Endless Things (51 page)

An instrument. Not cabled but strung; a hundred strings, not for hands to play.

"A harp,” said Pierce, and his throat filled with sweetness. “An aeolian harp."

"O harp and altar, of the fury fused,” said Axel. “Father Kircher's harp.” They walked on down toward it, and it rose over them as they did so. Axel's granddaughters stood beneath it, their hands extended and their fingers spread, mouths open too, as though every part of them could hear if it listened. Only their brown eyes were abstracted, unseeing.

"Amazing, huh?” Rosie Rasmussen asked them. “I told you so."

How did it make such a perfect concord? They talked about it. The steel strings were tuned with turnbuckles to those intervals Pythagoras had discovered, sacred numbers of which the universe is made; chosen somehow so that any of them sounded together would agree, aleatory harmonies of the wind's wanderings, for the wind bloweth where it listeth. You knew what harmonies were possible because of how you strung the instrument, but not what harmonies you'd get.

"Well, didn't David hang up his harp on the end of his bed, to hear the wind blow through it in the night?"

"I don't know,” said Pierce.

"Yes,” said Axel. “Oh yes. David's harp."

"Imagine a stormy night here,” Roo said, and Pierce remembered one, down the mountain from here, one stormy night; all possible concords, discords too, played all at once and loud as hell. He took her hand. Vita and Mary brought their fingers close and closer, feeling the buzz of the sensitive strings transmitted into them through the changeful air; looked up to their father and mother as though to ask,
Is it true?

There was an inscription cut into the harp's base, beneath Hurd Hope Welkin's name and dates. Val came closer and bent to read:

Yea, the swallow hath found an house, and the sparrow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young: even thine altars, O Lord of hosts.

They had come up as far as it was possible to go. They stood smiling at one another and listening to the wind play the great instrument all by itself, in the same movement by which it blew the light fine hair of Pierce's children. One by one, or two at once, they put their hands upon it to feel the vibrations, as much those of the earth below, it seemed, as of the silver air around. The hills of the Faraways lay around them, they themselves upon the heights of the highest; Spofford and Val pointed to Mount Whirligig to the west across the Shadow River valley, and what might have been the blue edge of Mount Merrow, over east beyond the Blackbury's wide bolt of silk carelessly unrolled. They sat, some of them, and Roo and Rosie opened bags in which they had brought food and drink, which they divided. It seemed to one or two of them that there was no reason now ever to go farther, or to go anywhere else at all, just as there is no reason for the small pilgrims or shepherds or lovers in a painting by Claude of a mountain, a temple, a sky, to do anything further than they are doing at that moment, and at the same time they knew that when they had rested there for long enough they would have to arise and start back down again along the path, into the spring and the rain that would soon begin to fall.

last author's note

With
Endless Things
, the work I have always in my own mind called
Ægypt
is as complete as it will ever be, and consists now of four parts:
The Solitudes
, first published as
Ægypt
in 1987;
Love & Sleep
, 1994;
Dæmonomania
, 2000; and the present volume. It will be noted that exactly twenty years have passed between the publication of the first part and the publication of the last. This was not my plan. The conception and writing go back ten years farther.

The present volume has been largely finished for some years; references to emperor penguins, and to speculations about Jesus’ lineage, predate the current ubiquity of these subjects.

I have tried to honor the many authors and works from which the historical, geographical, or philosophical underpinnings or overlays of
Ægypt
derive. To the many mentioned in earlier volumes should be added, for the special contents of this one,
Prague in Black and Gold
by Peter Demetz;
Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science
by Hilary Gatti, which largely informed the dialogue between Bruno and his prison visitor, though all distortions deliberate or accidental concerning his theories are my own;
The Companion Guide to Rome
by Georgina Masson, from which the fictitious guidebook entries in this book are not taken;
The Maharal of Prague
by Yaakov Dovid Shulman;
Comenius
by Daniel Murphy. There are others I can't now remember. To all these authors, and to those named in earlier volumes, their predecessors and forebears persisting and vanished, the long chain from digital Now back to Thoth, I dedicate this series.

John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky, and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (
The Deep
) in 1975, and his fourteenth volume of fiction (
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
) in 2005.

Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.