John Powys - The Brazen Head

As Peleg noticed the deeply amused, and intensely practical interest that Ghosta took in all these objects, he told himself that he had been wise to keep the existence of this cave, which had originally been shown to him by a travelling tinker from Wales, entirely to himself. This Welsh tinker had told him about certain ancient Welsh gods, who had travelled through the land like himself doing work in leather and in various metals. He had explained that he himself, in every district he visited, selected some special spot where he could labour unmolested at his job and fulfil the various professional orders he obtained in that neighbourhood; and he swore that it had been in a vision of one of these old tribal deities, a being who called himself Manawyddan fab-Llyr, that he had learnt of this cave and been assured, that if he kept the secret to himself, nobody would disturb him there.

It was too early for more than a few tiny leaf-buds to have appeared on the willow and alder boughs that in a confused mass hid the mouth of the cave; but at about ten yards distance outside this half-circle of entangled trunks, and closely twisted twigs, grew an immense pine.

The rough bark of this tree, for it was a tree that stood with its back, so to speak, to the cave and to the cave’s bodyguard of entwined branches and twigs, had become for Peleg a token of the precise hour; for its colour darkened and lightened, flickered and shadowed, according to the advancing and retreating, the self-concealing and self-revealing, of Sun and Moon and the intermittent rising and falling of the wind.

Though he had only once or twice actually passed a night in this cave, he had of late amused himself by making careful preparations for a winter night there. He had prepared a tall barrier of wooden bars that exactly fitted the mouth of the cave, but was easily lifted up and could be deposited, after use, beneath one of the interior walls, a barrier that he could render proof against wind and snow and rain by covering it with the skins of cattle and sheep.

What he felt especially proud of, as he showed the cave’s domestic conveniences to his beautiful Hebrew friend, was a tightly wedged mass of clean and dry hay, with which he had packed from floor to ceiling a rocky recess in one of the cave’s corners, towards which the ground sloped upwards a little.

He studied every flicker of her expression with boyish solemnity, as he now proceeded to strew on the ground at the back of the cave a thick sprinkling of this pleasantly-scented summer-hay for their February siesta. It seemed to him that she whitened a little at the first glance she threw upon this lover’s bed, then reddened a little, but she continued to watch his every movement with an expression that it would have been totally impossible for him to interpret; but which revealed in reality something of that infinitely maternal and desperately romantic tenderness that young Tilton was struggling now so intensely, day after day, with his hammer and chisel, to convey to his carved image of the Virgin as he imagined her uttering her immemorial “Magnificat”.

And quite suddenly, and as it may well be imagined, to Peleg’s wonder and delight, Ghosta took the whole situation into her own hands. “Let’s make a good fire,” she cried, “and warm the whole place before we lie down! And let’s heat some water and have a good drink of hot red wine!”

Such had been his secret meticulous preparations for a situation exactly like this one, only built up entirely in his imagination, that few lovers would believe, however deeply they trusted their tale-bearers, how small was the lapse of time before a blazing fire of sticks and logs, unattended by any great volume of smoke, was burning triumphantly, and before they were exchanging with each other deep draughts of red wine mixed with bubbling water.

The effect of these timely preparations were enhanced by the noon-day sunshine, which poured down upon them past the great pine-tree outside, one of whose two big boughs lay on the ground, while the other was extended wide, with a gesture as comprehensive as that with which Jacob, after wrestling all night with the angel, must have greeted the hills and valleys and rivers of the Promised Land.

Then as they replaced the goblets, from which they had been drinking, on the wide shelf that ran round the cave, Ghosta uttered the most astonishing words that her companion had ever heard issuing from human lips.

“Now is the moment, O my friend, when you and I must strip ourselves of all. For a man knoweth not the woman he loves, nor does a woman know the man she loves, until each is as naked as the other.”

The words struck him like a ritual, mystical and solemn, but the natural, half-laughing way she came close up to him and proceeded to loosen the buckle of his belt, and then, drawing back a few paces, began with incredible rapidity, but with gay and laughing interjections, and indeed with half-humorous and almost mischievous smiles at certain particularly crucial moments, to fling off every stitch of her clothing, made him feel at ease with the whole universe.

Peleg imitated her as fast as he could; but perhaps it was significant of the double stream of blood in his veins that, before they lay down together on that sweet-scented bed of hay, he lifted his wooden screen across the entrance to their amorous hermitage and hung over it a large bull’s hide.

As he did so he couldn’t help being struck by the sun-warmth which reached his fingers from this same skin, for he had snatched it up from the top of a pile that ever since dawn had been in reach of the Sun. Nor did the gigantic amorist, while the Sun above the bull’s-hide screen caressed his own swarthy neck, fail to note with something like philosophical vanity that he was not so absorbed by the passion of love as to be unable to get, even at this moment of moments, a quite definite sensuous pleasure from the touch of the Lord of Life.

But when once those two lay down together, all other thoughts, impressions, experiences, sensations were absorbed and engulfed in the blind intermingling of two bodies, two souls, two spirits; so much so that the shock and the blood of her ravishment by him, and the furious onslaught of his possession of her, were both swept into a whirling vortex of rainbow-irradiated bubbles, tossed into space, as the confluent torrents of their two life-streams became one terrific river.

Calling up these blinding moments in calmer blood, our Mongolian giant could not help being struck by the fact that it was Ghosta, and not he, who fell into a sleep of blissful exhaustion when their ecstasy was over. This, he decided after long and delicate ponderings, was due to the fact that, in her case, body, soul, and spirit were much more intimately united than in his; so that when their union had been fully achieved, there was no residual reservoir left, of “energeia akinesis”, or “unruffled force”, such as could keep her consciousness alert and observant: while in his case, whether due to his masculinity or to his stature, there remained a definite level of mental awareness that was completely unaffected by what senses, or soul, or spirit, were feeling or had felt.

And this awareness was closely allied to action. What Peleg did, therefore, when the trance of their beatitude had ebbed and she was asleep, was to slip noiselessly from Ghosta’s side, and — with the stealthy movements of a male panther arranging the fragments of his half-devoured prey before distributing them to its little ones while their mother slept — to re-assume his garments one by one, till he was completely clad. Then, with a fond but not lingering glance at his sleeping mate, he stole into the interior of the cave and began completing, as far as it was possible to do such a thing without the usual accompanying sounds, all the preparations upon which of late he had been secretly engaged, so that he might be in a position to offer his re-discovered bride, when the moment came, the sort of romantic, but deliciously tasting and completely satisfying meal, that was worthy of such a never-to-be-repeated occasion.