The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page A

hidden cat, large or small. I have noticed, walking in English parkland, that during the approach to an indeterminate object—say a large rock, with mossy growths, or a small log, the mind continues, from the minimal evidence, or sketched points of reference given, to
construct
the supposed creature. I have created whole ravens—heavy beak, claws, pinion-feathers, watchful eye—from what had to be
reconstructed
, seen again, as a hawthorn root. Here several times I have seen a lion crouched—tufted ears, shoulder muscles, softly lashing tail—where there was nothing but the movement of a bush in a breeze and a light catching on some shiny object, creating a vision of eyes to watching eyes. Something of this kind must have happened to me that night, but on a scale so awful and disgusting that I hesitate to relate it. Indeed I shall relate it only to attempt a rational exorcism. I believe the initial images may have risen in my poor brain, induced in part by our visit to Elephant Fountain, where the heaps of bones of those great beasts have suggested to the natives that it is a graveyard to which they go to die, to lay themselves down amongst their forebears and companions. Be that as it may, I suddenly saw the whole foreshore—on which there were a moderate number of big pebbles, small boulders, driftwood, etc. etc.—spread with bones. These bones were human bones, cloven skulls, severed spines, smashed femurs and tibia, little heaps of tiny phalanges and metatarsals. They gleamed white in the moonlight, and ruddy near at hand, in the light of the camp-fire. Wherever I looked, my gazeseemed, as it were, to invest these dry bones with flesh. I thought irresistibly of Ezekiel in his valley of the dry bones. “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord … And behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but there was no breath in them.” Ezekiel made his bones a living army but my creative eye went no further than to invest these with raw, slippery flesh, livid or freshly bleeding, hacked about and mauled, to which unspeakable things had been done. I had performed much butchery on beasts, in my sporting days, and in my explorations, and I was cognisant of the organs and limbs of the human body, from brain to toenail, from my medical days. But I can hardly believe that the horrible tortures, the ingenious mincing and carving up to which this mass of manhood had been subjected, came from my own subconscious. My mind retches at it still. Parts joined together in fantastic conjunctions—nipples with eye-sockets, and other unspeakable concatenations—all in pain, in pain. I walked amongst them, trying to discern a whole man, and came upon a half-flayed, severed head on a pole, out of which—I swear it
—my own eyes looked at me sorrowfully
. As if to say, why have you brought me to this pass?
    â€œThese heaps of flesh were inanimate but not immobile. They so to speak writhed or flowed together, moulding themselves into new forms. I was put in mind of some beautifulsad lines of Alfred Tennyson’s poem for Henry Hallam’s lamented brother Arthur, so tragically cut off. It was published anonymously just as I left for this unknown country: Henry pressed a copy into my hand as we parted. It is a fantastical, fragmentary poem, but its grief rings true, and is a grief for the whole earth, for the loss of a faith.
    â€œThe hills are shadows and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands
Like clouds they shape themselves, and go.
    â€œI wish I had not thought of this then, for now