THE COUNTRY BEYOND MOON’S RISING
I CAME BACK FROM LUXOR WITH THE CRANES, GOING NORTHWARD IN THE spring; soaring and circling and leisurely they went, and, though they could have kept pace with our train, they saw no need to do so and we soon passed them. I imagine that if one does write the story of one’s tellurian journey (as Francis Thompson would have called it) one should write something of common things seen by the way, so that other travellers may identify one’s journey; and that one should brighten, or at least vary, one’s tale with a few unusual things such as one’s fellow-travellers may not have seen for themselves. Every sportsman that owns a gun will be familiar with searching for various kinds of birds in different cover, and an intricate search that may be, even in grass, so that the thing is almost an art in itself; but I wonder if anyone has searched, as I searched now, in a field of clover for a motor-tyre. On my way out from Cairo to Mena House Hotel a tyre left a wheel of the taxi and ran on down the road before us, till it slanted a bit to its right and came to the steep bank that raises the road and went down it, gaining momentum, and away through a clover field until it fell; and the taxi-driver, not having marked it carefully, had a long search for it in the clover that was luxuriant in the middle of March. Outside Mena House Hotel as I sat in a chair I noticed two detectives standing, and realized, what I afterwards heard to have been the case, that Lord Allenby must be in the neighbourhood, which I suppose is what the detectives were there to conceal, because the country was a little disturbed at that time. In fact some people had said to me: “Are you really going to the Sudan just now, with all these disturbances?”
To whom I had replied: “Do you realize that where I am going is as far from Cairo as Poland is?”
I had never yet met Lord Allenby, and most unfortunately he had been told that I was staying at some other hotel, and had kindly invited me to lunch or dinner, but I never received the invitation. I don’t suppose that the detectives gave themselves away like that every day, and shouldn’t like to suggest that they did; but, coming from the South, I had a hat with a rather wider brim than what most people had in Cairo, and I think it was that that excited them. Afterwards my wife and I got to know Lord and Lady Allenby very well, and it is a privilege to have known so great a man. A lady had once written to me telling me that a poem I wrote at the time of the armistice, and which appeared in The Times on Armistice Day, was Lord Allenby’s favourite poem. Something has taught me, I don’t know what, to discount and even discredit all praise: this method of preventing one’s head being turned is, after all, rather like clamping one’s weathercock so that it shall not turn too lightly to wandering breezes. But, however that may be, I merely disbelieved the lady. Then I heard it again, and again I disbelieved it; but I said to my wife then, “If I hear it a third time, I shall believe it.” And the third time I heard it from Lord Allenby.
I came back with my heads and skins on the Mooltan, and with some less obvious trophies, trophies that are indeed invisible till the printer’s aid has been secured, and invisible even then to such as may keep their eyes shut. The trophies to which I refer are rather territories than trophies, the territories by which travel extends the boundaries of the imagination. In writing of those travels, as I do now, I follow a suggestion that was offered to me; but a little reluctantly, because I have always held that the experience of a lifetime should be treated like the raw gold that goldsmiths must keep at the back of their shops, nuggets not for sale, but only to be used for the work of the goldsmith’s craft, the material that is to receive the impression of their fancies. It was from material gathered on this journey that on 29th and 30th March, 1925, I wrote a tale called The Tale Of The Abu Laheeb. There was in this tale more description of the upper reaches of the White Nile or of the Bahr-el-Gazai than I have given here; indeed the whole setting of that fantastic story may be regarded as accurately true to life, though not the tale itself. I mention this short story and its date, because it was the first time that I told of the wanderings of a character that I called Jorkens. He was my reply to some earlier suggestion that I should write of my journeys after big game and, being still reluctant to do this, I had invented a drunken old man who, whenever he could cadge a drink at a club, told tales of his travels. When in addition to his other failings I made him a liar, I felt that at least there could be nothing boastful about my stories. And yet their background is all true; the cactus forests of Kenya are there, the Laikipia plains, the papyrus swamps of the Nile, the Sahara and some of its mountains, and Egypt, Aden, the Ganges and the Himalayas: the lie is the tale itself, worked up with this material as a goldsmith will make a winged goddess from honest gold. It is unfortunate that I named him Jorkens, which is practically the same name as a character in Dickens, as I had overlooked at the time. I should like to change his name by deed poll if I knew what authority had charge of the patronymics of fiction; perhaps the Authors’ Society. On 3rd April I wrote another story of this nature, getting the material this time from North Africa. It was some years before I wrote many more of these tales, but they have by now made three books and I have another more than half written. Those already published I called The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, and Jorkens Remembers Africa, and Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey. I used one method in all these tales, which was to choose an event which was as impossible as I was able to imagine, and then to expend all my ingenuity in making it plausible and, if I could, credible. Anybody, I rather felt, could make a reader believe that he saw a rabbit; but it required some little skill, and was worth working for, to make him believe that Jorkens married a mermaid in Aden. In a delightful letter that Kipling wrote to me about the first of these books he said: “For sheer cheek the mermaid yarn is the best. I am not thinking for the minute of anything but the audacity of it.”
And my wife reminds me of one tale in which I succeeded too well: this was a story of a journey by aeroplane to the planet Mars, not undertaken by Jorkens himself, but by a friend; and one day I received a letter from America, saying, “It is obvious from the sincerity with which you write that you believe that it can be done. If you tell me this really is so I will devote my life to getting there.” And I have no doubt he would have. But millions of Americans just now are concentrating on getting to Berlin. Very likely he is among them. I did not know how to answer the letter. It reached me in India when I was rather preoccupied with tigers, and the weather was hot, and I never found leisure and energy to answer it, as I should have done. But what would I have said if I had?
I wrote no more tales that year about Jorkens, for on 8th May I started a novel called The Charwoman’s Shadow, and it occupied me off and on until 29th October. It was practically a continuation of my Chronicles of Rodriguez, telling of the Golden Age in Spain down to the last day of it, for the book ends with the words “and the Golden Age was over.” The exact date of the Golden Age is not given, for a reason that is stated in the preface to The Chronicles of Rodriguez, which is that “magic even in small quantities appears to affect time, much as acids affect some metals.” And magic is to be found in both of these books.
I learned when writing this book that, although an idea for a story seems never to be forgotten, at any rate in my memory, where such ideas have sometimes lain for years before I have got to work on them, yet a phrase is as illusive as a butterfly, and should always be jotted down if worth remembering. One such phrase came to me one evening as I was playing chess with the blacksmith in his garden in Shoreham and the full moon came up huge over a hill called White Hill, and I did jot the phrase down, but mislaid it and could not find it when I needed it for this book. The idea that haunted it I remembered, but not the actual phrase. The huge moon coming over the hill in the summer evening filled all the air with mystery, which deepened over the hill in the land that one could not see, and the phrase that came to me out of that mystery was “the country beyond Moon’s Rising.” This was the very thing that I wanted towards the end of that book, and when I could not find the exact words I tried to remember them and could do no better than “the country towards Moon’s Rising,” which after all is only a roundabout way of saying further east. But it should have been “the country beyond Moon’s Rising,” and when I discovered the bit of paper on which I had jotted it down the book was already in print and I fear no-one will remember to alter it in later editions. For that book ends with the tale of a magician, who had been rather the villain than the hero of the book, though he was a man of some personality; and as the book ends he goes away through a pass of the Pyrenees, in search of a land to which magicians went, escaping the damnation that is their due, and the children of Pan and all magical things go with him. “And before the human destiny overtook him he saw one morning, clear where the dawn had been, the luminous rock of the bastions and glittering rampart that rose up sheer from the frontier of the Country Beyond Moon’s Rising.... Upon those battlements and by the opening gates were gathered the robed Masters that had trafficked with time and dwelt awhile on Earth, and handed the mysteries on, and had walked round the back of the grave by the way that they knew, and were even beyond damnation. They raised their hands and blessed him.
“And now for him, and the creatures that followed after, the gates were wide that led through the earthward rampart of the Country Beyond Moon’s Rising. He limped towards it with all his magical following. He went therein, and the Golden Age was over.”