Read (1972) The Halloween Tree for Free Online Page A

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 fruit 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:
    “There it goes, boys. The heart, soul, and flesh of Halloween. The Sun!
There Osiris is murdered again. There sinks Mithras, the Persian fire.
There falls Phoebus Apollo all Grecian light. Sun and flame, boys. Look
and blink. Turn that crystal spyglass. Swing it down the Mediterranean
Coast a thousand miles. See the Greek Isles?”
    “Sure,” said plain George Smith, dressed up as fancy pale ghost.
“Cities, towns, streets, houses. People jumping out on porches to bring
food!”
    “Yes.” Moundshroud beamed. “Their Festival of the Dead: the Feast of Pots. Trick-or-Treat old