blue sky just clearing from the haze of the day. West-wind weather may make the North, even in September, no bad imitation of the Tropics, and I sincerely pitied the man who all these stifling hours had been toiling on the screes of Sgurr Dearg. By-and-by we sat down on a bank of heather, and idly watched the trough swimming at our feet. The clatter of the pony’s hoofs grew fainter, the drone of bees had gone, even the midges seemed to have forgotten their calling. No place on earth can be so deathly still as a deer-forest early in the season before the stags have begun roaring, for there are no sheep with their homely noises, and only the rare croak of a raven breaks the silence. The hillside was far from sheer-one could have walked down with a little care-but something in the shape of the hollow and the remote gleam of white water gave it an extraordinary depth and space. There was a shimmer left from the day’s heat, which invested bracken and rock and scree with a curious airy unreality. One could almost have believed that the eye had tricked the mind, that all was mirage, that five yards from the path the solid earth fell away into nothingness. I have a bad head, and instinctively I drew farther back into the heather. Leithen’s eyes were looking vacantly before him.
“Did you ever know Hollond?” he asked.
Then he laughed shortly. “I don’t know why I asked that, but somehow this place reminded me of Hollond. That glimmering hollow looks as if it were the beginning of eternity. It must be eerie to live with the feeling always on one.”
Leithen seemed disinclined for further exercise. He lit a pipe and smoked quietly for a little. “Odd that you didn’t know Hollond. You must have heard his name. I thought you amused yourself with metaphysics.”
Then I remembered. There had been an erratic genius who had written some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical conception of infinity. Men had praised them to me, but I confess I never quite understood their argument. “Wasn’t he some sort of mathematical professor?” I asked.
“He was, and, in his own way, a tremendous swell. He wrote a book on Number which has translations in every European language. He is dead now, and the Royal Society founded a medal in his honour. But I wasn’t thinking of that side of him.”
It was the time and place for a story, for the pony would not be back for an hour. So I asked Leithen about the other side of Hollond which was recalled to him by Correi na Sidhe. He seemed a little unwilling to speak...
“I wonder if you will understand it. You ought to, of course, better than me, for you know something of philosophy. But it took me a long time to get the hang of it, and I can’t give you any kind of explanation. He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at the Bar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that he rather fancied my legal ability. He came to me with his story because he had to tell someone, and he wouldn’t trust a colleague. He said he didn’t want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged to their own theories and wouldn’t understand, or, if they understood, would get ahead of him in his researches. He wanted a lawyer, he said, who was accustomed to weighing evidence. That was good sense, for evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data. Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk, and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect for his brains. At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could give him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge. He was a simple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help. I used to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would never have guessed that he had any thoughts beyond getting up steep rocks.
“It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matter that was filling his mind. We had been taking an off-day, and were sitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple in the twilight. Chamonix always makes me choke a little-it is so crushed in by those great snow masses. I said something about it—said I liked the open spaces like the Gornegrat or the Bel Alp better. He asked me why: if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon? I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an empty world. He repeated the word ‘empty’ and laughed.
“’By “empty” you mean,’ he said, ‘where things don’t knock up against you?’
I told him No. I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank aether.
“You don’t knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you want. It can’t be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel.”
“I agreed that the word needed explaining. ‘I suppose it is mental restlessness,’ I said. ‘I like to feel that for a tremendous distance there is nothing round me. Why, I don’t know. Some men are built the other way and have a terror of space.’
“He said that that was better. ‘It is a personal fancy, and depends on your KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent Blanche. And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing. Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent matter. Blind men often have it. But in any case, whether got from instinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.’
“Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see little point. I told him so, and he laughed. “’I am not sure that I am very clear myself. But yes—there IS a point. Supposing you knew-not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition—that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real—as real to the mind. Would you still feel crowded?’
“’No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. It is only what we call matter that signifies. It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other thing, for there would be no escape from it. But what are you getting at? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?’
“He said he wasn’t thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk of another subject.
“Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he started again on the same tack. He asked me how I accounted for the fact that animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country. I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.
“’Rubbish, man,’ he said. ‘That’s only another name for the puzzle, not an explanation. There must be some reason for it. They must KNOW something that we cannot understand. Tie a cat in a bag and take it fifty miles by train and it will make its way home. That cat has some clue that we haven’t.’
“I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about the psychology of cats. But he was not to be snubbed, and went on talking.
“’How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.’
“But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.
“Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner. I thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street about nine with a kit-bag full of papers. He was an odd fellow to look at—a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones, clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set, greyish eyes. He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty good condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine months out of the twelve. He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that night I saw that he was considerably excited.
“He said that he had come to me because we were old friends. He proposed to tell me a tremendous secret. ‘I must get another mind to work on it or I’ll go crazy. I don’t want a scientist. I want a plain man.’
“Then he fixed me with a look like a tragic actor’s. ‘Do you remember that talk we had in August at Chamonix—about Space? I daresay you thought I was playing the fool. So I was in a sense, but I was feeling my way towards something which has been in my mind for ten years. Now I have got it, and you must hear about it. You may take my word that it’s a pretty startling discovery.’
“I lit a pipe and told him to go ahead, warning him that I knew about as much science as the dustman.
“I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an ‘empty homogeneous medium.’ ‘Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view. An animal, for instance. It feels a kind of quality in Space. It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like intelligible. Take an Australian savage. He has the same power, and, I believe, for the same reason. He is conscious of intelligible landmarks.’
“’You mean what people call a sense of direction,’ I put in.
“’Yes, but what in Heaven’s name is a sense of direction? The phrase explains nothing. However incoherent the mind of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data. I’ve been all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business, and after you eliminate the clues from sight and hearing and smell and half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.’
