VERSION 1.0 dtd 032700 EDGAR PANGBORN Mount Charity EDGAR PANGBORN was born in New York City in 1909. His formal education consisted, he observes, of being moderately exposed to Harvard. He studied piano and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music and for a time planned a musical career before he turned to writing. Except for military service in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II, he has worked as a free-lance writer and painter. In 1951 he received a Special Award of Merit from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His published novels are West of the Sun, science fiction (1953); A Mirror for Observers, science fiction (1954), which won Pangborn the International Fantasy Award; Wilderness of Spring, a historical novel (1958); The Trial of Callista Blake, a novel concerned with capital punishment (1962); Davy, a novel of the future (1964); and The Judgment of Eve, a novel of the future (1966). Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972) is a collection of short stories. To his list of admirable science fiction stories he has now added "Mount Charity," which was a finalist in the 1971 Nebula Awards balloting. My name is Peregrine; I have two friends. Do not touch me. Feel the air stir as I move it with my wing, and understand: I am flesh. One of my friends is hiding yonder at the edge of the pines. He is Lykos. Think of a European wolf, larger and shaggier than your American timber wolves. Three thousand years ago his pelt was rich black; like my plumage it has whitened. My other friend carries on his work far from here, in a cave on one of the lower peaks of the Cascade Range. The distant ancestors of the Blackfoot Indians called that peak Mount Charity because of its good shelters, springs, areas of sweet grass, tempered winds. If you see him you will think of a tailless monkey, a Barbary ape. For his amusement and ours, after we discovered India, we named him Hanuman. He too has gone white. He was the first of us to understand that we do grow old. We already knew we could die- Once we were four. I will not stand on your wrist. You would find our flesh cold. I like this arm of your chair. I like to watch the late sun on your face, Doctor, though I notice you need to turn away from it as I never do. Speech is hard for me. I know your language well, but my throat labors over human sounds. Be patient with me. We have watched you five summers. We like these hills you call Vermont. We like the young people who come in summer with their tents; and you exploit your version of Socratic method to stir their minds. A Socratic school, isn't it? In a way. I chase them with logic. 1 want them to know fantasy and objective truth, to value both, and understand the differences. You call me Doctor, but it's fifteen years since I retired from practice. It will be hard, Peregrine, to convince me that you are not the dream of an old man fallen asleep in the sun. You may feel more certain when Lykos comes to lie at your feet, and speak in a better voice than mine. We cannot know our origin. While your science was growing articulate we listened, in our fashion. You could explore-your miscroscopes, telescopes, mathematics, subtle method-as we never could. What we believe about our beginning is an imitation of your sort of speculation. Since nothing like us exists, so far as we know, anywhere on Earth except in our three bodies, and since our flesh can have very little in common with that of any Earthborn being, we think we may have originated from . . . let us imagine spores brought by a meteorite that fell on the Iberian Peninsula three thousand years ago. This unknown living dust was capable (we imagine) of entering a terrestrial host and growing until every part, while retaining the original design, became transmuted into our substance, whatever it is, with its unearthly long life and tenacious memory, its partly humanlike powers of reason, imagination, affection. (Sometimes, it's true, we think in ways I cannot explain to you.) And we suppose that dust did enter the grown bodies of a peregrine hawk, a wolf, a monkey, a snake. We take this hypothesis because we have none better. Maybe when we die and your experts examine us they will provide an altogether different explanation. But we hope to live for some brief time yet. And it seems to us that your wise men, confronted by their own runaway technology, by the decay of political and social responsibility, above all by the horrors of human overbreeding, have enough to' engage their energies for a long time-if a long time is still possible for any being on this planet-without bothering about three aliens, "impossible" creatures, who can only watch, reflect and finish (if we have time) a certain task. We're not even sure it would be safe for your kind to handle us. This is a new concern, taught us by your science. We have never had much physical contact with the animal life of Earth-it disturbs us; our senses shrink. We can love you, but not by touch. (If you don't understand this, let it pass: it affects us more than you.) The leaves of a few plants are the only food that sustains us. Such contact as we have made with animal life, most of it accidental, has done no harm that we know of to either side, but we never know enough. I prefer that you do not put out your hand to me. Needless precaution, very likely, but sooner that than harm you. The fourth of our number was killed by terrified peasants smashed with stones and sticks. They may have felt pious anger at her serpentine shape as well as fear. It happened in the twelfth century of your Christian calendar. However, we have seen men of the present day provoked to the same idiotic destructiveness, by forms they find too remote from the little human pattern and therefore to be hated. Ophis had stored her memory with knowledge of the great world below the tops of the grass. For centuries she had also been listening to the human things-under floors, behind walls, in garden hedges, beyond campfires. As much as she passed on to us is safe in Hanuman's faultless memory and in the written record that he labors over at Mount Charity. But Ophis died before we had begun that record, and so the rest of what she knew is beyond recovery. If you have any wish to convince others of our existence, even those goodhearted scholars of yours who themselves would never hurt us, I beg yon dismiss it. We dare not show ourselves. I came to you frightened, and am still frightened in spite of what we know about you. We are too familiar-forgive me-with the human habit of shooting first and then looking to see what the bullet struck. We have searched your people in every generation for those few we might dare to approach, in need. It is long since we have spoken. Lykos, three hundred and fifty years ago, wished to save a woman he found lost in the woods, and could not quiet her fear of him except by using his mild human voice. Alas, his kindness! The poor soul reeled home dazed by the holy marvel, believing it a pure experience of the presence of God; and she chattered to the wrong ears, and so was burnt for a witch on the urgent recommendation of the then Archbishop of Cologne. More than once I have seen human kindness reach out to save a moth from the flame, and the hand frightens the silly beautiful thing directly into death. We come to you now because we are truly in great need of help. What threatens us would seem trivial to most others of your breed, supposing they could first accept the fact of our existence. We know you will not think in those terms, but you might well hesitate from other reasons. You have a right to know more about us who come begging. Let me talk on about us for a while. In our time we have examined all the regions between the poles, except the seas. I have flown to the farthest islands. I know the upper air (how clean it once was!); Lykos and Hanuman for centuries searched the jungles, the prairies, steppes, tundra, and fields and pastures governed by men. They traveled everywhere with Ophis, while she lived. We have found no others of our kind. In the sea?-it's possible; there we can't go. Some of the dust that (may have) made us could have fallen there. I came to consciousness on a patch of ground near the mouth of what is called today the Guadalquivir, and the first beauty I saw and marveled at was the play of afternoon sunlight on the waters of the Atlantic; the first music I knew was counterpoint of wind and ocean. I think it was after my-should I say birth?-that a city grew up south of there; the Romans knew it as Gades, now Cadiz. Yes, there might be a few of us in the sea. I think they could hardly have discovered communication as we did; to them humanity might be no more than a fraction of the rain of death that falls slowly through the green spaces to the ooze. If the corruption of the sea by your breed threatens to destroy them, they will have no defense and no escape. However, we have found no others. The hope of doing so has not quite gone, but it is faint. Yours is a huge world. Only men stultified by impatience or indifference believe it to be small. Only the pitiably ignorant believe it has been explored. I'll tell you more of that first awareness. I came to it as mind without speech or knowledge or memory, in possession of an airy body that could fly without learning the art, see and hear keenly, discover the racing pleasures of the wind. With smell, hunger woke (nothing like a hawk's) and I pecked at leaves, drawn by this or that pungent scent, until I learned how hunger could be qui eted. But though my mind was empty and waiting, it was charged by a flame of curiosity like that of no other animal, I now understand, except man. With no language, tradition or guide, no concept of communication, I watched the continuous wonderful flow of life about me, and I was able to make comparisons, elementary deductions; to move from small observations to large, combine them, and forget nothing. I don't know how long I lived in this beginning way. Only a few years, I think. I was teaching my mind to do what my body could do without teaching: to fly. Though I saw the roundness of the world and the invitation of distances, I did not, during this time, fly beyond the Pyrenees, nor very far out over the oceans. Short distances above northern Africa, yes-how green it was then!-but I always returned. I think I knew I would move on, but first I needed to understand more of this region where my conscious existence began. I witnessed. endless killing of life by life. It made me timid, showing me an image of death as motion-all-gone, followed usually by engulfment in some hungry mouth, or decay. I found that most creatures of my own size or smaller' sheered away from me, the hawks as scared as any of the others. My scent, I suppose, or else something they feel by perceptions that have eluded your studies so far, Doctor. Does my scent offend you? No. Musky and strange. But to me, pleasant. Good. Mosquitoes were bothering you a while ago. You won't notice any while I stay here. One day-I was still very young, if that is the right word-I was flying above those northern hills, and I saw Lykos crossing a ridge where the snow was lying thinly. Beside him walked Hanuman. This I knew to be altogether out of the pattern. Wolves I had watched, fierce predators; monkeys were animals of the warm southern part, never in these hills and certainly never in the company of a great black wolf. As I slid by and returned in wonder, Lykos' golden eyes were moving to follow my flight, and with a loving arm over his back crouched Hanuman. Then the monkey stood up, swinging an arm out and in as I had seen human beings do to summon others. I swooped lower still, overcoming fright. No wolf or monkey smell, but my own!--the leaf-mold smell that I encountered when I cleaned my feathers or slipped my head under my wing. I lit beside them unafraid, and little Ophis slid down from her easy riding place in the deep fur of Lykos' neck. We were four. The three were already well advanced in a private language that we still speak among ourselves. We acquired human languages later on, as we needed them. (The story of their growth from what they were three thousand years ago is one of the treasures already saved for you in that record of Hanuman's.) I picked up this one of ours in a few days, having already learned love at the moment when Hanuman touched me. We have no sex. The bodies of Lykos and Hanuman are in the male design but without sexual desire, which we can understand only as observers; Ophis was in the female pattern. A matter of chance: we suppose the drifting dust entered whatever nearby host would admit it. I don't know which sex my body was before it was changed, and it's no matter. If we reproduce by spores, possibly (I am now only dreaming aloud)-possibly if we can die of old age, our bodies may dry and scatter the germs of our substance on the air? Does the thought frighten you? No, Peregrine. We know love in terms of devotion, or shared experience and compassion (in this sense we can love your breed, and we do) and of pleasure in nearness, of the sometimes wordless touching of self by self. Our bodies to you would seem cold; we are warm to one another .... Can you imagine a human being standing in the room where my body was becoming a living dust? 1 can imagine it without distress. Can you image yourself standing there? . That is harder. I myself would not wish it. Human beings should live. I think my natural time of dying is still far off. When it comes, perhaps some human invalid, someone who would otherwise die-but it hardly y matters. If our substance entered, only the frame, the outward image, would remain human. Human beings must live as human beings. It is your world. You cannot be as we are, nor we as varied and adaptable and adventurous, beautiful, even happy, as your people might become if you will learn how to live; if you will start thinking of fewer and better, not of more and greedier. I think we ought to live too, a few of us, if it is possible, if we are certain our substance can be kept harmless to the natural life of Earth. But as we do not have your potential for evil, neither have we, to the full, your potential for good. It is you who must become the Earth people if you can-the good husbandmen, the music makers and keepers of the vineyard. Our great journeys began soon after that meeting on the mountainside. We crossed the Pyrenees, in the spring of a year in what you call the ninth century B.C. We traveled as we pleased through the forests that were later Gaul, along the northern coast of Europe, the shores of the Baltic, into the vast body of Asia. Years, and we reached the Pacific. I flew far up and down the coasts, seeing the roofs, smoke, fields of a civilization already stupendous. At that time we did not pause to learn much of it, because we wanted to know the world as a single vision. I found that region of fog where the greatest of oceans narrows to a strait dividing the continents, and I led my friends the long way there. Hanuman, with the aid of Lykos, contrived a raft. We waited till winter narrowed the strait to fewer miles, and crossed, aided as well as threatened by the fierce current and the pack ice. Part of the time Lykos swam, pulling the raft. He was in no danger of sinking. We can endure a degree of cold that would be lethal to you, and our flesh is much more light and buoyant than yours. But we do fear the ocean, having had no way to learn enough about it. That day it seemed all menace and obscurity. I hoped as I flew that I could warn them of an ugly fin approaching, or shape rising out of the gray confusion-but that fog, that everlasting fog! Concealing us helpfully, yes, but making my sharp eyes useless. Well, we came through, and later returned safely. As a company we made that journey only one more time. To me, of course, ocean barriers are less than the divisions of a chessboard. On that journey-already into the eighth century B.C. in your terms-we explored the entire coast of North America, across the north to Newfoundland, south to what you have made the Canal Zone, down to the Horn with many years of learning a new jungle, northward over the Andes, again Alaska. Decades later, back near our place of origin. We studied most of the human settlements and cultures that we found, avoiding contact because we knew the dangers. In those centuries of our exploration we never appeared as more than a quick shadow at the corner of a human eye, a dot of wings circling in and out of the clouds. Remember, Doctor: three thousand years is no great age. Before our minds awoke, Mohenjo-Daro had been buried and forgotten under a welter of later building. Great Agade of Babylonia was founded more than a thousand years before our waking-but we knew that city, in our time. Ophis in its cellars, Hanuman a fleeting shadow on midnight roofs. Lykos strolled its stinking alleys in the dark, listening to human voices, and the dogs cringed away unharmed. Greece we knew, her few enlightened centuries. I have flown over Crete, over all the Grecian islands. We can say to you, Helen was indeed beautiful; the heart of Achilles did break at the death of his friend. I saw the burning of Troy town black on the sky only one of the thousand wars we witnessed, all of them foul, vain and unnecessary. That one matters only because a poet made music. Yes, Odysseus of the many devices did set out from there on his homeward journey-but of that I know, as you do, only what is told by a better voice. In a much later journey we passed by Antioch and Tyre, then on as far as a massive human disturbance-Alexandria, where we heard familiar Greek and Roman dialects. We followed the coast westward and came upon the legions before Carthage. By your calendar, that was 146 B.C. That night Lykos and Hanuman prowled outside the camps and heard the cursing, complaining, occasionally thoughtful talk of soldiers, chatter of camp-followers and slaves, grunt of dice-players, squeak of wheels, spitting, snorting, belching, whine of whips -night sounds not greatly different from what we heard again in 1346 at the siege of Calais. Not deeply different, old man, from night as we heard it in the summer of 1863 outside Vicksburg. If we had been present I think we would have heard the same blending of black mirth, innocent obscenities, patience, aimless despair and fatigue, in the trenches of Verdun, or before the fighting began at Monte Cassino. We would hear it, possibly more hysterical, wherever soldiers talk to each other in the poisonous war your government carries on so blindly and endlessly in Vietnam. We try to understand it. I flew above Carthage. We had grown rather sophisticated then about the human thing. I knew what would happen. We guessed the dominance of Rome was inevitable, if only because of that beefy Roman stubbornness, and this city was the enemy's heart. We had heard gossip and truth about bilious Cato in his eighties. The old hater was dead then-he hated the Greeks too-but his hate still sputtered where the legions could hear it. In six days Carthage was smoke. Before I sought cleaner air I heard the screaming, glimpsed the usual human entertainments. Yet it was said there was not much laughter among the Roman officers-and yes, if you're curious, it's probably true that Scipio Aemilianus did weep, for the record, at this product of his good generalship. Sickened of men, above all sickened of their self-delusions, we wandered down into jungle Africa-our third long journey there -and watched again your groping human pattern in the life of savage tribes. Those were rough jungles, as some of them are today. Once Lykos '(he is coming to you now from the pines) fell into a pygmies' pit trap and we could not finish digging him out before they came. I darted among them and tore at their faces until they fled, gibbering of witchcraft. I can't recall you ever looked handsomer, Peregrine. Let me tend that leg, Lykos! I can walk on three, Doctor. Our wounds heal; our green blooded flesh has never taken any infection. But it's true we heal much more slowly than when we were young, the bullet does give me pain, and there at the joint I suppose it might interfere with the setting of the bone. However, sir-contact with our flesh Oh, you don't believe that yourself, do you? After all your time on Earth, and no harm done? Let me at least extract the bullet, and splint it. It would be simple, for me. But about contact-some caution, Doctor After three thousand years and no harm done? Let me follow my own common sense. Besides, I'm--quite old. It makes no real difference. Rest here. III get what I need .... He wouldn't call others with a telephone? No, Lykos. I am sure. He's honest. You have not made the request? No, but I told him we came to make one. Still time to retreat, Peregrine. We could let him think this surgery was what we came to ask. Too timid, Lykos. We must make the request. Something in his face-I think he has a cancer. It's possible . . . Quiet. Do whatever he asks .... Was that too much? No, you're very quick and good. But Doctor, I do suggest avoiding contact with the green blood that's oozing where the bullet was. Let it drain. It clots quickly. Try not to touch it when you put on the splints. This thing is a nasty little.22. What happened? Some hunter. I was certain I was hidden but must have been careless. I ran off. I don't know what he thinks I was. If he thinks. Splints now. This will be bad, you know .... I've felt worse .... )Vow it will heal. Your kindness is spring in winter. Peregrine, go on with what you were telling him. Mm, those pygmies! I did get rather cross. yes, you expressed your thoughts with some freedom. Well, Doctor, it was after we had witnessed the decay and near-death of learning in what you call the early Middle Ages that Hanuman began work on his record. That dreary collapse, from the fourth century on, that blackout of Western culture for something like a thousand years, made clear to us how easy it is for a society as imperfectly developed, as precariously balanced in nature as yours, to let its light go out. Maybe there is a recurrent mental fatigue in human cultures, induced by the short periods of enterprise. You push on with your grand vigor for a while, and then slump; abdication of intelligence as the governing force, and of course if that's complete enough it drags down virtually everything in a long ruin. It seemed to us that in our limited way we might function as preservers of history. We thought that a detailed, scrupulously truthful record of all we knew, all we had observed from our detachment, might someday be a thing of value to you, even a source of guidance. Surely it's true, if a culture that forgets history is condemned to repeat it, the complement of the proposition ought to be true. Qualify it, Peregrine-I imagine the Doctor will agree. No culture as yet has actually forgotten history because no culture has really possessed more than fragments of it. With that allowed for I guess the old saying may be true enough. I suppose a knowledge of history adequate for a trustworthy guide has never been possessed by more than a handful of scholars. Some have done their best to transmit it, but who reads? Men at large simply don't know their own past. Snippets hastily gulped in school-by those who have schools; simple and popular generalizations, mostly false and harmful. I am forced to agree, Lykos. Lykos is more a pessimist than I, maybe for the very reason that his affection for humanity is deeper. Maybe. Never think I doubt the value of our record. I only wonder whether these volatile short-lived beings will ever find the wit to use it. He and I speak alike, Doctor; think very much alike. But Lykos thinks in privacy, like all sentient beings. You might have to know us a hundred, years or so to discover in how many ways we are persons. Ophis was our humorist. Had a sweet small thorn in her speech that could make even Hanuman smile. He's all meditative thought, logic, philosophy-and compassion. His hands have changed visibly with that endless writing; both somewhat enlarged-he writes with either hand and deep black grooves in thumbs and middle fingers. We began our record in your ninth century A.D. We had hoped to give it to you in a time when you had begun to show, as a society of intelligent beings, more signs of intelligent behavior. Under present conditions we can hardly wait any longer for that. We may have waited too long already, counted too much on the power of your often brilliant individuals and minorities. The record is not finished. Hanuman has been able to bring it only a short way into your twentieth century .... Lykos, my throat is tired. I'll go on, in my grumbling way. Are you sure, Doctor, that we're safe from interruption? I'm not prepared to meet anyone but you. The kids all took o-f to a movie in the village and won't be back till after dark-you'll hear the two cars. No one else comes to see me here, or if anyone does, that door has a loose latch 1 didn't shut You could push it open and then get into a closet or under my bed. I'm housebroken, too. (Peregrine, I don't feel that shrinking, when he strokes my head.) - (Good. You were always a sentimental pup.) That was your private language, wasn't it? Yes, I was telling old Feather puff I like your touch. We conceived the idea of that record suddenly, but it took years to find a place to work on it and keep it safe. At length we chose a cave in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps. The entrance was larger than we liked; we did what we could with brush barricades. It seemed remote enough. Swarming Italy lay more than a hundred miles away across the Adriatic. Around our cave, gaunt wilderness, here and there goat trails, six miles away a mountain track that was used, but very little, by carts and horsemen. From our cliff we looked down on the distant roofs of a peasant village, but we were sheltered from it not only by our height, but by ugly gorges, dense woods, tumbled rocks. Bears, the beasts in my shape, and that was also a country thick with belief in vampires, witches, all manner of spooks. No man ventured far alone, even by day, and two or more men together are sure to make a noise. Our secret trail was easy for Hanuman. I had enough trouble with parts of the climb so that I was sure no other wolf would try it, and men would be deterred unless they had some compelling motive. Ophis knew many little approaches but preferred to ride my neck-that trifling weight .... Come back to the story, Lykos. Yes. That cave served us five hundred years. Hanuman developed the full plan of his work. No feeling of immediate urgency was pushing us in those centuries, only the larger sense of it, awareness of the insecurity of all things living. We could not be certain the civilization of Europe would recover any force and virtue, but by that time we had our own perspective. We were in touch with the rest of the world, with men's continual failures, recoveries, groping advances. Peregrine of course was Hanuman's best reporter, traveling wherever wings can go. We knew of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, the primitive peoples, the tribal groups and young civilizations in this northern continent. China, the Mongols, India, the shut-away people of Australia, the human experience in jungle, veldt, seacoast of Africa. In our record is more than you can ever learn elsewhere of the wonderful voyages that carried men to the islands of the Pacific. There's no settled place in the world from the Arctic to Patagonia where Peregrine has not listened in the dark to the talk of men. I myself made many journeys, with Ophis and then alone. Often Hanuman left his work to come with me, because he was our best thief. In those centuries the monasteries were almost our only source of parchment, vellum, other writing fabrics. Hanuman made ink from gum and soot, and slotted bamboo pens long before Europe had anything better than the quill; papers we had to steal. Robbing the poor monks' scriptoria was often easier than getting what we needed from cellars or other storage places, and it was always more fun. In the monastic records of eastern Europe from the ninth into the fourteenth century, there may well be here and there an embarrassed mention of the theft of writing materials by the Devil; if so, Devil is to be taken in the Pickwickian sense. Then we'd have the stiff task of conveying our loot by secret ways to the cave. Hanuman was writing at that time in the compact, rather inflexible Latin of the Augustan age, and he wrote with almost no margins in a script hardly thicker than the legs of a millipede; nevertheless our greed for the precious material was insatiable For Hanuman-always the master intelligence of our company, before whom we others are only loving fools-would not leave out one fact that might be of importance to men, and he was bound to have it all in such perfect order that the record could be used by any human scholar with ability to read and courage to endure the truth. Our plunder had to travel mostly on my back. I had narrow escapes. Sometimes I had sore feet. But it was worth any effort. And that part of it, that product of five hundred years of toil, was all destroyed. The year was 1348, the month of May. Ophis had died two hundred years before. I was traveling southward through France, where the Hundred Years' War had already built up the true monument to princely quarrels-ruin and desolation. And as I started down the Rhone valley I began to overhear men talk of that other plague, the Black Death, for it was then, as we knew, in full fury at Avignon. My mind was drenched with the presence of death, when Peregrine found me with the news of our own disaster. A young man out hunting very bravely alone had taken a fall into a spot from which he could see our cave entrance. Intent at his work, Hanuman had not been aware of him until he tumbled and cursed in pain. Then from behind the brush barricade Hanuman watched him, not too badly hurt, limping and scrambling nearer. He had saved his bow and hunting knife in the fall, but lost his arrows; he was bleeding, lamed, scared, and wanted shelter because the sky was churning with the threat of storm. Hanuman stayed motionless in the barricade until the young man pushed aside part of it and entered the cave. Then he moved to better concealment and called in a human voice: "Go away! Go away!" He had a desperate hope that if the boy could be frightened off there might be a chance to get the record out of danger before others were brought to look at the place. The young hunter was properly frightened, and plunged out of the cave with Hanuman's pen and the strip of parchment he had been busied with and he searched for the source of the call. Then his keen eyes found Hanuman's face as the gusty wind shoved bushes aside. He yelled and fled, tumbling and struggling down the incline mad with terror. And while Hanuman listened to the diminishing uproar of his retreat, the wind fetched in a stupendous rain, a battering downpour that was to last all night and on into the morning. Yet even if he had had a dry place to take it, Hanuman thinks, he could never have got the record safe-it was too big, and those people were braver than he supposed. They came in the morning even before the rain had ceased. They brought a priest, and oil, and torches, a dozen men with spears and arrows and axes. Fifty yards off in dense growth on the higher ground, Hanuman listened to a great droning of dog-Latin exorcism, prayers in the dialect, howling and pounding of metal to drive away Satan. He heard himself described two or three times by the scared (and very proud) young man, as twice the height of two tall men, with flaming nostrils that poured forth the stench of Hell, and a voice that turned a man's blood to milk Then there was real fire, and heaving smoke, and black scraps of priceless parchment floating out and down the hillside on the damp wind. Hanuman came away to a clearing where he was accustomed to meet Peregrine and me, and Peregrine found him there and brought me word. When we were all three together We do not weep, Doctor. We come together, and-rest. As we had done after Ophis died, we went into thick woods, and I lay where Hanuman could lean against me with Peregrine in his arms. We rest. We abandon thought, memory, sorrow, everything except our trusting and healing nearness to each other; for this, together with our imperfect but perfectible knowledge of natural law, is the only aspect of life that will never deceive or betray us. After that time of retreat, we at length roused ourselves, to consider how to take up our task of record making once more, from the beginning. We returned to this continent. Another raft of vines and branches securely woven by Hanuman with what clumsy help I could provide; another crossing of that fogbound channel, our last I don't think I could swim it now, pulling a raft. Before we crossed, Peregrine had surveyed the ranges from Alaska to the southern Sierras. Of many good places, Mount Charity seemed the best for our needs. Standing on its flat summit you are in the center of a vast bowl, and the bottom of the bowl is the green jade of treetops. They clothe a valley so many-angled, so tumbled and broken up with lesser elevations and spurs of the greater peaks, that it should N- hardly be called a valley at all. There are small lakes, and streams A river flows off underground, and where it emerges, if it does, even I have never been sure. And all around the summit, where the winds are never violent, stand the snow-topped giants. They look as though a shout might reach them, though the nearest one, says Peregrine, is twenty-four miles away. For the last ten or fifteen years, of course, the air has not been that clear, but we remember. We knew men would never come there for grazing livestock, let alone clearing and farming: little enough for even goats to find. But for us there has been rich plenty. The needles of western pine and larch for us are sustaining food. We brought with us the seeds of European herbs we have grown used to, and they have naturalized well. Myrtle also grows there, which we enjoy, in patches of open ground near our cave. There is in particular one little meadow directly below us. It is really a large outcropping of rock, slightly tilted, so that over the centuries enough soil has built up there to support small plants, wild grasses, though not trees. To us this is the loveliest of all the world's meadows. We have thought of it and tended it as our garden since 1377. You probably remember that Edward III of England died that year, one of the great princes whose masterpiece was the Hundred Years' War. And a man who served him as soldier, valet, envoy, political handyman, and compared to whom (in my view) Edward and nearly all the other monarchs of European history were not much more than hop toads in fancy clothes, was then getting on for forty-a friend of yours, I believe, Geoffrey Chaucer. (I hope you'll excuse my slipping in to look at your books a couple of months ago, when nobody was around and you left the door on that loose latch.) Yes, that little meadow has been our garden for very nearly six hundred years. Indians traveled by once in a great while, making use of an open space farther down the mountainside for their overnight camps on journeys across the range. Those had to be important journeys, for they disliked and dreaded the dark forest of the lower ground, and the cruel passes through the heights. We learned from their talk that when they reached this place they called Mount Charity they felt safe. "Charity" is the nearest English translation we can find, but in the original there was some overtone of the supernatural, for they imagined themselves in the presence of a friendly spirit who would grant travelers protection so long as they were careful not to outstay their welcome. Later, I regret to say, this benign legend may have taken on an odd flavor of Wolf Spirit. If we have the future hours together that I hope we may, Doctor, you might ask me about that sometime. Our cave entrance is obscure: we helped nature. The cave itself is an immense fissure directly underlying the mountain's summit. A main gallery runs inward a hundred yards. There are side galleries; at the end of one is a pool that receives sweet water from every rain and has nourished our contemplation for the centuries. In another, daylight enters from a crack in the western face of the cliff thirty feet above the cave floor: there is our library, and our record; there Hanuman works, reached by the sun for a little while in the evenings, and in the dark he has the candles he himself makes from bayberry and other sources. At certain seasons the moon is with him. A rock fall-we think at least a thousand years ago-.closed up the lower part of the cave entrance. The upper part can be shut, if we choose, with an artificial rock we made, convincing to look at, if you have the enterprise to scramble up a steep-slanted boulder under the cliff's overhang and peer in at it, but not very strong. So far as we know, the Indians never came up to look at it. Maybe they would have felt it a trespass on the spirit's dwelling place. A good spelunker would catch on to it in no time, or for that matter an enterprising Boy Scout. Paper was again a problem. It cost us a few years of experiment and trouble to work out a method of manufacturing it ourselves from oat grass. In the fourteenth century we could still feel we might have plenty of time. To this day, on Mount Charity, you can find small clearings where an odd type of oat grass still seeds itself in yearly. We have helped it a little, to be sure, for sentimental reasons. Naturally as soon as the Spanish settlements in California were stable enough to provide us with paper, we were ready with Hanuman's light fingers and my quiet feet, and we enjoyed the game almost as much as in old times. But your antiquarians and possibly your chemists may someday be interested in studying the paper we made: it is flexible even now, safe to handle with care, and most of Hanuman's ink shows up as sharply as yesterday. There is great plenty of it, for Hanuman was determined to bring back from his memory every page of the lost account, while also dealing with the constant flow of new events, as Peregrine brought word from other continents and I came in with more about the Indian world of North and South America. You see the importance of that, Doctor, considering what slight concern the white pioneers had for the history of any people but themselves. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are enormously documented, and I daresay all the important facts can be found in the human records. Nevertheless Hanuman wishes to bring his account to the present time, if only because (we hope) there is a value in the viewpoint of three thousand years. Doctor, I think we are tiring you excessively. You look Please, go on! I'll take it up again, Lykos. We weren't too worried, Doctor, when the Union Pacific came into Portland-it was far away. The road linking Eugene with Boise did frighten us, but They're after Mount Charity. Yes, Doctor. We ought to have been making ready for flight seventy odd years ago, when the horseless carriage started driving the stables out of business. But our foresight is only a little better than human. And like you we have that way, that human way, of imagining the cup may pass. Several years ago a trail across the southern part of our bowl in the hills was widened and blacktopped. Now a spur, a scenic highway, is to be driven all the way to the flat summit of Mount Charity. The summit will be developed, as they call it, into a parking lot for an estimated eight hundred cars. There is to be a hotel in our garden, which the developers have already named, in their blueprints, Overlook Inn-The Home of Creative Viewing. Christ! Let me think-1 have some money Not enough for what you're thinking, Doctor. Sit quiet, please. Rest. Peace. Let me tell you what our hope is, much more modest. Work won't start on this obscenity until next summer, maybe not then. Some environmentalists are already fighting it. They can't win-too many more urgent things demand their effort and funds, and the money back of the hotel thing is big-but they will delay it, and that wins us time. Could you remodel this house a little? maybe a bigger cellar, some other things-to give us a hiding place and storage for our records, for ten or fifteen years Yes. Yes, anything, whatever I have. My God, l must write a will, so that the kids will have the place. Stupid of me to neglect it so long, but I get tired easily-discouraged Please rest yourself while I finish, Doctor. We must have the young people in it, yes. We'll need their help. But . . . you understand, don't you? If the secret of our existence is known too soon, Hanuman's effort to complete the story is done for. Even supposing the best, supposing there were no immediate wish to destroy us, to be smothered in your people's good intentions would be as lethal as-as the Pentagon trying to make me tell them all the good news of Russian and Chinese military Stop a moment, Peregrine. That sickens me too much. I'm sorry, Doctor. It was a foolish example .... May I go on? Yes. We came to you first, and you only, because we have no one else. You understand, your students-some changes in the group each summer, and we can't follow them, study them. I told you, we studied you a long while before we dared approach. So, now, will you tell us which of these young people we can trust for secrecy? You know them. We don't. Trust them all. This is my one piece of human knowledge you must accept. Trust them all, Peregrine. Oh-wonderful-even if I only dream it! To know the past, make ft a truer guide! Something I can do not just preach while the time runs out- Peregrine He's dead. His heart couldn't bear joy. Yes, that was joy .... I hear the cars. He wrote no will, Lykos. They won't have this place. They'll find some way to help us. Brut-what if Then it happens. But Peregrine, we must stop waiting for perfection. And I think this generation is something new on Earth. They are the first to understand they could lose their world-their world, Peregrine-and my heart tells me they are too good to let it go. Come with me. We're going to them now, and we will trust them all.