Let me say the obvious: this film is artistically a masterpiece beyond a doubt. The nephew picks up the investigation where his uncle left off and is soon driven quite mad. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.A man inherits his great-uncle's papers and finds that his uncle had been investigating some strange occurrences surrounding a lost ship at sea and a man's exotic dreams.
Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.
And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.
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