Lilith | Page 9

George MacDonald
It had no colour, but was like the translucent
trembling of the hot air that rises, in a radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground,
vibrant like the smitten chords of a musical instrument. What it was grew no plainer as I
went nearer, and when I came close up, I ceased to see it, only the form and colour of the
trees beyond seemed strangely uncertain. I would have passed between the stems, but
received a slight shock, stumbled, and fell. When I rose, I saw before me the wooden wall
of the garret chamber. I turned, and there was the mirror, on whose top the black eagle
seemed but that moment to have perched.
Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret spaces had an
UNCANNY look. They seemed to have long been waiting for something; it had come,
and they were waiting again! A shudder went through me on the winding stair: the house
had grown strange to me! something was about to leap upon me from behind! I darted
down the spiral, struck against the wall and fell, rose and ran. On the next floor I lost my
way, and had gone through several passages a second time ere I found the head of the
stair. At the top of the great stair I had come to myself a little, and in a few moments I sat
recovering my breath in the library.
Nothing should ever again make me go up that last terrible stair! The garret at the top of
it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it, threatening to crush me out of it! The
brooding brain of the building, it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom
might any moment appear in the library where I sat! I was nowhere safe! I would let, I
would sell the dreadful place, in which an aërial portal stood ever open to creatures
whose life was other than human! I would purchase a crag in Switzerland, and thereon
build a wooden nest of one story with never a garret above it, guarded by some grand old
peak that would send down nothing worse than a few tons of whelming rock!
I knew all the time that my thinking was foolish, and was even aware of a certain
undertone of contemptuous humour in it; but suddenly it was checked, and I seemed

again to hear the croak of the raven.
"If I know nothing of my own garret," I thought, "what is there to secure me against my
own brain? Can I tell what it is even now generating?--what thought it may present me
the next moment, the next month, or a year away? What is at the heart of my brain? What
is behind my THINK? Am I there at all?--Who, what am I?"
I could no more answer the question now than when the raven put it to me in--at--"Where
in?--where at?" I said, and gave myself up as knowing anything of myself or the universe.
I started to my feet, hurried across the room to the masked door, where the mutilated
volume, sticking out from the flat of soulless, bodiless, non-existent books, appeared to
beckon me, went down on my knees, and opened it as far as its position would permit,
but could see nothing. I got up again, lighted a taper, and peeping as into a pair of
reluctant jaws, perceived that the manuscript was verse. Further I could not carry
discovery. Beginnings of lines were visible on the left-hand page, and ends of lines on the
other; but I could not, of course, get at the beginning and end of a single line, and was
unable, in what I could read, to make any guess at the sense. The mere words, however,
woke in me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible. Some
dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one
never had before, new in colour and form--spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto
unproved: here, some of the phrases, some of the senseless half-lines, some even of the
individual words affected me in similar fashion--as with the aroma of an idea, rousing in
me a great longing to know what the poem or poems might, even yet in their mutilation,
hold or suggest.
I copied out a few of the larger shreds attainable, and tried hard to complete some of the
lines, but without the least success. The only thing I gained in the effort was so much
weariness that, when I went to bed, I fell asleep at once and slept soundly.
In the morning all that horror of the empty garret spaces had left me.


CHAPTER IV
SOMEWHERE OR NOWHERE?
The sun was
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