THE TORCH-BEARERS—II

THE BOOK OF EARTH

WORKS OF ALFRED NOYES

• Collected Poems—3 Vols.
• The Lord of Misrule
• A Belgian Christmas Eve
• The Wine-Press
• Walking Shadows—Prose
• Tales of the Mermaid Tavern
• Sherwood
• The Enchanted Island and Other Poems
• Drake: An English Epic
• Poems
• The Flower of Old Japan
• The Golden Hynde
• The New Morning
• The Torch-Bearers—
• Watchers of the Sky
• The Book of Earth

THE TORCH-BEARERS—II

THE BOOK OF
EARTH

BY
ALFRED NOYES

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXV

Copyright, 1925, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I—THE BOOK OF EARTH

I
The Grand Canyon

Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.

Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,

Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,

I came to the dreadful brink.

I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth

Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,

Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.

On the brink of the Grand Canyon,

Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,

From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,

Down from abyss to abyss,

Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming

Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,

The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,

Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.

There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,

I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting

Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped

Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges

That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.

A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,

The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light

It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.

It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.

All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.

I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.

Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss

Endlessly on.

Far down, as a cloud sailed over,

A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,

Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,

Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow

With smouldering colours of those buried fires

Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb.

And there, so far below that not a sound,

Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,

I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,

The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,

The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,

For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,

Rolls to the broad Pacific.

From Flaming Gorge,

Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain

Of subject canyons, the green river flows,

Linking them all together in one vast gulch,

But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn,

With names like pictures, for six hundred miles:

Black Canyon, where it rushes in opal foam;

Red Canyon, where it sleeks to jade again

And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below;

Split-Mountain Canyon, with its cottonwood trees;

And, opening out of this, Whirlpool Ravine,

Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls

With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire;

Kingfisher Canyon, gorgeous as the plumes

Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues;

Glen Canyon, where the Cave of Music rang

Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song;

Vermilion Cliffs, like sunset clouds congealed

To solid crags; the Valley of Surprise

Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass;

Labyrinth Canyon, and the Valley of Echoes;

Cataract Canyon, rolling boulders down

In floods of emerald thunder; Gunnison’s Valley

Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail;

Then, for a hundred miles, Desolation Canyon,

Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road

Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world;

Gray Canyon next; then Marble Canyon, stained

With iron-rust above, but brightly veined

As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it;

Then deep Still-water.

And all these conjunct

In one huge chasm, were but the towering gates

And dim approaches to the august abyss

That opened here,—one sempiternal page

Baring those awful hieroglyphs of stone,

Seven systems, and seven ages, darkly scrolled

In the deep Book of Earth.

Across the gulf

I looked to that vast coast opposed, whose crests

Of raw rough amethyst, over the Canyon, flamed,

A league away, or ten. No eye could tell.

All measure was lost. The tallest pine was a feather

Under my feet, in that ocean of violet gloom.

Then, with a dizzying brain, I saw below me,

A little way out, a tiny shape, like a gnat

Flying and spinning,—now like a gilded grain

Of dust in a shaft of light, now sharp and black

Over a blood-red sandstone precipice.

“Look!”

The Indian guide thrust out a lean dark hand

That hid a hundred forests, and pointed to it,

Muttering low, “Big Eagle!”

All that day,

Riding along the brink, we found no end.

Still, on the right, the pageant of the Abyss

Unfolded. There gigantic walls of rock,

Sheer as the world’s end, seemed to float in air

Over the hollow of space, and change their forms

Like soft blue wood-smoke, with each change of light.

Here massed red boulders, over the Angel Trail

Darkened to thunder, or like a sunset burned.

Here, while the mind reeled from the imagined plunge,

Tall amethystine towers, dark Matterhorns,

Rose out of shadowy nothingness to crown

Their mighty heads with morning.

Here, wild crags

Black and abrupt, over the swimming dimness

Of coloured mist, and under the moving clouds,

Themselves appeared to move, stately and slow

As the moon moves, with an invisible pace,

Or darkling planets, quietly onward steal

Through their immense dominion.

There, far down,

A phantom sword, a search-beam of the sun,

Glanced upon purple pyramids, and set

One facet aflame in each, the rest in gloom;

While from their own deep chasms of shadow, that seemed

Small inch-wide rings of darkness round them, rose

Tabular foothills, mesas, hard and bright,

Bevelled and flat, like gems; or, softly bloomed

Like alabaster, stained with lucid wine;

Then slowly changed, under the changing clouds,

Where the light sharpened, into monstrous tombs

Of trap-rock, hornblende, greenstone and basalt.

There,—under isles of pine, washed round with mist,

Dark isles that seemed to sail through heaven, and cliffs

That towered like Teneriffe,—far, far below,

Striving to link those huge dissolving steeps,

Gigantic causeways drowned or swam in vain,

Column on column, arch on broken arch,

Groping and winding, like the foundered spans

Of lost Atlantis, under the weltering deep.

For, over them, the abysmal tides of air,

Inconstant as the colours of the sea,

From amethyst into wreathing opal flowed,

Ebbed into rose through grey, then melted all

In universal amethyst again.

There, wild cathedrals, with light-splintering spires,

Shone like a dream in the Eternal mind

And changed as earth and sea and heaven must change.

Over them soared a promontory, black

As night, but in the deepening gulf beyond,

Far down in that vast hollow of violet air,

Winding between the huge Plutonian walls,

The semblance of a ruined city lay.

Dungeons flung wide, and palaces brought low,

Altars and temples, wrecked and overthrown,

Gigantic stairs that climbed into the light

And found no hope, and ended in the void:

It burned and darkened, a city of porphyry,

Paved with obsidian, walled with serpentine,

Beautiful, desolate, stricken as by strange gods

Who, long ago, from cloudy summits, flung

Boulder on mountainous boulder of blood-red marl

Into a gulf so deep that, when they fell,

The soft wine-tinted mists closed over them

Like ocean, and the Indian heard no sound.

II
Night and the Abyss

A lonely cabin, like an eagle’s nest,

Lodged us that night upon the monstrous brink,

And roofed us from the burning desert stars;

But, on my couch of hemlock as I lay,

The Book of Earth still opened in my dreams.

Below me, only guessed by the slow sound

Of forests, through unfathomable gulfs

Of midnight, vaster, more mysterious now,

Breathed that invisible Presence of deep awe.

Through the wide open window, once, a moth

Beat its dark wings, and flew—out—over that,

Brave little fluttering atheist, unaware

Of aught beyond the reach of his antennæ,

Thinking his light quick thoughts; while, under him,

God opened His immeasurable Abyss.

All night I heard the insistent whisper rise:

One page of Earth’s abysmal Book lies bare.

Read—in its awful hieroglyphs of stone—

His own deep scripture. Is its music sealed?

Or is the inscrutable secret growing clearer?

Then, like the night-wind, soughing through the pines,

Another voice replied, cold with despair:

It opens, and it opens. By what Power?

A silent river, hastening to the sea,

Age after age, through crumbling desert rocks

Clove the dread chasm. Wild snows that had their birth

In Ocean-mists, and folded their white wings

Among far mountains, fed that sharp-edged stream.

Ask Ocean whence it came. Ask Earth. Ask Heaven.

I see the manifold instruments as they move,

Remote or near, with intricate inter-play;

But that which moves them, and determines all

Remains in darkness. Man must bow his head

Before the Inscrutable.

Then, far off, I heard,

As from a deeper gulf, the antiphonal voice:

It opens, and it opens, and it opens,—

The abyss of Heaven, the rock-leaved Book of Earth,

And that Abyss as dreadful and profound

Locked in each atom.

Under the high stars,

Man creeps, too infinitesimal to be scanned;

And, over all the worlds that dwindle away

Beyond the uttermost microscopic sight,

He towers—a god.

Midway, between the height

That crushes, and the depth that flatters him,

He stands within the little ring of light

He calls his knowledge. Its horizon-line,

The frontier of the dark, was narrow, once;

And he could bear it. But the light is growing;

The ring is widening; and, with each increase,

The frontiers of the night are widening, too.

They grow and grow. The very blaze of truth

That drives them back, enlarges the grim coasts

Of utter darkness.

Man must bow his head

Before the Inscrutable.

Then, from far within,

The insistent whisper rose:

Man is himself

The key to all he seeks.

He is not exiled from this majesty,

But is himself a part of it. To know

Himself, and read this Book of Earth aright;

Flooding it as his ancient poets, once,

Illumed old legends with their inborn fire,

Were to discover music that out-soars

His plodding thought, and all his fables, too;

A song of truth that deepens, not destroys

The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures

The spirit of man on more adventurous quests

Into the wildest mystery of all,

The miracle of reality, which he shares.

But O, what art could guide me through that maze?

What kingly shade unlock the music sealed

In that dread volume?

Sons of an earlier age,

Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand.

Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led

Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain,

Could set a bound to his own realms of night,

Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven,

And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers....

Leonardo—found a shell among the hills,

A sea-shell, turned to stone, as at the gaze

Of his own cold Medusa. His dark eyes,

Hawk-swift to hunt the subtle lines of law

Through all the forms of beauty, on that wild height

Saw how the waves of a forgotten world

Had washed and sculptured every soaring crag,

Ere Italy was born. He stood alone,—

His rose-red cloak out-rippling on the breeze,—

A wondering sun-god. Through the mountain-peaks,

The rumour of a phantom ocean rolled.

It tossed a flying rainbow at his feet

And vanished....

Milton—walked in Paradise.

He saw the golden compasses of God

Turning through darkness to create the world.

He saw the creatures of a thousand æons

Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay,

Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power

Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp,

Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book,

Not to be loosed for centuries.

Nearer yet,

Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand,

Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark,

Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf,

And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds

All forms of life together. He turned aside

And lost it, saying, “I wait for light, more light.”

And these all towered among celestial glories,

And wore their legends like prophetic robes;

But who should teach me, in this deeper night,

The tale of this despised and wandering house,