The Cathedral | Page 9

star.
Looking up still, but straight before him, he saw in the air, through the
hazy twilight, sword-blades already bright, gigantic blades without hilts
or handles, thinner towards the point; and these blades, standing on end
at an immense height, appeared in the gloom they cut, to be patterned
with vague intaglios or in ill-defined relief.
As he peered into space to the right and left, he was aware of a gigantic
panoply on each side at a vast height, resting on blocks of darkness,
and consisting of a colossal shield riddled with holes, hanging above
five broader swords, without hilts, but damascened on their flat blades
with indefinite designs of bewildering niello.

Little by little the tentative sun of a doubtful winter's day pierced the
fog, which vanished in blueness; the shield that hung to the left of
Durtal, the north, was the first to come to life; rosy fires and the lurid
flames of punch gleamed in its hollows, while below, in the middle
blade, there started forth in the steel-grey arch, the gigantic image of a
negress robed in green with a brown mantle. Her head, wrapped in a
blue kerchief, was set in a golden glory, and she stared out, hieratic and
wild-looking, with white, wide-open eyes.
And this engimatical Ethiop had on her knees a black infant whose eyes,
in the same way, stood out like snowballs from the dusky face.
All about her, very gradually, the other swords, still so dim, began to
glow, blood rippling from their crimsoned points as if from recent
slaughter; and this trickling red formed a setting for the shapes of
beings come, no doubt, from the distant shores of Ganges: on one side
a king playing on a golden harp; on the other a monarch wielding a
sceptre ending in the turquoise-blue petals of a fabulous lily.
Then, to the left of the royal musician there was another man, bearded,
with a walnut-stained face, the eye-sockets vacant and covered by
round spectacles; on his head were a diadem and a tiara, in his hands a
chalice and a paten, a censer and a loaf; while to the right of the other
sovereign who held the sceptre, a still more harassing shape came forth
against the blue background of the sword--a sort of oriental brigand,
escaped perhaps from the prison cells of Persepolis or Susa, a bandit as
it seemed, wearing a little scarlet cap edged with yellow, in shape like
an inverted jam-pot, and a tan-coloured gown with white stripes on the
skirt; and this clumsy and ferocious personage bore a green palm and a
book.
Durtal turned away to sound the depths of darkness, and before him, at
a giddy height on the horizon, more sword-blades gleamed. The
scrawls which might have been mistaken in the darkness for patterns
embossed or incised on the surface of the steel, developed into figures
draped in long, straight, pleated robes; and at the highest point of the
firmament there hovered amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires a
woman crowned, pale of face, dressed like the Moorish mother of the

northern side in Carmelite-brown and green; and she too held an infant,
a child, like herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand, and
extending the other in benediction.
Last of all, the still dark side, the late side, to Durtal's right hand and
further south, till now wrapped in the half-dispelled morning haze, was
lighted up; the shield opposite to that on the north caught the blaze, and
below it, against the polished metal of the broad blade facing that
which presented the negress queen, appeared a woman of somewhat
olive hue, in raiment like the others, of myrtle-green and brown,
holding a sceptre, and with her, too, there was a child. And round her
again emerged images of men piled up one above the other,
shouldering each other in the narrow field they filled.
For a quarter of an hour nothing was clearly defined; then the real
things asserted themselves. In the middle of the swords, which were in
fact mosaic of glass, the figures stood out in broad daylight. In the field
of each window with its pointed arch bearded faces took form,
motionless in the midst of fire; and on all sides, in the thicket of flames,
as it were the burning bush of Horeb where God showed His glory to
Moses, the Virgin was seen in an unchangeable attitude of imperious
sweetness and pensive grace, mute and still, and crowned with gold.
She was, indeed, many; She came down from the empyrean to lower
levels, to be closer to Her flock, and at last found a place where they
might almost kiss Her feet, at the corner of an aisle that was always in