Lost in the immense gloom of a great forest was a small clearing where the sun might break in to bring extraordinary treasures to light. Feathery tufts of palm made moiré patterns behind each other and against the blue of the sky; the delicate arms of porphyryngias were raised to bestow a benign shade upon the humbler glyptopod. On every side vines restrained the frothing tonnage of vegetable life which otherwise seemed likely to break loose and balloon skyward, lifting with it the rest of the forest from the face of the earth. Amongst this foliage glowed flowers and fruit of every kind: bells and cups, cynths and calices, sprays and single blooms like solitary gongs mingled with pricklefruit, quinsicums and the scarlet orbs of the tart tabitabi.
To one side of this clearing stood a hut made of fronds like a woven basket set upon timber legs. And in this hut, all by himself, lived the Poet. Many years ago he had come from a distant country, a cold grey place inhabited by a cold grey people little moved by Art but much interested in Commerce. Hither had he come, a wanderer, a solitary in search of he knew not what except that it would thaw the chill from mind and marrow. For, truth to tell, his first book of poems, Nard for the King, had not been well received in his native land.
Then he had curled his beard and put upon himself traveller’s raiment. ‘For,’ he reasoned, ‘while it is little to me that I am unappreciated, it is everything to my Soul that it should be able to feed on beautiful things. Here there is only ugliness and meanness since the cold grey North has crept into these people’s hearts and locked them in ice.’
For a while he trudged the world, and the world rewarded him with wonders and delight. In love and gratitude he spoke his verse in dusty squares and village lanes; in bazaars he raised his voice among gold-capped minarets, and the desert wastes heard his songs. At length, meagred by hunger and worn out with travel, he wandered into a library where, having first ascertained that it held no copy of his poems, he found a map of the country he was in. It was rather old and still had the word ‘Unexplored’ printed across many a region of the interior.
‘That’, mused the Poet, ‘is where I must go. I have lived too long among the known. A hundred cultures have I seen’ (this was, of course, poetic licence) ‘and sundry domestications of the earth. And always where the hand of man sets its imprint a strangeness vanishes, a uniqueness is lost, an otherness is made the deadly same.’
So saying he drew a line across the map with decisiveness and was engaged by the Librarian in a short conversation before making his way to the market-place to find bearers to carry his few necessities. Then he recurled his beard, gathered his tatters about him and taking up his leather pouch of manuscripts set off on his last journey.
On the tribulations which beset him there is no need to dwell. At the end of the time it took to write four sonnets and an epithalamium he pushed his way through a clump of stinging millefoils and limped into the clearing. And in that instant he recognised his home.
*
Time passed, and the Poet moved through intensities of vision. At dawn he would rise to watch the night’s distillates tremble their dewdrops along the edges of leaves as the first rays of the sun pierced the upper branches. Nearby there ran a shallow stream whose laterite bed was home to sly brown elvers and translucent prawns which a quick eye and a defter hand might net. Across this each dawn shimmered the first gauzy dragonflies like scattered dream-residues, which would vanish as the heat hardened into broad day. At noon he ate a simple meal of fruit and rinsed his mouth in the crystal runnel before retiring to his hut, doubtless to write. At dusk a light breeze would spring up and lemon-censers spill their fragrance on the air which with the aromatic popping of peppernut husks would bring the Poet forth, stretching the cramps of creativity and yawning in the cool of the evening.
And thus in simple splendour he passed his days. Sometimes he was a little lonely. ‘But’, he told himself, ‘I have my Art, and all Art demands sacrifice. If I have renounced companionship, I still live in a world of Beauty and Love,’ since the love he lavished on his poems was indeed that of a parent for its child. Nevertheless, at dusk sometimes a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some shy and gentle faun – might be glimpsed flitting from the undergrowth to the rude hut wherein the Poet glowed and burned and gave off sparks in his solitude.
Now, there was a Headman whose village lay some way off in the forest and in whose bailiwick the Poet was living. Sometimes when the sun was high and smothered the clearing with its heat this man would trudge through, now carrying a great bundle of wood on his head, now with merely a bow and a knife but with his body streaked with sweat and the bright blood drawn by cruel whipthorn. Often the Poet would be so entranced by his Art that, lost in inward vision beneath the emerald tent of a clump of sagathy plantains, his eyes were blind to the Headman’s weary progress past his hut. But at another time he would spring up and bid the Headman rest awhile.
‘I fear,’ he would apologise on such occasions, ‘that I have little enough to offer your body by way of refreshment, so simply do I live. But your mind – ah! that I can refresh. I have just this moment made the most exquisite ballad, and there should be a fragment of ode lying around somewhere from last night.’
Then he would read to the Headman in a strange and beautiful voice. And it was as if his words were so attuned to the Nature from which it seemed he had drawn them that the very leaves shivered and the twigs like silver tuning-forks responded to his pitch until the whole glade rang softly at his words. Even the insects’ mechanical clamour grew hushed. Shard and carapace ceased their husking; mandibles in mid-munch froze; locust heads with many-faceted eyes swivelled to where this music came.
The Headman sat as if enraptured. ‘Oh, you have spoken truly’, he would say in a soft voice when the last hum had died away. ‘You have once more spoken the Truth, my great and good Friend.’
And the forest exhaled its long-pent decaying breath, the jewelled birds dared try again their own small voices. For the Poet had spoken of things which other men cannot see but which on hearing they know to be true; and this recognition makes them inexpressibly sad yet eager to hear more as if it were a cure for unacknowledged wounds. And the Poet knew of his power and whence it came. ‘Wherefore’, he said to himself when the heaviness of night lay on the forest outside his hut and the fireflies inside tangled their shining paths in the thatch overhead, ‘I hide myself from the world and formulate medicines for its pain. I am not a Prophet in the wilderness, for I herald no one. Also I foresee nothing. Yet am I a Seer, for I see everything as it is.’
Since he was not a stupid man, either, he saw that part of the reason for the Headman’s visits had to do with a supply of gin, the last remnants of which the Poet still had laid by him from the day of his arrival, having known of no good reason why plain living and high thinking should be any further penalised. Thus grew up between them that agreeable companionship which may be distilled from grain and words. And each was much the better for it since under its benign influence the Headman could forget he revered this foreigner as a shaman while it would quite slip the Poet’s mind that he sometimes thought of this native as marvellously dignified.
So tireless sun and patient moon swung each other about the sky in a literary device known as tachychronia, signifying the rapid passage of time. And dawn preceded dusk and vice versa until the day came when a hardly audible sound like a memory of thunder hung breathing about the forest’s distant rim. It rose and fell on the breeze so that at times it was not there at all but then took its place once again behind the jungle cries of insect, bird and beast. Some days later it had become almost constant, and when the Headman appeared, bowed beneath trusses of viridian gourds, the Poet having bade him rest and refreshed him as usual with verses and gin asked him what it might mean. ‘I fear’, he added, ‘that dreadful disasters, storms and earthquakes such as never before must be shaking the land about us. And yet the ground whereon we sit is curiously unmoved.’
The Headman, too, had heard the sound but was equally uncertain as to its cause. His village had spoken of the roar of floodwaters since it bore some resemblance to that caused by the river in spate with the coming of the monsoon. Days later still the noise had grown more menacing, and amid its now constant growl were to be discerned irregular pantings such as wild beasts make when rending prey. This-time the Headman was more informative.
‘A messenger has arrived by boat. He comes from the King. The King in his wisdom, caring only for the greater well-being of his subjects, has contrived a brilliant plan to make us all rich. Maybe you as well’ – he gave a reassuring bow to the Poet. ‘For, although you are a foreigner and a wonderful teacher not like us, yet still you sojourn in the King’s land and may receive of his benison.’
‘But I am already far richer than I deserve.’ The Poet looked round in bewilderment at the familiar yet ever-changing beauty of his domain. ‘I need no other wealth. The King is, of course, too good,’ he added politely. ‘But what is his brilliant plan?’
‘He has sold the forest’, announced the Headman, ‘to strangers like yourself from far-off lands. They have bought all the trees and now they are cutting them down. Those are their remarkable machines which you can hear even as we speak. They say they can make a field this size’ – he pointed at the clearing – ‘in the time it takes us to cook rice and banban and of it make a sweet-sap pudding. Whereas it would take my people with their axes fourteen suns to clear this ground for our slender purple cassava.’ And with that the Headman left, his head dazed with Progress and the benefits it promised to shower on his hitherto moneyless folk.
But the Poet was filled with anguish and with rage. For a further two whole days he listened to the inexorable tide of engines encircle his beautiful world and watched in love and pity the trees put forth their young leaves, the spiders spin their sticky threads, the elvers in the crystal stream lave their slippery ribbons in the current. All was as it ever had been, and all was changed for ever. He alone of those myriad creatures to whom the clearing was the universe knew it and could mourn their end before they ended.
Then on the third day at dawn the Poet arose and addressed his domain with bitterest tears:
‘Is it not I who have brought this down upon you? Is not the fault mine? For at last they have tracked me down, my cold compatriots: they pursue me and my kind even to the uttermost ends of the earth. I took upon myself an exile’s life that I might court the Muse in her natural halls, and even so did she come to me. Where before was silence we have made enduring music; we have wrought marvellous songs. Out of nothing have we spun our webs of words and hung them up to ensnare with gentlest Art the unhappy souls who chance by. We have magnified the beauty of the world whose outward sign Creation is and lo! the hearts of men grow greater in response.
‘Now they, those countrymen of mine whose blood is salt with the driven spume of grey and Northern seas, whose hearts are cold with Nonconformist zeal and will not be warmed except before the twin fires of self-righteousness and greed, they have tracked me here so they may lay waste my Soul.’
And the clearing was hushed as he paused and it seemed as though the uneasy rumble of vile mills had drawn a little closer.
‘Is it not I who have brought this down upon you? Oh, my lovely elverines, beloved tabitabi tree, is not the fault mine? My error lay in thinking them indifferent. Yet, though many years have passed, they have not forgotten me, hidden in your midst in populous solitude. What other motive could they have, thus to track me even to Paradise itself and encompass me about with hateful engines? Even now they steadily abolish Nature who for so long has cherished me secretly in her bosom as a pearl in a precious setting. What other motive could they have but vengeance? Is not the world already full enough of Swedish furniture? Lives there a man who would not see a shaggy, ancient hardwood tree stand in living majesty rather than in the office of some executive? Who, looking at such a noble giant, thinks only of a heap of desks? No, the fault is mine, the fault is mine.’
Thus spake the Poet; and he ceased, weeping. And the clearing heard his words and the forest trembled, for it knew that, although in matters of detail he slightly erred (the logging consortium which had gained the Royal Warrant being, in fact, Japanese), in essence he was accurate and once more spoke a Truth. So the Poet retired to his simple hut heavy-hearted and, with the world’s encroachment ringing in his ears, began his greatest work: an Elegy such as had not been before or since and written as though his very eyes had shed every one of the lacrimae rerum.
Meanwhile by devious routes the reputation of this stranger living in the land had reached the ears of the King.
‘Seemingly,’ he told his Chamberlain, who had actually brought the news himself a month or two ago, ‘there lives in a distant region of Our Kingdom a Poet with the gift of Truth and Beauty. We find this hard to believe, for such parts are commonly lived in by displaced zoo populations and dreary savages. Wherefore would a Poet seek Beauty and Truth in such a place? Nevertheless, it is Our wish and Our command that a poem from this man’s pen be brought that We may judge with Our own eyes the truth of these astounding claims. Selah’ (which, being interpreted from the language of that land, means ‘Hurry’).
But the Chamberlain groaned inwardly; for, although it was his pleasure and his pride to do his Monarch’s bidding, he was wont to do it comfortably at Court and had not the slightest desire for arduous travels to howling outposts. Nonetheless he went; and towards the end of quite excessive tribulations through lands which would not recognise his ebony stick of office, sumptuously inlaid as it was with rubies, onyx and the clearest amethyst, he came upon the Headman, who undertook to guide him through what remained of the forest to his final goal.
They found the Poet deep in composition of his Song of songs beneath the cool pavilion of umbrageous sagathy. His Elegy lay in a half-completed pile and his gold nib flashed across the page as some livid jewel with a sun breaking at its heart. With what assurance, with what radiance did this slender golden monarch proceed his winding way; and behind him dressed in sombre black trailed his courtiers, his words. The Chamberlain watched in fascination. In whose kingdom moved this king? he wondered. It was of mere paper; and this mere paper lay within the greater Kingdom he himself served. And yet his King did not command it. He who reigned here was a ragged stranger with a ragged beard. Almost as if he had heard the thought, the ragged stranger raised his hand in salutation and looked up.
‘Greetings, Friend,’ he addressed the Headman. ‘You have brought a finely apparelled gentleman to this our ruined Paradise.’ And in truth he had to raise his voice in order to be heard above the roar of engines which seemed to encompass the glade at no great distance.
‘Chamberlain to His Majesty,’ the gentleman in question announced himself, striking the Poet lightly on top of his head with the ebony rod. ‘His Majesty commands:
‘Your as yet unsubstantiated fame has humbly crept, thanks to His serenest magnanimity, to the portals of the King’s ear, which, having deigned to hear, is graciously curious to hear still more. Give me a poem that I may bear it with swiftest steps to Him who, having once delighted, is not slow to reward.’ He rapped the Poet’s crown again. ‘His Majesty commands.’
‘Which poem?’ asked the Poet. ‘They are so many, my dearest children whom even now the nursery cannot contain’ – and he indicated the doorway of his little hut through which dim and shadowy piles of paper could be descried almost entirely filling that humble dwelling. ‘Which of my children will you take and introduce to the outer world?’
‘How do I know which poem?’ asked the Chamberlain testily. ‘The best, obviously.’
‘Inter pares,’ mused the Poet, ‘and with the magnificent exception of the Elegy on which I am currently at work, primus is perhaps my sonnet “In Praise of Praise”.’ He got up, went to the hut, rummaged for a while and returned with a small sheet of paper.
‘Read it,’ commanded the Chamberlain. ‘And it had better be good. It is ultimately for the ears of His Majesty, remember. There are no references in it to Democracy?’
‘None,’ said the Poet. Then he read in his strange and beautiful voice; and the leaves shivered and the twigs like silver tuning-forks sang in sympathy and the soft ringing of the glade seemed to drown the nearby bellowing of machinery and to abolish its very memory so all became once more just as it always had been. The Headman’s eyes filled with tears, so painfully did it remind him of days which were and could not come again, the more so since he had heard this poem many times before and loved its words without quite knowing why. And suddenly he was flooded with a great pity for his Friend.
The Poet ceased; and as from far away the noise of engines gradually returned.
‘Take it,’ he said at last, and held the paper out. But what was this? The Chamberlain was also weeping. Down his cheeks and down his beard and even down his ebony stick the tears ran, past rubies, onyx and the clearest amethyst, down into the clearing’s very dust. His shoulders shook, his lips framed bubbling syllables. He was weeping for he knew not what: for years wasted in foolish office, for the cruelties and the pleasures of his position, for a lifetime spent denying the Beauty that Is. From the very emptiness of his heart the tears sprang; for the Chamberlain was weeping for his Soul.
‘Go, my friend,’ said the Poet gently. ‘Bear my humble offspring to your great and good King, and may it speak to him as it has spoken to you. And now I must complete my Elegy since I feel a strange presentiment and dark forebodings of a waning light.’
So the Headman led the weeping Chamberlain away, who in time recovered, reached the capital and presented himself to his Monarch. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘I have done as You commanded. I have found this Poet of whom You spake, although only after the greatest difficulties for the way to this, perhaps the remotest, part of Your Kingdom lies defended almost impregnably by the hand of Nature. All manner of rivers, deserts, swamps, mountain ranges—’
‘Silence,’ ordered the King. ‘We care little for your troubles. We gave you a task. Have you brought Us a poem?’
‘I have, Sire,’ said the Chamberlain, producing it. ‘And all that came to your August Ear concerning this Poet is true, and still more than true. He spoke this poem himself, and Nature paused to listen. The very birds were silent and my tears fell as the monsoon rains to hear him.’
‘You always were impressionable,’ said the King. ‘Well, read it anyway.’
So the Chamberlain read; and something he remembered of the Poet’s own cadence must have come back with the words, for as he spoke the King stopped fidgeting with his rings and the disdainful glance he cast through the window grew misty so that to his eyes the formal gardens of the palace took on the lineaments of Eden. Even the toiling figures of his subjects became transformed and for a moment unthinkably appeared as noble as himself. When the Chamberlain finished reading there was a long silence.
‘I have not heard the like before,’ the King said at last, to his Chamberlain’s amazement forgoing the Royal We. ‘I feel I know things now I never knew; yet what they are cannot be said except in the very words you spoke. Truly, a kingdom within whose borders dwells a man like this is rich indeed. You say he lives in a swamp?’
‘More of a forest, Sire.’
‘A forest? A man of this greatness? It is absurd.’
‘Mr Ishugu’s men are cutting it down as fast as they can.’
‘Quite right, too. We can’t have forests. Nasty dank things; they make us look hopelessly primeval and underdeveloped. Besides, I’m told they harbour guerrillas. No; this Poet shall be brought forthwith to the palace here and housed in the utmost style and comfort for as long as he desires. I shall have a suite of rooms cleared of women immediately. You will return at once and fetch him. Meanwhile the finest engravers in the land shall copy this poem on to a slab of the purest gold and it shall be presented to him on his arrival.’
‘Sire, it may be he would not come with me. He is a man of the simplest tastes and perhaps Your generosity will overwhelm him so that he feels unable to appear in Court, clad as he is in rags and beard.’
‘Well, who would he come with, then?’ demanded the King with a slight return to his old peremptory manner.
‘He has a friend, it seems; a Headman of the lowest caste. Maybe the Poet would go with him.’
‘Very well. Let this Headman bring him. There is no need for you to go at all: you will be better employed here, organising the Reception. Send messengers to the Headman. Selah.’
*
But meanwhile in the clearing time had passed in which the Poet, quite possessed by his creative act, laboured to complete his Elegy before he was engulfed by Progress. His gold nib flew, the pages mounted up. Daily he sent forth the Headman as his scout to keep him informed as to the advancing tide. His friend at his bidding slipped away through jungle paths. But when he came to where the loggers were he stopped and stared with superstitious awe.
Machines like mythic beasts on silver tracks roared and grunted, smashed down trees and tore their hides off. On all sides stretched a barren waste of splintered stumps, barkless trunks in pyramids. The undulating jungle floor which had been for ever hidden and engloomed now lay beneath the blazing eye of day, strangely bare and dull. Something in the Headman’s breast stirred in torment at the sight. Yet still more powerfully he felt excitement rise as in his inner mind he saw rolling acres of cassava plant, waving okra, golden maize. Never again need he wend a weary way about the forest tracks in search of food: no longer need he brave the cruel whipthorn to bring his children grubs and pods and acid fungus ears, bark and nut, berry and leaf.
Yet well he knew he would distress his Friend by giving an exact account of this desert’s steady advance. So back he went, and the Poet said: ‘Tell me, what did you see?’
‘Nothing, Friend, but the shaking of leaves, the insects’ dance and the lazy shimmer of a summer noon.’
But the Poet, gazing up at him and hearing the nearby snort of powerful exhausts, said gently: ‘Headman, you lie. My ears hear more than your eyes see. Go now therefore once again and come and tell me how it goes.’
A second time the Headman sped away. But when he so quickly arrived at the edge of the great wound weeping its sap from uncounted broken stems his heart grew heavy. ‘I cannot tell him,’ he cried in anguish. ‘It is far better he should not know, but write until he fully makes an end.’ So back he went, and the Poet said: ‘Now, tell me truly: what did you see?’
‘The crested lizard on a branch, the spider in its delicate lair, the buttermoth on painted wing.’
This time the Poet laid down his pen. ‘I had not thought that all our years of Friendship could be so easily betrayed. It surely is not much to ask a Friend to do. It seems that I was wrong.’
And his face was so sad and stricken that the Headman turned in bitter grief and ran a third time and resolved to bear his witness true. But he now had hardly any distance to go. The topmost branches of the nearest tree were shuddering to the blade. At the edge of the clearing he turned round. At his back an ochre-yellow bulldozer poked its snout through a bush and stopped.
‘My Friend, my Friend, my dearest Friend,’ he called. ‘They’re here.’
Across the clearing the Poet looked up, looked down, wrote a word or two, drew a line and laid down his golden nib.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It is finished.’
Now, when dusk came and the bulldozers fell silent he went alone to sit as usual beside the rivulet. A light breeze sprang up as it always did; but no lemon-censers spilt their fragrance on the air, nor popped any husk of peppernut. A single cicada stropped its legs and then, embarrassed on its own behalf, fell to silence. Even the surface of the stream was iridescent with a film of diesel waste.
‘My lovely elverines,’ murmured the Poet; but they had fled away downstream and were gone. ‘Great and mysterious forest, my fastness and my home,’ he whispered. But of the forest only a single line of trees made a thin circle about the clearing. Between their ancient trunks showed an infinity of sky.
So he went to his hut and, composing himself upon his bed of manuscripts, gazed up in the dark to where a solitary firefly drew erratic scribbles in the thatch.
Light my way, firefly, he thought to the tiny insect. Light my way.
And when at dawn the Headman came he found the Poet lifeless with the worn-out firefly dead upon his breast.
Then the grieving Headman’s tears fell like rain. An hour he wept and thought about his Friend and, constantly remembering that golden speech to which even the forest had stooped its verdant ears, wept afresh. And as he did there stole from the nearest shadow a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some newly dispossessed faun of the erstwhile forest – who mourning fell at the dead feet and kissed them and performed loving obsequies. Together they lifted up the body and washed it in the stream, calling upon their deities. Then the Headman took his knife and touched it to his lips and cut from the Poet’s body his heart, according to their custom. And they placed the heart in a box most exquisitely carved in secret over many months, and the sweetest unguents poured therein: most precious gums and balsamums, myrrhincense and liquid nard. They did it about with a rattan thong and buried it deeply at the foot of the beloved tabitabi tree.
In silence then they caught up the body and carried it to the hut. And the Headman took some pages from the just-completed Elegy (for in truth the entire manuscript was far too large) and placed them in the dead mouth. ‘For’, he said, ‘is it not professed in our tradition that the words of a man’s mouth shall return thereto?’ Then he set fire to the hut according to their custom, it being proper for a man’s works to perish with him that none might nourish an evil pride. For all things done beneath the heavens are sufficient unto themselves since none shall last, no, for even their smoke is blown away.
So, even as his works, the Poet’s body was consumed and became as nothing, and the smoke of it was blown away. There fell upon the clearing a silence as had never been; and the Headman went grieving thence.
In due time the messenger bore the news to the Chamberlain, who told the King how the great Poet was dead, how his works were ashes and his heart lay embalmed beneath the tabitabi tree. And the King was exceeding sorrowful.
‘Bring from this humble clearing’, he commanded, ‘that thing which is the most precious in all my Realm and it shall be enshrined in our holiest temple with utmost pomp. Helas’ (which being interpreted from that tongue means ‘It is meet to grieve’).
So back the Chamberlain went to that far-off region and found the Headman but lo! the clearing itself the Headman could not find, for it now extended eighty kilometres all about in a waste of stumps and stunted leathery shrubs and the deep ruts made by logging trucks. But after much searching he did come upon a filthy rivulet with close at hand what might have been the site of a long-extinguished fire. And all around were men in metal hats eating sandwiches among parked machinery.
Then, empowered as he was by the King’s Command, the Headman – who was soon to be appointed the region’s Reafforestation Officer – laid his hand reverently on that most precious thing which long since had been for him a source of hope and pleasure. And to the Royal Presence he despatched, in a Progress aided by a thousand willing hands, an ochre-yellow bulldozer.