AEgypt (41 page)

—How is gold made? Arthur asked.

—Gold grows, said Mr. Talbot. Deep deep in mountains, where the earth is oldest, gold is. So you make deep mines to find it. But you must never take away all the gold; you must not, for you will take away the seed of gold, by which it grows. Like fruit, take away that which is ripe; leave the rest to ripen. And it will. Slowly, slowly, the stones of the mountain, the clays of it, grow up to be gold; they become gold.

—Do they?

—In Wales, Mr. Talbot said. In Wales, when I went into the mountains, I knew the gold was growing, all around me, in the earth; deep within. It seemed I could hear it grow.

—Hear it?

—One day, in a thousand years, a thousand thousand, all stone will have grown into gold.

—The world will end by then, said Arthur.

—Perhaps it will. But we can teach the gold to grow faster. If we learn how. We can help, like midwives, to bear the gold from what contains it; we can bring it to birth.

Arthur said nothing to that. The rain had slackened, begun to cease, and the clouds once again to part and change; the sun shone. Glastonbury was not gold but silver.

—I'll go piss, said Mr. Talbot.

He went out past the little fire and into the long green alley of the chapel's nave, and thought a long time. He went down toward the sanctuary along the wall, stopping to look into side-chapels. When he reached the sanctuary and the place where the altar had been, he looked back; he could no longer see the campfire. He took from within his coat a small stone jar, well sealed with wax.

He looked around for a spot. He saw a narrow flight of steps, leading downward beneath a carved arch; when he went down them, he found that the way was blocked with fallen stones, except for a narrow opening just large enough for him to get half his body in, but not to crawl inside. He thought he heard, within, a sound of water, as though there were a well inside. He closed his eyes; he saw the dog-face of a smiling being; he dropped the jar into the space within.

Tomorrow, with Doctor Dee, he would find it there, as he had found his book; and the story could go on.

At the top of the bald high hill called the Tor of Glastonbury there is a tower like a finger of stone, St. Michael's tower. At the foot of the hill, in the valley that lies between the Tor and the hill west of it, Chalice Hill, there is a well, the Holy Well. The road that leads up the Tor passes this well. Doctor Dee, on his way upward, stopped by it. Chambers have been built around it, of heavy stone that shows the tool that worked it, and which Doctor Dee supposed the Romans put there, or even the Druids before them.

They were great and wise men, the Druids, and of the doctor's own race, though in their pride they had denied Christ and striven against His disciples. There were tales of how they had set up the stones that stood in a ring on Salisbury plain, had brought them here out of Ireland through the air, like a flock, and settled them there on the plain. Doctor Dee knew that when blessed Patrick had questioned them, and asked them who made the world, the Druids answered: the Druids made it.

He stepped down into the mossy way which led into the chambers of the well. At the dark door he put out his hand against the stone, listening for a time to the sound of the waters; then he entered. It was somewhere up on Chalice Hill that the spring arose which fed this well; it arose, so it was said, at the spot where Joseph of Arimathea buried the Cup from which Our Lord drank at His last supper. The Cup,
calix, crater
, from which that hill was named. Unless the chalice the hill was named for was the hill itself, a cup inverted on the earth and pouring out its liquid water-wine here. Doctor Dee looked down at the stones which the water passed over—they were streaked and soaked with red. Blood Well was this place's other name.

He drank there, and prayed, and went on. The road left the shelter of the greening trees, and by stages proceeded around the Tor in a spiral as it went upward. The sky began to clear, and a sharp breeze was on the doctor's cheek. As he rose higher, farther and farther spread out the lowlands in his sight, even as far as to the sea. Above these lowlands rose Cadbury Hill, and Chalice Hill, and Weary-all Hill like a whale lifting a huge back into the air, and this hill he climbed. In ancient times, he knew, they had all been islands, these hills; the lowlands were all under sea. Glastonbury itself had been an island, Avalon, isle of apples. This Tor could be got to by boat; Weary-all was the isle where Joseph first put ashore, where he plunged his staff into the earth. There, the Thorn had sprung up, the Thorn which blossoms at Christmas. Doctor Dee had seen it, the Holy Thorn, all white flowers at Christ's nativity: for he had climbed these hills many times, and described their antiquities, and measured the earth around. Chorography was another art of his: the measurement and description of a portion of earth and its contents and its geometries. Only there was no portion of earth that was like the one he stood on now, no other portion that he knew of.

Breathing strongly, and pressing his own staff into the roadway, he climbed. The road turned. He was approaching the summit; and as he trod the spiral track, the lowlands and the hills around began to awake.

The Lion that Mr. Talbot had seen could not be discerned from the Tor, for he lay on the slope of the hills opposite Somerton; but now the doctor could make out Virgo, toward the east, outlined by the black and silver penstroke of the Cary River—Virgo, like his Queen, with her staff, and the wide panniers of her skirts. East of her, the Scorpion lay curled by the river Brue, the sting in his tail an outcrop of bright stone.

The Centaur next awoke, who was Hercules too, hero and horse in one, made of the Pennard Hills or himself making them or both; West Pennard church steeple the arrow in his bow. And north of him the Goat, and the old fortification they called Ponter's Ball making the Goat's horn. Doctor Dee went on walking sunwise around the cone of the Tor. Figure by figure the Twelve came forth, from the Ram in Wilton and Street with the corn on his back green now that would be golden fleece come harvest time, all around to the two Fishes tied together at the tail: one being the great whale of Weary-all Hill, the other lying in the village of Street, its round eye the old round churchyard there. A huge nativity which no one who did not know it was there could ever see, not even from the top of the Tor, though it might be discerned—it might be—by one who flew overhead, hovered overhead like that hawk, and looked down.

If it had not been a dream, who had carried him?

Doctor Dee had reached the precincts of the tower. In its height the wind hooted, the freshening wind that plucked at the doctor's beard and at the hem of his coat. Now the land lay open all around, and Doctor Dee stood in the center as though at a gnomon and looked out over Logres.

Kingdoms had been smaller then: and yet when the sea had filled the low places and covered the sands between the isles and high places which formed these figures, figures of the starry universe above them, then Arthur and his knights had had kingdom upon kingdom hereabouts, land upon land to travel in. For one kingdom is all kingdoms: a hill, a road, a dark wood; a castle to come to; a perilous bridge to cross.

Avalon was the isle where Arthur was borne away to die or sleep: and yet the same isle was Camelot where he reigned. And Avalon was Perceval's island too, by right from his father King Pelles who had his seat there: so some old books had it. It was the place from which Perceval set out to seek the Grail: that Grail sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone, sometimes a dish, which was not different from the cup that blessed Joseph brought to this septentrional isle, which poured good water still: had poured water into Doctor Dee's hands this very day.

By Michael's tower Doctor Dee sat down, and drew his coat around him. Clouds lifting from the Severn Sea like winged creatures showed him a white bar and a gray line that was his own land of Wales far to the West, the West into which the Druids had gone away, bearing the past with them.

There was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were Grails of earth, water, fire, air: there was a stone, a cup, a
crater
or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintessence. Unless that Grail be not truly the whole seven-ringed cup of heaven itself, containing all things, contained within all things, the cup from which, willy-nilly, every soul must drink.

He thought: Is the universe one thing? And is the whole of it contained in every part?

Years ago, long years ago, he had discovered what might be a sign for the one thing the universe is. He had drawn it with rule and compass, and for a year he had bent his mind upon it to see if it would grow, to see if it would begin to draw to itself like a lodestone more and more of what the world is made of: fire, air, earth, water; numbers, stars, souls. The more he regarded it, the more it did so. It became a glyph like the holy glyphs of AEgypt that contain knowledge otherwise inexpressible, words too long to speak. He carried his sign with him as a woman carries a child, until one week in Antwerp (he was a fire of knowledge in that week, a burning bush) he had committed his sign to a little book, and belched out all that he knew about it, wrote without knowing what he wrote, until he was empty.

He had written it; he had had it set in type, and printed.

And it might still be that the sign which he had made was a sign for the one thing that the universe is. But it was a seal over secrecies now. It had passed from him, and he no longer knew what it pictured; he could not understand the book he had written.

He might come to know again and understand. He might, now.
Not any answer withheld from you.
The hawk that hung in the middle of the air, looking down, began to fall in a long gyre. The sun was setting in the sea: Doctor Dee could almost hear it hiss.

To go about Logres, as the sun goes about the year; to search the circle of creation, and find in a castle that is your own the Grail, long-sought, long-hungered-for, that belongs to you. In the High History which Doctor Dee had read in the old language, King Perceval's name is construed
Par lui fet
: made by himself.

And the cup that he sought, wounded, in the castle of his wounded father, what was it but this cup Aquarius which Doctor Dee looked down on in the star temple laid out in Somersetshire below?

And though it might be only here that such figures of earth (now darkening, and closing great eyes in sleep) had been cut by wizards’ hands, still the stars shine everywhere; and so it must be that in every place there is a star temple, impressed upon circles of earth, large or small. And inside every one of them must a Grail be hidden.

Doctor Dee raised his eyes to the heavens, whose stairs were swept of cloud now, and Tell me, he said: Tell me: Is the universe one thing? Is it, after all?

The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his question to: they saw him, for this ring of earth is a place they often stop by, to gaze into it, as into a mirror, or through it, as through a keyhole. They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, to look over their shoulders—for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind.

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All on an April morning, Pierce Moffett walked out of his apartment and down Maple Street toward town. In the yards along his way householders were digging, planting, freeing shrubs of winter garb and cutting their ragged hair. Some turned to watch Pierce go by, and most greeted him. “Morning!” Pierce said heartily, grinning inwardly to be hailed in this way, it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn't imagine how odd it was for him to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. He blessed them, blessed their big fannies protruding as they bent over their pots and borders, blessed their hedges and the lemony blossoms of their springing black bushes, now what was that stuff called again, was that forsythia?

There was so much to learn, or to relearn, the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citizens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history. Pierce sighed deeply.
The world is so full of a number of things,
he thought,
that I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

As happy as kings. He had turned from Maple Street down River Street (had the founding families pondered a long time before choosing these simple self-evident names, Maple, River, Hill?) and then down to where River Street meets Bridges Street, and the town's chief buildings faced the fast brown river and the spring sky. There on the corner he went into a small store whose red-and-white tin sign said VARIETIES. He asked for a pouch of his usual cheap tobacco, and noticed that there were magazines here as well as candy, gum, and cigarettes, a good selection in fact in a tall wooden rack, including one or two fairly abstruse journals Pierce had supposed he would now have to subscribe to, but no. Good. He wandered farther down the dim length of the shop. There was a brief soda fountain with a real marble top and three or four stools, he turned one with a hand as he passed and it grumbled as such stools should. There was a notice posted beside the stacks of today's newspapers, stating that those who wanted a Sunday
New York Times
must sign up for one in advance.

Well.

For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday the particular character it had for him—a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality—was not Jehovah claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday
Times,
a gas with the acrid smell of printer's ink, a narcotizing, sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized. How anyway were Sundays spent here? Maybe he'd have to start going to church.