Lilith | Page 7

over something--doubtless the
frame of the mirror-- and stood nose to beak with the bird: I was in the open air, on a
houseless heath!


CHAPTER III
THE RAVEN
I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as when one cannot
distinguish between fog and field, between cloud and mountain-side. One fact only was
plain--that I saw nothing I knew. Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that
touch would correct sight, I stretched my arms and felt about me, walking in this
direction and that, if haply, where I could see nothing, I might yet come in contact with
something; but my search was vain. Instinctively then, as to the only living thing near me,
I turned to the raven, which stood a little way off, regarding me with an expression at
once respectful and quizzical. Then the absurdity of seeking counsel from such a one
struck me, and I turned again, overwhelmed with bewilderment, not unmingled with fear.
Had I wandered into a region where both the material and psychical relations of our
world had ceased to hold? Might a man at any moment step beyond the realm of order,
and become the sport of the lawless? Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet,
and heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me!
"How DID I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question was immediately
answered.
"You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice.
I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape. The terror that madness
might be at hand laid hold upon me: must I henceforth place no confidence either in my
senses or my consciousness? The same instant I knew it was the raven that had spoken,
for he stood looking up at me with an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird
seemed to cast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself.
I beg my reader to aid me in the endeavour to make myself intelligible--if here
understanding be indeed possible between us. I was in a world, or call it a state of things,
an economy of conditions, an idea of existence, so little correspondent with the ways and
modes of this world--which we are apt to think the only world, that the best choice I can
make of word or phrase is but an adumbration of what I would convey. I begin indeed to
fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because
no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. Already I have set down
statements I would gladly change did I know how to substitute a truer utterance; but as

often as I try to fit the reality with nearer words, I find myself in danger of losing the
things themselves, and feel like one in process of awaking from a dream, with the thing
that seemed familiar gradually yet swiftly changing through a succession of forms until
its very nature is no longer recognisable.
I bethought me that a bird capable of addressing a man must have the right of a man to a
civil answer; perhaps, as a bird, even a greater claim.
A tendency to croak caused a certain roughness in his speech, but his voice was not
disagreeable, and what he said, although conveying little enlightenment, did not sound
rude.
"I did not come through any door," I rejoined.
"I saw you come through it!--saw you with my own ancient eyes!" asserted the raven,
positively but not disrespectfully.
"I never saw any door!" I persisted.
"Of course not!" he returned; "all the doors you had yet seen--and you haven't seen
many--were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The strange thing to you," he went
on thoughtfully, "will be, that the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in!"
"Oblige me by telling me where I am."
"That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know
where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."
"How am I to begin that where everything is so strange?"
"By doing something."
"What?"
"Anything; and the sooner you begin the better! for until you are at home, you will find it
as difficult to get out as it is to get in."
"I have, unfortunately, found it too easy to get in; once out I shall not try again!"
"You have stumbled in, and may, possibly, stumble out again. Whether you have got in
UNFORTUNATELY remains to be seen."
"Do you never go out, sir?"
"When I please I do, but not often, or for long. Your world is such