Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

A penitential Lent I am having of it, and no mistake, most of it spent in this tiny cell, no more than five by three feet across, four feet high, with a vault rising to a foot beyond that. There is a grating of wrought iron for a door, which leads on to a passageway lined with numerous other cells like mine. The walls are rough, undressed stone held together with slapped-on mortar, of which more in a moment. When it rains a sheen, almost a curtain of water, tainted only with the musty stoniness it picks up on the way, runs down them, forms a pool, and trickles away under the bars and into the corridor. There is a heap of straw on the floor, which is changed weekly.

I am of course alone. There was a family of mice, but I have eaten them. This was silly. If I had let the pregnant females come to term, there would have been more. Perhaps I could have husbanded them, and continued for longer to supplement a diet of rye crusts, a handful of which are thrust under the grating on most evenings. The straw, too, has seeds of grain in it. occasionally a whole ear.

The mortar. It was mixed, I would guess, with too much sand, and is further weakened by the presence of flint shards. I managed on the second day to liberate one of these, about an inch long and with a sharp point, and I have been using it and its successors to grind, pick and poke through the mortar. Today, four weeks later, or thereabouts, I achieved daylight, the first I have seen for nearly five weeks, through a hole, a passageway with a slight angle in it, just big enough to take my hand and forearm, up to my shoulder, right through to the outside. Impossible to exaggerate the lift this has given to my spirits: the first two joints of my index finger are in the sun!

I imagine what this must be like from the outside: the blank wall at the back of an annexe to the Guild Hall; a sudden trickle of sandy mortar from a point where three corners of stone do not quite meet as they should, a small brown finger poking through and waggling. At what height is this happening? A foot above the floor of the alley? Six feet up? Even higher? Will it be seen? What will happen if it is? I twist and pull and extricate my arm. Knowing these people, I should not be surprised to have my finger bashed with a stone, slashed with a knife, or even bitten off. Instead I put my eye to the hole and, in spite of the bend in my tunnel. I can sense that sunlight. And then, with my ears against it, I can hear a distant bell, the clatter of hoofs on cobbles and, nearer, a hoarse voice, a woman's, insisting that the cabbages she has for sale are spring cabbages, new season, freshly pulled, buy them here.

So. After all, this cell may be a womb rather than a tomb and the naked child within may yet contrive a birth canal. Why not? In the darkness, virtually complete even after my eyes became adjusted to it, I have yet been able to work out the extent of the patch of mortar I have been working at and it is at least as big as the circumference of my head – and, as every magician knows, if your head will go through the rest will follow… if you know how. I scrabble about, find the latest of my flint tools, and set about enlarging what I have begun. It is, of course, dull work, scrape, scrape, twist, twist, and then dragging out the dust and grit I have loosened with my lacerated fingertips. Occasionally they bleed, and now I can see the blood. Previously I could only taste it. But it is not work that requires mental concentration and my mind can wander freely.

Or it can, even here and in this situation, do what I like best and dwell, with reverence and relish, on every sensation that racks my body: the ache in my thighs, the cold in the soles of my feet, the stiffness across my shoulders, even the dry, sharp, coarse unpleasantness of hard sand, cement and crumbs of flint beneath my fingers. And hunger. Like a cancer gnawing my entrails. It is only through the senses that we know we are alive, only through the senses that we can make the best of being alive.

However, right now, I muse on the stupidity that brought me to this tomb-womb.

I wandered into an open space. One side was filled with a tall church, perhaps the most elegant I have seen on my travels. Smaller than St Paul's, not as noble as Notre-Dame of Paris, it soars perpendicularly with high bridges of flying stone shaped like the bones in the breast of a bird, which balance in equilibrium the forces with which the weight of the roof pushes the walls outwards, walls pierced with windows so it seems there is no wall, but pillars and glass only. It carries the eye and the people who built it would say the soul too, to the tower and then the steeple amd so to the heaven where these people believe their three gods, which they will insist with absurd lack of sense is one god, and his mother loo, all dwell.

The big doors at the west end were open and people were wandering in and out, so out of curiosity I joined them. Inside tall thin pillars climbed to galleries stacked on each other, the stones mostly a pale soft grey but some black marble, pillars which branched out into a grand foliation in the root, like huge tan-shaped leaves, veined with ridges of stone. There are such giant leaves in the forests above our Coromandel coast, but I have never seen anything like them in Ingerlond or Francia. And the wonder of these is that, considering how high they are, they are painted in glowing colour, blues, reds and gold for the most part rather than the greens of the leaves they echo. They are almost as grand as the paintings, tiles, inlays and enamels that adorn our own temples.

The walls of glass beneath and between are all coloured too. some in patterns, others in pictures depicting the lives of their godmen and Sadhus; but the most glorious windows, the most wonderful, are big round rose windows set high in the end walls where the predominant colour is blue, an awe-inspiring deep, resonant blue, and the subject matter the life and glory of Mary who, no matter what these Christians think, is surely an avatar for Parvati, or, as she is sometimes called, Uma, and for whom I am named is her servant.

But for the most part it is not Parvati but Kali who rules, even if she is never seen, for Death is everywhere: in the man torn and bleeding, nailed to his cross, in the depiction of martyrdoms, or at least in the way the sadhus clutch like badges the implements by which they were tortured to death – Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence with his roasting rack, and hundreds more. And finally Kali stalks the arcades and ambulatories below, for here are the tombs of bishops and nobles, with statues of their corpses laid on top, some in armour, some in the vestments of their office. And on one at least is depicted, also in stone, a gruesome skeleton over which the worms still crawl.

So, in one place, we have the ecstasy of godmen and the misery of death, and nowhere in between any love or acknowledgement of the glory that can accompany us on our pilgrimage from darkness through light and back to darkness. What sort of religion is this that carries the mind to a heaven of blue, yet dwells with cadavers?

I have my answer. By these means, splendour and horrid fear combined, the churchmen and princes keep their hold on the souls of the masses who toil for them – for these cathedrals assail the senses with promises of ecstasies always just beyond your reach but ultimately attainable in death, while they terrify with fear of death and everlasting torment. Not only are there colour and light, but there is treasure too, in crosses and croziers, images and vestments. Incense in clouds is released from swung thurifers of polished silver, and music from flutes, fifes, oboes, trumpets, trombones and drums as well as sung. Even that produced by sets of pipes through which air is pumped with a bellows breathes when small slabs of ivory-covered wood are pressed, fills the spaces, colouring them with varied sound… All this magnificence, appealing to every sense save only that most important one of touch, may induce a euphoria as pronounced as that which comes from over-indulgence in bhang, and fools one into thinking that if one is not in heaven then heaven, when it is achieved, will be much like this.