Nowhere

“ The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they faced about again.
“Upon my word, my dear,” said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from her to her visitor, “it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will excuse me) take a rounder.”
Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear. ”

“ Beyond the deceitful web which wraps the earth was the true heaven, endless space, and it was black, ominously obscure, with the sputtering spark of burning tears, of infinite worlds, little lamps of eternity in whose flame lived other swarms of invisible atoms, and the icy, blind, and cruel soul of shadowy space laughed at their passions and longings, at the lies they fabricated incessantly to protect their ephemeral existence, striving to prolong it with the illusion of an immortal soul. ”

“ Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.” ”

“ It has been built and burrowed from time immemorial far down underneath some great, beautiful, sunny, human metropolis, called The World Above, but of this light-crowned city those who inhabit the subterranean retreats of The Darker Realm know but little, of its happy days and doings they can but dream. ”

“ Stand there alone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived—nor ever will live—where the silence is a thing, pressing closer and closer [93] about you—smothering you—so that, instinctively, you throw out your hands to push it away that you may breathe—then you begin to know desolation—the utter desolation of the frozen wilderness, the cold, dead land of mystery. ”

“ Empty, lifeless, its streets deserted and bare, its vast mass of towering structures of blue vibrations without occupant of any kind! No single serpent-shape moved in all that tremendous city, and I saw that upon the great clearing where the vast serpent-fleet and the colossal death-beam cone had rested there was now nothing. The world beneath us, the universe about us, were a world, universe—deserted! ”

“ Space and darkness began to demand human attention. Unable to do otherwise, she looked up and contemplated the big blackboard of night, and especially the North Star, to which the front stars of the Dipper served as a pointer. And very soon she was wholly engaged upon the silence.
It is no small thing, if you are not used to it, to occupy a lone prairie at night. You face the absence of the whole human race. The ominous stillness centres upon you with all the weight of Past, Present, and Future. You are sitting up with the universe. ”

“ Then in silence—for here we respire with difficulty, and talk but little—in the centre of this immense space, in solitude, without a single object to interrupt the view for 200 miles or more all round, abstracted from the earth, upheld by an invisible medium, our mouths so dry that we cannot eat, a white sea below us, so far below, we see few, if any, irregularities. ”

“ The human soul demanded to shriek aloud in order to preserve its sanity, and yet a whisper uttered over against the heavy portent of this universal stillness seemed a profanation that left the spirit crouched beneath a fear of retribution. And then suddenly the aurora, the only privileged voice, would crackle like a silken banner.
At first the world in the vastness of its spaces seemed to become bigger and bigger. ”

“ And All of Us, and many of this company, shared each other’s lives for one bright, sunny year, away Behind the Back of Beyond, in the Land of the Never-Never; in that elusive land with an elusive name—a land of dangers and hardships and privations yet loved as few lands are loved—a land that bewitches her people with strange spells and mysteries, until they call sweet bitter, and bitter sweet. ”

“ Then, the strange, lost, homeless feeling that Home is nothing but a cot and a box in a big bare barrack-room, that the whole of God’s wide Universe contains no private and enclosed spot that is one’s own peculiar place wherein to be alone—at first a truly terrible feeling. ”

“ We are in the region of that eternal silence which wraps the summit of the ‘everlasting hills.’ A hush of dreamy repose broods over this lofty peak, which still retains the last rays of the setting sun, while over the world below twilight has fallen. ”

“ To the region of shadow, The region of death, Where dust is a stranger, And life has no breath; Where darkness and silence Their dim shrouds have cast Round the phantoms of worlds That belong to the past ”

“ Even in the toiling hum-drum city, her spirit comes to us. There is a sombre presence in each long, dull street; and the dark river creeps ghost-like, under the black arches, as if bearing some hidden secret beneath its muddy waves. ”

“ And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
148
A PHANTASY
I have dreamt of an unknown land—a land remote in ulterior time, and alien space not ascertainable: the desert of a long-completed past, upon which has settled the bleak, irrevocable silence of infinitude; where all is ruined save the stone of tombs and cenotaphs; and where the sole peoples are the kingless, uncounted tribes of the subterranean dead. ”

“ And there is no horizon anywhere around, for above is a sky of rolling clouds through which the sun never shines, and the mists of the mountain-tops mingle with the clouds of the sky, and so, too, does the sullen haze that lies on the grey sea. It is the region of death—no life, no light, no love. ”

“ You might walk through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, and yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered like one who steps out of the light into darkness ”

“ I, an idle singer, fleeing from the world's shame, make a pilgrimage to an unknown land—O Heaven—or Hell?
Thou Silence, who never responds to mortal's voice, where is the secret door of Paradise?—Speak once unto me! ”

“ The world, and worldly things, do weigh,
And some sweet solace I would find,
Into the sky I love to stray,
And, all alone, to wander round
In lone seclusion from the ground.
Ah! Then what solitude is mine—
From grovelling mankind aloof!
Their road is but a thin-drawn line:
Their busy house a scarce-seen roof. ”

“ The scene, gradually changing as the hours go by, seems to belong not to earth but to the outermost boundary of unattainable space, as though it lay much nearer heaven, the misty fairyland of dreams and imagination, of hope and yearning, than to the earth with its mortals, its cares, its sins, and its vanity. ”

“ Life, like a rushing river, tears all living men forward, and behind them, ever more distant, remains that misty region, which is filled with the vanished and forgotten. Who are they who, at any time, think of that misty region, and look at the face of the giantess who reigns in it? ”

“ The dark seems to rise upward from the earth. The sounds of men and beasts carry over long distance, drifting in among the trees, and the loneliness of the vast, empty earth comes back to us,—what is forgotten in the rush of the sunshine,—the constant loom of the mystery. ”

“ Space — the old source of time — should be undone,
Eternity defined, by men who trusted
Another tier would equal them with god.
A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations,
Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles
Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder
That glowed upon their under sides by night
And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil. ”

“ Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. ”

“ Nothing—and worse than nothing. There is a place out there where heaven and hell, as well as the earth and the sky, are suspended. I suddenly found myself in a halfworld where all directions seemed to lead straight down. ”

“ After a winter in the town, to be dropped thus suddenly into the intense quiet of the country-side makes an almost ghostly impression upon one, as of an enchanted silence, a silence that listens and watches but never speaks, finger on lip. ”

“ I imagined that in the shapeless desert, in the dusk of a world of shadows, I was searching for somebody dearer to me than the whole world, one without whom I could not and would not live, and I searched with the conviction that I should have to search forever and never find what I was looking for. ”

“ A vague sense of loneliness impresses the traveler from a distant land—as if in his pilgrimage through foreign climes he had at length wandered into the midst of a strange and peculiar civilization—a boundless desert of wild-looking streets, a waste of colossal palaces, of gilded churches and glistening waters, all perpetually dwindling away before him in the infinity of space. ”

“ A stillness the most profound, and a terrible solitude, forced themselves constantly on the mind as the great features of the place. Here, on the summit, where the stillness was absolute, unbroken by any sound, and solitude complete, we thought ourselves beyond the region of animated life ”

“ Everything seems far, far away. My old self, my own history, even the point of time, three hours ago by the things we used to call watches, when I left the lodge and started upon my long, dark, silent ride—seems to be separated from me by an eternity of space and tranquil, incidentless existence. ”

“ Everything is small, graceful, mysterious. Every hundred paces a deserted little square, in which I stop breathless; now and then a crossway, and not a living soul; and everything always white—closed windows and silence. ”

“ A chill wind from space seemed to be blowing through the room, whispering of time’s vagaries, and how space had different clocks, and how the affairs of men were swept by time and chance down to a sunless sea. ”

“ An awesome silence hangs over the desert. Hushed and humbled by the immensity of space, one expects to hear the rush of worlds through the universe. At times the bosom swells with a wild desire to sing and shout in the glory of pure living. ”

“ Enough to keep alive the stories of the settlement here and the rest of the universe outside. We see the ships land in the city and we know that up there are worlds we can only dream about and never see. ”

“ The solemn and melancholy appear places once instinct with life, when deserted by those familiar forms and faces that have long inhabited them. There is no desert, no uninhabited isle in the far ocean, no wild, barren, pathless tract of unmitigated sterility, which could for one moment compare in point of loneliness and desolation to a deserted city. ”

“ He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. ”

“ But in the Valley someways, I had feeling of assurance that it must be; for it was plain that the telling of the book was sound in its bottom sense; as might be seen; for how should any live in the utter bleak and deadly chill of the silent upper world that lay an hundred miles up in the night, hid and lost for ever. ”

“ The candle lighted, we again reconnoitred—nothing to be seen in dressing-room, bed-room, or the drawing-room beyond, the door of which was shut. But the curious sense of a presence near us—stronger than any feeling of the kind I had ever previously experienced—was gone. You have all felt the presence of another person unseen. ”

“ Talks to the silence at his side.
Talks to the silence and talks to the trees.
But what is beyond, beyond all these?
Beyond is a house with a ruined wall,
Where the long road enters an ancient wood. ”

“ By a natural process of fallacious judgment, the idea of space as void is developed as an existent thing or body. This is the ghost of space—the creation of an entity out of nothing. I may remove the furniture from the room, it is still filled with air; I may remove the air from the room, it is still filled with ether. We may suppose it possible to remove the ether, then nothing—void—remains, but man has no means by which to accomplish the feat, and we call the air and the ether space. The space of which we speak is occupied; it is the space inclosed by the walls, occupied by air and ether. ”

“ Look at those vast edifices, so vast where space is such an object! There, while weeping for sorrows which are not, laughing at the light jest or the ludicrous misadventure, how little is remembered of the want which makes fear the only bond that binds the living to life! ”

“ Outside, in what was called the big world, things were going on with frantic hurry and change, but in here the leisured calm was huge, gigantic, so much so that the other dwindled into a kind of lost remoteness. ”

“ One would say that a place so isolated and confined, where neither the beauty of nature nor of art appears, and where the sky is almost the only thing in view, was created for contemplation and to be the home of innocence. ”

“ The scenery—as scenery—was as grand as bare heathery mountains and wide desolate waters could make an almost treeless solitude, but viewed as a home for human beings, viewed as land that has rent and taxes and existence to be carved out of it, it has a hopeless look. ”

“ The extraordinary range and height of the horizon gives one a vague idea of the infinity of space. The deep unbroken silence and the consciousness that we have left all animal and vegetal life far behind, produce a profound feeling of solitude. ”

“ In these sombre chambers of the hills, walled in upon every side, the stillness seems literally to grasp at every slight sound and cling to it with strange vibrations and lingering echoes, which remind one how utterly alien to these places are the common sounds of the everyday world that pass unnoticed—a world so ridiculously near and yet so infinitely remote. ”