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Updated: May 7, 2025
Rachel awoke and sat up looking round her wonderingly. Then by the dim light of the lamps she saw Noie seated at her side, and the old dwarf-woman, who was called Mother of the Trees, squatted at a little distance watching them both and remembered. "Thou hast had happy dreams, Lady, and thou art well again, is it not so?" queried Nya.
Still, eat and live on, for I wait a message." "A message from whom?" asked Rachel. "A message from the dead, Sister. It was promised to me by Nya before she passed, and if it does not come, then it will be time to die." So they made fire and boiled the moss till it was a horrible, sticky substance, which they swallowed as best they could, washing it down with gulps of water.
At the sight of that marvellous wall Rachel and Noie halted involuntarily, and Noie asked: "Who made it, Mother?" "The giants who lived when the world was young. Can our hands lift such stones?" Nya answered, as, bending down, she thrust the top shoot from her fallen tree deep into the humid soil, then added: "On, child; there is danger here."
Yet he fought on till, utterly exhausted, his head fell forward, and he swooned away. On the day following that when she had summoned Eddo to speak with her, Nya sat at the mouth of the cave. It was late afternoon, and already the shadows gathered so quickly that save for her white hair, her little childlike shape, withered now almost to a skeleton, was scarcely visible against the black rock.
Then Nya walked up the cave and sat herself down within the circle of the lamps with her back to the stalactite that was shaped like a tree, bidding Rachel and Noie be seated in front of her. Two of the dwarf-mutes appeared, women both of them, and squatted to right and left, each gazing into a bowl of limpid dew.
So next night Nya laid her charm upon Rachel as before, and again her spirit sought for Richard. This time it seemed to her that she did not leave the earth, but with infinite pain, with terrible struggling, wandered to and fro about it, bewildered by a multitude of faces, led astray by myriads of footsteps. Yet in the end she found him.
Nya ceased her singing, and the dwarf women their beating on the drums. "Hast thou been a journey, Maiden?" she asked, looking at Rachel curiously. "Aye, Mother," she answered in a faint voice, "and a journey far and strange." "And thou, Noie, my niece?" "Aye, Mother," she answered, shivering as though with cold or fear, "but I went not with my Sister here, I went alone for years and years."
After a while Nya ceased her beating, and in the utter silence of the night, which was broken only, as always, by the occasional crash of falling trees, for no breath of air stirred, and all the beasts of prey had sought their lairs before light came, both she and Noie seemed to hear, far, infinitely far away, the faint beat of an answering drum.
"Enter, Lady," Nya said, "for this must be thy home a while until thou goest to rule as Mother of the Trees after me, or, if it pleases thee better, up yonder to die." They went into the cave, having no choice. It was a great place lit dimly by the outer light, and farther down its length with lamps.
Evidently they were all of them deaf mutes, for they made signs to Nya, who answered them with other signs, the purport of which seemed to sadden and disturb them greatly. "They have seen the fall of my tree in their bowls," explained Nya to Noie, "and ask me if it is a true vision. I tell them that I am come here to die and that is why they are sad.
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