212 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

the master o£ the Schloss; his agents are everywhere
. . . there is an atmosphere of force and terror . .
occasionally beauty . . . 'meaning behind meaning,
form behind form'. I can imagine that after seven
years of investigating this formal but Protean re-
ligion, one may still despair of an interpretation.
Olga in Kafka's novel, it will be remembered, tried
to construct "out of glimpses and rumours and
through various distorting factors" an image of
Klamm. "He's reported as having one appearance
when he comes into the village and another on leav-
ing it, after having his beer he looks different from
what he does before it, when he's awake he's different
from when he's asleep, when he's alone he's different
from when he's talking to people, and—what is com-
prehensible after all that—he's almost another person
up in the Castle." Take the case of the rich and
sinister headman at Zigita: for all anyone knew he
might be the devil himself ... or was the devil the
blacksmith? or was there a devil in the sense of an
individual at all, any more than the group of young
warriors had been a devil, was it perhaps a fraud
practised by the initiates? But it was a mistake to
suggest that the young warriors were frauds: in their
composite form they were the devil.

Then take the masks, I had asked Mark whether
he feared Landow when Jbe was out of his mask and
just the blacksmith of Mosambolahun; and it was
obvious that he feared him less, but that even then
the blacksmith retained an aura of something not
quite human. Did the supernatural rest in the mask?
No, one person would say, it was in the combination
of the two, but on the other hand old disused masks