Still, curiosity was by no means dead in him, and since he could not go to the moon he moved west across the uplands instead, toward Viriconium. In a region of winding dales a further queer event overtook him.
Fissuring the high plateau, so that from above it looked like a grey and eroded cheese, these deep little dry-bottomed valleys were dreamy and untenanted. Hanging thickets of thorn and ash made them difficult of access (except where some greenway deserted impulsively its grassy sheep run to follow an empty streambed, plunge through tumbled and overgrown intake walls, and nose like a dog among the mossy ruins of some long-abandoned village), and each was guarded by high, white, limestone bastions. Into one such came the dwarf at the end of a warmish October afternoon, the wheels of his caravan creaking on a disused track drifted with ochre leaves. Reluctant to disturb the elegant silence of the beech-woods, he descended slowly, looking for a place to pass the night. The air was warm, the valley dappled with honey-coloured light. Summer still lived here in the smell of the wild garlic, the dance of the insects in the steep glades, and the slow fall of a leaf through a slanting ray of sun.
The curves of the track revealed to him first a forgotten hamlet in the valley floor-then, swimming above that in a kind of amber glow, the enormous cliff which dominated it.
The village was long dead. Past it once had flowed a stream called the Cressbrook, but there was no one left now to call it anything, and it had retreated shyly underground leaving only a barren strip of stones to separate the relics of human architecture from the vast limestone cathedral on its far bank. There was no water for his ponies, but Tomb turned them out of their shafts anyway; he felt magnetized, drawn, on the verge of some discovery. For this they bore him no more or less ill will than usual, and he could hear them tearing at the damp grass as he pottered along the bank of the vanished brook. But he couldn’t get comfortable there, or amid the contorted and lichenous boughs of the reverted orchard with its minute sour apples-and after a while he shook his head, staring puzzledly about him. Something had attracted him, and yet the place was nothing more than a collection of bramble-filled intakes, grassy mounds, and heaps of stone colonized by nettle and elderberry, its air of desuetude and loss magnified by the existence of the cliff above That cliff! That aching expanse of stone, with its ancient jackdaw colonies, its great ragged swathes of ivy, and its long, mysterious yellow stains! It hung up there, every line of it precise in the amber glow, every scalloped overhang thick with brown darkness, every leaning ash tree, golden and exact against its own black shadow. Every buttress was luminous. The gloomy and suggestive caves worn in its face by a million years of running water seemed more likely places of habitude than the pitiful handful of relics facing it across the dry stream. The shadow of a bird, flickering for a moment across an acre of vibrant white stone, invested it with some immemorial yet transitory significance (some distillation or heirloom of a thousand twilights, a billion such shadows fossilized impalpably in the rock): it was like a vast old head-imperial, ironic, and compelling.
Eventually he cooked himself a meal and ate it squatting comfortably on the step of the caravan. Smoke from his fire became trapped in the inversion layers and drifted down the little valley. Evening came closer and yet never seemed to arrive-as if the valley and its great white guardian were removed from the ordinary passage of Time. The sun dipped forever into the greyness and yet never sank. The air cooled, but so slowly. No wind came. Tomb the Dwarf scratched his crotch, yawned. He stood up to massage the deep ache of an old back wound.
He fed the ponies. Then he went to look at the cliff.
At first, a little out of breath after the ascent of the vegetated scree beneath, he was content merely to stand at the bottom of it and crane his neck to watch the jackdaws. The rock was warm: he placed the palm of his hand against it, flat. The earth beneath his boots was filled with the smell of autumn: he breathed deeply, cocking an eye at a hanging rib, a soaring corner, an ivy-filled crack.
He stood there at the beginning of it where every line led upward, then he began to climb.
He had remembered what was haunting him.
He climbed slowly and amiably, placing his feet with care, here jamming a fist into a crack, there balancing his way across some steep slab while empty space burnt away beneath him like a fuse; and with him as he climbed went the long barren limestone scars of his youth, burning and distant under a foreign sun: the baking hinterlands of the Mingulay Peninsula in summer-the stones so bright at midday they hurt the eyes- the tinkers’ caravans string themselves out like gems across the Mogadon Littoral-the sea cliffs blaze in a fifty-mile arc from Radiopolis to Thing Ten while, high above the stone heaps and the thorny rubbish in the dry gullies, patrols a single lammergeyer, a speck on the burning bowl of the air! Each place or event he now saw miniaturised and arid, as if sealed in clear glass. He regretted none of them-but he was glad on the whole to have exchanged them for the softer airs of the North; and the memory identified, the haunting laid, he let it slip away…
Soon he was able to rest on a shaggy platform some three hundred feet from his starting point and perhaps two hundred more above the caravan on the valley floor. Here there was a cool breeze, and he could watch the jackdaws pursue their millennial evening squabble beneath him; harrying one another from roost to roost, then exploding away into the clear air in a clatter of wings and sneers-to soar and drift and drop like stones into the treetops below before returning to the bramble ledges to begin the whole tedious argument over again… . He took off his belt and with it anchored himself among the roots of the yew with which he shared his perch. The air around him cooled; the light began imperceptibly to fade; the long shoulders of the plateau receded north before him, horizon after horizon like grey pigeon feathers set against the enamelled blues and yellows of the sky. Across the valley he could no longer distinguish individual ash trees-crowned with a continuous lacy fretwork of branches, the sun red and unmoving above it, the far slope rose dark and sullen like a vast earthwork.
And as he watched, a head began to raise itself above that earthwork.
It was such a brief glimpse that later he was unable to describe it coherently-by then, of course, it no longer mattered. The thing revealed itself in total silence, and by parts. First the drooping, jointed antennae, in constant nervous motion, were lifted above the trees; then the great globular eyes followed them, dull and faceted, set in a wedge-shaped carapace like the stained and polished skull of a dead horse; finally came the mouth-parts, working like a machine. Two trembling, oddly curved forelimbs appeared, and, braced against the earth’s dark edge (although they left not the slightest mark), levered this shocking mask high above the dwarf’s stance. He never saw the rest of the creature. The valley winked out below him; the cliff lurched and spun; he shuddered, and heard a thin piping noise coming out of his own mouth Then it was gone.
He retained the impression of something fading, of a noise he had never actually heard gradually diminishing from some unimaginable crescendo- as if an invisible energy dissipating itself like water dribbling away under a stone-then he felt the rough powdery bark of the yew against his sweating hand; the cry of the jackdaws came back to him (faint at first, as though from a vast distance); the valley of the Cressbrook was once more as it had been Such a brief glimpse.