Author: Peter Harris
Category: Childrens
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Chapter Six
The Forest Portal of Silverwood
The sense of peaceful expectancy that had filled me since entering Chartres cathedral in the morning did not leave me, but grew deeper in this natural cathedral of trees. Turning around and around to take in the scene, I was dizzied by the great pillars of the trees, of a kind I had never seen before, nearly as tall as the giant redwoods of California, smooth-boled like the stone pillars of Chartres. I realised I was in a kind of natural glade, about fifty feet across, with a floor of low ferns and moss, ringed about with these smooth-trunked forest giants. Close by me was a single upright stone, about three feet high. It bore no markings that I could see at first, but there was moss and lichen growing on it, so I could not be sure.
On impulse I got the Ouvron out again and turned this way and that, holding it in front of me. Once again, sure enough, the surroundings grew somehow dim, while pathways of light radiated out around me. But this time one path caught my eye as being different from all the others, and more vibrant: it glowed with a golden radiance like a narrow beam of sunlight coming into a darkened room, and streamed off through a darkness more intense than any earthly night, but pierced with brilliant points of light - stars, but brighter than any I had seen before. And at the end of the radiant path lay a golden, heavenly country. In the centre of that country was a lofty plateau ringed with majestic pinnacles of stone, and each pinnacle was topped with a grove of tall trees. A wall of white marble ran between the pinnacles, enclosing the plateau. In the centre of the plateau was a calm lake. In the middle of the lake was an island, and growing there was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. It was very tall, its leaves were emerald green and gold, its fivefold trunk silver flecked with gold. And from the midst of the huge ring of linked limbs just beneath the glistening crown shone a great jewel or crystal, pulsating with golden light. The tree and the crystal were intensely alive, sentient. I felt they were aware of me, calling to my heart.
‘So this is what I’ve been missing all my life! This is the Garden of Eden!’ I thought, and a wave almost of homesickness for the place enveloped my heart with a tug that was irresistible. I took a step into the now-familiar crackling darkness. I was walking the magical pathway through a vast tract of star-filled space, compressed as it were into a few paces, arched over with those strange branching tunnels of jet black. Soon I would be in Eden...
The glorious destination rapidly drew near. I froze, my joyful yearning turned to horror: where the beautiful country with the heavenly Tree had been, I now saw evil things. Creatures like walking thorns draped with black cloaks peered from huge thorn thickets on the peaks of the plateau. The Tree was dark beneath sickly purplish clouds. There was no jewel in it. The creatures looked up as if they could already see me and were waiting for me. I heard their harsh croaking voices as I turned back and tried to get out of the dark between-place. But my feet were not touching anything, and I felt as if I was falling into an infinite void. I screamed and lunged forward, grabbing the edge of the world out of which I had so foolishly ventured, and somehow I was back, with my feet on solid ground again. I reeled in shock and revulsion. Paradise had been invaded! I recalled the terrible little poem by Blake, about the rose being sick, devoured by ‘the worm which flies in the night’. I wanted at any cost to undo that hideous change, to reverse the evil and restore my vision of perfect beauty - though I doubt whether I could have done anything then - I was shaking, almost paralysed by fear.
Later I would learn that the vision I had seen of the Tree was of a time and an age long gone: the Golden Age of the Makers. For now sinister things are happening there, of which I was to learn much more...