 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
IV.
During this state of semi-unconsciousness, or rather trance,
a remarkable dream or vision came to him. The actual artificial
objects around him slid from him, and were replaced by
a baseless yet most imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But
though a baseless vision in itself, this airy spectacle assumed
very familiar features to Pierre. It was the phantasmagoria of
the Mount of the Titans, a singular height standing quite detached
in a wide solitude not far from the grand range of dark
blue hills encircling his ancestral manor.
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own
ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning
alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each
man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar
mind and mood. Thus a high-aspiring, but most moody,
disappointed bard, chancing once to visit the Meadows and beholding
that fine eminence, christened it by the name it ever
after bore; completely extinguishing its former title—The Delectable
Mountain—one long ago bestowed by an old Baptist
farmer, an hereditary admirer of Bunyan and his most marvelous
book. From the spell of that name the mountain never
afterward escaped; for now, gazing upon it by the light of
those suggestive syllables, no poetical observer could resist the
mount would fain adapt itself to its so recent name, some
people said that it had insensibly changed its pervading aspect
within a score or two of winters. Nor was this strange conceit
entirely without foundation, seeing that the annual displacements
of huge rocks and gigantic trees were continually modifying
its whole front and general contour.
On the north side, where it fronted the old Manor-house,
some fifteen miles distant, the height, viewed from the piazza
of a soft haze-canopied summer's noon, presented a long and
beautiful, but not entirely inaccessible-looking purple precipice,
some two thousand feet in air, and on each hand sideways
sloping down to lofty terraces of pastures.
Those hill-side pastures, be it said, were thickly sown with a
small white amaranthine flower, which, being irreconcilably
distasteful to the cattle, and wholly rejected by them, and yet,
continually multiplying on every hand, did by no means contribute
to the agricultural value of those elevated lands. Insomuch,
that for this cause, the disheartened dairy tenants of
that part of the Manor, had petitioned their lady-landlord for
some abatement in their annual tribute of upland grasses, in
the Juny-load; rolls of butter in the October crock; and steers
and heifers on the October hoof; with turkeys in the Christmas
sleigh.
“The small white flower, it is our bane!” the imploring
tenants cried. “The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs
and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth,
it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this! The
terraced pastures grow glittering white, and in warm June still
show like banks of snow:—fit token of the sterileness the
amaranth begets! Then free us from the amaranth, good
lady, or be pleased to abate our rent!”
Now, on a somewhat nearer approach, the precipice did not
belie its purple promise from the manorial piazza—that sweet
Bunyanish old title originally bestowed;—but showed the profuse
aërial foliage of a hanging forest. Nevertheless, coming
still more nigh, long and frequent rents among the mass of
leaves revealed horrible glimpses of dark-dripping rocks, and
mysterious mouths of wolfish caves. Struck by this most unanticipated
view, the tourist now quickened his impulsive steps
to verify the change by coming into direct contact with so
chameleon a height. As he would now speed on, the lower
ground, which from the manor-house piazza seemed all a grassy
level, suddenly merged into a very long and weary acclivity,
slowly rising close up to the precipice's base; so that the
efflorescent grasses rippled against it, as the efflorescent waves
of some great swell or long rolling billow ripple against the
water-line of a steep gigantic war-ship on the sea. And, as
among the rolling sea-like sands of Egypt, disordered rows of
broken Sphinxes lead to the Cheopian pyramid itself; so this
long acclivity was thickly strewn with enormous rocky masses,
grotesque in shape, and with wonderful features on them,
which seemed to express that slumbering intelligence visible in
some recumbent beasts—beasts whose intelligence seems struck
dumb in them by some sorrowful and inexplicable spell.
Nevertheless, round and round those still enchanted rocks,
hard by their utmost rims, and in among their cunning crevices,
the misanthropic hill-scaling goat nibbled his sweetest
food; for the rocks, so barren in themselves, distilled a subtile
moisture, which fed with greenness all things that grew about
their igneous marge.
Quitting those recumbent rocks, you still ascended toward the
hanging forest, and piercing within its lowermost fringe, then
suddenly you stood transfixed, as a marching soldier confounded
at the sight of an impregnable redoubt, where he had fancied
it a practicable vault to his courageous thews. Cunningly
masked hitherto, by the green tapestry of the interlacing leaves,
you; and, trickling with unevaporable moisture, distilled upon
you from its beetling brow slow thunder-showers of water-drops,
chill as the last dews of death. Now you stood and
shivered in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning
August down the meads. All round and round, the grim
scarred rocks rallied and re-rallied themselves; shot up, protruded,
stretched, swelled, and eagerly reached forth; on every
side bristlingly radiating with a hideous repellingness. Tossed,
and piled, and indiscriminate among these, like bridging rifts
of logs up-jammed in alluvial-rushing streams of far Arkansas:
or, like great masts and yards of overwhelmed fleets hurled
high and dashed amain, all splintering together, on hovering
ridges of the Atlantic sea,—you saw the melancholy trophies
which the North Wind, championing the unquenchable quarrel
of the Winter, had wrested from the forests, and dismembered
them on their own chosen battle-ground, in barbarous disdain.
'Mid this spectacle of wide and wanton spoil, insular noises of
falling rocks would boomingly explode upon the silence and
fright all the echoes, which ran shrieking in and out among the
caves, as wailing women and children in some assaulted town.
Stark desolation; ruin, merciless and ceaseless; chills and
gloom,—all here lived a hidden life, curtained by that cunning
purpleness, which, from the piazza of the manor house, so beautifully
invested the mountain once called Delectable, but now
styled Titanic.
Beaten off by such undreamed-of glooms and steeps, you
now sadly retraced your steps, and, mayhap, went skirting the
inferior sideway terraces of pastures; where the multiple and
most sterile inodorous immortalness of the small, white flower
furnished no aliment for the mild cow's meditative end. But
here and there you still might smell from far the sweet aromaticness
of clumps of catnip, that dear farm-house herb. Soon
you would see the modest verdure of the plant itself; and
timbers of log-houses long extinct would also meet your
eye; their desolation illy hid by the green solicitudes of the unemigrating
herb. Most fitly named the catnip; since, like the
unrunagate cat, though all that's human forsake the place, that
plant will long abide, long bask and bloom on the abandoned
hearth. Illy hid; for every spring the amaranthine and celestial
flower gained on the mortal household herb; for every
autumn the catnip died, but never an autumn made the amaranth
to wane. The catnip and the amaranth!—man's earthly
household peace, and the ever-encroaching appetite for God.
No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt,
but took your way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic
height. In mid field again you paused among the recumbent
sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You
paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You
saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants,
writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with upborn
moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his
whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at
him;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning
his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally
in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him
off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly
left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl.
To Pierre this wondrous shape had always been a thing of
interest, though hitherto all its latent significance had never
fully and intelligibly smitten him. In his earlier boyhood a
strolling company of young collegian pedestrians had chanced
to light upon the rock; and, struck with its remarkableness, had
brought a score of picks and spades, and dug round it to unearth
it, and find whether indeed it were a demoniac freak of nature,
or some stern thing of antediluvian art. Accompanying this
eager party, Pierre first beheld that deathless son of Terra. At
nothing but the turbaned head of igneous rock rising from out
the soil, with its unabasable face turned upward toward the
mountain, and the bull-like neck clearly defined. With distorted
features, scarred and broken, and a black brow mocked
by the upborn moss, Enceladus there subterraneously stood,
fast frozen into the earth at the junction of the neck. Spades
and picks soon heaved part of his Ossa from him, till at last a
circular well was opened round him to the depth of some thirteen
feet. At that point the wearied young collegians gave over
their enterprise in despair. With all their toil, they had not
yet come to the girdle of Enceladus. But they had bared good
part of his mighty chest, and exposed his mutilated shoulders,
and the stumps of his once audacious arms. Thus far uncovering
his shame, in that cruel plight they had abandoned him,
leaving stark naked his in vain indignant chest to the defilements
of the birds, which for untold ages had cast their foulness
on his vanquished crest.
Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan,
wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon
enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from
whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush,
in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to
be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy
to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with
costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding
from the broken bronze;—not unworthy to be compared with
that bold trophy of high art, this American Enceladus, wrought
by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than
compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the
inferior skill of man. Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenseless;
but Nature, more truthful, performed an amputation,
and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket
above the thigh.
Such was the wild scenery—the Mount of Titans, and the
repulsed group of heaven-assaulters, with Enceladus in their
midst shamefully recumbent at its base;—such was the wild
scenery, which now to Pierre, in his strange vision, displaced
the four blank walls, the desk, and camp-bed, and domineered
upon his trance. But no longer petrified in all their ignominious
attitudes, the herded Titans now sprung to their feet;
flung themselves up the slope; and anew battered at the precipice's
unresounding wall. Foremost among them all, he saw a
moss-turbaned, armless giant, who despairing of any other
mode of wreaking his immitigable hate, turned his vast trunk
into a battering-ram, and hurled his own arched-out ribs again
and yet again against the invulnerable steep.
“Enceladus! it is Enceladus!”—Pierre cried out in his
sleep. That moment the phantom faced him; and Pierre saw
Enceladus no more; but on the Titan's armless trunk, his own
duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with
prophetic discomfiture and woe. With trembling frame he
started from his chair, and woke from that ideal horror to all
his actual grief.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |