In wonder that turned to startled rapture, Tortha gazed at the miraculous being, and sustained for a moment the strangely thrilling light of her chill eyes, in which he seemed to find an obscure recognition, such as a long-veiled divinity, appearing at last, would vouchsafe to her worshipper.
Somehow, she seemed to bring with her the infrangible solitude of remote places, the death-deep hush of lonely plateaus and mountains. A silence, such as might dwell in some abandoned city, fell on the chaffering, chattering crowd as she went by; and the people drew back from her in sudden awe. Before the silence could break into gossiping murmurs, Tortha had guessed her identity.
He knew that he had seen the White Sybil, that mysterious being who was rumored to come and go as if by some preterhuman agency in the cities of Hyperborea. No man had ever learned her name, her nativity, or her dwelling-place; but she was said to descend like a spirit from the bleak mountains to the north of Cerngoth; from the desert land of Polarion, where the oncoming glaciers crept in valleys that had once been fertile with fern and cycad, and passes that had been the highways of busy traffic.
No one had ever dared to accost or follow her. Often she came and went in eerie silence; but sometimes, in the marts or public squares, she would utter weird prophecies and cryptic tidings of doom. In many places, throughout Mhu Thulan and central Hyperborea, she had foretold the enormous sheet of ice, now crawling gradually downward from the pole, that would cover the continent in ages to come, and would bury beneath oblivious drift the mammoth palms of its jungles and the superb pinnacles of its metropoles. And in great Commoriom, then the capital, she had prophesied a stranger doom that was to befall this city long before the encroachment of the Arctic ice. Men feared her everywhere, as a messenger of unknown outland gods, moving abroad in supernal bale and beauty.
All this, Tortha had heard many times during the course of his return journey from Tycho Vulpanomi; and he had wondered somewhat at the tale, but had soon dismissed it from his mind, being laden with marvellous memories of exotic things and places. But now that he had seen the Sybil, it was as if an unexpected revelation had been offered to him; as if he had discerned, briefly and afar, the hidden goal of a mystic pilgrimage.
In that single glimpse of the enigmatic entity, he had found the personification of all the vague ideals and unfixed longings that had drawn him from land to land. Here was the eluding strangeness he had sought on alien breasts and waters, and beyond horizons of fire-vomiting mountains. Here was the veiled Star, whose name and luster he had never known, but whose magnetical attraction had led him blindly beneath southron skies—and back again to Cerngoth.
The moon-cold eyes of the Sybil had kindled a strange love in Tortha, to whom love had been, at best, no more than a passing agitation of the heart. Being identified at bottom with his poetic yearning for all high and unachievable things, for the peril and wonder and disaster of untrodden places, the love was profound and lasting, as no passion for a mortal woman could have been.
However, on that occasion, it did not occur to him that he might follow the visitant or come to learn more concerning her. Momentarily, he was content with the rare vision that had fired his soul and dazzled his senses. Dreaming such dreams as the moon might inspire in a moth; dreams through which the Sybil moved like a woman-shaped flame on ways that were too far and too steep for human feet, he returned to his house in Cerngoth.
The days that ensued were dim and dream-like to Tortha, and were presided over by his memory of the White Sybil, which was clearer to him than outward things. He felt a desire that was beyond the senses—a fire that had fallen as if from Arctic stars. A mad Uranian fever mounted in his soul, together with the sure knowledge that he sought an impossible fruition. Idly, to beguile the hours, he copied the poems he had written during his journey, or turned over the pages of boyish manuscripts. All were equally void and without meaning now, like the sere leaves of a bygone year.
With no prompting on the part of Tortha, his servants and visitors spoke to him of the Sybil. Seldom, they said, had she entered Cerngoth, appearing more often in cities remote from the ice-bound waste of Polarion. Truly, she was no mortal being, for she had been seen on the same day in places hundreds of miles apart. Huntsmen had sometimes met her on the mountains above Cerngoth; but always, when encountered thus, she had disappeared quickly, like a morning vapor that melts among the crags.
The poet, listening with a moody and absent mien, spoke of his love to no one. Well he knew that his kinsfolk and acquaintances would deem this passion a more errant madness than the youthful yearning that had led him to unheard-of lands. No human lover had aspired to the Sybil, whose beauty was a perilous brightness, akin to meteor and fireball; a fatal and lethal beauty, born of transarctic gulfs, and somehow one with the far doom of worlds.
Like the brand of frost or flame, her memory burned in Tortha. Musing among his neglected books, or walking abroad in reverie on which no external thing could intrude, he saw always before him the pale, unearthly radiance of the Sybil. He seemed to hear a whisper from boreal solitudes: a murmur of ethereal sweetness, poignant as ice-born air, vocal with high, unhuman words, that sang of inviolate horizons and the chill glory of lunar auroras above continents impregnable to man.
The long summer days of Hyperborea went by, bringing the outland folk to trade their furs and eider in Cerngoth, and damaskeening the slopes beyond the city with flowers of bright azure and vermilion. But the Sybil was not seen again in Cerngoth; nor was she heard of in other cities. It seemed as if her visitations had ceased; as if, having delivered the enigmatic tidings committed to her by the outer gods, she would appear no more in the haunts of mankind.
Amid the despair that was twin to his passion, Tortha had nurtured a hope that he might again behold the visitant. Slowly the hope grew fainter; but left his longing undiminished. In his daily walks he now went farther afield, leaving the houses and streets and turning toward the mountains that glowered above Cerngoth, guarding with icy horns the glacier-taken plateau of Polarion.
Higher he went each day on the upward-sloping fields, lifting his eyes to the sullen crags from which the Sybil was rumored to descend. An obscure message seemed to call him on; and still, for a time, he did not dare to obey the summons wholly, but turned back to Cerngoth.
There came the forenoon when he climbed to a hill-meadow from which the roofs of the city were like littered shells beside a sea whose tumbling billows had become a smooth floor of turquoise. He was alone in a world of flowers: the frail mantle that summer had flung between the desolate peaks and Cerngoth. The turf seemed to roll away from him on every hand in broad scrolls and carpetries of flaming color. Even the wild briars had put forth their fragile, sanguine-tinted blossoms; and the very banks and precipices were heavily arrased with low-hanging bloom.
Tortha had met no one; for he had long since left the trail by which the squat mountain people came to the city. A vague prompting, which seemed to include a promise unspoken by any voice, had led him to this lofty meadow from which a crystal rill ran seaward amid the bright cascades of flowers.
Pale and diaphanous beneath the sun, a few cirrus clouds went floating idly toward the glacial pinnacles; and the quarrying hawks flew oceanward on broad red wings. A perfume, rich as temple-incense, rose from the crushed blossoms whereon he had trampled; the light lay still and heavy upon him, dazzling his senses; and Tortha, a little weary from his climbing, grew faint for a moment with some strange vertigo.