The child’s encounter with the gibbet

The child’s encounter with the gibbet is a pivotal episode in the child’s crossing of Portland: the desolate landscape gives way to a visible remnant of human violence, and the child’s curiosity ends in flight. At first, the child hears a sound that is neither wind, sea, nor animal cry and takes it as evidence that someone is nearby. Following it across the dark, bare ground, the child approaches a low eminence near the cliff, where a shape has appeared through the mist.

Approach and Discovery

The object first resolves into the rough outline of an arm raised against the sky, with a chain hanging from it. The chain’s movement in the wind has made the noise that drew the child onward. Beneath it hangs a long, swaddled mass, at once childlike in its wrapping and manlike in its length. Torn flesh protrudes from the lower end. The darkness, mist, sea, and distant storm seem to magnify the sight, making the suspended body appear immense and almost inseparable from the desolate night around it.

The Corpse at Close Range

The child moves toward the gibbet in a double motion of attraction and recoil: each step takes him higher, though he wishes to descend, and closer, though he wishes to retreat. Bold but trembling, he finally stands beneath the structure and looks up. What had appeared at a distance as a shapeless mass now becomes a body whose details make the spectacle more terrible, not less.

The corpse is tarred, its face coated in pitch that seems to change with the shadows. The mouth, nose, and eyes appear as holes in the darkened mask. Coarse canvas, soaked in naphtha, is wrapped and apparently corded around the body; mouldy and torn, it exposes a protruding knee and ribs beneath the rents. The face has taken on the colour of earth, while slugs leave pale traces across it. Canvas clings to the bones like a sculpted robe, and the fractured skull gapes like rotten fruit. The precise inventory turns the distant horror into an intimate encounter with decay.

Yet the body retains unsettling traces of human expression. Its teeth still seem to hold a laugh, the open mouth suggests the remnant of a cry, and the tilted head appears to listen. These impressions do not restore life; they make its absence more vivid. The child has approached expecting to discover someone, but finds instead a dead man whose remaining gestures seem to address the living without being able to answer them.

The Storm, the Ravens, and the Flight

A sudden squall changes the scene from stillness to violent motion. The breeze rises into a gale; the corpse tosses on its chain, which first grinds and then shrieks. A rushing sound comes from the horizon, and the child sees a flight of Ravens pierce the mist and descend on the gibbet. They crowd onto the structure rather than the body, their croaking filling the darkness while the child, already chilled, is held fast by terror.

The birds’ pause becomes a signal. One Raven settles on the skeleton, and the flock plunges onto it, hiding the hanged man beneath a mass of black wings. At that instant the corpse seems to bound. Whether it is the wind or the dead body that moves remains uncertain, but the strengthening hurricane takes hold of it, wrenching it in every direction. The birds scatter, return, and struggle over the remains as the chain jerks and the suspended figure twists on its pivot. The storm appears to animate a puppet while the Ravens attack it: neither force restores life, yet together they make the corpse seem to fight back. The turning body and spiralling flock become a whirl within the hurricane, with the roar of the sea rising from below.

The child witnesses the whole convulsion and can endure it no longer. Trembling, staggering, and nearly falling, he presses both hands to his forehead, then rushes down the hill with long strides. His eyes are closed and his hair streams in the wind; as he flees, he seems almost another phantom, leaving behind the gibbet, the storm, and the Ravens’ assault in the night.

Narrative Significance

The encounter is built as a sequence of changing perceptions: an unexplained sound draws the child toward what first resembles a tree, then the outline of an arm and chain, and finally the unmistakable remains of a man. Each closer view answers one question only to sharpen the dread. The child had taken the noise as evidence that someone was there; at the gibbet he finds a body that can neither speak nor move by its own power. Even the apparent signs of expression—the teeth that retain a laugh, the open mouth that seems to preserve a cry, the head inclined as if listening—offer no reply. The scene turns the child’s search for human presence into an encounter with its terrible absence.

The storm and the Ravens intensify that uncertainty without resolving it. The body seems to leap, twist, and struggle, yet the hurricane catches the chain and drives the movement; the child cannot tell whether the corpse or the wind makes the first bound. This indeterminacy keeps the spectacle between physical violence and nightmare, while the ravens’ assault makes death appear to continue as torment. The child’s escape marks the limit of what he can witness: the encounter does not explain the dead man’s identity or fate, but leaves him fleeing from a sight in which human remains, weather, and darkness have become almost impossible to distinguish.