At the Back of the North Wind

all about him. Now it blinded him by smiting him upon the eyes; now it deafened him by bellowing in his ears; for even when the thunder came he knew now that it was the billows of the great ocean of the air dashing against each other in their haste to fill the hollow scooped out by the lightning; now it took his breath quite away by sucking it from his body with the speed of its rush. But he did not mind it. He only gasped first and then laughed, for the arm of North Wind was about him, and he was leaning against her bosom. It is quite impossible for me to describe what he saw. Did you ever watch a great wave shoot into a winding passage amongst rocks? If you ever did, you would see that the water rushed every way at once, some of it even turning back and opposing the rest; greater confusion you might see nowhere except in a crowd of frightened people. Well, the wind was like that, except that it went much faster, and therefore was much wilder, and twisted and shot and curled and dodged and clashed and raved ten times more madly than anything else in creation except human passions. Diamond saw the threads of the lady’s hair streaking it all. In parts indeed he could not tell which was hair and which was black storm and vapour. It seemed sometimes that all the great billows of mist-muddy wind were woven out of the crossing lines of North Wind’s infinite hair, sweeping in endless intertwistings. And Diamond felt as the wind seized on his hair, which his mother kept rather long, as if he too was a part of the storm, and some of its life went out from him. But so sheltered was he by North Wind’s arm and bosom that only at times, in the fiercer onslaught of some curl-billowed eddy, did he recognise for a moment how wild was the storm in which he was carried, nestling in its very core and formative centre.

It seemed to Diamond likewise that they were motionless in this centre, and that all the confusion and fighting went on around them. Flash after flash illuminated the fierce chaos, revealing in varied yellow and blue and grey and dusky red the vapourous contention; peal after peal of thunder tore the infinite waste; but it seemed to Diamond that North Wind and he were motionless, all but the hair. It was not so. They were sweeping with the speed of the wind itself towards the sea.

VII

The Cathedral

I must not go on describing what cannot be described, for nothing is more wearisome.

Before they reached the sea, Diamond felt North Wind’s hair just beginning to fall about him.

“Is the storm over, North Wind?” he called out.

“No, Diamond. I am only waiting a moment to set you down. You would not like to see the ship sunk, and I am going to give you a place to stop in till I come back for you.”

“Oh! thank you,” said Diamond. “I shall be sorry to leave you, North Wind, but I would rather not see the ship go down. And I’m afraid the poor people will cry, and I should hear them. Oh, dear!”

“There are a good many passengers on board; and to tell the truth, Diamond, I don’t care about your hearing the cry you speak of. I am afraid you would not get it out of your little head again for a long time.”

“But how can you bear it then, North Wind? For I am sure you are kind. I shall never doubt that again.”

“I will tell you how I am able to bear it, Diamond: I am always hearing, through every noise, through all the noise I am making myself even, the sound of a far-off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don’t hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” returned Diamond, stoutly. “For they wouldn’t hear the music of the faraway song; and if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.”

“But you have never heard the psalm, and you don’t know what it is like. Somehow, I can’t say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries.”

“But that won’t do them any good⁠—the people, I mean,” persisted Diamond.

“It must. It must,” said North Wind, hurriedly. “It wouldn’t be the song it seems to be if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with the rest. I am sure it will. And do you know, ever since I knew I had hair, that is, ever since it began to go out and away, that song has been coming nearer and nearer. Only I must say it was some thousand years before I heard it.”

“But how can you say it was coming nearer when you did not hear it?” asked doubting little Diamond.

“Since I began to hear it, I know it is growing louder, therefore I judge it was coming nearer and nearer until I did hear it first. I’m not so very old, you know⁠—a few thousand years only⁠—and I was quite a baby when I heard the noise first, but I knew it must come from the voices of people ever so much older and wiser than I was. I can’t sing at all, except now and then, and I can never tell what my