The Man Who Saw Through Heaven

== THE MAN WHO SAW THROUGH HEAVEN ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
People have wondered 
(therebeing obviously no question of romance involved) how I could ever
have allowed myself to be let in for the East African adventure of Mrs. Diana
in search of her husband. There were several reasons. To begin with, the time
and effort and money weren't mine; they were the property of the wheel of which
I was but a cog, the Society through which Diana's life had been insured, along
with the rest of that job lot of missionaries. The "letting in" was
the firm's. In the second place, the wonderers have not counted on Mrs. Diana's
capacity for getting things done for her. Meek and helpless. Yes, but God was
on her side. Too meek, too helpless to move mountains herself, if those who
happened to be handy didn't move them for her then her God would know the
reason why. Having dedicated her all to making straight the Way, why should her
neighbor cavil at giving a little? The writer for one, a colonial governor
general for another, railway magnates, insurance managers, safari leaders, the
ostrich farmer of Ndua, all these and a dozen others in their turns have felt
the hundred-ton weight of her thin-lipped meekness— have seen her in metaphor
sitting grimly on the doorsteps of their souls. 
A third reason lay in my own troubled conscience.
Though I did it in innocence, I can never forget that it was I who personally
conducted Diana's party to the Observatory on that fatal night in Boston before
it sailed. Had it not been for that kindly intentioned "hunch" of
mine, the astounded eye of the Reverend Hubert Diana would never have gazed
through the floor of Heaven, and he would never have undertaken to measure the
Infinite with the foot rule of his mind. 
It all started so simply. My boss at the
shipping-and-insurance office gave me the word in the morning. "Bunch of
missionaries for the Platonic tomorrow. They're on our hands in a way. Show 'em
the town." It wasn't so easy when you think of it: one male and seven
females on their way to the heathen; though it was easier in Boston than it might
have been in some other towns. The evening looked the simplest. My friend Krum
was at the Observatory that semester; there at least I was sure their
sensibilities would come to no harm. 
On the way out in the streetcar, seated opposite to
Diana and having to make conversation, I talked of Krum and of what I knew of
his work with the spiral nebulae. Having to appear to listen, Diana did so (as
all day long) with a vaguely indulgent smile. He really hadn't time for me.
That night his life was exalted as it had never been, and would perhaps never
be again. Tomorrow's sailing, the actual fact of leaving all to follow Him,
held his imagination in thrall. Moreover, he was a bridegroom of three days
with his bride beside him, his nerves at once assuaged and thrilled. No, but
more. As if a bride were not enough, arrived in Boston, he had found himself
surrounded by a very galaxy of womanhood gathered from the four corners;
already within hours one felt the chaste tentacles of their feminine dependence
curling about the party's unique man; already their contacts with the world of
their new lives began to be made through him; already they saw in part through
his eyes. I wonder what he would have said if I had told him he was a little
drunk. 
In the course of the day I think I had got him fairly
well. As concerned his Church he was at once an asset and a liability. He
believed its dogma as few still did, with a simplicity, "the old-time
religion." He was born that kind. Of the stuff of the fanatic, the reason
he was not a fanatic was that, curiously impervious to little questionings, he
had never been aware that his faith was anywhere attacked. A self-educated man,
he had accepted the necessary smattering facts of science with a serene
indulgence, as simply so much further proof of what the Creator could do when
He put His Hand to it. Nor was he conscious of any conflict between these facts
and the fact that there existed a substantial Heaven, geographically up, and a
substantial Hot Place, geographically down. 
So, for his Church, he was an asset in these days. And
so, and for the same reason, he was a liability. The Church must after all keep
abreast of the times. For home consumption, with modern congregations,
especially urban ones, a certain streak of "healthy" skepticism is no
longer amiss in the pulpit; it makes people who read at all more comfortable in
their pews. A man like Hubert Diana is more for the cause than a hundred. But
what to do with him? Well, such things arrange themselves. There's the Foreign
Field. The blacker the heathen the whiter the light they'll want, and the
soldier the conception of a God the Father enthroned in a Heaven of which the
sky above them is the visible floor. 
And that, at bottom, was what Hubert Diana believed.
Accept as he would with the top of his brain the fact of a spherical earth
zooming through space, deep in his heart he knew that the world lay flat from
modern Illinois to ancient Palestine, and that the sky above it, blue by day
and by night festooned with guiding stars for wise men, was the nether side of
a floor on which the resurrected trod. 
I shall never forget the expression of his face when
he realized he was looking straight through it that night. In the quiet dark of
the dome I saw him remove. his eye from the eyepiece of the telescope up there
on the staging and turn it, in the ray of a hooded bulb, on the demon's keeper,
Krum. 
"What's that, Mr. Krum? I didn't get you!" 
"I say, that particular cluster you're looking at
" 
"This star, you mean?" 
"You'd have to count awhile to count the stars
describing their orbits in that 'star,' A4r. Diana. But what I was saying— have
you ever had the wish I used to have as a boy— that you could actually look
back into the past? With your own two eyes?" 
Diana spoke slowly. He didn't know it, but it had
already begun to happen; he was already caught. "I have often wished, Mr.
Krum, that I might actually look back into the time of our Lord. Actually.
Yes." 
Krum grunted. He was young. "We'd have to pick a
nearer neighbor than Messier 79 then. The event you see when you put your eye
to that lens is happening much too far in the past. The light waves thrown off
by that particular cluster on the day, say, of the Crucifixion— you won't live
to see them. They've hardly started yet— a mere twenty centuries on their way—
leaving them something like eight hundred and thirty centuries yet to come
before they reach the earth." 
Diana laughed the queerest catch of a laugh.
"And— and therethere won't be any earth here, then, to welcome them."
"What?" It was Krum's turn to look startled.
So for a moment the two faces remained in confrontation, the one, as I say,
startled, the other exuding visibly little sea-green globules of sweat. It was
Diana that caved in first, his voice hardly louder than a whisper. 
"W-w-will there?" 
None of us suspected the enormousness of the thing
that had happened in Diana's brain. Krum shrugged his shoulders and snapped his
fingers. Deliberately. Snap! "What's a thousand centuries or so in the
cosmic reckoning?" He chuckled. "We're just beginning to get out
among 'em with Messier, you know. In the print room, Mr. Diana, I can show you
photographs of clusters to which, if you cared to go, traveling at the speed of
light . . ." 
The voice ran on; but Diana's eye had gone back to the
eyepiece, and his affrighted soul had re-entered the big black tube sticking
its snout out of the slit in the iron hemisphere. . . . "At the speed of
light!" . . . That unsuspected, that wildly chance-found chink in the
armor of his philosophy! The body is resurrected and it ascends to Heaven
instantaneously. At what speed must it be borne to reach instantaneously that
city beyond the ceiling of the sky? At a speed inconceivable, mystical. At, say
(as he had often said to himself), the speed of light. . . . And now, hunched
there in the trap that had caught him, black rods, infernal levers and wheels,
he was aware of his own eye passing vividly through unpartitioned emptiness,
eight hundred and fifty centuries at the speed of light! 
"And still beyond these," Krum was heard,
"we begin to come into the regions of the spiral nebulae. We've some
interesting photographs in the print room, if you've the time." 
The ladies below were tired of waiting. One had
"lots of packing to do." The bride said, "Yes, I do think we
should be getting along, Hubert, dear; if you're ready — " 
The fellow actually jumped. It's lucky he didn't break
anything. His face looked greener and dewier than ever amid the contraptions
above. "If you— you and the ladies, Cora— wouldn't mind— if Mr.— Mr.—
[he'd mislaid my name] would see you back to the hotel . . ." Meeting
silence, he began to expostulate. "I feel that this is a rich experience.
I'll follow shortly; I know the way." 
In the car going back into the city Mrs. Diana set at
rest the flutterings of six hearts. Being unmarried, they couldn't understand
men as she did. When I think of that face of hers, to which I was destined to
grow only too accustomed in the weary, itchy days of the trek into
Kavirondoland, with its slightly tilted nose, its irregular pigmentation, its
easily inflamed lids and long moist cheeks, like those of a hunting dog,
glorying in weariness, it seems incredible that a light of coyness could have
found lodgment there. But that night it did. She sat serene among her virgins. 
"You don't know Bert. You wait; he'll get a
perfectly wonderful sermon out of all that tonight, Bert will." 
Krum was having a grand time with his neophyte. He
would have stayed up all night. Immured in the little print room crowded with
files and redolent of acids, he conducted his disciple "glassy-eyed"
through the dim frontiers of space, holding before him one after another the
likenesses of universes sister to our own, islanded in immeasurable vacancy,
curled like glimmering crullers on their private Milky Ways, and hiding in
their wombs their myriad "coal pockets," star-dust fetuses of which—
their quadrillion years accomplished— their litters of new suns would be born,
to bear their planets, to bear their moons in turn. 
"And beyond these?" 
Always, after each new feat of distance, it was the
same. "And beyond?" Given an ell, Diana surrendered to a pop-eyed
lust for nothing less than light-years. "And still beyond?" 
"Who knows?" 
"The mind quits. For if there's no end to these
nebulae " 
"But supposing there is?" 
"An end? But, Mr. Krum, in the very idea of an
ending " 
"An end to what we might call this particular
category of magnitudes. Eh?" 
"I don't get that." 
"Well, take this— take the opal in your ring
there. The numbers and distances inside that stone may conceivably be to
themselves as staggering as ours to us in our own system. Come! That's not so
farfetched. What are we learning about the structure of the atom? A nucleus
(call it a sun) revolved about in eternal orbits by electrons (call them
planets, worlds). Infinitesimal; but after all what are bigness and littleness
but matters of comparison? To eyes on one of those electrons (don't be too sure
there aren't any) its tutelary sun may flame its way across a heaven a
comparative ninety million miles away. Impossible for them to conceive of a
boundary to their billions of atomic systems, molecular universes. In that
category of magnitudes its diameter is infinity; once it has made the leap into
our category and become an opal it is merely a quarter of an inch. That's
right, Mr. Diana, you may well stare at it: between now and noiv ten thousand
histories may have come and gone down there. . . . And just so the diameter of
our own cluster of universes, going over into another category, may be " 
"May be a— a ring— a little stone— in a— a— a—
ring." 
Krum was tickled by the way the man's imagination
jumped and engulfed it. 
"Why not? That's as good a guess as the next. A
ring, let's say, worn carelessly on the— well, say the tentacle— of some vast
organism—some inchoate creature hobnobbing with its cloudy kind in another
system of universes— which in turn . . ." 
It is curious that none of them realized next day that
they were dealing with a stranger, a changed man. Why he carried on, why he
capped that night of cosmic debauch by shaving, eating an unremarkable
breakfast, packing his terrestrial toothbrush and collars, and going up the
gangplank in tow of his excited convoy to sail away, is beyond explanation—
unless it was simply that he was in a daze. 
It wasn't until four years later that I was allowed to
know what had happened on that ship, and even then the tale was so disjointed,
warped, and opinionated, so darkly seen in the mirror of Mrs. Diana's
orthodoxy, that I had almost to guess what it was really all about. 
"When Hubert turned irreligious . . ." That
phrase, recurrent on her tongue in the meanderings of the East African quest to
which we were by then committed, will serve to measure her understanding.
Irreligious! Good Lord! But from that sort of thing I had to reconstruct the
drama. Evening after evening beside her campfire (appended to the Mineral
Survey Expedition Toward Uganda through the kindness— actually the worn-down
surrender— of the Protectorate government) I lingered awhile before joining the
merrier engineers, watched with fascination the bumps growing under the
mosquitoes on her forehead, and listened to the jargon of her mortified
meekness and her scandalized faith. 
There had been a fatal circumstance, it seems, at the
very outset. If Diana could but have been seasick, as the rest of them were
(horribly), all might still have been well. In the misery of desired death,
along with the other contents of a heaving midriff, he might have brought up
the assorted universes of which he had been led too rashly to partake. But he
wasn't. As if his wife's theory were right, as if Satan were looking out for
him, he was spared to prowl the swooping decks immune. Four days and nights
alone. Time enough to digest and assimilate into his being beyond remedy that lump
of whirling magnitudes and to feel himself surrendering with a strange new
ecstasy to the drunkenness of liberty. 
Such liberty! Given Diana's type, it is hard to
imagine it adequately. The abrupt, complete removal of the toils of reward and
punishment; the withdrawal of the surveillance of an all-seeing, allknowing
Eye; the windy assurance of being responsible for nothing, important to no one,
no longer (as the police say) "wanted!" It must have been beautiful
in those few days of its first purity, before it began to be discolored by his
contemptuous pity for others, the mask of his inevitable loneliness and his
growing fright. 
The first any of them knew of it— even his wife— was
in midvoyage, the day the sea went down and the seven who had been sick came
up. There seemed an especial Providence in the calming of the waters; it was
Sunday morning, and Diana had been asked to conduct the services. 
He preached on the text: "For of such is the
kingdom of Heaven." 
"If our concept of God means anything it means a
God allmighty, Creator of all that exists, Director of the infinite, cherishing
in His Heaven the saved souls of all space and all timeP 
Of course; amen. And wasn't it nice to feel like
humans again, and real sunshine pouring up through the lounge ports from an
ocean suddenly grown kind? . . . But— then— what was Diana saying? 
Mrs. Diana couldn't tell about it coherently even
after a lapse of fifty months. Even in a setting as remote from that steamer's
lounge as the equatorial bush, the ember-reddened canopy of thorn trees, the
meandering campfires, the chant and tramp somewhere away of Kikuyu porters
dancing in honor of an especial largesse of fat zebra meat— even here her
memory of that impious outburst was too vivid, too aghast. 
"It was Hubert's look! The way he stared at us!
As if you'd said he was licking his chops! . . . That 'Heaven' of his!" 
It seems they hadn't waked up to what he was about
until he had the dimensions of his sardonic Paradise irreparably drawn in. The
final haven of all right souls. Not alone the souls released from this our own
tiny earth. In the millions of solar systems we see as stars how many millions
of satellites must there be upon which at some time in their histories
conditions suited to organic life subsist? Uncounted hordes of wheeling
populations! Of men? God's creatures at all events, a portion of them
reasoning. Weirdly shaped perhaps, but what of that? And that's only to speak
of our own inconsiderable cluster of universes. That's to say nothing of other
systems of magnitudes, where God's creatures are to our world what we are to
the worlds in the atoms in our finger rings. (He had shaken his, here, in their
astounded faces.) And all these, all the generations of these enormous and
microscopic beings harvested through a time beside which the life span of our
earth is as a second in a million centuries: all these brought to rest for an
eternity to which time itself is a watch tick— all crowded to rest pellmell,
thronged, serried, packed, packed to suffocation in layers unnumbered
light-years deep. This must needs be our concept of Heaven if God is the God of
the Whole. If, on the other hand — 
The other hand was the hand of the second officer, the
captain's delegate at divine worship that Sabbath day. He at last had
"come to." 
I don't know whether it was the same day or the next;
Mrs. Diana was too vague. But here's the picture. Seven women huddled in the
large stateroom on B deck, conferring in whispers, aghast, searching one
another's eye obliquely even as they bowed their heads in prayer for some
light— and of a sudden the putting back of the door and the in-marching of the
Reverend Hubert . . . 
As Mrs. Diana tried to tell me, "You understand,
don't you, he had just taken a bath? And he hadn't— he had forgotten to —
" 
Adam-innocent there he stood. Not a stitch. But I
don't believe for a minute it was a matter of forgetting. In the high
intoxication of his soul release, already crossed (by the second officer) and
beginning to show his zealot claws, he needed some gesture stunning enough to
witness to his separation, his unique rightness, his contempt of match-flare
civilizations and infinitesimal taboos. 
But I can imagine that stateroom scene: the gasps, the
heads colliding in aversion, and Diana's six weedy feet of birthday suit
towering in the shadows, and ready to sink through the deck I'll warrant, now
the act was irrevocable, but still grimly carrying it off. 
"And if, on the other hand, you ask me to bow
down before a God peculiar to this one earth, this one grain of dust lost among
the giants of space, watching its sparrows fall, profoundly interested in a
speck called Palestine no bigger than the quadrillionth part of one of the
atoms in the ring here on my finger . . ." 
Really scared by this time, one of the virgins
shrieked. It was altogether too close quarters with a madman. 
Mad? Of course there was the presumption: "Crazy
as a loon." Even legally it was so adjudged at the Platonic's first port
of call, Algiers, where, when Diana escaped ashore and wouldn't come back
again, he had to be given over to the workings of the French. Law. I talked
with the magistrate myself some forty months later, when, "let in"
for the business as I have told, I stopped there on my way out. 
"But what would you?" were his words.
"We must live in the world as the world lives, is it not? Sanity? Sanity
is what? Is it, for example, an intellectual clarity, a balanced perception of
the realities? Naturally, speaking out of court, your friend was of a sanity
—of a sanity, sir — " Here the magistrate made with thumb and fingers the
gesture only the French can make for a thing that is matchless, a beauty, a
transcendent instance of any kind. He himself was Gallic, rational. Then, with
a lift of shoulder: "But what would you? We must live in the world that
seems." 
Diana, impounded in Algiers for deportation, escaped.
What after all are the locks and keys of this pinchbeck category of magnitudes?
More remarkable still, there in Arab Africa, he succeeded in vanishing from the
knowledge and pursuit of men. And of women. His bride, now that their
particular mission had fallen through, was left to decide whether to return to
America or to go on with two of the company, the Misses Brookhart and Smutts,
who were bound for a school in Smyrna. In the end she followed the latter
course. It was there, nearly four years later, that I was sent to join her by
an exasperated and worn-out Firm. 
By that time she knew again where her husband-errant
was— or where at least, from time to time in his starry dartings over this our
mote of dust, he had been heard of, spoken to, seen. 
Could we but have a written history of those years of
his apostolic vagabondage, a record of the towns in which he was jailed or from
which he was kicked out, of the ports in which he starved, of the ships on
which he stowed away, presently to reveal himself in proselyting ardor,
denouncing the earthlings, the fatelings, the dupes of bugaboo, meeting scoff
with scoff, preaching the new revelation red-eyed, like an angry prophet. Or
was it, more simply, like a man afraid? 
Was that the secret, after all, of his prodigious
restlessness? Had it anything in common with the swarming of those pale worms
that flee the Eye of the Infinite around the curves of the stone you pick up in
a field? Talk of the man without a country! What of the man without a universe?
It is curious that I never suspected his soul's
dilemma until I saw the first of his mud sculptures in the native village of
Ndua in the province of Kasuma in British East. Here it was, our objective
attained, we parted company with the government safari and shifted the burden
of Way-straightening to the shoulders of Major Wyeside, the ostrich farmer of
the neighborhood. 
While still on the safari I had put to Mrs. Diana a
question that had bothered me: "Why on earth should your husband ever have
chosen this particular neck of the woods to land up in? Why Kavirondoland?
" 
"It was here we were coming at the time Hubert
turned irreligious, to found a mission. It's a coincidence, isn't it? " 
And yet I would have sworn Diana hadn't a sense of
humor about him anywhere. But perhaps it wasn't an ironic act. Perhaps it was
simply that, giving up the struggle with a society blinded by "a little
learning" and casting about for a virgin field, he had remembered this. 
"I supposed he was a missionary," Major
Wyeside told us with a flavor of indignation. "I went on that. I let him
live here— six or seven months of it— while he was learning the tongue. I was a
bit nonplused, to put it mildly, when I discovered what he was up to." 
What things Diana had been up to, the major showed us
in one of the huts in the native kraal— a round dozen of them, modeled in mud
and baked. Blackened blobs of mud, that's all. Likenesses of nothing under the
sun, fortuitous masses sprouting haphazard tentacles, only two among them
showing nodules that might have been experimental heads. . . . The ostrich
farmer saw our faces. 
"Rum, eh? Of course I realized the chap was
anything but fit. A walking skeleton. Nevertheless, whatever it is about these
beasties, there's not a nigger in the village has dared set foot inside this
hut since Diana left. You can see for yourselves it's about to crash. There's
another like it he left at Suki, above here. Taboo, no end!" 
So Diana's "hunch" had been right. He had
found his virgin field indeed, fit soil for his cosmic fright. A religion in
the making, here before our eyes. 
"This was at the very last before he left,"
Wyeside explained. "He took to making these mud pies quite of a sudden;
the whole lot within a fortnight's time. Before that he had simply talked,
harangued. He would sit here in the doorway of an evening with the niggers
squatted around and harangue 'em by the hour. I knew something of it through my
houseboys. The most amazing rot. All about the stars to begin with, as if these
black baboons could half grasp astronomy! But that seemed all proper. Then
there was talk about a something a hundred times as big and powerful as the
world, sun, moon, and stars put together— some perfectly enormous, stupendous,
awful being— but knowing how mixed the boys can get, it still seemed all
regular— simply the parson's way of getting at the notion of an Almighty God.
But no, they insisted, there wasn't any God. That's the point, they said; there
is no God. . . . Well, that impressed me as a go. That's when I decided to come
down and get the rights of this star-swallowing monstrosity the beggar was
feeding my labor on. And here he sat in the doorway with one of these beasties—
here it is, this one— waving it furiously in the niggers' benighted faces. And
do you know what he'd done?— you can see the mark here still on this wabble leg,
this tentacle businesshe had taken off a ring he had and screwed it on just
here. His finger ring, my word of honor! And still, if you'll believe it, I
didn't realize he was just daft. Not until he spoke to me. 'I find,' he was
good enough to enlighten me, 'I find I have to make it somehow concrete.' . . .
'Make what? ' . . . 'Our wearer.' 'Our what, ivhere?' ... 'In the following
category.' . . . His actual words, honor bright. I was going to have him sent
down country where he could be looked after. He got ahead of me though. He
cleared out. When I heard he'd turned up at Suki I ought, I suppose, to have
attended to it. But I was having trouble with leopards. And you know how things
go." 
From there we went to Suki, the major accompanying. It
was as like Ndua as one flea to its brother, a stockade inclosing round houses
of mud, wattles, and thatch, and full of naked heathen. The Kavirondo are the
nakedest of all African peoples and, it is said, the most moral. It put a great
strain on Mrs. Diana; all that whole difficult anxious time, as it were
detachedly, I could see her itching to get them into Mother Hubbards and
cast-off Iowa pants. 
Here too, as the major had promised, we found a holy
of holies, rather a dreadful of dreadfuls, "taboo no end," its shadows
cluttered with the hurlothrumbos of Diana's artistry. What puzzled me was their
number. Why this appetite for experimentation? There was an uncertainty; one
would think its effect on potential converts would be bad. Here, as in Ndua,
Diana had contented himself at first with words and skyward gesticulations. Not
for so long, however. Feeling the need of giving his concept of the cosmic
"wearer" a substance much earlier, he had shut himself in with the
work, literally— a fever of creation. We counted seventeen of the nameless
"blobs," all done, we were told, in the seven days and nights before
their maker had again cleared out. The villagers would hardly speak of him;
only after spitting to protect themselves, their eyes averted, and in an undertone,
would they mention him: "He of the Ring." Thereafter we were to hear
of him only as "He of the Ring." 
Leaving Suki, Major Wyeside turned us over
(thankfully, I warrant) to a native who told us his name was Charlie Kamba. He
had spent some years in Nairobi, running for an Indian outfitter, and spoke
English remarkably well. It was from him we learned, quite casually, when our
modest eight-load safari was some miles on its way, that the primary object of
our coming was non-existent. Hubert Diana was dead. 
Dead nearly five weeks— a moon and a little— and
buried in the mission church at Tara Hill. Mission church! There was a poser
for us. Mission church? 
Well then, Charlie Kamba gave us to know that he was
paraphrasing in a large way suitable to our habits of thought. We wouldn't have
understood his informant's "wizard house" or "house of the
effigy." 
I will say for Mrs. Diana that in the course of our
halt of luo-ubrious amazement she shed tears. That some of them were not tears
of unrealized relief it would be hardly natural to believe. She had desired
loyally to find her husband, but when she should have found him— what? This
problem, sturdily ignored so long, was now removed. 
Turn back? Never! Now it would seem the necessity for
pressing forward was doubled. In the scrub-fringed ravine of our halt the
porters resumed their loads, the dust stood up again, the same caravan moved
on. But how far it was now from being the same. 
From that moment it took on, for me at least, a new
character. It wasn't the news especially; the fact that Diana was dead had
little to do with it. Perhaps it was simply that the new sense of something
aimfully and cumulatively dramatic in our progress had to have a beginning, and
that moment would do as well as the next. 
Six villages: M'nann, Leika, Leikapo, Shamba, Little
Tara, and Tara, culminating in the apotheosis of Tara Hill. Six stops for the
night on the road it had cost Diana as many months to cover in his singular
pilgrimage to his inevitable goal. Or in his flight to it. Yes, his stampede.
Now the pipers at that four-day orgy of liberty on the Platonic's decks were at
his heels for their pay. Now that his strength was failing, the hosts of
loneliness were after him, creeping out of their dreadful magnitudes, the
hounds of space. Over all that ground it seemed to me we were following him not
by the word of hearsay but, as one follows a wounded animal making for its
earth, by the droppings of his blood. 
Our progress had taken on a pattern; it built itself
with a dramatic artistry; it gathered suspense. As though it were a story at
its most breathless places "continued in our next," and I a reader
forgetting the road's weariness, the dust, the torment of insects never
escaped, the inadequate food, I found myself hardly able to keep from running
on ahead to reach the evening's village, to search out the inevitable
repository of images left by the white stranger who had come and tarried there
awhile and gone again. 
More concrete and ever more concrete. The immemorial
compromise with the human hunger for a symbol to see with the eyes, touch with
the hands. Hierarchy after hierarchy of little mud effigies— one could see the
necessity pushing the man. Out of the protoplasmic blobs of Ndua, Suki, even
M'nann, at Leikapo Diana's concept of infinity (so pure in that halcyon epoch
at sea), of categories nested within categories like Japanese boxes, of an
overcreature wearing our cosmos like a trinket, unawares, had become a mass
with legs to stand on and a real head. The shards scattered about in the filth
of the hut there (as if in violence of despair) were still monstrosities, but
with a sudden stride of concession their monstrousness was the monstrousness of
lizard and turtle and crocodile. At Shamba there were dozens of huge-footed
birds. 
It is hard to be sure in retrospect, but I do believe
that by the time we reached Little Tara I began to see the thing as a whole—
the fetus, working out slowly, blindly, but surely, its evolution in the womb
of fright. At Little Tara there was a change in the character of the exhibits;
their numbers had diminished, their size had grown. There was a boar with tusks
and a bull the size of a dog with horns, and on a tusk and on a horn an indentation
left by a ring. 
I don't believe Mrs. Diana got the thing at all.
Toward the last she wasn't interested in the huts of relics; at Little Tara she
wouldn't go near the place; she was "too tired." It must have been
pretty awful, when you think of it, even if all she saw in them was the mud-pie
play of a man reverted to a child. 
There was another thing at Little Tara quite as
momentous as the jump to boar and bull. Here at last a mask had been thrown
aside. Here there had been no pretense of proselyting, no astronomical
lectures, no doorway harangues. Straightway he had arrived (a fabulous figure
already, long heralded), he had commandeered a house and shut himself up in it
and there, mysterious, assiduous, he had remained three days and nights, eating
nothing, but drinking gallons of the foul water they left in gourds outside his
curtain of reeds. No one in the village had ever seen what he had done and left
there. Now, candidly, those labors were for himself alone. 
Here at last in Tara the moment of that confession had
overtaken the fugitive. It was he, ill with fever and dying of nostalgia— not
these naked black baboon men seen now as little more than blurs— who had to
give the Beast of the Infinite a name and a shape. And more and more, not only
a shape, but a shapeliness. From the instant when, no longer able to live alone
with nothingness, he had given it a likeness in Ndua mud, and perceived that it
was intolerable and fled its face, the turtles and distorted crocodiles of
Leikapo and the birds of Shamba had become inevitable, and no less inevitable
the Little Tara boar and bull. Another thing grows plain in retrospect: the
reason why, done to death (as all the way they reported him), he couldn't die.
He didn't dare to. Didn't dare to close his eyes. 
It was at Little Tara we first heard of him as
"Father Witch," a name come back, we were told, from Tara, where he
had gone. I had heard it pronounced several times before it suddenly obtruded
from the native context as actually two English words. That was what made it
queer. It was something they must have picked up by rote, uncomprehending;
something then they could have had from no lips but his own. When I repeated it
after them with a better accent they pointed up toward the north, saying,
"Tara! Tara!"— their eagerness mingled with awe. 
I shall never forget Tara as we saw it, after our last
blistering scramble up a gorge, situated in the clear air on a slope belted
with cedars. A mid-African stockade left by some blunder in an honest Colorado
landscape, or a newer and bigger Vermont. Here at the top of our journey, black
savages, their untidy shambas, the very equator, all these seemed as
incongruous as a Gothic cathedral in a Congo marsh. I wonder if Hubert Diana
knew whither his instinct was guiding him on the long road of his journey here
to die. . . . 
He had died and he was buried, not in the village, but
about half a mile distant, on the ridge; this we were given to know almost
before we had arrived. There was no need to announce ourselves, the word of our
coming had outrun us; the populace was at the gates. 
"Our Father Witch! Our Father Witch!" They
knew what we were after; the funny parrotwise English stood out from the clack
and clatter of their excited speech. "Our Father Witch! Ay! Ay!" With
a common eagerness they gesticulated at the hilltop beyond the cedars. 
Certainly here was a change. No longer the
propitiatory spitting, the averted eyes, the uneasy whispering allusion to him
who had passed that way: here in Tara they would shout him from the housetops,
with a kind of civic pride. 
We learned the reason for this on our way up the hill.
It was because they were his chosen, the initiate. 
We made the ascent immediately, against the village's
advice. It was near evening; the return would be in the dark; it was a bad
country for goblins; wouldn't tomorrow morning do? . . . No, it wouldn't do the
widow. Her face was set. . . . And so, since we were resolved to go, the
village went with us, armed with rattles and drums. Charlie Kamba walked beside
us, sifting the information a hundred were eager to give. 
These people were proud, he said, because their wizard
was more powerful than all the wizards of all the other villages "in the
everywhere together." If he cared to he could easily knock down all the
other villages in the "everywhere," destroying all the people and all
the cattle. If he cared to he could open his mouth and swallow the sky and the
stars. But Tara he had chosen. Tara he would protect. He made their mealies to
grow and their cattle to multiply. 
I protested, "But he is dead now." 
Charlie Kamba made signs of deprecation. I discerned
that he was far from being clear about the thing himself. 
Yes, he temporized, this Father Witch was dead, quite
dead. On the other hand he was up there. On the other hand he would never die.
He was longer than forever. Yes, quite true, he was dead and buried under the
pot. 
I gave it up. "How did he die?" 
Well, he came to this village of Tara very suffering,
very sick. The dead man who walked. His face was very sad. Very eaten. Very
frightened. He came to this hill. So he lived here for two full moons, very
hot, very eaten, very dead. These men made him a house as he commanded them,
also a stockade. In the house he was very quiet, very dead, making magic two
full moons. Then he came out and they that were waiting saw him. He had made
the magic, and the magic had made him well. His face was kind. He was happy. He
was full-fed. He was full-fed, these men said, without any eating. Yes, they
carried up to him very fine food, because they were full of wonder and some
fear, but he did not eat any of it. Some water he drank. So, for two days and
the night between them he continued sitting in the gate of the stockade, very
happy, very full-fed. He told these people very much about their wizard, who is
bigger than everywhere and longer than forever and can, if he cares to, swallow
the sky and stars. From time to time, however, ceasing to talk to these people,
he got to his knees and talked in his own strange tongue to Our Father Witch,
his eyes held shut. When he had done this just at sunset of the second day he fell
forward on his face. So he remained that night. The next day these men took him
into the house and buried him under the pot. On the other hand Our Father Witch
is longer than forever. He remains there still. . . . 
The first thing I saw in the hut's interior was the
earthen pot at the northern end, wrong side up on the ground. I was glad I had
preceded Mrs. Diana. I walked across and sat down on it carelessly, hoping so
that her afflicted curiosity might be led astray. It gave me the oddest
feeling, though, to think of what was there beneath my nonchalant sitting
portion— aware as I was of the Kavirondo burial of a great man— up to the neck
in mother earth, and the rest of him left out in the dark of the pot for the
undertakings of the ants. I hoped his widow wouldn't wonder about that inverted
vessel of clay. 
I needn't have worried. Her attention was arrested
otherwheres. I shall not forget the look of her face, caught above me in the
red shaft of sundown entering the western door, as she gazed at the last and
the largest of the Reverend Hubert Diana's gods. That long, long cheek of hers,
buffeted by sorrow, startled now and mortified. Not till that moment, I
believe, had she comprehended the steps of mud images she had been following
for what they were, the steps of idolatry. 
For my part, I wasn't startled. Even before we started
up the hill, knowing that her husband had dared to die here, I could have told
her pretty much what she would find. 
This overlord of the cosmic categories that he had
fashioned (at last) in his own image sat at the other end of the red-streaked
house upon a bench— a throne?— of mud. Diana had been no artist. An ovoid
two-eyed head, a cylindrical trunk, two arms, two legs, that's all. But
indubitably man, man-size. Only one finger of one of the hands had been done
with much care. It wore an opal, a two-dollar stone from Mexico, set in a
silver ring. This was the hand that was lifted, and over it the head was bent. 
I've said Diana was no artist. I'll take back the
words. The figure was crudeness itself, but in the relation between that bent
head and that lifted hand there was something which was something else. A sense
of scrutiny one would have said no genius of mud could ever have conveyed. An
attitude of interest centered in that bauble, intense and static, breathless
and eternal all in one— penetrating to its bottom atom, to the last electron,
to a hill upon it, and to a two-legged mite about to die. Marking (yes, I'll
swear to the incredible) the sparrow's fall. 
The magic was made. The road that had commenced with
the blobs of Ndua— the same that commenced with our hairy ancestors listening
to the night wind in their caves— was run. 
And from here Diana, of a sudden happy, of a sudden
looked after, "full-fed," had walked out 
But no; I couldn't stand that mortified sorrow on the
widow's face any longer. She had to be made to see what she wanted to see. I
said it aloud: 
"From here, Mrs. Diana, your husband walked out —
" 
"He had sunk to idolatry. Idolatry!" 
"To the bottom, yes. And come up its whole
history again. And from here he walked out into the sunshine to kneel and talk
with 'Our Father Witch — ' " 
She got it. She caught it. I wish you could have seen
the light going up those long, long cheeks as she got it: 
"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy
Name!" 
We went down hill in the darkness, protected against
goblins by a vast rattling of gourds and beating of heathen drums.
Category:Steele
Category:Published