IV.
Pierre plunged deep into the woods, and paused not for
several miles; paused not till he came to a remarkable stone, or
rather, smoothed mass of rock, huge as a barn, which, wholly
isolated horizontally, was yet sweepingly overarched by beech-trees
and chestnuts.
It was shaped something like a lengthened egg, but flattened
more; and, at the ends, pointed more; and yet not pointed,
but irregularly wedge-shaped. Somewhere near the middle
of its under side, there was a lateral ridge; and an obscure
point of this ridge rested on a second lengthwise-sharpened rock,
slightly protruding from the ground. Beside that one obscure
and minute point of contact, the whole enormous and most
ponderous mass touched not another object in the wide terraqueous
world. It was a breathless thing to see. One broad
haunched end hovered within an inch of the soil, all along to
the point of teetering contact; but yet touched not the soil.
Many feet from that—beneath one part of the opposite end,
which was all seamed and half-riven—the vacancy was considerably
larger, so as to make it not only possible, but convenient
to admit a crawling man; yet no mortal being had
ever been known to have the intrepid heart to crawl there.
It might well have been the wonder of all the country
round. But strange to tell, though hundreds of cottage
hearthstones—where, of long winter-evenings, both old men
smoked their pipes and young men shelled their corn—surrounded
it, at no very remote distance, yet had the youthful
Pierre been the first known publishing discoverer of this stone,
which he had thereupon fancifully christened the Memnon
Stone. Possibly, the reason why this singular object had so
long remained unblazoned to the world, was not so much because
it had never before been lighted on—though indeed,
both belted and topped by the dense deep luxuriance of the
aboriginal forest, it lay like Captain Kidd's sunken hull in the
gorge of the river Hudson's Highlands,—its crown being full
eight fathoms under high-foliage mark during the great springtide
of foliage;—and besides this, the cottagers had no special
motive for visiting its more immediate vicinity at all; their
timber and fuel being obtained from more accessible woodlands
—as because, even, if any of the simple people should have
chanced to have beheld it, they, in their hoodwinked unappreciativeness,
would not have accounted it any very marvelous
sight, and therefore, would never have thought it worth their
while to publish it abroad. So that in real truth, they might
have seen it, and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable
a circumstance. In short, this wondrous Memnon Stone
could be no Memnon Stone to them; nothing but a huge
stumbling-block, deeply to be regretted as a vast prospective
obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross-road
through that wild part of the Manor.
Now one day while reclining near its flank, and intently
eying it, and thinking how surprising it was, that in so long-settled
a country he should have been the first discerning and
appreciative person to light upon such a great natural curiosity,
Pierre happened to brush aside several successive layers
of old, gray-haired, close cropped, nappy moss, and beneath, to
his no small amazement, he saw rudely hammered in the rock
some half-obliterate initials—“S. ye W.” Then he knew, that
ignorant of the stone, as all the simple country round might
immemorially have been, yet was not himself the only human
being who had discovered that marvelous impending spectacle:
but long and long ago, in quite another age, the stone had
been beheld, and its wonderfulness fully appreciated—as the
painstaking initials seemed to testify—by some departed man,
who, were he now alive, might possibly wag a beard old as the
most venerable oak of centuries' growth. But who,—who in
Methuselah's name,—who might have been this “S. ye W?”
Pierre pondered long, but could not possibly imagine; for the
initials, in their antiqueness, seemed to point to some period before
the era of Columbus' discovery of the hemisphere. Happening
in the end to mention the strange matter of these initials
to a white-haired old gentleman, his city kinsman, who, after a
long and richly varied, but unfortunate life, had at last found
great solace in the Old Testament, which he was continually
studying with ever-increasing admiration; this white-haired old
kinsman, after having learnt all the particulars about the stone
—its bulk, its height, the precise angle of its critical impendings,
and all that,—and then, after much prolonged cogitation
upon it, and several long-drawn sighs, and aged looks of hoar
significance, and reading certain verses in Ecclesiastes; after all
these tedious preliminaries, this not-at-all-to-be-hurried white-haired
old kinsman, had laid his tremulous hand upon Pierre's
firm young shoulder, and slowly whispered—“Boy; 'tis Solomon
the Wise.” Pierre could not repress a merry laugh at
this; wonderfully diverted by what seemed to him so queer
and crotchety a conceit; which he imputed to the alledged
dotage of his venerable kinsman, who he well knew had once
maintained, that the old Scriptural Ophir was somewhere on
our northern sea-coast; so no wonder the old gentleman should
fancy that King Solomon might have taken a trip—as a sort
of amateur supercargo—of some Tyre or Sidon gold-ship across
the water, and happened to light on the Memnon Stone, while
rambling about with bow and quiver shooting partridges.
But merriment was by no means Pierre's usual mood when
thinking of this stone; much less when seated in the woods,
he, in the profound significance of that deep forest silence,
viewed its marvelous impendings. A flitting conceit had often
crossed him, that he would like nothing better for a head-stone
than this same imposing pile; in which, at times, during the
soft swayings of the surrounding foliage, there seemed to lurk
some mournful and lamenting plaint, as for some sweet boy
long since departed in the antediluvian time.
Not only might this stone well have been the wonder of the
simple country round, but it might well have been its terror.
Sometimes, wrought to a mystic mood by contemplating its
ponderous inscrutableness, Pierre had called it the Terror
Stone. Few could be bribed to climb its giddy height, and
crawl out upon its more hovering end. It seemed as if the
dropping of one seed from the beak of the smallest flying bird
would topple the immense mass over, crashing against the trees.
It was a very familiar thing to Pierre; he had often climbed
it, by placing long poles against it, and so creeping up to where
it sloped in little crumbling stepping-places; or by climbing
high up the neighboring beeches, and then lowering himself
down upon the forehead-like summit by the elastic branches.
But never had he been fearless enough—or rather fool-hardy
enough, it may be, to crawl on the ground beneath the vacancy
of the higher end; that spot first menaced by the Terror Stone
should it ever really topple.
