It is the yearning effort of the Faustian Soul for the Apollonian Ideal.

 Oswald Spengler:     The Decline of the West, 1918  

I dreamed that the sun had set and the light faded in grey and magenta. Walking over old snow I reached the hills in the East, black laced by bare trees. I entered a sunken path and, although it was dark by now, I could see. Soon I reached the other side and saw above the sea a castle, far away, and a rising sun surrounding it with the colours of the rainbow. I felt a wave of exultation coming over me, an experience of content, happiness and bliss. On the gentle breeze I heard a symphony of distant voices intoning harmonies never heard and a longing to enter the castle rose within me. I knew that whatever I had dreamed had become reality.

Not knowing how long I stood, tasting the beauty of it all, it became clear to me that I had to return to tell the world about it. Once I had arrived back on the snowy field, I asked: Where am I? The answer came swiftly: You are in Littlestown, Adams County, Pennsylvania, USA.

Henry Faust

On the Athenais, east of Socotra, 1977

24^th December 1990

1

 Henry was on his way to actually find his dream.

The day was dark. Clouds above the rolling hills of Chester County painted the sky in endless variations of grey.  Large signs told him that the turnoff for the American Wonderland was approaching, but he took the Lancaster turn to the Susquehanna River and York. It started to rain and the windscreen wipers danced with the spray.

Many things had happened since the dream but when he found in a Rand McNally Road Atlas of the United States that Littlestown really existed, he knew he had to go to find the castle he had dreamt about. He became obsessed by the idea and with it, his marriage broke up, his friends left him and he lost his job. But with the loss of his loved ones he had gained the freedom to prepare himself to find the castle.

Route 30 leads northward around York and then again southwest towards Gettysburg.  Near Hanover, the rain stopped and the cloud cover broke to allow shafts of watery light to touch the sodden hills. On Route 194 he drove into a flat valley in which Littlestown clings to round hills that range towards the east of the valley. Driving slowly, he tried to compare the landscape that he was seeing with the one he remembered from his dream. Pink light painted the dark clouds with delicate shades of magenta and the broken snow below the black filigree of leafless trees reflected traces of purple. Like two slides, the image of what he saw and the image of his memory came together. He stopped the car.

As the day darkened into an early night, Henry took a torch from the boot of the car and walked across a desolate field covered with decayed snow and soggy tufts of yellow grass, which stretched between the road and the hills. As in the dream, he came to the sunken path. He pushed through a barrier of wet undergrowth dripping with icy water. Bizarre black branches of sickly saplings reached for his face, mouldering bulrush and squelching tufts of moss entangled his feet. Brown ferns pulled at his arms as he stumbled onto a fungi-studded place, surrounded at each side by steep, wooded slopes. In front of him, the beam of the torch revealed a dripping, moss-covered wall of crumbling masonry. He let the torchlight wander along the wall and then the beam of light disintegrated into the dark opening of a tunnel from whose mouth fear appeared to spiral in black circles.

“Oh, no. That is not right,” he moaned and the certainty of reaching the distant castle collapsed and disappointment descended like a dark shroud over his mind. He had not dreamed about a tunnel. Rage rose in him and his screams echoed between the wooded slopes. Finally, it became clear to him that there was no way back; that he had to go on. 

Was it safe to go into this stinking hole? There might be pitfalls, shafts plummeting into unfathomable depths, passages leading into oblivion, foul air, giant rats and revolting spiders. As he walked into the tunnel, cold sweat broke from his skin and the darkness restricted his breathing. Long-forgotten memories of nights in air-raid shelters flooded him with images of dark cellars full of frightened people. Pale faces in semi-darkness awaiting the moment in which the houses with all their treasured possessions, artefacts and memories disintegrated in a hail of bombs dropped from the aircraft above.

Was there somebody behind him? Did he hear steps or was it the echo of his own breathing? The shaky beam of his torch crawled along dripping rock walls to rest on blackness.

Nothing.

No grinning pale faces. No fangs dripping with gore. It was only his imagination. The light beam moved upwards to the arched roof of the tunnel. Raw rock dripped with chalky water growing miniature stalactites. Lichens and spider webs hung like interwoven curtains, reaching out for him. Icy water trickled down his neck and his jaws clenched tightly in terror and his legs became rigid. A cool breath of air touched his face and with a shriek he ran, letting go of his torch, which clattered to the ground, flickered and went out…

Henry stood transfixed and petrified. Absolute blackness surrounded him. There was no up, no down, no left, no right, no forward or back, only a terrifying void. He was condemned to be frozen forever in primeval darkness under endless layers of rock. He would be captured in the strata only to be released as a fossil when the rocks had given way to the weather of millennia. He needed to get out of this void as quickly as possible. But how? He could see no way forward. He hardly dared to breathe. He tasted his own fear and he fell to his knees.

“I don’t want to die,” he cried. “Help me, help!”

The sound of his cries bounced off the tunnel walls and echoed down into the blackness of the void and returned as faint voices, calling for help.

Voices?

Were they already looking for him?

          Memories came back to him like illuminated stained glass windows; pictures of the Medway Valley, pubs in Gravesend and vistas of London. Others of the Karoo in South Africa, Aberdeen and Findochty. His town of birth in Germany and his father’s friend, the Jewish GI from America. Travels through Belgium; the sanatorium in Bavaria run by nuns and his uncle in Cologne. The tableau of his memories began to break up. They became a kaleidoscope of whirling colours retreating faster and faster into the black hole of the tunnel. Nothing was left between him and eternity.  He wanted to cry but could not. He knelt in the mud and with wide-open eyes waited for death.