THE VERY OLD FOLK

From a letter written to "Melmoth" (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3,
1927

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of
Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have
been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial
proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first
before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of
the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude
new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the
circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens--broad-browed Roman
colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of
the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas--and sprinklings of helmeted
legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient
Vascones--all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and
ill-defined uneasiness.

I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to
have brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward.
It appeared that I was a provincial quæstor named L. Cælius Rufus, and that I
had been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from
Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth
legion, under the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole
region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where the permanent
station was.

The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the
townsfolk were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from
Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the
mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told of
in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and
spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom saw
them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed
messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants by means of
gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the peaks,
their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the
same--the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends of
November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would never be
heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and farmers
were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk--that more than one thatched hut
was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.

This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the
very old folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little
squint-eyed traders had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three of
them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their
mountains--and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was
menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their
victims at the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the villagers were
afraid.

For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the
ædile Tib. Annæus Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at
Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night.
Balbutius had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were
empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the Roman
People unless our own citizens were menaced. I, however, who seemed to be a
close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him; averring that I had studied
deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the very old folk
capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was
a Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The complaining
ædile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius Cinna,
who had come over with Scipio's army. Accordingly I had sent a slave--a nimble
little Greek called Antipater--to the proconsul with letters, and Scribonius had
heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius,
to Pompelo; entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and
stamping out whatever nameless orgies he might find-- bringing such prisoners as
he might take to Tarraco for the next proprætor's court. Balbutius, however,
had protested, so that more correspondence had ensued. I had written so much to
the proconsul that he had become gravely interested, and had resolved to make a
personal inquiry into the horror.

He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there
hearing enough rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing
firmly by his order for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with
one who had studied the subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius'
cohort--and Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he
honestly believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous
sentiment of unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and settled.

So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills--old Scribonius
Libo in his toga prætexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and
wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate,
blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius
with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of
townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. I
myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no especially distinguishing
characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and country folk
scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been there
nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread. Old
Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later comers
seemed to hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a place of death or
the temple of some mystic god.

We entered the prætorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his
objections, and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives
in extreme contempt while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite
them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to antagonise the
minority of colonists and civilised natives by inaction, than to antagonise a
probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.

I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany the
cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous
Vascones were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes with them were
inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might take; that they had not in
the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill
become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere
with a course which the justice and prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on
the other hand, the successful administration of a province depended primarily
upon the safety and good-will of the civilised element in whose hands the local
machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed, and in whose veins a large mixture
of our own Italian blood coursed. These, though in numbers they might form a
minority, were the stable element whose constancy might be relied on, and whose
cooperation would most firmly bind the province to the Imperium of the Senate
and the Roman People. It was at once a duty and an advantage to afford them the
protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a sarcastic look at
Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity, and of
a slight interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in
Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real
one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of Syria and
Ægyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with the
bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering Lacus
Nemorensis. There were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on
the Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman
People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be
but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers, A.
Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman citizens for the practice of
the Bacchanalia--a matter kept ever in memory by the Senatus Consultum de
Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every eye. Checked in time,
before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with which the iron of a
Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would not be too much for the
powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be apprehended, and the
sparing of a great number of mere spectators would considerably lessen the
resentment which any of the sympathising country folk might feel. In short, both
principle and policy demanded stern action; and I could not doubt but that
Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and obligations of the Roman
People, would adhere to his plan of despatching the cohort, me accompanying,
despite such objections as Balbutius and Asellius---speaking indeed more like
provincials than Romans--might see fit to offer and multiply.

The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in an
unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his
approval of my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional
capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former
with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes,
a measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in terrible
rhythm. Some few of the legionarii shewed timidity, but sharp commands brought
them into line, and the whole cohort was soon drawn up on the open plain east of
the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on accompanying the
cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native guide to point out
the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named Vercellius, the son of pure
Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the foothills. We began to march
in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a young moon trembling over the
woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the fact that the Sabbath
was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must have reached the hills,
and even the lack of a final decision could not make the rumour less
alarming--yet there were the sinister drums as of yore, as if the celebrants had
some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the forces of the Roman
People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we entered a rising gap in
the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on either side, and
displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our bobbing torches.
All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the centuriones,
and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that those who had
horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to guard them,
though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of terror. Once
in a while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the woods nearby,
and after a half-hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of the way made the
advance of so great a body of men--over 300, all told--exceedingly cumbrous and
difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness we heard a frightful sound
from below. It was from the tethered horses--they had screamed, not neighed, but
screamed...and there was no light down there, nor the sound of any human thing,
to shew why they had done so. At the same moment bonfires blazed out on all the
peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk equally well before and behind us.
Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a crumpled heap
weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword snatched from the
belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look of terror
that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when
the horses screamed... he, who had been born and lived all his life in that
region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began
to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing
screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly
so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations
which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings. The whole
cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I watched what I
thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the spectral luminosity of
the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cygnus.
Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky--even bright Deneb and
Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind us. And as the torches died
out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort only the
noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and
now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as
had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of
furtive tales. And above the nighted screaming of men and horses that dæmonic
drumming rose to louder pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and
deliberateness swept down from those forbidden heights and coiled about each man
separately, till all the cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if
acting out the fate of Laocoön and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed
resigned. He uttered words amidst the screaming, and they echo still in my ears.
"Malitia vetus...malitia vetus est...venit...tandem venit..." ("Wickedness of
old...it is wickedness of old...happened...happened at last...")

And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of
the subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no
record exists, but the town at least was saved--for encyclopædias tell of the
survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona...

Yrs for Gothick Supremacy--
C . IVLIVS . VERVS . MAXIMINVS.