The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
of Mr. Wace to see any similar clarity in the faint opalescence of the
crystal were wholly unsuccessful, try as he would. The difference in
intensity of the impressions received by the two men was very great, and
it is quite conceivable that what was a view to Mr. Cave was a mere
blurred nebulosity to Mr. Wace.
The view, as Mr. Cave described it, was invariably of an extensive plain,
and he seemed always to be looking at it from a considerable height, as if
from a tower or a mast. To the east and to the west the plain was bounded
at a remote distance by vast reddish cliffs, which reminded him of those
he had seen in some picture; but what the picture was Mr. Wace was unable
to ascertain. These cliffs passed north and south--he could tell the
points of the compass by the stars that were visible of a night--receding
in an almost illimitable perspective and fading into the mists of the
distance before they met. He was nearer the eastern set of cliffs; on the
occasion of his first vision the sun was rising over them, and black
against the sunlight and pale against their shadow appeared a multitude of
soaring forms that Mr. Cave regarded as birds. A vast range of buildings
spread below him; he seemed to be looking down upon them; and as they
approached the blurred and refracted edge of the picture they became
indistinct. There were also trees curious in shape, and in colouring a
deep mossy green and an exquisite grey, beside a wide and shining canal.
And something great and brilliantly coloured flew across the picture. But
the first time Mr. Cave saw these pictures he saw only in flashes, his
hands shook, his head moved, the vision came and went, and grew foggy and
indistinct. And at first he had the greatest difficulty in finding the
picture again once the direction of it was lost.
His next clear vision, which came about a week after the first, the
interval having yielded nothing but tantalising glimpses and some useful
experience, showed him the view down the length of the valley. The view
was different, but he had a curious persuasion, which his subsequent
observations abundantly confirmed, that he was regarding the strange world
from exactly the same spot, although he was looking in a different
direction. The long façade of the great building, whose roof he had looked
down upon before, was now receding in perspective. He recognised the roof.
In the front of the façade was a terrace of massive proportions and
extraordinary length, and down the middle of the terrace, at certain
intervals, stood huge but very graceful masts, bearing small shiny objects
which reflected the setting sun. The import of these small objects did not
occur to Mr. Cave until some time after, as he was describing the scene to
Mr. Wace. The terrace overhung a thicket of the most luxuriant and
graceful vegetation, and beyond this was a wide grassy lawn on which
certain broad creatures, in form like beetles but enormously larger,
reposed. Beyond this again was a richly decorated causeway of pinkish
stone; and beyond that, and lined with dense red weeds, and passing up the
valley exactly parallel with the distant cliffs, was a broad and
mirror-like expanse of water. The air seemed full of squadrons of great
birds, manoeuvring in stately curves; and across the river was a multitude
of splendid buildings, richly coloured and glittering with metallic tracery
and facets, among a forest of moss-like and lichenous trees. And suddenly
something flapped repeatedly across the vision, like the fluttering of a
jewelled fan or the beating of a wing, and a face, or rather the upper
part of a face with very large eyes, came as it were close to his own and
as if on the other side of the crystal. Mr. Cave was so startled and so
impressed by the absolute reality of these eyes that he drew his head back
from the crystal to look behind it. He had become so absorbed in watching
that he was quite surprised to find himself in the cool darkness of his
little shop, with its familiar odour of methyl, mustiness, and decay. And
as he blinked about him, the glowing crystal faded and went out.
Such were the first general impressions of Mr. Cave. The story is
curiously direct and circumstantial. From the outset, when the valley
first flashed momentarily on his senses, his imagination was strangely
affected, and as he began to appreciate the details of the scene he saw,
his wonder rose to the point of a passion. He went about his business
listless and distraught, thinking only of the time when he should be able
to return to his watching. And then a few weeks after his first sight of
the valley came the two customers, the stress and excitement of their
offer, and the narrow escape of the crystal from sale, as I have already
told.
Now, while the thing was Mr. Cave's secret, it remained a mere wonder, a
thing to creep to covertly and peep at, as a child might peep upon a
forbidden garden. But Mr. Wace has, for a young scientific investigator, a
particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind. Directly the crystal and
its story came to him, and he had satisfied himself, by seeing the
phosphorescence with his own eyes, that there really was a certain
evidence for Mr. Cave's statements, he proceeded to develop the matter
systematically. Mr. Cave was only too eager to come and feast his eyes on
this wonderland he saw, and he came every night from half-past eight until
half-past ten, and sometimes, in Mr. Wace's absence, during the day. On
Sunday afternoons, also, he came. From the outset Mr. Wace made copious
notes, and it was due to his scientific method that the relation between
the direction from which the initiating ray entered the crystal and the
orientation of the picture were proved. And, by covering the crystal in a
box perforated only with a small aperture to admit the exciting ray, and
by substituting black holland for his buff blinds, he greatly improved the
conditions of the observations; so that in a little while they were able
to survey the valley in any direction they desired.
So having cleared the way, we may give a brief account of this visionary
world within the crystal. The things were in all cases seen by Mr. Cave,
and the method of working was invariably for him to watch the crystal and
report what he saw, while Mr. Wace (who as a science student had learnt
the trick of writing in the dark) wrote a brief note of his report. When
the crystal faded, it was put into its box in the proper position and the
electric light turned on. Mr. Wace asked questions, and suggested
observations to clear up difficult points. Nothing, indeed, could have
been less visionary and more matter-of-fact.
The attention of Mr. Cave had been speedily directed to the bird-like
creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier
visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for a
time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he thought,
grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads were round and
curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled
him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not
feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish and
with the same subtle play of colour, and these wings were not built on the
plan of bird-wing or bat, Mr. Wace learned, but supported by curved ribs
radiating from the body. (A sort of butterfly wing with curved ribs seems
best to express their appearance.) The body was small, but fitted with two
bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the
mouth. Incredible as it appeared to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last
became irresistible that it was these creatures which owned the great
quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad
valley so splendid. And Mr. Cave perceived that the buildings, with other
peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great circular windows, which
opened freely, gave the creatures egress and entrance. They would alight
upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost rod-like, and
hop into the interior. But among them was a multitude of smaller-winged
creatures, like great dragon-flies and moths and flying beetles, and
across the greensward brilliantly-coloured gigantic ground-beetles crawled
lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways and terraces, large-headed
creatures similar to the greater winged flies, but wingless, were visible,
hopping busily upon their hand-like tangle of tentacles.
Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts that
stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon Mr. Cave,
after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one particularly vivid
day that the glittering object there was a crystal exactly like that into
which he peered. And a still more careful scrutiny convinced him that each
one in a vista of nearly twenty carried a similar object.
Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to one,
and folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about the
mast, would regard the crystal fixedly for a space,--sometimes for as long
as fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the suggestion
of Mr. Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this visionary world
was concerned, the crystal into which they peered actually stood at the
summit of the end-most mast on the terrace, and that on one occasion at
least one of these inhabitants of this other world had looked into Mr.
Cave's face while he was making these observations.
So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless we
dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr. Wace, we have to
believe one of two things: either that Mr. Cave's crystal was in two
worlds at once, and that while it was carried about in one, it remained
stationary in the other, which seems altogether absurd; or else that it
had some peculiar relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar
crystal in this other world, so that what was seen in the interior of the
one in this world was, under suitable conditions, visible to an observer
in the corresponding crystal in the other world; and _vice versa_. At
present, indeed, we do not know of any way in which two crystals could so
come _en rapport_, but nowadays we know enough to understand that the
thing is not altogether impossible. This view of the crystals as _en
rapport_ was the supposition that occurred to Mr. Wace, and to me at
least it seems extremely plausible...
And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence of
Mr. Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened rapidly--
there was a very brief twilight interval indeed--and the stars shone out.
They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged in the same
constellations. Mr. Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and
Sirius; so that the other world must be somewhere in the solar system,
and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of miles from our own.
Following up this clue, Mr. Wace learned that the midnight sky was a
darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that the sun seemed a little
smaller. _And there were two small moons!_ "like our moon but
smaller, and quite differently marked," one of which moved so rapidly that
its motion was clearly visible as one regarded it. These moons were never
high in the sky, but vanished as they rose: that is, every time they
revolved they were eclipsed because they were so near their primary
planet. And all this answers quite completely, although Mr. Cave did not
know it, to what must be the condition of things on Mars.
Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that peering into
this crystal Mr. Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its