A Walk on the Hill

Because ofmatter, then, the Cosmos is misty and dim; but because of the power of form for connecting and ordering (which gives Cosmos its name) it is beautiful and pleasing. For this reason, then, it may be properly described as a cave that is pleasant when one first comes upon it because it participates in form, but obscure when one examines its foundations and penetrates with the mind to the depths of it. -Porphyry, The Cave of the Nymphs A Walk on the Hill by Rodger Cunningham Rurey Bain climbed the trail of coalblackened dirt up an embankment overgrown with honeysuckle and strewn with last year's slashed-down trees of heaven. Reaching the top, he looked down the other side at the town spread below him, at roofs new and old, at a bright trailer court where a field had been. He glanced over his shoulder, where the tracks curved into a skyline gapped with its missing passenger depot, over the flat white tree-lined geometry of Chobeka, and across the great river. Then Rurey turned from the town, toward the hill. The track swung around on its tall embankment to meet the one that sliced along the face of the hill behind Chobeka, the straight abrupt hillside cut by a river in which the last dinosaurs had laid their bones. The bluff had been sharpened and straightened again by the railroad that ran ruler-straight and level halfway up its face. The tracks converged to pass over the hollow where Fifteenth Street penetrated the railroad and snaked up the hill. Rurey stepped along the overpass, two ties at a time. He walked on past a stretch where the cut hillside formed a series of broad surfaces, huge facets like Cyclopean walls, then past the mouth of a small hollow drained by a culvert out of sight 47 beneath him, and into the shadow of another hill-face, not so close-shaved as the last but by nature too steep to climb easily. Not far now. Once over another bridge, Rurey left the tracks where he knew he should. The trail led up steep and black through the new spring green. It was narrow but clear, though it seemed to have been kept that way more by rainfall than by footfalls. Drifts of last year's gray stalks lay in swept ranks at the curves and the bottom. Rurey's teet crunched the stalks and sank into the loam. Shortly he was on the trail proper. Making his way into the woods, he could hardly attend to them for keeping an eye on unremembered sheds and fences that he kept passing a few yards uphill. He moved away from the tracks, inward along the edge of the last hollow, toward his goal where the cliff below him sharply jutted out in a great squared-off rock, split from the body of the cliff by a crevice a foot or so wide. Halfway up the crag's five-yard height, it was stepped Back like a gigantic rough chair, though he had never climbed down or up to the seat. Now as so often before, he satisfied himself with stepping over the crevice and sitting down on the chairback , where the roots of an oak twisted themselves into a safe and easy perch. As he lowered himself to sit, the last glowering toolshed sank out of sight over the brow of the rise above, and finally he was where he wanted to be. The name of the place was the King's Chair. It had taken him years to realize how the name's unromantic simplicity testified to its age and rootedness. Not a developer's name. And not "King George" or whatever, but "the king," a figure of legend who had lost his name like Pharaoh, like Daddy; and there the King would sit in the woods, looking out at his town of subjects, but his seat was empty and anyone could sit in it, a dwarfed child, with feet not touching the footstool, but with impunity. So Rurey sat, catching his breath, and his mind pushed the now-unseen fences and houses back over the other side of...