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The Original Word for Rain
Peter
Higgins
When Saul Traherne
received a small but useful inheritance following the death of his
parents, he took stock of his life. He was twenty-nine, single, and
lonely; he loathed his job; and he had no close friends in London. So
when the money came, he calculated that he had enough to live on, if he
was careful, and he felt free at last to leave the city and join that
almost extinct social class, the genteel poor of independent means.
Having no taste for material pleasures, he resolved to devote himself
to the one real passion of his life, the study of the magical arts, and
in particular to the pursuit his great ambition, recovering the lost
original Edenic language of Adam and Eve.
The question of
where he should live was resolved a few days after the funeral, in a
second-hand bookshop in Clerkenwell, when he came across a footnote in
a monograph on the theurgy of Henry Cornelius Agrippa. "Viscount Thursby of Peignisbright
(Saul read), a marginal figure on
the fringes of the Order of the Golden Dawn, purchased widely across
Europe and the Levant between about 1895 and the outbreak of the Great
War. Though commonly rooked by unscrupulous dealers, he succeeded in
amassing a considerable collection of authentic material, including
MSS, incunables, scrying equipment and paraphernalia. He bequeathed his
collection, and a substantial fund for its maintenance, to Peignmouth
Public Library in furtherance of his noble belief that 'the path of
return to mankind’s rightful place should be made clear for the
shopkeeper, the wet-nurse and the labourer in the field.' "
Peignmouth! Saul’s
parents had taken their annual seaside holidays in Peignmouth when he
was a boy, and suddenly in that Clerkenwell shop he was transported
back to those long-lost days filled with light and spaciousness and a
sense of plenty. He left the bookshop in a daze, and walked the London
streets that afternoon in a state of longing and agitation. “It’s a
message,” he thought. “A sign, a calling, not to be ignored. I’m meant
to be in Peignmouth.” So to Peignmouth he went, where he rented a room
in a red-brick terraced house in the hinterland behind the seafront and
installed his few belongings.
It was the perfect
place for him, small and homely, unchanged in forty years or more, with
faded carpets and heavy wooden furniture. There was nothing in it that
was new or modern or flimsy. “I can be settled here,” he said to
himself with quiet satisfaction. He wanted nothing but solitude, and
time to pursue his solitary researches. He intended to lead an austere
life of study, renunciation and physical discipline. He would be a
mendicant scholar, the eremitical neophyte of some obscure religious
order. Freed from the need to participate in the compromises and
self-distortions that getting money required, he would dedicate himself
to the pursuit of luminous, hard-won truth.
Peignmouth Public
Library he found to be a grim Victorian building: grey stone walls,
steep gabled roofs and lofty mullioned windows that reflected only
darkness. Entering the library for the first time, Saul’s heart sank
when he smelled the familiar library smell of fat and shabby old books
and stale raincoats. Any sunshine that might have crept in through the
high, dusty windows was flooded out by powerful fluorescent
striplights.
There was no sign to
direct visitors to the Thursby collection: he had to ask at the
counter, and was sent up a narrow staircase that disappeared behind a
pillar. Several turns of the staircase and three stiff swing-doors
later, he emerged into a long, warm, sleepy room where two or three
people were reading under the gaze of an ordinary station-clock.
“Can I help?”
The curator
supervising at the desk was a youngish woman, small and slight. Saul
beheld waves of strong, pale hair; a blue T-shirt; brown arms; and
clever eyes, bright and ocean-green. She blessed him with her smile.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Um, no. I mean,
well yes. I just wanted to have a look around, to start with. I’m
planning to do some work here, but first, well, I need to... you know,
get the hang of the place.”
She smiled again her
beatific smile. “No problem. I’ll show you.” She left her station to
show him how to use the card index, which stuffed several large
cabinets – “Thursbury’s own classification, a bit idiosyncratic, but
you’ll get the idea” – and Thursby’s massive, privately-printed
concordances. All the works he had hoped to find were there, and many
more that were new to him, including – Saul was astounded to find –
many original manuscripts, and volumes from the authors’ own libraries,
with their own MS marginalia. Bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling,
and alongside the shelves stood row after row of display cases and
vitrines containing the other artefacts from Thursby’s collection. Here
too, Saul found a strange plenty: a Hand of Glory; an ancient baby’s
caul, mounted on yellowing paper and surrounded by intricate hand-drawn
geometry; a collection of divining rods; lengths of black hair tied in
a series of complex knots. Against each item was propped an explanatory
card, yellowing and densely written in a cramped and backward-sloping
hand.
Saul paused before a
small, delicate orrery of brass and copper, complete and perfect and
simply waiting to be set in motion. The intricate mechanism included an
extra planet, represented by a tiny jewel-like sphere of green set to
orbit at an extreme angle to the elliptical plane between Venus and
Earth. The card read simply: Fludd’s own, shewing Rannalon.
“Do you want to look
at anything more closely?”
“You mean, take them
out of the cases? Is that allowed?”
“Sure. You can’t
take them out of the library, of course. But you can study them here.
That’s what they’re for.”
“Oh. Right.” He
paused a moment. “Uh… no. Not just now. Later, maybe.”
After that first
visit, Saul went to the library every day. Once he had got his bearings
and planned out a programme of study for himself, he fell quickly and
easily into a regular pattern of life. He would be at the library for
opening time and work there all morning, reading and making notes. The
afternoons he spent in long, ranging walks, and in the evenings he
would return to his room and work again, until he was too tired to
think any more, and then he would get into his narrow bed and fall into
a heavy, dreamless sleep. He was alone, but he was fulfilled and happy.
His collection of notes and sketches grew day by day, gradually taking
over and filling his small room.
As he worked on in this way the days lengthened and the pale nights
grew shorter week by week. It developed into a hot, bright, dry early
summer. The lawns and roadside verges grew dry and yellow. Each day was
like the one before: powdery blue skies with scarcely a cloud. The moon
took to appearing early in the evenings, silver-white and intangible
while the sky was bright with the lingering day, but as the night grew
dark, so the moon would turn heavier and buttery, waxing towards the
full. Every morning the sun rose earlier, and so did Saul. He found
himself waking regularly at five a.m., feeling full of light and air
and the currents of life and sleeplessness. He made himself breakfast
and sat in the garden drinking tea until the time came when he could
leave for his day’s work at the library.
But something was
threatening to disturb the limpid calm of his monklike life. In those
early mornings he found himself thinking less and less about his work
in the Collection and more and more about the beatific smile of the
curator. Her name was Julia Redgrove, he learned from the helpful notes
of advice that she pinned to the reading room walls. He thought
about her at his breakfast, and on the way to the library, anticipating
his first sight of her that day; and at the library he would look up
from his books and watch her, surreptitiously. He got to know the
clothes she wore and he watched her body as she moved around the
reading room. He found himself wondering about her: where did she live?
what did she do in the evenings? And if she did not appear for work as
usual, he wondered where she might have gone.
One Sunday morning
he came upon her sitting in the window of the café on the
esplanade. She was alone, drinking coffee. A pile of newspapers sat on
the table at her elbow but she wasn’t reading, just looking out of the
window. Without stopping to think, Saul went in, picked up a coffee for
himself at the counter, and went over.
“Hi,” he said. “I
don’t know if you remember me. From the library.”
She looked up and
smiled the smile. “Of course I remember. Mr Traherne. The Collection’s
not exactly overwhelmed with readers.”
“Saul,” he said.
“Can I, um, can I sit down?”
“Sure.” She shoved
the pile of papers to one side. “I’m Julia.”
“I know. I mean,
I’ve seen, I… you write your name on all those notices.”
She smiled. “So,”
she said, “what’s your special thing, Saul? What are you looking for?
In the library?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Everyone
who comes to the Collection is looking for something, some dream
they’re following. So what are you looking for?”
“Well…” Saul
hesitated. He’d never actually talked to anybody about this stuff
before. He didn’t want to sound… strange. But, hell, he thought, she is
the Thursby Curator, after all. “Well… if you really want to know… I’m
looking for truth, I suppose. Complete truth.” He stopped.
Julia looked at him and nodded. “Go on,” she said. She seemed
interested. Saul hadn’t talked to anyone about anything at all for
months, not since the funeral, except exchanging a few words with
shopkeepers and the like. Now, because he was with Julia and she was
listening to him, and seemed to be interested, and seemed to like him,
he let go, without really meaning to, and all the bottled-up ideas and
images in his head came pouring out.
“When you were
young,” said Saul, “I mean, really young, when you were a child, did
you ever lie on your back and look up at the sky? You know how it looks
as if the clouds are fixed in place and the trees are toppling towards
you, always toppling but never crashing down? And you lie there and you
look up and you feel sort of… complete. Completely alive. And
everything is… more vivid. Better. Everything is so clear.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Well, that’s it,”
said Saul. “That’s what I want. Not sometimes, but always, all the
time, to be that happy.”
“But that’s poetry,”
said Julia. “You don’t need to look for that in old books of magic.”
“No, I don’t mean
just poetry, not like you mean,” he went on. “I mean for real. I think
that something went wrong somewhere, a long time ago, and the world
got… polluted. Like there’s dust in the air all the time, soot and
smuts, making everything dim and, not dirty exactly, but… spoilt.
Wrong. Disappointing, I suppose. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
It’s only superficial. The dirt is in our head and you can wipe the
dirt away.” Saul paused, embarrassed. “You think I’m weird, don’t
you?”
“No, look, sorry, I
don’t, really. It’s interesting. I think about stuff like this too, you
know.”
“Well… what I’m
getting at is... oh, I don’t know where to start, but say…
everything has its right name, its true name.”
“You mean the name
Adam gave it,” said Julia lightly.
Saul looked at her,
full on. An obscure new thing moved inside him, a glimpse of joy. “You
know?” he said. “You know? About that?”
“Of course,” she
said. “Genesis. Adam in the garden of Eden. ‘So out of the ground the Lord God formed
every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to
the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called
every living creature, that was its name.’” She couldn’t
suppress a grin of triumph when she came up with that. “And the
question is,” she continued, “what was the language Adam used to name
the world as it was being created? Because we were made in God’s image
and that was God’s language too.”
“Yes! Yes! That’s
it!” People were looking. He continued more quietly. “The original
language, that names things as they really are, and gives them their
full and original meaning. You couldn’t lie in that language, you
couldn’t say what wasn’t true, or what was only partly true. If you
thought of something by its true name, you’d know it fully and you’d
know everything about it. Nothing that mattered would be hidden from
you.”
“That’s wizard
language,” said Julia. “If you know the hidden name of something, you
can control it. And if you say something in the true language, it
becomes true. You say ‘you’re dead’ and… bang!” She slapped her hand on
the table and flashed her sea-green eyes. “Dead.”
“No!” said Saul
horrified. “Not that! You couldn’t do that, you couldn’t even want to
do it. It’s the opposite of control. It’s seeing everything as it
really and truly is: everything full of light and air: fire and air,
earth, wind: alive with cold fire.” Now Julia was looking at him full
on. Her face was open and clear and seraphic and full of… what? Saul
didn’t know. “I want to find that original, perfect language again,” he
continued. “It’s been scattered and distorted and forgotten, but
it can be found again. Fragments. Echoes. Remembered and handed down
unrecognised from generation to generation. That’s what I’m looking
for. I want to find it and learn it and speak it.”
“Blimey,” said Julia.
After that first
meeting, Saul saw Julia quite often. Sitting in some huddled pub
corner, they’d get slightly drunk together and talk about magic and the
Collection and the rancorous office politics among what Julia called
“the normal staff” at the library. Saul enjoyed these long evenings and
looked forward to them, but he was never entirely sure about them. What
did Julia want from him? What did she expect? And what did he want?
Every day during
that long, dry summer Saul continued to work in the drowsy upstairs
room of Peignmouth Public Library, ploughing through book after book,
following threads of reference and allusion back through the works of
the Renaissance and medieval magi, and then further back before them to
their Arabic, Greek and Hebrew forebears. He consulted original
manuscripts and he studied the ancient languages in which they were
written. As he read ever more widely and deeply, he began to pick
up veiled hints and references to other scholars who had followed the
same trail before him. And then flashes of insight began to come to
him, slowly at first but then ever more frequently. He began to come
upon ideas, words and phrases, diagrams, snatches of sound, that would
make him physically tremble with excitement. He would note them all
down, these shards and fragments, in his notebook.
His first major
discovery, the one that put him on the right track, was a single word
scribbled on a scrap of brittle yellow paper in one of the display
cabinets. The accompanying explanatory card in Thursbury’s hand read: “Shem, retrieved from the mouth of the
Prague golem by the Earl of Leicester, 1573.” The next big
step forward was a phrase included in an anonymous marginal correction
to Paracelsus’ instructions for creating the homunculus. This in turn
led him to Roger Bacon’s own manuscript of the Fons Vitae of Avicebron
with an illustration added by a later hand (Bacon’s own, in all
probability) showing the Sephiroth framed by a beautiful and intricate
drawing (or map?) of a labyrinth.
Weeks passed. The
summer was turning out to be the hottest and driest on record. It
brought out insects in remarkable numbers: butterflies and ladybirds
crawled in profusion over the wilting gardens; grasshoppers chirruped
in the dry grass, and crane-flies clattered at every window. Spiders,
wasps and harvestmen feasted on the profusion, while swallows and
martins danced in the high, bright skies, and moth-hunting bats whirred
ghostlike in the dusk. Saul would lie in bed on those strange
electrified nights, hot and wakeful under just a sheet, with a notebook
and pencil on the bedside table so he could scribble down whatever
random thoughts came to him. His window stood open, and occasional
breezes would enter the room, stirring the yellow curtains, bringing in
the cries of seagulls, the brassy summer smells, and rumours of
the rolling of dry thunder out at sea. There were flashes of blue
lightning, but it never rained.
Throughout that hot
dry season, Saul continued to take long solitary walks in the
afternoons, when he found that his thoughts returned again and again to
Julia; to something she had said; to some small movement she had made;
to the memory of the turn of her head. He never spoke to her about it,
he barely even acknowledged it to himself, but in his loneliness he was
falling in love with her.
However, when he was
out on his endless walks, he found it easy enough to put his thoughts
of Julia into a box in his head and close the lid. He was serious about
his work, and as he walked he would sift through in his mind the
phrases, sounds and ideas that he had collected that morning, looking
for patterns and connections, keeping alert for the chime of something
ringing true, and the answering tremor within himself that told him he
had found it. Sometimes as he walked something would stop him dead in
his tracks—ivy on a red brick wall; a swift, screaming across the blue
sky overhead; a twisted tree-root; a sun-warm stone; the perfect curve
of a bay—and he would stare at it and drink it in with all his senses.
And then he would start to throw word-fragments at it, sometimes in his
mind only, sometimes whispering and sometimes shouting aloud, hurling
sound-shapes into the wind. He tried out words and phrases,
hand-movements and even broken dance-steps that grew from the strange
sediment of his findings and seemed, somehow, right. Then he would
stand, stock-still, intent, focused, listening and watching for any
response, any answering ring or echo in the world that would tell him
he had got it right. But there was nothing. He wasn’t discouraged. “I’m
like a baby,” he told himself. “It’s like learning to talk for the
first time, all over again. I’ve got to learn how to make the sounds
first. Meaning and understanding will come later. The main thing is to
keep trying, and to keep listening. It will come.”
Saul’s walks tended
to carry him out of Peignmouth. He developed a more or less regular
route. He would stride away westwards along the coast, past huge
Edwardian mansions, with their mock-Tudor frontages, their gothic
towers and their gardens bulging with overgrown rhododendron, magnolia
and privet. After the mansions came smaller houses, red-brick terraces
that gave way to bungalows separated by clipped lawns, parched by the
endless summer drought. Then came shabby, weather-beaten shacks and
chalets and allotments; and then the dwellings stopped, and the path
wound on along the cliff-edge, rising and falling with the contours of
the land. Saul walked on, over wind-swept points and through still,
warm hollows filled with the sweet coconut-smell of the gorse. The
purple sea glimmered far below; linnets and stone-chats flitted beside
him; a raven barked; a kestrel pinned itself to the sky against the
wind. And Saul sang, every day, his song in Adam’s tongue. Every day
his voice grew stronger and the song grew fuller, wiser and more
complete.
One afternoon in
August when the sun was burning and the sea shimmered, Saul walked
further along the cliff-tops than normal. At about four o’clock he was
beginning to think about turning back, when he reached a fingerpost: Rammas Wood. The OS map, he
thought, showed a footpath that cut across the neck of the headland
from about here, so he climbed the stone stile between wind-clipped
thorn trees and passed into a still, green world.
Entering the wood
was like passing out of time into endlessness, out of movement into
rest. It was warm and quiet and earthy beneath the leaf-canopy of oak
and ash. Saul paused. He felt the heaviness in the air, the hanging
warmth, the watchful presence of the trees. A catspaw of wind stirred
the foliage. A pair of fat woodpigeons burst out of the undergrowth in
alarm and clattered clumsily away. Somewhere out of sight a green
woodpecker gave its raucous cry. Saul found that he was trembling, and
he knew beyond all doubting that there and then, in that moment,
suddenly, something had happened, or something had stirred, or
something had been found: something hidden but momentous. He felt
completely sure of it. Somewhere and somehow a threshold had been
crossed. There was a chance here, now, for him: an opening.
He sat down on the
mossy branch of a fallen oak, shaken and elated. “This is what I have
prepared myself for,” he said. “I am ready.” He listened. He heard the
winding stirring among the trees, and he felt… movement. He laid his
hand along the sun-warm branch and sunk his fingers into the moss,
resting. Woodlice came onto his hand and explored the gaps between his
fingers. A spider stepped delicately up onto his thumb and began to
climb his arm. Caterpillars dropped from the trees onto his hair.
Quietly Saul spoke the true syllable of greeting. A bird came to a
branch above his head, a small whitethroat, and fixed him with a bright
curious gaze. Saul gave the smile of welcome and felt in return the
breeze stirring the feathers on the whitethroat’s back. More birds
came. A shrew twittered at him from the leaf-mould. Saul began to rock
gently from side to side, murmuring a slow oak-song, a rowan-song, a
sleeping-owl-song, in tune with the rhythmical thrumming of the winds
in Rammas Wood.
A pressure was
building up: an intensity of there-ness and is-ness that could not be
sustained. It burst like a berry against the roof of his mouth. Saul
spoke. A pulse of heart-sound – Saul-sound, Rammas-sound – exploded
outwards in concentric ripples of release, out from the epicentre of
Saul, spreading outwards through the woodland in all directions,
rippling outwards through fields and rock, touching the sea, touching
the cloudless sky. And then it was over. The moment passed. Saul was
alone, just Saul, in the ordinary wood. It was as if a cloud had passed
in front of the sun, though the ordinary afternoon was as bright and
warm as ever.
He felt tired and
drained. His legs were trembling, and he wanted to go home. But as he
stood up stiffly and turned to go, he saw a face watching him from
under the trees: a thin cream face, as small as a child’s but not a
child’s, with dark curly hair and a crow’s bright eye, just looking at
him, and there was a strong, sour smell of earth in the air. Then the
face opened its mouth and leaves came out. A sort of smile, a green
smile. And then the face was gone, back into the woods.
Saul ran: back,
back, out of the wood and onto the familiar, parched cliff path. The
sun was lower on the horizon than he had thought. Running as hard as he
dared for fear of pitching himself over the cliff-edge, he headed back
towards Peignmouth. As he ran he became aware of a darkening of the
air, until he was running through heavy copper light. A dark cloud-mass
was rolling up out of the west, sliding across the high, empty blue and
closing the sky above Peignmouth. Saul ran on, harder, more
desperate, and as he ran he found himself shouting. He shouted rain.
The true original word for rain. He called the rain and rain came, warm
fat rain, rain-buds splashing open, soft and dark on the hard, dusty
ground. A few drops at first, and then many, many: rain came thundering
down on the gorse, filling the wet air with sweet earth smells.
Saul ran on.
By the time he
reached Peignmouth he was soaked to the skin. His clothes were drenched
with rain and sweat, he was hot and muddy and breathing hard, and his
hair was plastered across his forehead. The rain was streaming down the
slate roofs, and the gusting wind was sweeping rain across the
roads. The hedges and the garden shrubs were dark and shining.
Saul felt as if he were returning to the human world after a long
absence. Everything in the rain-drenched street looked fresh and new.
As he stood in the rain, gazing across the town that had become his
home, he could hardly keep still on his feet, such was the sense of
strength welling up inside him. As the rain poured down from the purple
sky, he felt an answering torrent of truth and magic rise up within him
like a river beginning to flow. He went to find Julia, to speak
to her of his triumph and his love.
She was waiting for
him in the Fisherman’s Arms. She looked slight and bright and together,
and her ocean-green eyes flashed with pleasure when she saw him come
in.
But she wasn’t
alone. There was a man with her, a stranger to Saul, tucked in next to
her on the bench. Saul went over to them, feeling the confidence and
elation draining out of him under the bland, open gaze of the stranger.
“Saul!” said Julia
brightly. “This is Richard.”
Richard nodded and
put out his hand, easy and casual. “Hi Saul. Nice to meet you.” He was
wearing a striped shirt, long sleeves buttoned at the wrist. Saul felt
painfully aware of his own wet clothes and bedraggled hair. “Saul’s the
one I’ve been telling you about, Richard,” said Julia. Richard’s face
registered nothing. “You know. At the library. He’s doing this
incredibly interesting research.”
“Of course,” Richard
nodded. Saul turned to Julia.
“Sorry I’m late. I
was…”
“Are you?” said
Julia, blithely. “Never mind, sit down. We’ve got some great news.
Richard’s got this new job in Paris. He’s in banking, did I tell you?
It’s all terribly high-pressure and he’s awfully good at it.” Richard
smiled placidly and sipped his beer.
“No, I didn’t know.
That’s nice,” said Saul.
“And the great thing
is,” said Julia, “I’ve got a job there too. At the Bibliotheque
Nationale. Second in charge of Renaissance manuscripts. I’ve been
trying for a job like this for years. I can’t stay stuck here forever,
can I? And Richard and I will be together.” Richard took her hand
in his.
“Oh,” said Saul.
“Well. That is great. Congratulations. Look, let me get you both a
drink.” And he went to the bar, dripping wet, cold and tired.
Late that night he
lay alone in his bed in his tiny room, awake and lost. A cool breeze
was stirring the curtain and his light was on but he wasn’t reading. A
moth settled on the lampshade. It had pale mottled wings like lichen on
a weathered gravestone. Saul stared at it emptily. In the pattern of
its wings he saw inscribed the seven sacred letters. He spoke them
quietly one by one as the curtains shifted in the rain-breeze. Beyond
the rooftops and the lamp-lit streets, beyond Peignmouth pier, huge
slender figures clothed in milky light were rising from the waves and
walking towards the shore. Great whales roiled the surface of the
waters, and the sky split open and the burning rain began to
fall.
THE END
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