Electronic Bookshelf/Electronic Bookshelf.iso/stories/porter.txt

Text File | 1994-12-22 | 13KB | 227 lines

                   The Long Porter's Tale

                       by Lord Dunsany


There are things that are known only to the long porter of
Tong Tong Tarrup as he sits and mumbles memories to himself
in the little bastion gateway.
   He remembers the war there was in the halls of the
gnomes; and how the fairies came for the opals once, which
Tong Tong Tarrup has; and the way that the giants went
through the fields below, he watching from his gateway: he
remembers quests that are even yet a wonder to the gods.
Who dwells in those frozen houses on the high bare brink of
the world not even he has told me, and he is held to be
garrulous.  Among the elves, the only living things ever
seen moving at that awful altitude where they quarry
turquoise on Earth's highest crag, his name is a byword for
loquacity wherewith they mock the talkative.
   His favourite story if you offer him bash -- the drug of
which he is fondest, and for which he will give his service
in war to the elves against the goblins, or vice-versa if
the goblins bring him more -- his favourite story, when
bodily soothed by the drug and mentally fiercely excited,
tells of a quest undertaken ever so long ago for nothing
more marketable than an old woman's song.
   Picture him telling it.  An old man, lean and bearded,
and almost monstrously long, that lolled in a city's gateway
on a crag perhaps ten miles high; the houses for the most
part facing eastward, lit by the sun and moon and the
constellations we know, but one house on the pinnacle
looking over the edge of the world and lit by the glimmer of
those unearthly spaces where one long evening wears away the
stars: my little offering of bash; a long forefinger that
nipped it at once on a stained and greedy thumb -- all these
are in the foreground of the picture.  In the background,
the mystery of those silent houses and of not knowing who
their denizens were, or what service they had at the hands
of the long porter and what payment he had in return, and
whether he was mortal.
   Picture him in the gateway of this incredible town,
having swallowed my bash in silence, stretch his great
length, lean back, and begin to speak.
   It seems that one clear morning a hundred years ago, a
visitor to Tong Tong Tarrup was climbing up from the world.
He had already passed above the snow and had set his foot on
a step of the earthward stairway that goes down from Tong
Tong Tarrup on to the rocks, when the long porter saw him.
And so painfully did he climb those easy steps that the
grizzled man on watch had long to wonder whether or not the
stranger brought him bash, the drug that gives a meaning to
the stars and seems to explain the twilight.  And in the end
there was not a scrap of bash, and the stranger had nothing
better to offer that grizzled man than his mere story only.
   It seems that the stranger's name was Gerald Jones, and
he always lived in London; but once as a child he had been
on a Northern moor.  It was so long ago that he did not
remember how, only somehow or other he walked alone on the
moor, and all the ling was in flower.  There was nothing in
sight but ling and heather and bracken, except, far off near
the sunset, on indistinct hills, there were little vague
patches that looked like the fields of men.  With evening a
mist crept up and hid the hills, and still he went walking
on over the moor.  And then he came to the valley, a tiny
valley in the midst of the moor, whose sides were incredibly
steep.  He lay down and looked at it through the roots of
the ling.  And a long, long way below him, in a garden by a
cottage, with hollyhocks all round her that were taller than
herself, there sat an old woman on a wooden chair, singing
in the evening.  And the man had taken a fancy to the song
and remembered it after in London, and whenever it came to
his mind it made him think of evenings -- the kind you don't
get in London -- and he heard a soft wind going idly over
the moor and the bumble-bees in a hurry, and forgot the
noise of the traffic.  And always, whenever he heard men
speak of Time, he grudged to Time most this song.  Once
afterwards he went to that Northern moor again and found the
tiny valley, but there was no old woman in the garden, and
no one was singing a song.  And either regret for the song
that the old woman had sung, on a summer evening twenty
years away and daily receding, troubled his mind, or else
the wearisome work that he did in London, for he worked for
a great firm that was perfectly useless; and he grew old
early, as men do in cities.  And at last, when melancholy
brought only regret and the uselessness of his work gained
round him with age, he decided to consult a magician.  So to
a magician he went and told him his troubles, and
particularly he told him how he had heard the song.  "And
now," he said, "it is nowhere in the world."
   "Of course it is not in the world," the magician said,
"but over the Edge of the World you may easily find it."
And he told the man that he was suffering from flux of time
and recommended a day at the Edge of the World.  Jones asked
what part of the Edge of the World he should go to, and the
magician had heard Tong Tong Tarrup well spoken of; so he
paid him, as is usual, in opals, and started at once on the
journey.  The ways to that town are winding; he took the
ticket at Victoria Station that they only give if they know
you: he went past Bleth: he went along the Hills of
Neol-Hungar and came to the Gap of Poy.  All these are in
that part of the world that pertains to the fields we know;
but beyond the Gap of Poy on those ordinary plains, that so
closely resemble Sussex, one first meets the unlikely.  A
line of common grey hills, the Hills of Sneg, may be seen at
the edge of the plain from the Gap of Poy; it is there that
the incredible begins, infrequently at first, but happening
more and more as you go up the hills.  For instance,
descending once into Poy Plains, the first thing that I saw
was an ordinary shepherd watching a flock of ordinary
sheep.  I looked at them for some time and nothing happened,
when, without a word, one of the sheep walked up to the
shepherd and borrowed his pipe and smoked it -- an incident
that struck me as unlikely; but in the Hills of Sneg I met
an honest politician.  Over these plains went Jones and over
the Hills of Sneg, meeting at first unlikely things, and
then incredible things, till he came to the long slope
beyond the hills that leads up to the Edge of the World, and
where, as all guide-books tell, anything may happen.  You
might at the foot of this slope see here and there things
that could conceivably occur in the fields we know; but soon
these disappeared, and the traveller saw nothing but
fabulous beasts, browsing on flowers as astounding as
themselves, and rocks so distorted that their shapes had
clearly a meaning, being too startling to be accidental.
Even the trees were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so much
to say, and they leant over to one another whenever they
spoke and struck grotesque attitudes and leered.  Jones saw
two fir-trees fighting.  The effect of these scenes on his
nerves was very severe; still he climbed on, and was much
cheered at last by the sight of a primrose, the only
familiar thing he had seen for hours, but it whistled and
skipped away.  He saw the unicorns in their secret valley.
Then night in a sinister way slipped over the sky, and there
shone not only the stars, but lesser and greater moons, and
he heard dragons rattling in the dark.
   With dawn there appeared above him among its amazing
crags the town of Tong Tong Tarrup, with the light on its
frozen stairs, a tiny cluster of houses far up in the sky.
He was on the steep mountain now: great mists were leaving
it slowly, and revealing, as they trailed away, more and
more astonishing things.  Before the mist had all gone he
heard quite near him, on what he had thought was bare
mountain, the sound of a heavy galloping on turf.  He had
come to the plateau of the centaurs.  And all at once he saw
them in the mist: there they were, the children of fable,
five enormous centaurs.  Had he paused on account of any
astonishment he had not come so far: he strode on over the
plateau, and came quite near to the centaurs.  It is never
the centaurs' wont to notice men; they pawed the ground and
shouted to one another in Greek, but they said no word to
him.  Nevertheless they turned and stared at him when he
left them, and when he had crossed the plateau and still
went on, all five of them cantered after to the edge of
their green land; for above the high green plateau of the
centaurs is nothing but naked mountains, and the last green
thing that is seen by the mountaineer as he travels to Tong
Tong Tarrup is the grass that the centaurs trample.  He came
into the snow fields that the mountain wears like a cape,
its head being bare above it, and still climbed on.  The
centaurs watched him with increasing wonder.
   Not even fabulous beasts were near him now, nor strange
demoniac trees -- nothing but snow and the clean bare crag
above it on which was Tong Tong Tarrup.  All day he climbed
and evening found him above the snow-line; and soon he came
to the stairway cut in the rock and in sight of that
grizzled man, the long porter of Tong Tong Tarrup, sitting
mumbling amazing memories to himself and expecting in vain
from the stranger a gift of bash.
   It seems that as soon as the stranger arrived at the
bastion gateway, tired though he was, he demanded lodgings
at once that commanded a good view of the Edge of the
World.  But the long porter, that grizzled man, disappointed
of his bash, demanded the stranger's story to add to his
memories before he would show him the way.  And this is the
story, if the long porter has told me the truth and if his
memory is still what it was.  And when the story was told,
the grizzled man arose, and, dangling his musical keys, went
up through door after door and by many stairs and led the
stranger to the top-most house, the highest roof in the
world, and in its parlour showed him the parlour window.
There the tired stranger sat down in a chair and gazed out
of the window sheer over the Edge of the World.  The window
was shut, and in its glittering panes the twilight of the
World's Edge blazed and danced, partly like glow-worms'
lamps and partly like the sea; it went by rippling, full of
wonderful moons.  But the traveller did not look at the
wonderful moons.  For from the abyss there grew with their
roots in far constellations a row of hollyhocks, and amongst
them a small green garden quivered and trembled as scenes
tremble in water; higher up, ling in bloom was floating upon
the twilight, more and more floated up till all the twilight
was purple; the little green garden low down was hung in the
midst of it.  And the garden down below, and the ling all
round it, seemed all to be trembling and drifting on a
song.  For the twilight was full of a song that sang and
rang along the edges of the World, and the green garden and
the ling seemed to flicker and ripple with it as the song
rose and fell, and an old woman was singing it down in the
garden.  A bumble-bee sailed across from over the Edge of
the World.  And the song that was lapping there against the
coasts of the World, and to which the stars were dancing,
was the same that he had heard the old woman sing long since
down in the valley in the midst of the Northern moor.
   But that grizzled man, the long porter, would not let the
stranger stay, because he brought him no bash, and
impatiently he shouldered him away, himself not troubling to
glance through the World's outermost window, for the lands
that Time afflicts and the spaces that Time knows not are
all one to that grizzled man, and the bash that he eats more
profoundly astounds his mind than anything man can show him
either in the World we know or over the Edge.  And, bitterly
protesting, the traveller went back and down again to the
World.

   Accustomed as I am to the incredible from knowing the
Edge of the World, the story presents difficulties to me.
Yet it may be that the devastation wrought by Time is merely
local, and that outside the scope of his destruction old
songs are still being sung by those that we deem dead.  I
try to hope so.  And yet the more I investigate the story
that the long porter told me in the town of Tong Tong Tarrup
the more plausible the alternative theory appears -- that
that grizzled man is a liar.