Chapter 21: Muspel

The fog thickened so that the two suns wholly disappeared, and all grew as black as night. Nightspore could no longer see his companion. The water lapped gently against the side of the island raft.

“You say the night is past,” said Nightspore. “But the night is still here. Am I dead, or alive?”

“You are still in Crystalman’s world, but you belong to it no more. We are approaching Muspel.”

Nightspore felt a strong, silent throbbing of the air--a rhythmical pulsation, in four-four time. “There is the drumming,” he exclaimed.

“Do you understand it, or have you forgotten?”

“I half understand it, but I’m all confused.”

“It’s evident Crystalman has dug his claws into you pretty deeply,” said Krag. “The sound comes from Muspel, but the rhythm is caused by its travelling through Crystalman’s atmosphere. His nature is rhythm as he loves to call it--or dull, deadly repetition, as I name it.”

“I remember,” said Nightspore, biting his nails in the dark.

The throbbing became audible; it now sounded like a distant drum. A small patch of strange light in the far distance, straight ahead of them, began faintly to illuminate the floating island and the glassy sea around it.

“Do all men escape from that ghastly world, or only I, and a few like me?” asked Nightspore.

“If all escaped, I shouldn’t sweat, my friend ... There’s hard work, and anguish, and the risk of total death, waiting for us yonder.”

Nightspore’s heart sank. “Have I not yet finished, then?”

“If you wish it. You have got through. But will you wish it?”

The drumming grew loud and painful. The light resolved itself into a tiny oblong of mysterious brightness in a huge wall of night. Krag’s grim and rocklike features were revealed.

“I can’t face rebirth,” said Nightspore. “The horror of death is nothing to it.”

“You will choose.”

“I can do nothing. Crystalman is too powerful. I barely escaped with--my own soul.”

“You are still stupid with Earth fumes, and see nothing straight,” said Krag.

Nightspore made no reply, but seemed to be trying to recall something. The water around them was so still, colourless, and transparent, that they scarcely seemed to be borne up by liquid matter at all. Maskull’s corpse had disappeared.

The drumming was now like the clanging of iron. The oblong patch of light grew much bigger; it burned, fierce and wild. The darkness above, below, and on either side of it, began to shape itself into the semblance of a huge, black wall, without bounds.

“Is that really a wall we are coming to?”

“You will soon find out. What you see is Muspel, and that light is the gate you have to enter.”

Nightspore’s heart beat wildly.

“Shall I remember?” he muttered.

“Yes, you’ll remember.”

“Accompany me, Krag, or I shall be lost.”

“There is nothing for me to do in there. I shall wait outside for you.”

“You are returning to the struggle?” demanded Nightspore, gnawing his fingertips.

“Yes.”

“I dare not.”

The thunderous clangor of the rhythmical beats struck on his head like actual blows. The light glared so vividly that he was no longer able to look at it. It had the startling irregularity of continuous lightning, but it possessed this further peculiarity--that it seemed somehow to give out not actual light, but emotion, seen as light. They continued to approach the wall of darkness, straight toward the door. The glasslike water flowed right against it, its surface reaching up almost to the threshold.

They could not speak any more; the noise was too deafening.

In a few minutes they were before the gateway. Nightspore turned his back and hid his eyes in his two hands, but even then he was blinded by the light. So passionate were his feelings that his body seemed to enlarge itself. At every frightful beat of sound, he quivered violently.

The entrance was doorless. Krag jumped onto the rocky platform and pulled Nightspore after him.

Once through the gateway, the light vanished. The rhythmical sound--blows totally ceased. Nightspore dropped his hands ... All was dark and quiet as an opened tomb. But the air was filled with grim, burning passion, which was to light and sound what light itself is to opaque colour.

Nightspore pressed his hand to his heart. “I don’t know if I can endure it,” he said, looking toward Krag. He felt his person far more vividly and distinctly than if he had been able to see him.

“Go in, and lose no time, Nightspore ... Time here is more precious than on earth. We can’t squander the minutes. There are terrible and tragic affairs to attend to, which won’t wait for us ... Go in at once. Stop for nothing.”

“Where shall I go to?” muttered Nightspore. “I have forgotten everything.”

“Enter, enter! There is only one way. You can’t mistake it.”

“Why do you bid me go in, if I am to come out again?”

“To have your wounds healed.”

Almost before the words had left his mouth, Krag sprang back on to the island raft. Nightspore involuntarily started after him, but at once recovered himself and remained standing where he was. Krag was completely invisible; everything outside was black night.

The moment he had gone, a feeling shot up in Nightspore’s heart like a thousand trumpets.

Straight in front of him, almost at his feet, was the lower end of a steep, narrow, circular flight of stone steps. There was no other way forward.

He put his foot on the bottom stair, at the same time peering aloft. He saw nothing, yet as he proceeded upward every inch of the way was perceptible to his inner feelings. The staircase was cold, dismal, and deserted, but it seemed to him, in his exaltation of soul, like a ladder to heaven.

After he had mounted a dozen steps or so, he paused to take breath. Each step was increasingly difficult to ascend; he felt as though he were carrying a heavy man on his shoulders. It struck a familiar chord in his mind. He went on and, ten stairs higher up, came to a window set in a high embrasure.

On to this he clambered, and looked through. The window was of a sort of glass, but he could see nothing. Coming to him, however, from the world outside, a disturbance of the atmosphere struck his senses, causing his blood to run cold. At one moment it resembled a low, mocking, vulgar laugh, travelling from the ends of the earth; at the next it was like a rhythmical vibration of the air--the silent, continuous throbbing of some mighty engine. The two sensations were identical, yet different. They seemed to be related in the same manner as soul and body. After feeling them for a long time, Nightspore got down from the embrasure, and continued his ascent, having meanwhile grown very serious.

The climbing became still more laborious, and he was forced to stop at every third or fourth step, to rest his muscles and regain breath. When he had mounted another twenty stairs in this way, he came to a second window. Again he saw nothing. The laughing disturbance of the air, too, had ceased; but the atmospheric throb was now twice as distinct as before, and its rhythm had become double. There were two separate pulses; one was in the time of a march, the other in the time of a waltz. The first was bitter and petrifying to feel, but the second was gay, enervating, and horrible.

Nightspore spent little time at that window, for he felt that he was on the eve of a great discovery, and that something far more important awaited him higher up. He proceeded aloft. The ascent grew more and more exhausting, so much so that he had frequently to sit down, utterly crushed by his own dead weight. Still, he got to the third window.

He climbed into the embrasure. His feelings translated themselves into vision, and he saw a sight that caused him to turn pale. A gigantic, self-luminous sphere was hanging in the sky, occupying nearly the whole of it. This sphere was composed entirely of two kinds of active beings. There were a myriad of tiny green corpuscles, varying in size from the very small to the almost indiscernible. They were not green, but he somehow saw them so. They were all striving in one direction--toward himself, toward Muspel, but were too feeble and miniature to make any headway. Their action produced the marching rhythm he had previously felt, but this rhythm was not intrinsic in the corpuscles themselves, but was a consequence of the obstruction they met with. And, surrounding these atoms of life and light, were far larger whirls of white light that gyrated hither and thither, carrying the green corpuscles with them wherever they desired. Their whirling motion was accompanied by the waltzing rhythm. It seemed to Nightspore that the green atoms were not only being danced about against their will but were suffering excruciating shame and degradation in consequence. The larger ones were steadier than the extremely small, a few were even almost stationary, and one was advancing in the direction it wished to go.

He turned his back to the window, buried his face in his hands, and searched in the dim recesses of his memory for an explanation of what he had just seen. Nothing came straight, but horror and wrath began to take possession of him.

On his way upward to the next window, invisible fingers seemed to him to be squeezing his heart and twisting it about here and there; but he never dreamed of turning back. His mood was so grim that he did not once permit himself to pause. Such was his physical distress by the time that he had clambered into the recess, that for several minutes he could see nothing at all--the world seemed to be spinning round him rapidly.