Bombardment. The sky burst and showered the earth with glowing meteors. Great-engined monsters roared athwart the earth. Tribes fled and hid in dim confusion and climbed out again to the burning day. Great temples rose to insane creeds, and gangs of red dwarfs laboured at titanic furnaces. Peace flowed and flowered with winking seasons, season on season. Then again the sky broke and flared with terror. Now faster and faster went her fall over and into an unthinkable abyss, in a wink and flow of green and gold and jet. Ceaseless and ceaseless.
Then something smote athwart the rapids, and the pit opened and devoured her.
2. The Incredible Morning
I
SHE OPENED her eyes and saw that it was not yet dawn. There was a pale light all abroad the great stretches of the Wiltshire Downs, forerunner of the sunlight, but only a ghost of its quality. A little rain was seeping away into the east. She heard the patter of its going, light-footed, through the darkness into the spaces where the east was wanly tinted. She sat up.
Close at hand a curlew called.
She was aware that she was still dreaming, for the window of the room in the ‘Peacock’ was set high in the wall, so that, lying in bed, as she lay now, she could see nothing of Pewsey or the Downs beyond. This was a fragment of night-time dream. Drowsy, she lay back again, cuddling her face in her arm, and reaching out her left hand to draw up the sheets about her. Her fingers strayed uncertainly, finding no sheet. With a sleepy irritation she sought further, and then sat up again. There was no sheet. But something else had led her to sit erect. Her hand had touched her own skin.
She was naked.
She put out her hand in the dimness and touched the bed. It was not a bed. She was lying on a bank of earth—a grassy bank. It was wet with dew. Her back and legs were wet and chilled with the dew. She sat erect, very rigid, her hands behind her.
The curlew called again, very close at hand. Wings flapped in the dimness, darkness-shielded, and there came a splatter of something in a hidden pool. Gay put up her hand to her mouth and bit it.
She gave a cry at the realness of the pain. What was it?
Where...?
Hell ’n’ blast, she knew! Sleep-walking! Not that she had ever sleep-walked before, that she knew. But that was what it must be. She had got out of her room and out of the ‘Peacock,’ and wandered out to the country beyond Pewsey. What a mess!
She rubbed her chilled self and put up a hand to push back the hair from her forehead. Soon be quite light—probably not yet four o’clock. She must get back. With a little luck she might get back unseen. The labourers’ wives would just be stirring to light their morning fires.
She stood erect; and instantly sat down, gasping. There was something strange in the morning air that caught at her lungs, icily as though she had swallowed a mouthful of snow. Now she became aware of another fact—the rate at which her heart was beating. It was pounding inside her chest, insanely, and the blood throbbing in her forehead with the rapid beat of a dynamo. Sleep-walking and nightmare—Oh, what a fool!
She sat with her head in her hands, giddy, till the world about her began to quiet into unquivering outlines. Her heart was easing to normal pulsations. Through her fingers she saw the dawn coming on Pewsey.
And there was no Pewsey.
II
She sat in a great dip of the Downs, grassy and treeless, houseless, without moving speck of life, that she could see, north, south, east or west. In the coming of the sun great hummocks at a distance shed themselves of shadows, they seemed like great tumuli as the light came upon them. A wind was coming with the light, and blew cold with dew. But it changed and grew warmer, blowing upon her naked body, blowing her hair about her face. Below the little incline on which she sat a stream that wandered through the great hollow in the Downs lost itself in a reed-fringed stretch of water: she saw that it was a marsh-fringed loch, stretching its reeds away to the foot of the tumuli.
She began to weep, terrified and lost, watching that bright becoming of the day. Hell ’n’ blast, she was mad—mad, or in a nightmare still. Where was her room and her clothes and that report on Toltec pottery?
She closed her eyes, sticking them fast, gripping her head in her hands. Then she dropped them and opened her eyes. She gave a low cry.
A great beast had come snuffling up the hill from the reeds and stood not a yard away from her, gigantic in the half-light, with pricked ears and a drooling tongue. Its musk smell smote her like a blow. It had the bigness of a bear, though the shape of a wolf. It gave a low wurr and dropped one ear.
Gay screamed, piercingly.
At that the beast backed away, growled blood-curdlingly, then turned, clumsily, and trotted away. Gay watched it with a breathless disbelief as it entered the reeds. A grunt and yap emerged. The reeds ceased to wave and move. Gay’s frozen silence went.
“Lost, lost—oh, I’m lost!” She screamed the words, knowing that someone would come and shake her awake and help her—the chambermaid, perhaps. She stared about her wide-eyed, waiting that coming. The day brightened and grew.
No smoke. No sign of a house or of human habitation. She raised her eyes to the east and saw against it a moving dot. It grew and enlarged, coming earthwards and nearer. She held her breath.
It was a great bird the size of a condor, and something of the same shape, with a crooked beak and immense pinions that beat the air with the noise of a river paddle-boat. It might have been twelve feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. It planed down close to the earth, to the spot where Gay stood and glared, uttered a raucous and contemptuous “Arrh,” and wheeled up into the sky again.
A condor in England!
Gay began to talk to herself. At the first word the silence of the deserted countryside seemed to intensify, listening. Breathtaking and terrible.
“I don’t care! This isn’t real, but I won’t go mad! I won’t, I...” She realised she was dreadfully thirsty, her lips grimed as with ancient dust. She glanced down at her body and saw it the same, covered evenly as with a thin sprinkling of soot. With a desperate courage she looked towards the loch. The beast...?
She picked up a stone in each hand and ran down into the water. It caught her and almost choked her, deep. She dropped the stones and splashed and swam, gasping. Something in the water caught at a foot, slimily, but she kicked it away. When she swam back to the shore again and climbed, gasping, from the icy embrace of the water, and wrung that water from her hair and wiped it from breasts and body and legs, she felt as though she had sloughed more than the covering of brown soot-dust. Wiping the water from her eyelashes, she raised her head again, knowing that surely the icy dip would have restored her sanity as it had cleansed her body. Around her were the unfamiliar, treeless, uninhabited hills. Then she saw something white rising up from the foot of the incline where she herself had awakened. It elongated and stretched, cruciform-wise. It was suddenly rigid. It was a man, naked as herself, and staring at her with dazed and astounded eyes.
It was Major Ledyard Houghton.
III
Her first impulse was to turn and run. But that was one too ridiculous to follow. Absurdly, she remembered a story from some Victorian romance of the heroine, nude, discovered by a man, and the modest female covering her face with her hands to hide her identity...She giggled and sank down on the grass.
“Thank goodness there’s someone else in this mess. But however have we got into it?”
“Damned if I know. I woke and saw you swimming down there... if I am awake.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve thought it all out for myself, and you can take the results on trust. But I do wish you’d sit down.”
“Why?”
Gay clasped her knees with her hands. “So that we can talk. And you’re rather—undraped.” He had an exceedingly white skin. It turned a rich crimson, face, neck... Gay turned away her eyes, politely, from survey of its further possibilities. He slumped down in the grass.
“Oh, damn it!”
