The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 1. THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

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High above the bracken and azalea-covered flank of the mountain, a pair of buzzards slowly circled. The slopes were touched now by a fitful golden glow as the sun prepared to set prematurely behind massed banks of cloud.

The little Pyrenean village of Olbier, almost the last inhabited settlement at the top of the Sos valley, was already in shadow. A faint clanking was audible far down the valley below the path, as a few stray goats stumbled hurriedly in the wake of their fellows to join the flock on its way home. The threat of approaching storm was almost tangible behind them. Small gusts and flurries of wind stirred the tall grasses by the path. The leisurely circling of the giant birds seemed almost immune to the disturbance at ground level, as if a deep slow breathing of maternal nature was preparing to guard itself, to batten down the hatches against whatever onslaught was being prepared by the elemental masters of the heights.

A rattle of stones from the path below might have been a last goat still astray. But it came again, and this time sounded nearer. Only human footsteps crunched with that particular rhythm. But in this wilderness and at this time of the late summer afternoon there was no destination on this path nearer than the ‘Refuge Fr. De Grail’ a thousand feet or more above. For a few moments the sound of faltering steps was silent. A faint cry came through the gathering mist. Then the footsteps started again.

As if to signal the imminent threat from the elements, one of the birds now wheeled away down the valley, and was soon lost to view among the misty outriders of drizzle-bearing cloud creeping like an advancing tide along the valley floor below. The other bird continued in a desultory way to describe a few diminishing spirals, and then it too drifted slowly valleywards. Successive waves of mist projected one after another in faintly discernible thickenings, almost like hands and fingers caressing the ground, enveloping the bushes, concealing and then quickly revealing again the features of the valley floor, so that the whole landscape to the north came into movement with no stable points of reference.

The last feature to lose its sharp outlines was man-made, or at least animal-made; the zigzag path descending to the tarred road up which the last of the goats had now disappeared. This path led up and over a col, it’s higher reaches invisible at this point, but destined to climb for many miles into and over the pass to the east of Pic Montcalm, and ultimately into Spain. In this direction the light was still vivid, and the mountain ridge was in sharp focus. But below it, and in all the valleys visible to the south, the cloud was now mounting like a sea of cotton foam. Sound too was blanketed by it, except nearby, where the wind was becoming increasingly gusty.

A wavering shadow appeared in the swirling cloud on the path and slowly thickened and darkened. No-one, animal or human, was there to observe when the girl stumbled at last to a halt by the little upland meadow above which the great birds had so recently watched for the movement of small rodents foraging in the grass. Without searching further for shelter the girl made for a clump of hazel bushes and threw herself down. Gathering round her the heavy peasant shawl of undyed wool, beaded with fine drops of condensation, and now with actual rain, which could be heard in gusty flurries in the hazel branches above her head.

Something about the way she settled exactly into the most comfortable depression in the stony ground would have told an observer that this was not the first time she had made a nest for herself under these particular bushes. Indeed she now turned on her side and began to scrabble about under the moss and pebbles as if in search of something. A sob of hysteria was quickly followed by a sigh of relief. She turned back onto her elbows, drew herself further under the bushes, and began to examine the object in her hand. Dark wisps of damp hair fell across her deep brown, almost black, large-pupilled eyes. As she pushed her hair aside with the back of a delicate, well cared-for hand, one would have been struck suddenly by the first of many incongruities. The hair, the peasant shawl, the rough sandals, the muttered Langue d’Oc phrases with which she began to croon endearments to the object in her hands, were all very much "de la region". But the cared-for skin, the movements, a certain lightness in her gestures, all bespoke something very different.

The stone she held was a piece of Pyrenean limestone about the size of a sparrow, and very much like it in shape. Clearly someone had been at work on this stone with a carving implement of some kind, because it was fashioned roughly into the shape of a dove, the tail feathers outspread, the head tucked beneath the wings. These were gathered about the body like the girl’s own shawl. Indeed, it was very much an abandoned nestling she now began to resemble, drawing the garment even closer round her as the increasingly rough weather burst into her inadequate shelter with a furious downpour of rain. Clasping the stone dove to her breast, she began to pour forth an answering torrent of words, which did almost seem for a moment to drive back the elements by the sheer violence of the emotion that racked her tiny frame. The full import of these words would not have penetrated the understanding of any twentieth-century listener. But any Cathar, any persecuted heretical refugee in these mountain fastnesses, cowering among the rocks and caves in a last retreat from the Inquisition, would have responded with a wave of protective love as the sacred words erupted with elemental force from this latter-day Cathar throat. Evoking as they did so an immediate response of sympathetic resonance from the very mountains themselves.

As if to confirm this response the heaviest downpour now appeared to have passed over. Although all trace of gold had now gone from the sky, and visibility through the mountain drizzle was restricted to a dozen yards or so, there was still plenty of light. The girl pulled herself out of her nest and shook off the worst of the rain. Her movements, as she fumbled in her handbag and pulled out a roll of bread wrapped in a tissue, were pure 20th century. It was as if something deep in her bodily reserves came to her rescue as pure survival, though everything in her soul-consciousness belonged to the mountains, belonged to a tradition of worship indigenous to the region over centuries. And as she sat again in the grass under the once more lightening sky nibbling the bread, she was picking at the form of the stone dove to emphasise some feature in its imagery. She longed for it to speak to her more vividly of her own soul in its church-rejecting elemental hunger for the divine, through and beyond the natural world. Yet the implement with which she did so was a cheap nail-file which one could find anywhere in a supermarket in Toulouse, or further out there in the strident twentieth-century world, which her bemused and hallucinated consciousness had for the time being entirely rejected and forgotten.

Suddenly, she looked up and began to listen. She got to her feet. "Ramón?"

Her light cry fell into the blanketing mist like a pebble into moss. It would hardly have been audible a hundred feet away. She gathered her things and began to stumble and climb up the slope, as if making for a perfectly well known objective; but she was quickly out of breath and had to stop. The pair of fallow deer, whose movements had aroused her, stood in petrified astonishment as she came into view, and at once darted up the slope, leaping wraith-like into the mist. A few stones were dislodged, then all was silent once more. This brooding silence suddenly came down on her with such a weight that she fell to her knees with a burst of sobbing.

"Il ne vient pas. Il ne vient pas." She cried, then began one more with added urgency to climb the steepening slope towards an overhang of cliff and tumbled rocks now only a few yards above her. Unhesitatingly she made her way between two of the largest of these. She stopped short as she always did at this point, almost physically pushed back by the immense blackness of the cavern these rocks concealed. Nothing would have induced her to take a step further down the trodden path, which led into the cave without Ramón himself in front of her. She couldn’t believe he would actually have made the crucial descent without her, knowing how essential it was to have her at the top of the pitch while he climbed down.

"Ramón!. Ramón!" she cried.

This time the echo of her light voice rang and re-rang across the vaulted roof, joining the "clack-chuck" of the jackdaws which flew out in protest, circling and muttering to each other as they redeployed themselves among the shelving recesses above her.

"Ramón!"

She knew he wasn’t there. She had known ever since late night when she lost touch with him after crossing that terrible river in the dark, that none of this was really happening. Something else much worse was happening instead, worse and yet so much better, something deep within the mountains in the darkness something she should never have left. She should be in the mountain darkness with the others, sharing the peace, sharing the horror, holding hands with all the others in the dark, drifting away across the frontier that led to the light, the Eternal Light promised by the holy ‘consolamentum’. The assurance of release from the darkness, from the crippling stone and the drowning water, the stone in men’s Inquisitorial hearts, the drowning tide of their relentless questioning.

A thin, pale, infinitely tenuous thread which linked her with Ramón and their purpose up here together suddenly snapped at this moment and flung away across the mountains like a tiny whiplash of light, cutting through the rain-clouds and out into the sunlight over the flat plains beyond. It came snapping home at last like the cut end of a broken piece of elastic straight into the solar plexus of a dark sweating young man struggling with a heavy rucksack up the platform of the main station at Toulouse. The vast diesel engines of the Paris train were already pounding out their tune of power, in preparation for a journey beyond the imagination of ghostly Cathars. Or indeed, of buzzards or deer, or any of the more tenuous elemental creatures still drifting in the faint cloud-land visible to the young man as he turned with a puzzled frown towards the southern horizon.

"Come on, Raymond, we’ll miss it," said the tall girl behind him. Her green-grey eyes puckered in the bright August sunlight, concealing the anxious concern with which for the past fortnight she had increasingly watched him. He continued to stand, staring uncomprehendingly into the distance, rucksack forgotten at his feet. Elbows jabbed at him. Shouting voices insisted. Rushing feet milled past and around them.

"Raymond!"

He looked into her eyes.

"The ladder" he said.

"What?"

"I’ve forgotten to…"

The guard’s whistle blew with shrill urgency.

"Come on!" the girl shouted. He heaved the rucksack up into the opening and stumbled in after it, hauling her up behind him. Only moments later the giant train pulled slowly out of the station.

Other threads snapped in all directions. Scraps of paper drifted down the platform in the wake of the parting train. Esther collapsed onto her rucksack in the corridor. Raymond stood, hands thrust into his pockets, nose pressed against the window, staring into the setting sun. The train gathered speed. In the far distance the cloud-capped mountains came into view to his left at an unbelievable height above the plain. As he pressed his face against the glass, gripping the handrail till his knuckles were sharply white against his sunburned hands, a moan of pure anguish forced itself between his lips. Stumbling across Esther’s feet and the baggage, he tried to open the window of the train door, wrestling with the catch, and even trying to get the door open. White-faced, Esther struggled after him shouting. Finally, she slapped him sharply across the mouth. He turned eyes empty and expressionless. He wiped his hand across his forehead, collapsed to the floor, and began to weep quietly. She returned to the rucksacks, found a comb, and started to run it through her shoulder length straight red hair, watching him meanwhile with a kind of grim solicitude.

While he was weeping, which he had been doing from time to time for the last week, she felt more relaxed. At least this emotional outlet was better than the fixed expression of despair, and even worse than that, the look of utter bewilderment, which sometimes greeted her casual references to incidents during the holiday with Helène and herself in the mountains. She was deeply worried about what had happened to Helène. The day before yesterday, when Raymond had turned up at their lodgings in Ussat, she had expected Helène to be with him. He, on the other hand, seemed devastated not to find her at the pension. Yesterday he was still looking for her. He went up to the doctor’s house, where she and Helène had first met him at a study-group, but Dr Perrier had seen no sign of her. When he came back he was once more in the abstracted and apparently hallucinated condition which had been an increasingly disturbing factor in the last two weeks.

Now, however, there was in addition a frightening feeling of urgency about him. It was apparently essential that he get back to England without losing any more time. From the little conversation she had had with this quite new, but very fascinating acquaintance in the last fortnight, she knew he had no job to return to. Moreover it had been her own intention to stay at least another month. The whole thing in fact was becoming something she didn’t want to deal with. She had far less responsibility for this young man now quietly weeping to himself in an empty train corridor than she had for Helène, who although she was in no sense a close friend, had at least been at college with her. Only the fact that Helène was a local girl with her family in Toulouse had prevented her ditching Raymond altogether when he laid siege to her at Ussat and more or less insisted on her accompanying him back to England to help him explain matters, as he put it, "to the English Templar Brotherhood". This was, as far as she was concerned, pure gobbledigook.

Something, which she now saw was quite half-baked, about the fact that she was some sort of social worker, that the young man was English, and that he was clearly on the edge of a breakdown, if not actually over the edge, had made her agree to go with him. But she now saw she had been utterly crazy to become so deeply involved on such short acquaintance. And why, for God’s sake, had she not at least gone to Dr Perrier first? At least she was a doctor, but of course she, Esther, had only met her that one time, and she was French, and, oh hell, it was none of her, Esther’s, business anyway. The fact was she was thoroughly out of her depth. What she should have done……

Her thoughts went back to Helène. If she really had a responsibility, it would have been to stay in Ussat till Helène turned up, or at the very least to have found out, perhaps through Dr Perrier, where Helène’s parents lived in Toulouse and see if she had gone back there. With all her maunderings and hysteria about the Cathars, she was in some ways just as much ‘at risk’ as this weepy, but, she confessed it, very attractive young man in the corner.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, something new and frighteningly adult was born. As clearly and sharply defined as when a butterfly, with that sharp little popping crack it emits at the moment of emergence from its chrysalis, immediately extracts its two antennae, which wave enquiringly and expectantly about in their first contact with the air. And when its little spiral tongue pulls itself free and starts to curl and uncurl, exploring entirely new dimensions of time and space, becoming for the first time on earth, a recognisable Being of the Light. Something vertical and razor-sharp emerged from the young woman’s angry and somewhat beleaguered Scottish soul, and muttered something that her Gaelic ancestors would have recognised as authentic. Indeed, it was closely akin to their own headlong clannish determination to establish a responsible and committed ego-quality on the earth’s surface. But being a woman first and foremost, and having a woman’s fellow-feeling for those of her sex who only late in life, or never, arrive at such a clarity of self-determination, she now found herself emitting a strong wave of protective warmth back through the cooling August evening into those distant mountains, and towards the gentle creature whom she now felt she had feebly and selfishly abandoned there.

It arrived far too late to reach the consciousness of the dark girl, which had by that time sunk very deeply into the mountains, and had for the time being lost its identity in a more diffuse mode of being, from which it would emerge, if at all, in recognisable and individual form only after a long period of transformation and healing, which lay beyond her own power to control, or even to affect. So do our powers of sacrifice and faith again and again offer to our fellow-beings opportunities for wholly undetermined, unpredictable occasions of selfless love. What Esther’s powerful gesture, wrested from her newly born spiritual being, did achieve, however, was to link itself with a purely physical emanation or essence, born of their time together in the mountains, and even perhaps with a linkage begun in much earlier periods of history. It was enough, at any rate, to attract the attention of a quite instinctive, even glandular process in the life-forces of the distraught girl now lying on the ground in a cave-mouth high up in the Grail valley of Montréal-de-Sos, where she was rapidly succumbing to the effects of exposure, and arouse in those processes a germinal motivation towards survival.

Infinitely slowly, the girl began to move towards the gap in the rocks, and to crawl painfully on hands and knees back down the slope towards the path. It was providential, and perhaps also part of Esther’s intervention, that the owner of the goats had miscounted his flock, and was making a last search higher up towards the refuge. When he saw the movements of Helène’s dun-coloured shawl among the bracken high up the slope to his right he thought that one of his animals had perhaps missed its footing and broken a leg.

It was less than two hours before she was lying, warm and asleep, wrapped in rugs before the blazing hearth of a shepherd’s cot in Olbier. But it was another full day before the doctor came from Tarascon, summoned when the shepherd’s wife realised the girl was not going to be able to move for some while. And it was several more days before the doctor himself appreciated that he was dealing with something a little different from straightforward shock and exposure.

--- oOo ---

Take the Divided Self
Enough to choose which one is you on each level
Not so much that the other, or others, pursue you
Raging with despair and hunger
To every encounter with the spirit
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’

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