The Vale of Dolour

'

It is already suspended in the air.

1

It was a strange realm, with pinewood after fir forest after a coniferous-deciduous tangle across undulous terraces of uncharted land, - a land of weird possibility, holding a beauty and an eerie gravity that together called forth an inarticulate mood of silent awe that the hush of those branches and solemnity of those leafy and boled vistas invoked.

Past tearful bluebells merging with bluish fog-lands they skirted on, in vicinities which sparkled with sluggish lakes and churling rivulets underneath a penumbral temple-like ambience of tall palmed-out spruces and elders; then the pinewood re-emerged, and they bended onto a succession of lush ups and downs of hills which commanded views of unwithholdable longing – floating harbours of light teal cloud in palish and pinkish suffusions, thoughtful and crisp as it was in the small-hour-to-dawn transition.

Mr Saften Gelmore, a traveller of fifty-eight, in coarser clothes of more lasting fabric allotted for his vocation of choice, in something between a Norfolk jacket and a brownish-green coat for the mildness of climate they were journeying in, over a sown vest and a pair of warm red-and-black-striped travel trousers – was observing from his equipage ensconcement the unfurling terrain with forest and scrubwood on either side of the road that was soon to drop off into a narrower forest lane.

By his side, a stranger by far to himself, a Mr Selinton, a dreamy explorer of the unknown and the unknowable on earth; a cast of juvenile aloofness worn upon his young visage of thirty-seven, made him the covert rumination of Gelmore's mind, which, overtaxed by the task ('Where did I catch him?'), would rather seek to regain composure in the eye-roamings across the store of higher and lower botany of the passing furlongs.

What so surely similar and dissimilar as a traveller with clear and vivid geographies and topographies within the mind's eye over against a strange subject whose occupations in field and thicket are not even so obvious to himself?.. It could rightfully be deduced that Gelmore and Selinton were as much divided by their visionary and questing 'trade' as unite on a joint emprise. And truly, Mr Saften Gelmore felt that though Selinton's unobtrusiveness evaded him on the one hand, it even more flowed into an alarming invasiveness – because he could not for the breath of him recall how they had met, and how they had wed their pathways together in this off-white horsedrawn carriage.

Its coachman was muffled in his clothes, his back to the body of the carriage, and but for a silhoutte by intermittent sunlight a shadow brooded over the fine latticework of the front pane. In carriage and four they verily sat, as Gelmore was able to notice from his seat by craning his neck out into the swish of the open air.

The calm roll of wheels upon the downy turf gave a velvety impression to the progress; maples and oaks skirted the bridle path that lost itself in clumps after clumps of timber, sonorous with a tenuous and yet rich quiescence; they were now through a mass of tangled trees, now on an even plain, now up and down – dreamily they sped, and the horses only brushed the air with their silken tails as they concertedly sped the van of riddles into the horizon of dubious promise, with the tabernacle of Gelmore's brain harassed by pricking, though diluted, suspicion in trials of some inexplicable, haunting uncertainty.

It being somewhat stuffy indoors, Gelmore took to slowly unbuttoning his coat; he felt an abrasive corner of an object within. A card dangled from his breast-pocket. It said but one thing.

Martnire Place, 7.30 p.m.

Somehow, Gelmore received an uneasying inkling that, sans any occasional stops of relief, they were to spend the day-round of the sun inside the noble cask on wheels.