On an Odd Note by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh [Kersh, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

THE BEGGARS’ STONE

The monotony of the plain becomes so heartbreaking that you would thank God for the sight of a withered tree. The land lies flat. The road forks and runs away into the unknown distance. Look east, look west; there is nobody, nothing but dust and grass and a dry, melancholy wind which twists the clouds into tortured shapes. The plain is mournful and legend-haunted.

Dig in it and you may find strange things: skulls scored with scars, bits of metal, defaced coins, weapons which at a touch fall to green powder. It swallows men like a sea. The Tartars passed this way, with the flat-faced riffraff of the Bad Lands. “Where my horses’ hoofs have passed no grass grows.” But grass has grown; the grass always wins in the end, and it covers everything, humbly bending before the wind, but savagely clutching the earth with its roots—bitter, gluttonous Puszta grass that devours the soil.

I say the road forks and is terribly lonely. But a few paces away from the point at which it divides there stands a stone, incalculably ancient, roughhewn into a rectangular shape, bury­ing itself by its own weight . . . “digging its own grave,” as they say in these parts.

It used to lie flat. Now it stands erect. In the place where it used to lie there is a deep hole. Grass has begun to encroach on the stone itself. The hard, pale surface sprouts sparse tufts like an old man’s chin. These tufts somehow make the stone look older. By moonlight they give it an appearance of something grotesquely like life.

Three sides of the stone are marked with inscriptions. Bend sideways and you may read initials, names and broken phrases in all the languages of the earth: J. H.; M. B. Hunyadi; several crosses; “GOD WILL PUNISH THEM,” in ancient Slavonic. In one corner somebody has laboriously hacked out a heart and an arrow. Roman, Greek, Russian, Tartar, Georgian—all alphabets may be found there. There is even the name of one FA’OUZI, beautifully carved in curling Arabic. To whom did these names and symbols belong? Only God knows.

The time will come when even these desolate marks will have been rubbed away by the rain and the dust, and then there will be nothing but the tired old stone, imperceptibly disintegrating atom by atom in the loneliness of the plain at the fork of the dreary road.

Why was the stone dropped there? For centuries nobody knew. Tramps used it as a seat, a bed, a kitchen and a meeting place. The friction of their bodies alone had worn little hollows in it. Their weight had helped to press it down. Their names were cut into it. They had nothing but names to leave. Some of them, no doubt, were so poor that they had no names. Men and women who lived and died up and down the interminable roads of Europe; people beyond society; lost souls; the forgotten of God; men without hope; eaters of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.