Part 12

Once only, after the period of childhood, I knew this emotion in a strong form. It was remarkable as representing the vivid projection of a dream-fear into waking consciousness; and the experience was peculiarly tropical. In tropical countries, owing to atmospheric conditions, the oppression of dreams is a more serious suffering than with us, and is perhaps most common during the siesta. All who can afford it pass their nights in the country; but for obvious reasons the majority of colonists must be content to take their siesta, and its consequences, in town.

The West-Indian siesta does not refresh like that dreamless midday nap which we enjoy in Northern summers. It is a stupefaction rather than a sleep,--beginning with a miserable feeling of weight at the base of the brain: it is a helpless surrender of the whole mental and physical being to the overpressure of light and heat. Often it is haunted by ugly visions, and often broken by violent leaps of the heart. Occasionally it is disturbed also by noises never noticed at other times. When the city lies all naked to the sun, stripped by noon of every shadow, and empty of wayfarers, the silence becomes amazing. In that silence the papery rustle of a palm-leaf, or the sudden sound of a lazy wavelet on the beach,--like the clack of a thirsty tongue,--comes immensely magnified to the ear. And this noon, with its monstrous silence, is for the black people the hour of ghosts. Everything alive is senseless with the intoxication of light;--even the woods drowse and droop in their wrapping of lianas, drunk with sun....

Out of the siesta I used to be most often startled, not by sounds, but by something which I can describe only as a sudden shock of thought. This would follow upon a peculiar internal commotion caused, I believe, by some abnormal effect of heat upon the lungs. A slow suffocating sensation would struggle up into the twilight-region between half-consciousness and real sleep, and there bestir the ghastliest imaginings,--fancies and fears of living burial. These would be accompanied by a voice, or rather the idea of a voice, mocking and reproaching:--“‘_Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun._’... Outside it is day,--tropical day,--primeval day! And you sleep!!... ‘_Though a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet--_’ ... Sleep on!--all this splendor will be the same when your eyes are dust!... ‘_Yet let him remember the days of darkness_;--FOR THEY SHALL BE MANY!’”

* * * * *

How often, with that phantom crescendo in my ears, have I leaped in terror from the hot couch, to peer through the slatted shutters at the enormous light without--silencing, mesmerizing;--then dashed cold water over my head, and staggered back to the scorching mattress, again to drowse, again to be awakened by the same voice, or by the trickling of my own perspiration--a feeling not always to be distinguished from that caused by the running of a centipede! And how I used to long for the night, with its Cross of the South! Not because the night ever brought coolness to the city, but because it brought relief from the _weight_ of that merciless sunfire. For the feeling of such light is the feeling of a deluge of something ponderable,--something that drowns and dazzles and burns and numbs all at the same time, and suggests the idea of liquified electricity.

* * * * *

There are times, however, when the tropical heat seems only to thicken after sunset. On the mountains the nights are, as a rule, delightful the whole year round. They are even more delightful on the coast facing the trade-winds; and you may sleep there in a seaward chamber, caressed by a warm, strong breeze,--a breeze that plays upon you not by gusts or whiffs, but with a steady ceaseless blowing,--the great fanning wind-current of the world’s whirling. But in the towns of the other coast--nearly all situated at the base of wooded ranges cutting off the trade-breeze,--the humid atmosphere occasionally becomes at night something nameless,--something worse than the air of an overheated conservatory. Sleep in such a medium is apt to be visited by nightmare of the most atrocious kind.

My personal experience was as follows:--

II

I was making a tour of the island with a half-breed guide; and we had to stop for one night in a small leeward-coast settlement, where we found accommodation at a sort of lodging-house kept by an aged widow. There were seven persons only in the house that night,--the old lady, her two daughters, two colored female-servants, myself and my guide. We were given a single-windowed room upstairs, rather small,--otherwise a typical, Creole bedroom, with bare clean floor, some heavy furniture of antique pattern, and a few rocking-chairs. There was in one corner a bracket supporting a sort of household shrine--what the Creoles call a _chapelle_. The shrine contained a white image of the Virgin before which a tiny light was floating in a cup of oil. By colonial custom your servant, while travelling with you, sleeps either in the same room, or before the threshold; and my man simply lay down on a mat beside the huge four-pillared couch assigned to me, and almost immediately began to snore. Before getting into bed, I satisfied myself that the door was securely fastened.

* * * * *

The night stifled;--the air seemed to be coagulating. The single large window, overlooking a garden, had been left open,--but there was no movement in that atmosphere. Bats--very large bats,--flew soundlessly in and out;--one actually fanning my face with its wings as it circled over the bed. Heavy scents of ripe fruit--nauseously sweet--rose from the garden, where palms and plantains stood still as if made of metal. From the woods above the town stormed the usual night-chorus of tree-frogs, insects, and nocturnal birds,--a tumult not to be accurately described by any simile, but suggesting, through numberless sharp tinkling tones, the fancy of a wide slow cataract of broken glass. I tossed and turned on the hot hard bed, vainly trying to find one spot a little cooler than the rest. Then I rose, drew a rocking-chair to the window and lighted a cigar. The smoke hung motionless; after each puff, I had to blow it away. My man had ceased to snore. The bronze of his naked breast--shining with moisture under the faint light of the shrine-lamp,--showed no movement of respiration. He might have been a corpse. The heavy heat seemed always to become heavier. At last, utterly exhausted, I went back to bed, and slept.

* * * * *

It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague uneasiness,--_the suspicion_,--that precedes a nightmare. I was half-conscious, dream-conscious of the actual,--knew myself in that very room,--wanted to get up. Immediately the uneasiness grew into terror, because I found that I could not move. Something unutterable in the air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultaneously I became aware of a Step ascending the stair,--a muffled heaviness; and the real nightmare began,--the horror of the ghastly magnetism that held voice and limb,--the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached, but with lentor malevolently measured,--slowly, slowly, as if the stairs were miles deep. It gained the threshold,--waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came,--a thing robed,--feminine,--reaching to the roof,--not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed;--and then--with a frantic effort--I woke, bathed in sweat; my heart beating as if it were going to burst. The shrine-light had died: in the blackness I could see nothing; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard moanings,--long nightmare moanings,--moanings that seemed to be answering each other from two different rooms below. And then, close to me, my guide began to moan,--hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him:--

“Louis!--Louis!”

We both sat up at once. I heard him panting, and I knew that he was fumbling for his cutlass in the dark. Then, in a voice husky with fear, he asked:--

“_Missié, ess ou tanne?_” [Monsieur, est-ce que vous entendez?]

The moaners continued to moan,--always in crescendo: then there were sudden screams,--“_Madame!_”--“_Manzell!_”--and running of bare feet, and sounds of lamps being lighted, and, at last, a general clamor of frightened voices. I rose, and groped for the matches. The moans and the clamor ceased.

“_Missié_,” my man asked again, “_ess ou tè oué y?_” [Monsieur, est-ce que vous l’avez vue?]

--“_Ça ou le di?_” [Qu’est-ce que vous voulez dire?] I responded in bewilderment, as my fingers closed on the match-box.

--“_Fenm-là?_” he answered.... THAT WOMAN?

The question shocked me into absolute immobility. Then I wondered if I could have understood. But he went on in his patois, as if talking to himself:--

--“Tall, tall--high like this room, that Zombi. When She came the floor cracked. I heard--I saw.”

After a moment, I succeeded in lighting a candle, and I went to the door. It was still locked,--double-locked. No human being could have entered through the high window.

--“Louis!” I said, without believing what I said,--“you have been only dreaming.”

--“Missié,” he answered, “it was no dream. _She has been in all the rooms, touching people!_”

I said,--

--“That is foolishness! See!--the door is double-locked.”

Louis did not even look at the door, but responded:--

--“Door locked, door not locked, Zombi comes and goes.... I do not like this house.... Missié, leave that candle burning!”

He uttered the last phrase imperatively, without using the respectful _souplé_--just as a guide speaks at an instant of common danger; and his tone conveyed to me the contagion of his fear. Despite the candle, I knew for one moment the sensation of nightmare outside of sleep! The coincidences stunned reason; and the hideous primitive fancy fitted itself, like a certitude, to the explanation of cause and effect. The similarity of my vision and the vision of Louis, the creaking of the floor heard by us both, the visit of the nightmare to every room in succession,--these formed a more than unpleasant combination of evidence. I tried the planking with my foot in the place where I thought I had seen the figure: it uttered the very same loud creak that I had heard before. “_Ça pa ka sam révé_,” said Louis. No!--that was not like dreaming. I left the candle burning, and went back to bed--not to sleep, but to think. Louis lay down again, with his hand on the hilt of his cutlass.

* * * * *

I thought for a long time. All was now silent below. The heat was at last lifting; and occasional whiffs of cooler air from the garden announced the wakening of a land-breeze. Louis, in spite of his recent terror, soon began to snore again. Then I was startled by hearing a plank creak--quite loudly,--the same plank that I had tried with my foot. This time Louis did not seem to hear it. There was nothing there. It creaked twice more,--and I understood. The intense heat first, and the change of temperature later, had been successively warping and unwarping the wood so as to produce those sounds. In the state of dreaming, which is the state of imperfect sleep, noises may be audible enough to affect imagination strongly,--and may startle into motion a long procession of distorted fancies. At the same time it occurred to me that the almost concomitant experiences of nightmare in the different rooms could be quite sufficiently explained by the sickening atmospheric oppression of the hour.

There still remained the ugly similitude of the two dreams to be accounted for; and a natural solution of this riddle also, I was able to find after some little reflection. The coincidence had certainly been startling; but the similitude was only partial. That which my guide had seen in his nightmare was a familiar creation of West-Indian superstition--probably of African origin. But the shape that I had dreamed about used to vex my sleep in childhood,--a phantom created for me by the impression of a certain horrible Celtic story which ought not to have been told to any child blessed, or cursed, with an imagination.

III

Musing on this experience led me afterwards to think about the meaning of that fear which we call “the fear of darkness,” and yet is not really fear of darkness. Darkness, as a simple condition, never could have originated the feeling,--a feeling that must have preceded any definite idea of ghosts by thousands of ages. The inherited, instinctive fear, as exhibited by children, is not a fear of darkness in itself, but of indefinable danger associated with darkness. Evolutionally explained, this dim but voluminous terror would have for its primal element the impressions created by real experience--experience of something acting in darkness;--and the fear of the supernatural would mingle in it only as a much later emotional development. The primeval cavern-gloom lighted by nocturnal eyes;--the blackness of forest-gaps by river-marges, where destruction lay in wait to seize the thirsty;--the umbrages of tangled shores concealing horror;--the dusk of the python’s lair;--the place of hasty refuge echoing the fury of famished brute and desperate man;--the place of burial, and the fancied frightful kinship of the buried to the cave-haunters:--all these, and countless other impressions of the relation of darkness to death, must have made that ancestral fear of the dark which haunts the imagination of the child, and still betimes seizes the adult as he sleeps in the security of civilization.

Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that strange nightmare-sensation of being held by invisible power exerted from a distance--is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite inheritance of numberless memories of _having been caught_? Perhaps the true explanation would suggest no prenatal experience of monstrous mesmerisms nor of monstrous webs,--nothing more startling than the evolutional certainty that man, in the course of his development, has left behind him conditions of terror incomparably worse than any now existing. Yet enough of the psychological riddle of nightmare remains to tempt the question whether human organic memory holds no record of extinct forms of pain,--pain related to strange powers once exerted by some ghastly vanished life.

The Eternal Haunter

This year the Tōkyō color-prints--_Nishiki-è_--seem to me of unusual interest. They reproduce, or almost reproduce, the color-charm of the early broadsides; and they show a marked improvement in line-drawing. Certainly one could not wish for anything prettier than the best prints of the present season.

My latest purchase has been a set of weird studies,--spectres of all kinds known to the Far East, including many varieties not yet discovered in the West. Some are extremely unpleasant; but a few are really charming. Here, for example, is a delicious thing by “Chikanobu,” just published, and for sale at the remarkable price of three _sen_!

Can you guess what it represents?... Yes, a girl,--but what kind of a girl? Study it a little.... Very lovely, is she not, with that shy sweetness in her downcast gaze,--that light and dainty grace, as of a resting butterfly?... No, she is not some Psyche of the most Eastern East, in the sense that you mean--but she is a soul. Observe that the cherry-flowers falling from the branch above, are passing _through_ her form. See also the folds of her robe, below, melting into blue faint mist. How delicate and vapory the whole thing is! It gives you the feeling of spring; and all those fairy colors are the colors of a Japanese spring-morning.... No, she is not the personification of any season. Rather she is a dream--such a dream as might haunt the slumbers of Far-Eastern youth; but the artist did not intend her to represent a dream.... You cannot guess? Well, she is a tree-spirit,--the Spirit of the Cherry-tree. Only in the twilight of morning or of evening she appears, gliding about her tree;--and whoever sees her must love her. But, if approached, she vanishes back into the trunk, like a vapor absorbed. There is a legend of one tree-spirit who loved a man, and even gave him a son; but such conduct was quite at variance with the shy habits of her race....

You ask what is the use of drawing the Impossible? Your asking proves that you do not feel the charm of this vision of youth,--this dream of spring. _I_ hold that the Impossible bears a much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. The Impossible may not be naked truth; but I think that it is usually truth,--masked and veiled, perhaps, but eternal. Now to me this Japanese dream is true,--true, at least, as human love is. Considered even as a ghost it is true. Whoever pretends not to believe in ghosts of any sort, lies to his own heart. Every man is haunted by ghosts. And this color-print reminds me of a ghost whom we all know,--though most of us (poets excepted) are unwilling to confess the acquaintance.

* * * * *

Perhaps--for it happens to some of us--you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of the night, even during childhood. Then, of course, you could not know the beautiful shape bending above your rest: possibly you thought her to be an angel, or the soul of a dead sister. But in waking life we first become aware of her presence about the time when boyhood begins to ripen into youth.

This first of her apparitions is a shock of ecstasy, a breathless delight; but the wonder and the pleasure are quickly followed by a sense of sadness inexpressible,--totally unlike any sadness ever felt before,--though in her gaze there is only caress, and on her lips the most exquisite of smiles. And you cannot imagine the reason of that feeling until you have learned who she is,--which is not an easy thing to learn.

Only a moment she remains; but during that luminous moment all the tides of your being set and surge to her with a longing for which there is not any word. And then--suddenly!--she is not; and you find that the sun has gloomed, the colors of the world turned grey.

Thereafter enchantment remains between you and all that you loved before,--persons or things or places. None of them will ever seem again so near and dear as in other days.

Often she will return. Once that you have seen her she will never cease to visit you. And this haunting,--ineffably sweet, inexplicably sad,--may fill you with rash desire to wander over the world in search of somebody like her. But however long and far you wander, never will you find that somebody.

Later you may learn to fear her visits because of the pain they bring,--the strange pain that you cannot understand. But the breadth of zones and seas cannot divide you from her; walls of iron cannot exclude her. Soundless and subtle as a shudder of ether is the motion of her.

Ancient her beauty as the heart of man,--yet ever waxing fairer, forever remaining young. Mortals wither in Time as leaves in the frost of autumn; but Time only brightens the glow and the bloom of her endless youth.

All men have loved her;--all must continue to love her. But none shall touch with his lips even the hem of her garment.

All men adore her; yet all she deceives, and many are the ways of her deception. Most often she lures her lover into the presence of some earthly maid, and blends herself incomprehensibly with the body of that maid, and works such sudden glamour that the human gaze becomes divine,--that the human limbs shine through their raiment. But presently the luminous haunter detaches herself from the mortal, and leaves her dupe to wonder at the mockery of sense.

No man can describe her, though nearly all men have some time tried to do so. Pictured she cannot be,--since her beauty itself is a ceaseless becoming, multiple to infinitude, and tremulous with perpetual quickening, as with flowing of light.

There is a story, indeed, that thousands of years ago some marvellous sculptor was able to fix in stone a single remembrance of her. But this doing became for many the cause of sorrow supreme; and the Gods decreed, out of compassion, that to no other mortal should ever be given power to work the like wonder. In these years we can worship only;--we cannot portray.

But who is she?--what is she?... Ah! that is what I wanted you to ask. Well, she has never had a name; but I shall call her a tree-spirit.

The Japanese say that you can exorcise a tree-spirit,--if you are cruel enough to do it,--simply by cutting down her tree.

But you cannot exorcise the Spirit of whom I speak,--nor ever cut down her tree.

For her tree is the measureless, timeless, billion-branching Tree of Life,--even the World-Tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots are in Night and Death, whose head is above the Gods.

Seek to woo her--she is Echo. Seek to clasp her--she is Shadow. But her smile will haunt you into the hour of dissolution and beyond,--through numberless lives to come.

And never will you return her smile,--never, because of that which it awakens within you,--the pain that you cannot understand.

And never, never shall you win to her,--because she is the phantom light of long-expired suns,--because she was shaped by the beating of infinite millions of hearts that are dust,--because her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the visions and hopes of youth, through countless forgotten cycles of your own incalculable past.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

A half-title page at the front of the book, and duplicate title headings which were printed before all except the first essay in each section, have been removed.

Illustrations have been moved next to the text which they illustrate, and so may not match the order in the List of Illustrations.

The following printing errors have been corrected:

Illustration following p. 50 “Kutswamushi” changed to “Kutsuwamushi”

p. 70 “KIN-HIBARI _natural size_)” changed to “KIN-HIBARI (_natural size_)”

p. 101 “sublety” changed to “subtlety”

p. 123 “inaminate” changed to “inanimate”

p. 127 “--The” changed to “--‘The”

p. 127 “Buddha.” changed to “Buddha.’”

Illustration after p. 136 “Seishi ‘Bosatsu” changed to “Seishi Bosatsu”

p. 142 “the Law” changed to “the-Law”

p. 142 “the Wondrous” changed to “the-Wondrous”

p. 142 (note) “reads:--Ji” changed to “reads:--“Ji”

p. 147 “Benevolence Listening” changed to “Benevolence-Listening”

p. 150 “Cloud-and Sword” changed to “Cloud-and-Sword”

p. 266 “softnesss” changed to “softness”

The following are inconsistently used:

bowstring and bow-string

glass-beads and glass beads

hataori and hata-ori

Kūkai and Kū-kai

lifetime and life-time

Sâkyamuni and Sakyamuni

skyblue and sky-blue

superindividual and super-individual

superindividuality and super-individuality

Sûtra (and sûtra) and Sutra (and sutra)

End of Project Gutenberg's Exotics and Retrospectives, by Lafcadio Hearn