The Hill of Dreams written by Arthur Machen

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THE HILL OF DREAMS

by

ARTHUR MACHEN

1907

I

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in
fairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone out
resolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he
had never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted after
heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been molded of lead. No
breeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dry
leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January woods.

About a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an
opening that promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected
lane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters,
and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each
side were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water gushed
down the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that he could
not get a glimpse of the country through which he was passing, but the
way went down and down to some unconjectured hollow.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its
descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very
far, all the long way from the know to the unknown. He had come as it
were into the bottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut
out the world. From the road behind him, from the road before him, from
the unseen wells beneath the trees, rivulets of waters swelled and
streamed down towards the center to the brook that crossed the lane. Amid
the dead and wearied silence of the air, beneath leaden and motionless
clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and rushing
water, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and watched
the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw, all hurrying
madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmy froth that had
gathered against a fallen tree.

Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and
higher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of
swarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till
there was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could lean and
look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had
strayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of the
lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys and
dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare
hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately
beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside
of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with
stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and
silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and
bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the leaden
sky, and as Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were reading a
wonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater than his
understanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on and on,
catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into which he had
penetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the day waned
everything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he heard the evening
sounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the barking of the
sheepdogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was growing late, and as
the shadows blackened he walked faster, till once more the lane began to
descend, there was a sharp turn, and he found himself, with a good deal
of relief, and a little disappointment, on familiar ground. He had nearly
described a circle, and knew this end of the lane very well; it was not
much more than a mile from home. He walked smartly down the hill; the air
was all glimmering and indistinct, transmuting trees and hedges into
ghostly shapes, and the walls of the White House Farm flickered on the
hillside, as if they were moving towards him. Then a change came. First,
a little breath of wind brushed with a dry whispering sound through the
hedges, the few leaves left on the boughs began to stir, and one or two
danced madly, and as the wind freshened and came up from a new quarter,
the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. The
growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the
stile where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in
the middle of the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw
the light blue smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt
greengage trees, against a pale band that was broadening along the
horizon. As he passed the stile with his head bent, and his eyes on the
ground, something white started out from the black shadow of the hedge,
and in the strange twilight, now tinged with a flush from the west, a
figure seemed to swim past him and disappear. For a moment he wondered
who it could be, the light was so flickering and unsteady, so unlike the
real atmosphere of the day, when he recollected it was only Annie Morgan,
old Morgan's daughter at the White House. She was three years older than
he, and it annoyed him to find that though she was only fifteen, there
had been a dreadful increase in her height since the summer holidays. He
had got to the bottom of the hill, and, lifting up his eyes, saw the
strange changes of the sky. The pale band had broadened into a clear vast
space of light, and above, the heavy leaden clouds were breaking apart
and driving across the heaven before the wind. He stopped to watch,
and looked up at the great mound that jutted out from the hills into
mid-valley. It was a natural formation, and always it must have had
something of the form of a fort, but its steepness had been increased by
Roman art, and there were high banks on the summit which Lucian's father
had told him were the _vallum_ of the camp, and a deep ditch had been dug
to the north to sever it from the hillside. On this summit oaks had
grown, queer stunted-looking trees with twisted and contorted trunks, and
writhing branches; and these now stood out black against the lighted sky.
And then the air changed once more; the flush increased, and a spot like
blood appeared in the pond by the gate, and all the clouds were touched
with fiery spots and dapples of flame; here and there it looked as if
awful furnace doors were being opened.

The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise like
a scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together with
a dismal grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the earth and all
upon it glowed, even the grey winter fields and the bare hillsides
crimsoned, the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and the very
road glittered. He was wonder-struck, almost aghast, before the scarlet
magic of the afterglow. The old Roman fort was invested with fire; flames
from heaven were smitten about its walls, and above there was a dark
floating cloud, like fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing tree
showed as black as midnight against the black of the furnace.

When he got home he heard his mother's voice calling: "Here's Lucian at
last. Mary, Master Lucian has come, you can get the tea ready." He told a
long tale of his adventures, and felt somewhat mortified when his father
seemed perfectly acquainted with the whole course of the lane, and knew
the names of the wild woods through which he had passed in awe.

"You must have gone by the Darren, I suppose"--that was all he said.
"Yes, I noticed the sunset; we shall have some stormy weather. I don't
expect to see many in church tomorrow."

There was buttered toast for tea "because it was holidays." The red
curtains were drawn, and a bright fire was burning, and there was the old
familiar furniture, a little shabby, but charming from association. It
was much pleasanter than the cold and squalid schoolroom; and much better
to be reading _Chambers's Journal_ than learning Euclid; and better to
talk to his father and mother than to be answering such remarks as: "I
say, Taylor, I've torn my trousers; how much to do you charge for
mending?" "Lucy, dear, come quick and sew this button on my shirt."

That night the storm woke him, and he groped with his hands amongst the
bedclothes, and sat up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He had seen
himself, in a dream, within the Roman fort, working some dark horror, and
the furnace doors were opened and a blast of flame from heaven was
smitten upon him.

Lucian went slowly, but not discreditably, up the school, gaining prizes
now and again, and falling in love more and more with useless reading and
unlikely knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well enough, but he
preferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. He
like history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain
deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic
still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest,
the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey. The
masters did not encourage these researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt,
should be for cricket and football, the _dilettanti_ might even play
fives and read Shakespeare without blame, but healthy English boys should
have nothing to do with decadent periods. He was once found guilty of
recommending Villon to a school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried to
extract unpleasantness from the text during preparation, and rioted in
his place, owing to his incapacity for the language. The matter was a
serious one; the headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit
gave up the name of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow
for Lucian, and complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes,
who resolved to confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book which
the headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work
decently, and sometimes doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose. His
school-fellows thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed were
very kind to him in their barbarous manner. He often remembered in after
life acts of generosity and good nature done by wretches like Barnes, who
had no care for old French nor for curious meters, and such recollections
always moved him to emotion. Travelers tell such tales; cast upon cruel
shores amongst savage races, they have found no little kindness and
warmth of hospitality.

He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them. Barnes
and his friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and anticipation; they
were going home to brothers and sisters, and to cricket, more cricket, or
to football, more football, and in the winter there were parties and
jollities of all sorts. In return he would announce his intention of
studying the Hebrew language, or perhaps Provencal, with a walk up a bare
and desolate mountain by way of open-air amusement, and on a rainy day
for choice. Whereupon Barnes would impart to Duscot his confident belief
that old Taylor was quite cracked. It was a queer, funny life that of
school, and so very unlike anything in _Tom Brown_. He once saw the
headmaster patting the head of the bishop's little boy, while he called
him "my little man," and smiled hideously. He told the tale grotesquely
in the lower fifth room the same day, and earned much applause, but
forfeited all liking directly by proposing a voluntary course of
scholastic logic. One barbarian threw him to the ground and another
jumped on him, but it was done very pleasantly. There were, indeed, some
few of a worse class in the school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfected
from tender years, who thought life already "serious," and yet, as the
headmaster said, were "joyous, manly young fellows." Some of these
dressed for dinner at home, and talked of dances when they came back in
January. But this virulent sort was comparatively infrequent, and
achieved great success in after life. Taking his school days as a whole,
he always spoke up for the system, and years afterward he described
with enthusiasm the strong beer at a roadside tavern, some way out of the
town. But he always maintained that the taste for tobacco, acquired in
early life, was the great life, was the great note of the English Public
School.

Three years after Lucian's discovery of the narrow lane and the vision of
the flaming fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of great
heat. It was one of those memorable years of English weather, when some
Provencal spell seems wreathed round the island in the northern sea, and
the grasshoppers chirp loudly as the cicadas, the hills smell of
rosemary, and white walls of the old farmhouses blaze in the sunlight
as if they stood in Arles or Avignon or famed Tarascon by Rhone.

Lucian's father was late at the station, and consequently Lucian bought
the _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_ which he saw on the
bookstall. When his father did drive up, Lucian noticed that the old trap
had had a new coat of dark paint, and that the pony looked advanced in
years.

"I was afraid that I should be late, Lucian," said his father, "though I
made old Polly go like anything. I was just going to tell George to put
her into the trap when young Philip Harris came to me in a terrible
state. He said his father fell down 'all of a sudden like' in the middle
of the field, and they couldn't make him speak, and would I please to
come and see him. So I had to go, though I couldn't do anything for the
poor fellow. They had sent for Dr. Burrows, and I am afraid he will find
it a bad case of sunstroke. The old people say they never remember such a
heat before."

The pony jogged steadily along the burning turnpike road, taking revenge
for the hurrying on the way to the station. The hedges were white with
the limestone dust, and the vapor of heat palpitated over the fields.
Lucian showed his _Confessions_ to his father, and began to talk of the
beautiful bits he had already found. Mr. Taylor knew the book well--had
read it many years before. Indeed he was almost as difficult to surprise
as that character in Daudet, who had one formula for all the chances of
life, and when he saw the drowned Academician dragged out of the river,
merely observed "_J'ai vu tout ca._" Mr. Taylor the parson, as his
parishioners called him, had read the fine books and loved the hills
and woods, and now knew no more of pleasant or sensational surprises.
Indeed the living was much depreciated in value, and his own private
means were reduced almost to vanishing point, and under such
circumstances the great style loses many of its finer savors. He was very
fond of Lucian, and cheered by his return, but in the evening he would be
a sad man again, with his head resting on one hand, and eyes reproaching
sorry fortune.

Nobody called out "Here's your master with Master Lucian; you can get tea
ready," when the pony jogged up to the front door. His mother had been
dead a year, and a cousin kept house. She was a respectable person called
Deacon, of middle age, and ordinary standards; and, consequently, there
was cold mutton on the table. There was a cake, but nothing of flour,
baked in ovens, would rise at Miss Deacon's evocation. Still, the meal
was laid in the beloved "parlor," with the view of hills and valleys and
climbing woods from the open window, and the old furniture was still
pleasant to see, and the old books in the shelves had many memories. One
of the most respected of the armchairs had become weak in the castors and
had to be artfully propped up, but Lucian found it very comfortable after
the hard forms. When tea was over he went out and strolled in the garden
and orchards, and looked over the stile down into the brake, where
foxgloves and bracken and broom mingled with the hazel undergrowth, where
he knew of secret glades and untracked recesses, deep in the woven green,
the cabinets for many years of his lonely meditations. Every path about
his home, every field and hedgerow had dear and friendly memories for
him; and the odor of the meadowsweet was better than the incense steaming
in the sunshine. He loitered, and hung over the stile till the far-off
woods began to turn purple, till the white mists were wreathing in the
valley.

Day after day, through all that August, morning and evening were wrapped
in haze; day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air was
strange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered by the
cool sweet verge of the woods, he saw and felt that nothing was common or
accustomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows and changed all the
form of the earth. Under the violent Provencal sun, the elms and beeches
looked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when the mists were thick,
the hills had put on an unearthly shape.

The one adventure of the holidays was the visit to the Roman fort, to
that fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he had
seen the flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before. Ever since
that Saturday evening in January, the lonely valley had been a desirable
place to him; he had watched the green battlements in summer and winter
weather, had seen the heaped mounds rising dimly amidst the drifting
rain, had marked the violent height swim up from the ice-white bulwarks
glimmer and vanish in hovering April twilight. In the hedge of the lane
there was a gate on which he used to lean and look down south to where
the hill surged up so suddenly, its summit defined on summer evenings not
only by the rounded ramparts but by the ring of dense green foliage that
marked the circle of oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the way he had
come that Saturday afternoon, one could see the white walls of Morgan's
farm on the hillside to the north, and on the south there was the stile
with the view of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage smoke; but down in the hollow,
looking over the gate, there was no hint of human work, except those
green and antique battlements, on which the oaks stood in circle,
guarding the inner wood.

The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot
August weather. Standing, or as his headmaster would have said, "mooning"
by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemed
to his fancy as if there were a halo about the hill, an aureole that
played like flame around it. One afternoon as he gazed from his station
by the gate the sheer sides and the swelling bulwarks were more than ever
things of enchantment; the green oak ring stood out against the sky as
still and bright as in a picture, and Lucian, in spite of his respect for
the law of trespass, slid over the gate. The farmers and their men were
busy on the uplands with the harvest, and the adventure was irresistible.
At first he stole along by the brook in the shadow of the alders, where
the grass and the flowers of wet meadows grew richly; but as he drew
nearer to the fort, and its height now rose sheer above him, he left all
shelter, and began desperately to mount. There was not a breath of wind;
the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside; the loud chirp of the
grasshoppers was the only sound. It was a steep ascent and grew steeper
as the valley sank away. He turned for a moment, and looked down towards
the stream which now seemed to wind remote between the alders; above the
valley there were small dark figures moving in the cornfield, and now and
again there came the faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing through
the air as on a wire. He was wet with heat; the sweat streamed off his
face, and he could feel it trickling all over his body. But above him the
green bastions rose defiant, and the dark ring of oaks promised coolness.
He pressed on, and higher, and at last began to crawl up the _vallum_, on
hands and knees, grasping the turf and here and there the roots that had
burst through the red earth. And then he lay, panting with deep breaths,
on the summit.

Within the fort it was all dusky and cool and hollow; it was as if one
stood at the bottom of a great cup. Within, the wall seemed higher than
without, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault. There
were nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked different
from the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand touch
a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire. Beyond the ditch there
was an undergrowth, a dense thicket of trees, stunted and old, crooked
and withered by the winds into awkward and ugly forms; beech and oak and
hazel and ash and yew twisted and so shortened and deformed that each
seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind. He began to fight his way
through the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard knocks from the
rebound of twisted boughs. His foot struck once or twice against
something harder than wood, and looking down he saw stones white with the
leprosy of age, but still showing the work of the axe. And farther, the
roots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high relics of a wall; and a
round heap of fallen stones nourished rank, unknown herbs, that smelt
poisonous. The earth was black and unctuous, and bubbling under the feet,
left no track behind. From it, in the darkest places where the shadow was
thickest, swelled the growth of an abominable fungus, making the still
air sick with its corrupt odor, and he shuddered as he felt the horrible
thing pulped beneath his feet. Then there was a gleam of sunlight, and as
he thrust the last boughs apart, he stumbled into the open space in the
heart of the camp. It was a lawn of sweet close turf in the center of the
matted brake, of clean firm earth from which no shameful growth sprouted,
and near the middle of the glade was a stump of a felled yew-tree, left
untrimmed by the woodman. Lucian thought it must have been made for a
seat; a crooked bough through which a little sap still ran was a support
for the back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not
really so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the
satisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He
sat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through the
dank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter
and hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and the
tingling fire seemed to spread all over his body.

Suddenly, he knew that he was alone. Not merely solitary; that he had
often been amongst the woods and deep in the lanes; but now it was a
wholly different and a very strange sensation. He thought of the valley
winding far below him, all its fields by the brook green and peaceful and
still, without path or track. Then he had climbed the abrupt surge of the
hill, and passing the green and swelling battlements, the ring of oaks,
and the matted thicket, had come to the central space. And behind there
were, he knew, many desolate fields, wild as common, untrodden,
unvisited. He was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he sat on the
stump, and at last lay down at full length on the soft grass, and more at
his ease felt the waves of heat pass over his body.

And then he began to dream, to let his fancies stray over half-imagined,
delicious things, indulging a virgin mind in its wanderings. The hot air
seemed to beat upon him in palpable waves, and the nettle sting tingled
and itched intolerably; and he was alone upon the fairy hill, within the
great mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the matted
thicket. Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with
the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapen
trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free,
but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above
ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were
forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that
amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in grey
lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rotted
bark he saw the masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated by the
simulacra of the wood, and could not see his hands, and so at last, and
suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive
skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed
faun.

Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints of
mysteries, secrets of life passed trembling through his brain, unknown
desires stung him. As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket, the
sunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between the
bright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadow of the brake made an
odd flickering light, in which all the grotesque postures of stem and
root began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf beneath him heaved and
sank as with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep, and lay still on
the grass, in the midst of the thicket.

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