Free Goose of Hermogenes by Allen Saddler Peter Owen Ithell Colquhoun Patrick Guinness

bent these spines like a bow, frozen this whole?
    The sea’s voice, almost out of earshot, is heard only as in the ear of a shell; and the sole water visible is an oblong tank, clear but black, which reflects a pod-like column bursting with strange fruit and unconcealing leaves. The women, their backs to the sea, look now towards that garden where trumpet-flowers and tree-labelias remind them of some exotic shore.
    But I have explored it already, and though the other day I could not find it when I looked for it, to-day I have no desire to enter. Still bemused by the gaze of the statue-woman, I cannot but search for her everywhere; and I find her in the land’s own long memory.
    She overthrew the Norsemen, she melted the Romans down. It was she who led the people. She fought on the hill of stones, she wore the tunic of battle, she wielded the sword, she rode. A breastplate of stone and glass covers her egg-ribs; and it is said that small living creatures dwell within, but she can scarcely comprehend their gnat-like life.
    Vellanserga weeps, her valley fills. She comes from the land-under-wave remembering the summer fires lighted in her honour and her train of young worshippers, girls and boys with fiery hair. But at full moon she is delighted; stone maidens wake and dance, notes jet from two or three giant pipes to the south-east somewhere by her knees, and from the north-west near her elbows are answered. Her bones become flutes. On the anniversary of her feast she stirs, sighs, half turns over, struggles to awake.
    At the dark of every moon Vellanserga bleeds. Her quick is hidden by a cloven bud overgrown with root-like tendrils, strawberry-red like a huge rose-gall; and by day an intoxicant juice is exuded drop by drop from the grotte below. Above the bush of rootlets a stem pushes up, with numbers of small tassels sprouting from it like greenish flowers, and by night this wick gives out an incandescent vapour – the colonist surmounting her left shoulder sees a distant glow in the hollow – and the organs are shaded by canopies of enormous leaves, each six-feet square and supported on a stalk scattered over with red barbs.
    On a flat space of ground an oblong is marked out with sticks and a cord, a sacred enclosure. Phantom walls arise; her daughter dances there with a dark acrobat in magnetic embrace. Impalpable wires swing them out to the planets, cords and poles hang through space; and now, their breast-bones touching, they glide in the air, their limbs’ action springing from a single centre. On paths drawn by the sea-gull they plunge and sway.
    The other daughter goes down to a beach made of broken shells; what strange light is there, it is neither day nor night. The sea is calm, stretches away; on the wet sand there stands the skeleton of a tower. A few scaffold-poles rise upward, and others are held across them with rope. They wait. She calls to the king of fishes.
    On the slope of Vellanserga’s right thigh a ghost sometimes appears painfully at dusk, and horses shy on one of her arterial roads. Down the middle of her body goes a slim furrow furred with shrubs, marking the course of her stream towards the sea. Her navel is a pool of water-lilies; from her armpit evening-primroses sprout. On the haunted bend by the mill is shown the sanctuary where she lived as a saint, and on her demesne are found other view-cells and a healing well. Vellanserga sleeps; the thickening of her coma is mist.
    From her left side juts one of her ribs, a headed stone; on the front is sketched a cross, on the back an indecipherable poem in ogham is inscribed. This marks the entrance to her chapel, now only foundations. Ferns cover the mouldered walls, a single column remains at the centre. The east is wanting the pelvic arch, the white egg-cell, the lamp-ichor; north and south lack aromatic fume and the candles’ waxen glow.

‘Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé
Dans le si blanc