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                Where the Tides Ebb and Flow

                       by Lord Dunsany




   I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial
was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could
there be any hell for me.
   I waited for some hours, knowing this.  Then my friends
came for me, and slew me secretly and with ancient rite, and
lit great tapers, and carried me away.
   It was all in London that the thing was done, and they
went furtively at dead of night along grey streets and among
mean houses until they came to the river.  And the river and
the tide of the sea were grappling with one another between
the mud-banks, and both of them were black and full of
lights.  A sudden wonder came into the eyes of each, as my
friends came near to them with their glaring tapers.  All
these things I saw as they carried me dead and stiffening,
for my soul was still among my bones, because there was no
hell for it, and because Christian burial was denied me.
   They took me down a stairway that was green with slimy
things, and so came slowly to the terrible mud.  There, in
the territory of forsaken things, they dug a shallow grave.
When they had finished they laid me in the grave, and
suddenly they cast their tapers to the river.  And when the
water had quenched the flaring lights the tapers looked pale
and small as they bobbed upon the tide, and at once the
glamour of the calamity was gone, and I noticed then the
approach of the huge dawn; and my friends cast their cloaks
over their faces, and the solemn procession was turned into
many fugitives that furtively stole away.
   Then the mud came back wearily and covered all but my
face.  There I lay alone with quite forgotten things, with
drifting things that the tides will take no farther, with
useless things and lost things, and the horrible unnatural
bricks that are neither stone nor soil.  I was rid of
feeling, because I had been killed, but perception and
thought were in my unhappy soul.  The dawn widened, and I
saw the desolate houses that crowded the marge of the river,
and their dead windows peered into my dead eyes, windows
with bales behind them instead of human souls.  I grew so
weary looking at these forlorn things that I wanted to cry
out, but could not, because I was dead.  Then I knew, as I
had never known before, that for all the years that herd of
desolate houses had wanted to cry out too, but, being dead,
were dumb.  And I knew then that it had yet been well with
the forgotten drifting things if they had wept, but they
were eyeless and without life.  And I, too, tried to weep,
but there were no tears in my dead eyes.  And I knew then
that the river might have cared for us, might have caressed
us, might have sung to us, but he swept broadly onwards,
thinking of nothing but the princely ships.
   At last the tide did what the river would not, and came
and covered me over, and my soul had rest in the green
water, and rejoiced and believed that it had the Burial of
the Sea.  But with the ebb the water fell again, and left me
alone again with the callous mud among the forgotten things
that drift no more, and with the sight of all those desolate
houses, and with the knowledge among all of us that each was
dead.
   In the mournful wall behind me, hung with green weeds,
forsaken of the sea, dark tunnels appeared, and secret
narrow passages that were clamped and barred.  From these at
last the stealthy rats came down to nibble me away, and my
soul rejoiced thereat and believed that he would be free
perforce from the accursed bones to which burial was
refused.  Very soon the rats ran away a little space and
whispered among themselves.  They never came any more.  When
I found that I was accursed even among the rats I tried to
weep again.
   Then the tide came swinging back and covered the dreadful
mud, and hid the desolate houses, and soothed the forgotten
things, and my soul had ease for a while in the sepulture of
the sea.  And then the tide forsook me again.
   To and fro it came about me for many years.  Then the
County Council found me, and gave me decent burial.  It was
the first grave that I had ever slept in.  That very night
my friends came for me.  They dug me up and put me back
again in the shallow hole in the mud.
   Again and again through the years my bones found burial,
but always behind the funeral lurked one of those terrible
men who, as soon as night fell, came and dug them up and
carried them back again to the hole in the mud.
   And then one day the last of those men died who once had
done to me this terrible thing.  I heard his soul go over
the river at sunset.
   And again I hoped.
   A few weeks afterwards I was found once more, and once
more taken out of that restless place and given deep burial
in sacred ground, where my soul hoped that it should rest.
   Almost at once men came with cloaks and tapers to give me
back to the mud, for the thing had become a tradition and a
rite.  And all the forsaken things mocked me in their dumb
hearts when they saw me carried back, for they were jealous
of me because I had left the mud.  It must be remembered
that I could not weep.
   And the years went by seawards where the black barges go,
and the great derelict centuries became lost at sea, and
still I lay there without any cause to hope, and daring not
to hope without a cause, because of the terrible envy and
the anger of the things that could drift no more.
   Once a great storm rode up, even as far as London, out of
the sea from the South; and he came curving into the river
with the fierce East wind.  And he was mightier than the
dreary tides, and went with great leaps over the listless
mud.  And all the sad forgotten things rejoiced, and mingled
with things that were haughtier than they, and rode once
more amongst the lordly shipping that was driven up and
down.  And out of their hideous home he took my bones, never
again, I hoped, to be vexed with the ebb and flow.  And with
the fall of the tide he went riding down the river and
turned to the southwards, and so went to his home.  And my
bones he scattered among many isles and along the shores of
happy alien mainlands.  And for a moment, while they were
far asunder, my soul was almost free.
   Then there arose, at the will of the moon, the assiduous
flow of the tide, and it undid at once the work of the ebb,
and gathered my bones from the marge of sunny isles, and
gleaned them all along the mainland's shores, and went
rocking northwards till it came to the mouth of the Thames,
and there turned westwards its relentless face, and so went
up the river and came to the hole in the mud, and into it
dropped my bones; and partly the mud covered them and partly
it left them white, for the mud cares not for its forsaken
things.
   Then the ebb came, and I saw the dead eyes of the houses
and the jealousy of the other forgotten things that the
storm had not carried thence.
   And some more centuries passed over the ebb and flow and
over the loneliness of things forgotten.  And I lay there
all the whole in the careless grip of the mud, never wholly
covered, yet never able to go free, and I longed for the
great caress of the warm Earth or the comfortable lap of the
Sea.
   Sometimes men found my bones and buried them, but the
tradition never died, and my friends' successors always
brought them back.  At last the barges went no more, and
there were fewer lights; shaped timbers no longer floated
down the fair-way, and there came instead old wind-uprooted
trees in all their natural simplicity.
   At last I was aware that somewhere near me a blade of
grass was growing, and the moss began to appear all over the
dead houses.  One day some thistledown went drifting over
the river.
   For some years I watched these signs attentively, until I
became certain that London was passing away.  Then I hoped
once more, and all along both banks of the river there was
anger among the lost things that anything should dare to
hope upon the forsaken mud.  Gradually the horrible houses
crumbled, until the poor dead things that never had had life
got decent burial among the weeds and moss.  At last the may
appeared and the convolvulus.  Finally, the wild rose stood
up over mounds that had been wharves and warehouses.  Then I
knew that the cause of Nature had triumphed, and London had
passed away.
   The last man in London came to the wall by the river, in
an ancient cloak that was one of those that once my friends
had worn, and peered over the edge to see that I still was
there.  Then he went, and I never saw men again: they had
passed away with London.
   A few days after the last man had gone the birds came
into London, all the birds that sing.  When they first saw
me they all looked sideways at me, then they went away a
little and spoke among themselves.
   "He only sinned against Man," they said; "it is not our
quarrel."
   "Let us be kind to him," they said.
   Then they hopped nearer me and began to sing.  It was the
time of the rising of the dawn, and from both banks of the
river, and from the sky, and from the thickets that were
once the streets, hundreds of birds were singing.  As the
light increased the birds sang more and more; they grew
thicker and thicker in the air above my head, till there
were thousands of them singing there, and then millions, and
at last I could see nothing but a host of flickering wings
with the sunlight on them, and little gaps of sky.  Then
when there was nothing to be heard in London but the myriad
notes of that exultant song, my soul rose up from the bones
in the hole in the mud and began to climb up the song
heavenwards.  And it seemed that a laneway opened amongst
the wings of the birds, and it went up and up, and one of
the smaller gates of Paradise stood ajar at the end of it.
And then I knew by a sign that the mud should receive me no
more, for suddenly I found that I could weep.
   At this moment I opened my eyes in bed in a house in
London, and outside some sparrows were twittering in a tree
in the light of the radiant morning; and there were tears
still wet upon my face, for one's restraint is feeble while
one sleeps.  But I arose and opened the window wide, and,
stretching my hands out over the little garden, I blessed
the birds whose song had woken me up from the troubled and
terrible centuries of my dream.