The Dark Tower: And Other Stories by C. S. Lewis

Author:C. S. Lewis [Lewis, C. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-14T04:30:00+00:00

‘I don’t believe a word of it!’ ejaculated Scudamour suddenly, looking up from the book, and then checking himself in some surprise. He had not been prepared for the distaste which had been aroused in him by the kind of immortality which the Othertimers apparently welcomed with enthusiasm. ‘I’d sooner be snuffed out,’ he found himself thinking. ‘I’d sooner go to heaven of harps and angels like what they used to tell me about when I was a boy.’ (No one had, in fact, told him any such thing, but he was under a not uncommon delusion on this subject.) ‘I’d sooner have anything than go round and round that way like a rat in a bucket of water.’ ‘But it might be true all the same,’ whispered his scientific consciousness. He turned once more to the book and read on. After a few pages he found the following.

‘It was left to X’s successors to find the practical bearing of his discovery. In the year 60 Z, who had come to chronology from the study of folklore, propounded the theory that certain fabulous creatures, and other images which constantly appeared in the myths of widely separated peoples and in dreams, might be glimpses of realities which exist in a time closely adjacent to our own. This led to his famous experiment with the Smokehorse. He selected this familiar horror of the nursery because it is almost unique among such images in having arisen in historical times—no evidence having been found of its existence before the last century. By the psychological technique which has since become famous he found that he could produce the Smokehorse, first as a dream, and later as a waking hallucination, in his own consciousness and that of the children on whom he experimented. But he also found that it had altered in various ways from the Smokehorse of tradition, and even from that of his own earliest memories. The old Smokehorse—still favoured in popular art—consists essentially of a small cylindrical body supported on four wheels, and the conspicuous tall spout which emits the smoke. But the Smokehorses seen by Z had very much larger bodies, usually of green, and eight or ten wheels, while the spout had been reduced to a tiny protuberance on the front of the cylindrical body. By 66 he had discovered a feature of which tradition and uncontrolled dreams had given no hint, and which therefore put it beyond doubt that he was dealing with some objective reality. He was able to observe that the Smokehorses in drawing their gigantic loads of wheeled vehicles proceeded not along the earth, as had been supposed, but along parallel rods of smooth metal, and that this was the real explanation of their prodigious speed.’

Scudamour, in spite of himself, was now reading too rapidly to take in the full sense of what he read. The next passage that he can remember was something like this.

‘By 69 Z had succeeded in making something like a map of certain portions of our native land as they are in Othertime.

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