No More Learning

Once in his gloom he paced
the forests for miles, now this way, now that, until, returning in the
twilight, he found himself standing on a cliff southward of the lake
that was southward of the mountains. The moon was rising. The sound
of the swaying of reeds floated from beneath, and the twittering of
the flocks of reed-wrens who love to cling on the moving stems. It was
the hour of votaries. He turned to the moon, then hurriedly gathered
a pile of leaves and branches, and making a fire cast thereon wild
strawberries and the fruit of the quicken-tree. As the smoke floated
upwards a bar of faint purple clouds drifted over the moon's face--a
refusal of the sacrifice. Hurrying through the surrounding woods he
found an owl sleeping in the hollow of a tree, and returning cast him
on the fire. Still the clouds gathered. Again he searched the woods.
This time it was a badger that he cast among the flames. Time after
time he came and went, sometimes returning immediately with some live
thing, at others not till the fire had almost burnt itself out. Deer,
wild swine, birds, all to no purpose. Higher and higher he piled the
burning branches, the flames and the smoke waved and circled like
the lash of a giant's whip. Gradually the nearer islands passed the
rosy colour on to their more distant brethren. The reed-wrens of the
furthest reed beds disturbed amid their sleep must have wondered at the
red gleam reflected in each other's eyes.
Useless his night-long toil;
the clouds covered the moon's face more and more, until, when the long
fire-lash was at its brightest, they drowned her completely in a surge
of unbroken mist. Raging against the fire he scattered with his staff
the burning branches, and trampled in his fury the sacrificial embers
beneath his feet. Suddenly a voice in the surrounding darkness called
him softly by name. He turned. For years no articulate voice had
sounded in his ears. It seemed to rise from the air just beneath the
verge of the precipice. Holding by a hazel bush he leaned out, and for
a moment it seemed to him the form of a beautiful woman floated faintly
before him, but changed as he watched to a little cloud of vapour;
and from the nearest of the haunted islands there came assuredly a
whiff of music. Then behind him in the forest said the voice, 'Dhoya,
my beloved. ' He rushed in pursuit; something white was moving before
him. He stretched out his hand; it was only a mass of white campion
trembling in the morning breeze, for an ashen morning was just touching
the mists on the eastern mountains. Beginning suddenly to tremble with
supernatural fear Dhoya turned homewards. Everything was changed; dark
shadows seemed to come and go, and elfin chatter to pass upon the
breeze. But when he reached the shelter of the pine woods all was still
as of old. He slackened his speed. Those solemn pine-trees soothed
him with their vast unsociability--many and yet each one alone. Once
or twice, when in some glade further than usual from its kind arose a
pine-tree larger than the rest, he paused with bowed head to mutter an
uncouth prayer to that dark outlaw.