The Halloween Tree

"All, boy, all," murmured Moundshroud. "The Egyptians, why, they built to last. Ten thousand years they planned for. Tombs, boys, tombs. Graves. Mummies. Bones. Death, death. Death was at the very heart, gizzard, light, soul, and body of their life! Tombs and more tombs with secret passages, so none might be found, so grave robbers could not borrow souls and toys and gold. You are a mummy, boy, because that was how they dressed for Eternity. Spun up in a cocoon of threads, they hoped to come forth like lovely butterflies in some far dear loving world. Know your cocoon, boy. Touch the strange stuffs."

"Why," said Ralph the Mummy, blinking at the smoky walls and old hieroglyphs. "Every day was Halloween to them!"

"Every day!" gasped all, in admiration.

"Every day was Halloween for them, too." Moundshroud pointed.

The boys turned.

A kind of green electric storm simmered in the tomb dungeon. The ground shuddered as with an ancient earthquake. Somewhere, a volcano turned over in its sleep, lighting the walls with one fiery shoulder.

And on the walls beyond were prehistoric drawings of cavemen, long before the Egyptians.

"Now," said Moundshroud.

Lightning struck.

Saber-toothed tigers caught the cavemen screaming. Tarpits drowned their bones. They sank, wailing.

"Wait. Let's save a few with fire."

Moundshroud blinked. Lightning struck to burn forests. One apeman, running, seized a burning branch and rammed it in a saber-tooth's jaws. The tiger shrieked and fell away. The apeman, snorting in triumph, tossed the fiery branch into a pile of autumn leaves in his cave. Other men came to hold their hands out to the fire, laughing at the night where the yellow beast eyes waited, afraid.

"See, boys?" Moundshroud's face flickered with the fire. "The days of the Long Cold are done. Because of this one brave, new-thinking man, summer lives in the winter cave."

"But?" said Tom. "What's that got to do with Halloween?"

"Do? Why, blast my bones, everything. When you and your friends die every day, there's no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last--"

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

"--now you have time to think of where you came from, where you're going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beastman, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?"

"And that's how Halloween began?"

"With such long thoughts at night, boys. And always at the center of it, fire. The sun. The sun dying down the cold sky forever. How that must have scared early man, eh? That was the Big Death. If the sun went away forever, then what?

"So in the middle of autumn, everything dying, apemen turned in their sleep, remembered their own dead of the last year. Ghosts called in their heads. Memories, that's what ghosts are, but apemen didn't know that. Behind their eyelids, late nights, the memory ghosts called, waved, danced, so apemen woke up, tossed twigs on the fire, shivered, wept. They could drive away wolves but not memories, not ghosts. So they held tight to their ribs, prayed for spring, watched the fire, thanked invisible gods for harvests of fru

it and nuts.

"Halloween, indeed! A million years ago, in a cave in autumn, with ghosts inside heads, and the sun lost."

Moundshroud's voice faded.

He unraveled another yard or two of mummy wrappings, draped them over his arm grandly and said: "More to see. Come on, boys."

And they walked out of the catacombs into the twilight of an old Egyptian day.

A great pyramid lay before them, waiting.

"Last one to the top," said Moundshroud, "is a monkey's uncle!"

And the monkey's uncle was Tom.

Gasping, they reached the pyramid's top where waited a vast crystal lens, a viewing glass which spun slowly in the wind on a golden tripod, a gigantic eye with which to bring far places near.

In the west, the sun, smothered and dying in clouds, sank. Moundshroud hooted his delight: