Disappearance

“ No account of disappearances under curious and romantic circumstances, or of the enigmatic fates of forthfaring men in our times, would approach completeness without some narration of one of the boldest and maddest projects ever undertaken by human beings, in many ways the crowning adventure of the nineteenth century. ”

“ I am speaking now of what I have called intentional disappearances, and I don't mean what you might term criminal disappearances either. Men make up their minds to cut away completely from their surroundings, to begin a new life, to turn over a fresh leaf, and so on ”

“ And the dead do not return. That is why there is nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colours, and neither the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands know. ”

“ In the face of the great mystery it would be thought that those who have returned to life after having been, for an appreciable time, apparently dead might have gained some insight into the unknown that lies beyond. ”

“ My life flieth away like a dream: why should I stay behind? Here shall I rest with my friends by the stream of the founding rock. When night comes on the hill: when the wind is up on the heath; my ghost shall stand in the wind, and mourn the death of my friends. The hunter shall hear from his booth. ”

“ If, perchance, this window should open toward strange abysses that reach vaguely away, or upon dark meadows that lie ghost-like in the mingled light, if out of the abyss rises, undefined, the vast, dim shape of the mystery, and wakens in us the haunting memories of dead yesterdays and forgotten years, if we seem carried past the day into the gray vastness that is beyond the sunset and before the dawn, let us recognize that the mystery or mysteries, the annunciation of the Infinite is a little child. ”

“ Painfully, then, I got upon my feet and stole, with no sentiment but a weak curiosity, to the prostrate thing. It was as if I had died and my dissatisfied ghost postponed its departure, seeking the last explanation of things. Thus, while my soul was sensitive to the least expression of the tragedy that absorbed it, in the human world outside it seemed no longer to feel an interest. ”

“ In some deserted grave—I cannot tell you why,
But I should like to sleep in some neglected spot
Unknown to every one, by every one forgot.
There lying I should taste with my dead breath
The utter lack of life, the fullest sense of death ”

“ Only in the grey light of afternoon and evening, and looking with the empty eye-socket of night-darkness can one easily apprehend what is spread out here—the last landscape of tens of thousands who lie dead. ”

“ The stillness of a dead world laid its spell on all that lived. To-day seemed an unreality, an idle impertinence; the real was that long-buried past which gave its meaning to all around me, touching the night with infinite pathos. Best of all, one's own being became lost to consciousness ”

“ My life is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, after all?'
They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her way, into the winter night. ”

“ And even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death—when we are cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we can no longer expect tomorrow to resemble yesterday, and find ourselves by some sudden shock on the confines of the unknown—there is often the same sort of lightning-flash through the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory. ”

“ For soon you lose the landscape through Absence, sorrow, eyes grown true To the naked limbs which show Buds that never more may blow. Now you know the lame were straight Ere you knew them, and the fate Of the old is yet to die. Now you know the dead who lie In the graves you saw where first The landscape on your vision burst, Were not always dead, and now Shadows rest upon the brow Of the souls as young as you. ”

“ And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity—and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell! ”

“ For the first time in her life that immemorial spirit of adventure which lies buried under the dead leaves of civilization at the bottom of every human heart—with whose re-arisen ghost men have moved mountains and ploughed jungles and charted illimitable seas—this imperishable spirit stirred restlessly in its grave and prompted her for once to be uncalculating and to risk the future. ”

“ The present, so full, so fearfully absorbing with the living, to the dead is a mystery; with those mouldering remains of man the past and the future are the great realities. The stillness, the uselessness if you will, of the old church-yard in the heart of the bustling city, renders it a more striking and impressive memento mori than the skull in the cell of a hermit. ”

“ One ultimate survivor lingers on,
And smiles, and to his ancient heart recalls
The long forgotten. Ere the morrow die,
He too, returning, through the curtain comes,
And the new age forgets us and goes on. ”

“ I seem to
"walk through a deep valley, far from the light of
"day, alone and comfortless! The damps of death
"fall thick upon me! Horrors stare me in the face!
"I look behind, there is no returning; Death follows
"after me; I walk in regions of Death, where no
"tree is; without a lantern to direct my steps,
"without a staff to support me."—Thus he laments
through the still evening, till the curtains of darkness
were drawn! Like the sound of a broken
pipe, the aged woman raised her voice. ”

“ So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead. ”

“ She stared, with a great visible fall. "But if he's one of your Dead?"
"He's one of the world's, if you like—he's one of yours. But he's not one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me. ”

“ Like misshapen ghosts they flee with the daylight—when, that is to say, their sources are not very deep in the spirit, imbedded there by cruel, unbending circumstance, for then night is the relief-bringer, morning has the pale terrors of reality in its train. ”

“ And they depart, and come no more,
Or come as phantoms and as ghosts.
Above the darksome sea of death
Looms the great life that is to be,
A land of cloud and mystery,
A dim mirage, with shapes of men
Long dead, and passed beyond our ken. ”

“ Then I made up my mind to flee to the end of the world, where no one ever goes. But is there a place anywhere, to which no one has ever yet been? I took nothing belonging to the dying animals, not even the halters; I left everything. And when the leader fell I did not even take the figured band from his head, which had come down to me from my ancestors.'
'A-ah!' responded the listeners. ”

“ Who can tread out the footprints of the dead?
And so on, up and down the dim vista of the past, following the sound of the dead feet that wander so restlessly, stamping upon the impress that will not be stamped out. Rave on, wild wind, eternal voice of human misery; fall, dead footsteps, eternal echo of human memory ”

“ Every one will have heard that persons who have been drowned and recovered, have had—in what would have been their last moments, if no means had been used to revive them—a strange vision of the past, in which their whole life seemed to float before them in review ”

“ Thy body lies drowned and horrible in the heart of the mountain. You are an appearance, a ghost. Go away, nothing corporeal resides in this illusion of you, else would I strike you. You are a ghost. Depart at once. I should not like to strike a ghost. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is the thing—the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the prose is clean obliterated by distance—that is the place to get our ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern times, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its troubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present. ”

“ Every living thing seemed to have departed out of life. He thought of all the persons whom he had this day seen alert and alive, as now no better than dead men, lying unconscious, while the earth turned under them in this ghostly light. And it seemed to him a thing of no greater wonder, that the dead should appear or utter voices, than that these innumerable bodies, prone and motionless, should again reënter into life. ”

“ She had forgotten that night until lately—forgotten her tears, her doubts, her hesitation; but, as at the day of judgment the scroll of our lives will be unfolded before us, so even in this world there are times when part of the history is remembered by us, when the thoughts and the resolutions of the long ago, appear before us like unwelcome ghosts. ”

“ One seemed then on the borderland of life where things moved that did not venture out into the sun, or in the sun became invisible. And, under the cover of this darkness, the dead man might somehow be able to carry out his threat. ”

“ As real ghosts, I suspect, as any one on earth ever saw; faces and scenes which have printed themselves so deeply on one’s brain, that when one passes the same place, long years after, they start up again, out of fields and roadsides, as if they were alive once more, and need sound sense to send them back again into their place as things which are past for ever, for good and ill. ”

“ Convinced that the missing man could not have got beyond the hearing of the clamor they had made through the night, they now anticipated some accident, and looked closely into every shadow and under every clump of fallen trees, behind logs, and into hollows. ”

“ Those who have been accustomed to dream of death as the end of all whom its shadowy portals inclose, alone are prepared to appreciate the awful and startling reality of this strange scene, breaking apart, as it did, like a rope of sand, all the preconceived opinions of countless ages on the existence and destiny of the living dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it, the scene was ghostlike,—the very land of unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves when they quit the slumberer’s brain. ”

“ I look across the mist that masks the dead;
The moon is tired and gives but little light,
The stars have gone to bed.
The earth is sick and seems to breathe with pain;
A lost wind whimpers in a mangled tree;
I do not see the foul, corpse-cluttered plain,
The dead I do not see. ”

“ Lost men were like lost needles in that wilderness. He, tattered and scratched and unkempt and aching after his mad scamperings in his lost man's panic, had he ever been well-garbed and calm and eloquent in a pulpit? ”

“ These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. ”

“ While, hung with clouds of fear and doubt, the unreturning wave Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave; And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to vale or bliss; One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss! ”

“ Come into your own home when everyone is gone, when the lights are out and the furniture rearranged—there I will show you the strange and frightening ghosts that are the shapes left over when reality superimposes itself upon the images of memory. ”

“ Poor folks like we uns has no use for ghosts.” Her words electrified her hearers, and with one accord they turned to depart. Some with dignity as if the sound of ghosts’ footsteps were an every day occurrence with them; others looking back over their shoulders fearfully trying to penetrate the darkness, and the mystery of those fast advancing footsteps. ”

“ And the "dead past's dead" unburied,
⁠By a magic word reveal.
Life has many hidden currents,
⁠Like the cave-streams of the earth,
Flowing deep and strong in secret,
⁠Ne'er betraying bourne or birth ”

“ That is how the affair stands at present, and, should the missing man never reappear or should his body never be found, the question, as you see, which will be required to be settled is, 'What is the exact time and place, when and where, he was last known to be alive!' As to the place, the importance of the issues involved in that question is obvious and we need not consider it. ”