Читать книгу Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris Lessing - Страница 6

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Inner-space fiction

For there is never anywhere to go but in.

CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL

Admittance Sheet

Friday, August 15th, 1969

Name…	Unknown
Sex…	Male
Age…	Unknown
Address…	Unknown

General Remarks

… At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. They took him into the station thinking he was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused and Amenable. Brought him to us at 3 a.m. by ambulance. During admittance Patient attempted several times to lie down on the desk. He seemed to think it was a boat or a raft. Police are checking ports, ships, etc. Patient was well-dressed but had not changed his clothes for some time. He did not seem very hungry or thirsty. He was wearing trousers and a sweater, but he had no papers or wallet or money or marks of identity. Police think he was robbed. He is an educated man. He was given two Libriums but did not sleep. He was talking loudly. Patient was moved into the small Observation ward as he was disturbing the other Patients.

NIGHT NURSE 6 a.m.

Patient has been awake all day, rambling, hallucinated, animated. Two Librium three-hourly. Police no information. Clothes sent for tracing, but unlikely to yield results: chainstore sweater and shirt and underclothes. Trousers Italian. Patient still under the impression he is on some sort of voyage. Police say possibly an amateur or a yachtsman.

DOCTOR Y. 6 p.m.

I need a wind. A good strong wind. The air is stagnant. The current must be pounding along at a fair rate. Yes, but I can’t feel it. Where’s my compass? That went days ago, don’t you remember? I need a wind, a good strong wind. I’ll whistle for one. I would whistle for one if I had paid the piper. A wind from the East, hard on to my back, yes. Perhaps I am still too near the shore? After so many days at sea, too near the shore? But who knows, I might have drifted back again inshore. Oh no, no, I’ll try rowing. The oars are gone, don’t you remember, they went days ago. No, you must be nearer landfall than you think. The Cape Verde Islands were to starboard—when? Last week. Last when? That was no weak, that was my wife. The sea is saltier here than close inshore. A salt, salt sea, the brine coming flecked off the horses’ jaws to mine. On my face, thick crusts of salt. I can taste it. Tears, seawater. I can taste salt from the sea. From the desert. The deserted sea. Sea horses. Dunes. The wind flicks sand from the crest of dunes, spins off the curl of waves. Sand moves and sways and masses itself into waves, but slower. Slow. The eye that would measure the pace of sand horses, as I watch the rolling gallop of sea horses would be an eye indeed. Aye Aye. I. I could catch a horse, perhaps and ride it, but for me a sea horse, no horse of sand, since my time is man-time and it is God for deserts. Some ride dolphins. Plenty have testified. I may leave my sinking raft and cling to the neck of a sea horse, all the way to Jamaica and poor Charlie’s Nancy, or, if the current swings me south at last, to the coast where the white bird is waiting.

Round and round and round I go, the Diamond Coast, the Canary Isles, a dip across the Tropic of Cancer and up and across with a shout at the West Indies to port, where Nancy waits for her poor Charlie, and around, giving the Sargasso Sea a miss to starboard, with Florida florissant to port, and around and around, in the swing of the Gulf Stream, and around, with the Azores just outside the turn of my elbow, and down, past the coasts of Portugal where my Conchita waits for me, passing Madeira, passing the Canaries, always en passant, to the Diamond Coast again, and so around, and so around again and again, for ever and ever unless the current swings me South. But that current could never take me South, not. A current is set in itself, inexorable as a bus route. The clockwise current of the Northern seas must carry me, carry me, unless … yes. They may divert me a little, yes they will, steering me with a small feather from their white wings, steadying me south, holding me safe across the cross not to say furious currents about the Equator but then, held safe and sound, I’d find the South Equatorial at last, at last, and safe from all the Sargassoes, the Scyllas and the Charybs, I’d swoop beautifully and lightly, drifting with the sweet currents of the South down the edge of the Brazilian Highlands to the Waters of Peace. But I need a wind. The salt is seaming on the timbers and the old raft is wallowing in the swells and I am sick. I am sick enough to die. So heave ho my hearties, heave—no, they are all gone, dead and gone, they tied me to a mast and a great wave swept them from me, and I am alone, caught and tied to the North Equatorial Current with no landfall that I could ever long for anywhere in the searoads of all that rocking sea.

Nothing from police. No reports of any small boats, yachts or swimmers unaccounted for. Patient continues talking aloud, singing, swinging back and forth in bed. He is excessively fatigued. Tomorrow: Sodium Amytal. I suggest a week’s narcosis.

August 17th

DOCTOR Y.

I disagree. Suggest shock therapy.

August 18th

DOCTOR X.

Very hot. The current is swinging and rocking. Very fast. It is so hot that the water is melting. The water is thinner than usual, therefore a thin fast rocking. Like heat-waves. The shimmer is strong. Light. Different textures of light. There is the light we know. That is, the ordinary light let’s say of a day with cloud. Then, sunlight, which is a yellow dance added to the first. Then the sparkling waves of heat, heat-waves, making light when light makes them. Then, the inner light, the shimmer, like a suspended snow in the air. Shimmer even at night when no moon or sun and no light. The shimmer of the solar wind. Yes, that’s it. Oh solar wind, blow blow blow my love to me. It is very hot. The salt has caked my face. If I rub, I’ll scrub my face with pure sea salt. I’m becalmed, on a light, lit, rocking, deliriously delightful sea, for the water has gone thin and slippery in the heat, light water instead of heavy water. I need a wind. Oh solar wind, wind of the sun. Sun. At the end of Ghosts he said the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, and at the end of When We Dead Awaken, the Sun, into the arms of the Sun via the solar wind, around, around, around, around …

Patient very disturbed. Asked his name: Jason. He is on a raft in the Atlantic. Three caps Sodium Amytal tonight. Will see him tomorrow.

DOCTOR Y.

DOCTOR Y. Did you sleep well?

PATIENT. I keep dropping off, but I mustn’t, I must not.

DOCTOR Y. But why not? I want you to.

PATIENT. I’d slide off into the deep sea swells.

DOCTOR Y. No, you won’t. That’s a very comfortable bed, and you’re in a nice quiet room.

PATIENT. Bed of the sea. Deep sea bed.

DOCTOR Y. You aren’t on a raft. You aren’t on the sea. You aren’t a sailor.

PATIENT. I’m not a sailor?

DOCTOR Y. You are in Central Intake Hospital, in bed, being looked after. You must rest. We want you to sleep.

PATIENT. If I sleep I’ll die.

DOCTOR Y. What’s your name? Will you tell me?

PATIENT. Jonah.

DOCTOR Y. Yesterday it was Jason. You can’t be either, you know.

PATIENT. We are all sailors.

DOCTOR Y. I am not. I’m a doctor in this hospital.

PATIENT. If I’m not a sailor, then you aren’t a doctor.

DOCTOR Y. Very well. But you are making yourself very tired, rocking about like that. Lie down. Take a rest. Try not to talk so much.

PATIENT. I’m not talking to you, am I? Around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and …

NURSE. You must be feeling giddy. You’ve been going around and around and around for hours now, did you know that?

PATIENT. Hours?

NURSE. I’ve been on duty since eight, and every time I drop in to see you, you are going round and round.

PATIENT. The duty watch.

NURSE. Around and around what? Where? There now, turn over.

PATIENT. It’s very hot. I’m not far away from the Equator.

NURSE. You’re still on the raft, then?

PATIENT. You aren’t!

NURSE. I can’t say that I am.

PATIENT. Then how can you be talking to me?

NURSE. Do try and lie easy. We don’t want you to get so terribly tired. We’re worried about you, do you know that?

PATIENT. Well, it is in your hands, isn’t it?

NURSE. My hands? How is that?

PATIENT. You. You said We. I know that ‘We’. It is the categorical collective. It would be so easy for you to do it.

NURSE. But what do you want me to do?

PATIENT. You as we. Not you as you. Lift me, lift me, lift me. It must be easy enough for you. Obviously. Just use your—force, or whatever it is. Blast me there.

NURSE. Where to?

PATIENT. You know very well. Tip me South with your white wing.

NURSE. My white wing! I like the sound of that.

PATIENT. You can’t be one of them. If you were, you’d know. You are tricking me.

NURSE. I’m sorry that you think that.

PATIENT. Or perhaps you’re testing me. Yes, that’s a possibility.

NURSE. Perhaps that is it.

PATIENT. It’s just a question of getting out of the North Equatorial Current into the South Equatorial Current, from clockwise to anti-clockwise. The wise anti-clocks.

NURSE. I see.

PATIENT. Well, why don’t you?

NURSE. I don’t know how.

PATIENT. Is it a question of some sort of a password? Who was that man who was here yesterday?

NURSE. Do you mean Doctor Y.? He was in to see you.

PATIENT. He’s behind this. He knows. A very kindly contumacious man.

NURSE. He’s kind. But I wouldn’t say contumacious.

PATIENT. I say it, so why shouldn’t you?

NURSE. And Doctor X. was in the day before that.

PATIENT. I don’t remember any Doctor X.

NURSE. Doctor X. will be in later this afternoon.

PATIENT. In what?

NURSE. Do try and lie still. Try and sleep.

PATIENT. If I do, I’m dead and done for. Surely you must know that, or you aren’t a maid mariner.

NURSE. I’m Alice Kincaid. I told you that before. Do you remember? The night you came in?

PATIENT. Whatever your name, if you sleep you die.

NURSE. Well, never mind, hush. There, poor thing, you are in a state. Just lie and—there, there. Shhhhh, hush. No, lie still. Shhh … there, that’s it, that’s it, sleep. Sleeeeeeeep. Sle-e-p.

Patient distressed, fatigued, anxious, deluded,

hallucinated.

Try Tofronil? Marplan? Tryptazol? Either that

or shock.

August 21st

DOCTOR X.

DOCTOR Y. Well, now, nurse tells me you are Sinbad today?

PATIENT. Sin bad. Sin bad. Bad sin.

DOCTOR Y. Tell me about it? What’s it all about?

PATIENT. I’m not telling you.

DOCTOR Y. Why not?

PATIENT. You aren’t one of Them.

DOCTOR Y. Who?

PATIENT. The Big Ones.

DOCTOR Y. No, I’m just an ordinary sort of size, I’m afraid.

PATIENT. Why are you afraid?

DOCTOR Y. Who are they, The Big Ones?

PATIENT. There were giants in those days.

DOCTOR Y. Would you tell them?

PATIENT. I wouldn’t need to tell Them.

DOCTOR Y. They know already?

PATIENT. Of course.

DOCTOR Y. I see. Well, would you tell Doctor X.?

PATIENT. Who is Doctor X.?

DOCTOR Y. He was in yesterday.

PATIENT. In and Out. In and Out. In and Out.

DOCTOR Y. We think it would help if you talked to someone. If I’m no use to you, there’s Doctor X., if you like him better.

PATIENT. Like? Like what? I don’t know him. I don’t see him.

DOCTOR Y. Do you see me?

PATIENT. Of course. Because you are there.

DOCTOR Y. And Doctor X. isn’t here?

PATIENT. I keep telling you, I don’t know who you mean.

DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. How about Nurse? Would you like to talk to her? We think you should try and talk. You see, we must find out more about you. You could help if you talked. But try to talk more clearly and slowly, so that we can hear you properly.

PATIENT. Are you the secret police?

DOCTOR Y. No. I’m a doctor. This is the Central Intake Hospital. You have been here nearly a week. You can’t tell us your name or where you live. We want to help you to remember.

PATIENT. There’s no need. I don’t need you. I need Them. When I meet Them they’ll know my needs and there’ll be no need to tell Them. You are not my need. I don’t know who you are. A delusion, I expect. After so long on this raft and without real food and no sleep at all, I’m bound to be deluded. Voices. Visions.

DOCTOR Y. You feel that—there. That’s my hand. Is that a delusion? It’s a good solid hand.

PATIENT. Things aren’t what they seem. Hands have come up from the dark before and slid away again. Why not yours?

DOCTOR Y. Now listen carefully. Nurse is going to sit here with you. She is going to stay with you. She is going to listen while you talk. And I want you to talk, tell her who you are and where you are and about the raft and the sea and about the giants. But you must talk more loudly and clearly. Because when you mutter like that, we can’t hear you. And it is very important that we hear what you are saying.

PATIENT. Important to you.

DOCTOR Y. Will you try?

PATIENT. If I remember.

DOCTOR Y. Good. Now here is Nurse Kincaid.

PATIENT. Yes. I know. I know her well. She fills me full of dark. She darks me. She takes away my mind.

DOCTOR Y. Nonsense. I’m sure she doesn’t. But if you don’t want Nurse Kincaid either, we’ll simply leave a tape recorder here. You know what a tape recorder is, don’t you?

PATIENT. I did try and use one once but I found it inhibiting.

DOCTOR Y. You did? What for?

PATIENT. Oh, some damned silly lecture or other.

DOCTOR Y. You give lectures, do you? What sort of lectures? What do you lecture about?

PATIENT. Sinbad the sailor man. The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y. Stop it! Please. Don’t start that again. Please.

PATIENT. Around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y. Around what? You are going around what? Where?

PATIENT. I’m not going. I’m being taken. The current. The North Equatorial, from the North African Coast, across, past the West Indies to the Florida Current, past Florida around the Sargasso Sea and into the Gulf Stream and around with the West Wind Drift to the Canaries and around past the Cape Verde Islands around and around and around and around …

DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. But how are you going to get out?

PATIENT. They. They will.

DOCTOR Y. Go on, now. Tell us about it. What happens when you meet them? Try and tell us.

He gives lectures. Schools, universities, radio, television, politics? Societies to do with? Exploration, archaeology, zoology? Sinbad. ‘Bad sin.’ Suggest as a wild hypothesis that just this once patient may have committed a crime and this not just routine guilt?

DOCTOR Y.

Accept hypothesis. What crime?

DOCTOR X.

Setting off from the Diamond Coast, first there is the southerly coastal current to get out of. Not once or twice or a dozen times, on leaving the Diamond Coast, the shore-hugging current has dragged us too far South and even within sight of that African curve which rounded would lead us in helpless to the Guinea Current to who knows what unwanted landfalls. But we have always managed just in time to turn the ship out and pointing West with Trinidad our next stop. That is, unless this time we encountered Them. Around and Around. It is not a cycle without ports we long to reach. Nancy waits for poor Charlie in Puerto Rico, George has his old friend John on Cape Canaveral, and I when the ship has swung far enough inshore wait to see Conchita sitting on her high black rock and to hear her sing her song for me. But when greetings and farewells have been made so many times, they as well as we want the end of it all. And when the songs have been heard so often, the singers no longer are Nancy, alone, poor Charlie, alone, or any of us. The last few journeys past the garden where Nancy waits, she was joined by all the girls in her town, and they stood along the wall over the sea watching us sail past, and they sang together what had so often called poor Charlie and his crew in to them before.

Under my hand

flesh of flowers

Under my hand

warm landscape

You have given me back my world,

In you the earth breathes under my hand.

My arms were full of charred branches,

My arms were full of painful sand.

Now I sway in rank forests,

I dissolve in strong forests,

I am the bone the flowers in flesh.

Oh now we reach it –

now, now!

The whistling hub of the world.

It’s as if God had spun a whirlpool,

Flung up a new continent.

But we men stood in a line all along the deck and we sang to them:

If birds still cried on the shore,

If there were horses galloping all night,

Love, I could turn to you and say

Make up the bed,

Put fire to the lamp.

All night long we would lie and hear

The waves beat in, beat in,

If there were still birds on the dunes,

If horses still ran wild along the shore.

And then we would wave each other out of sight, our tears lessening with each circuit, for we were set for our first sight of Them, and they, the women, were waiting with us, for on us their release depended, since they were prisoners on that island.

On this voyage there were twelve men on board, with myself as Captain. Last time I played deckhand, and George was Captain. We were four days out from shore, the current swinging us along fair and easy, the wind coming from the North on to our right cheeks, when Charles, who was lookout, called us forward and there it was. Or, there they were. Now if you ask how it is we knew, then you are without feeling for the sympathies of our imaginations in waiting for just this moment. And that must mean that you yourselves have not yet learned that in waiting for Them lies all your hope. No, it is not true that we had imagined it in just such a form. We had not said or thought, ever: They will be shaped like birds or be forms of light walking on the waves. But if you have ever known in your life a high expectation which is met at last, you will know that the expectation of a thing must meet with that thing—or at least, that is the form in which it must be seen by you. If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes, then if there is such a creature in that sea you will not see anything less, or more—that is what you are set to see. Armies of angels could appear out of the waves, but if you are waiting for a one-eyed giant, you could sail right through them and not feel more than a freshening of the air. So while we had not determined a shape in our thoughts, we had not been waiting for evil or fright. Our expectations had been for aid, for explanation, for a heightening of our selves and of our thoughts. We had been set like barometers for Fair. We had known we would strike something that rang on a higher, keener note than ourselves, and that is why we knew at once that this was what we had been sailing to meet, around and around and around and around, for so many cycles that it might even be said that the waiting to meet up with Them had become a circuit in our minds as well as in the ocean.

We knew them first by the feeling in the air, a crystalline hush, and this was accompanied by a feeling of strain in ourselves, for we were not strung at the same pitch as that for which we had been waiting.

It was a smart, choppy sea and the air was flying with spray. Hovering above these brisk waves, and a couple of hundred yards away, was a shining disc. It seemed as if it should have been transparent, since the eye took in first the shine, like that of glass, or crystal, but being led inwards, as with a glass full of water, to what was behind the glitter. But the shine was not a reflected one: the substance of the disc’s walls was itself a kind of light. The day was racingly cloudy, the sky half cloud, half sun, and all the scene around us was this compound of tossing waves and foam, and flying spray, of moving light, everything changing as we watched. We were waiting for strangers to emerge from the disc and perhaps let down, using the ways of humanity, a dinghy or a boat of some kind so that we, standing along the deck’s edge, grasping fast to ropes and spars, might watch Them approach and take their measure—and adjust our thoughts and manners for the time. But no one appeared. The disc came closer, though so unnoticeably, being part of the general restless movement of the blue and the white, that it was resting on the air just above the waves a few paces off before we understood by a sinking of our hearts that we were not to expect anything so comfortable as the opening of a door, the letting down of a ladder, a boat, and arms bending as oars swung. But we were still not expecting anything in particular when it was already on us. What? What we felt was a sensation first, all through our bodies. In a fever or a great strain of exhaustion, or in love, all the resources of the body stretch out and expand and vibrate higher than in ordinary life. Well, we were vibrating at a higher pitch, and this was accompanied by a high shrill note in the air, of the kind that can break glasses—or probably break much more, if sustained. The disc that had been in our eyes’ vision a few yards away, an object among others, though an object stronger than the others, more obliterating—seemed to come in and invade our eyes. I am describing the sensation, for I cannot say what was the fact. It was certain that this disc rose a little way up from the waves, so that it was level with our deck, and then passed over us, or through us. Yet when it was on us, it seemed no longer a disc, with a shape, but it was more a fast beating of the air, a vibration that was also a sound. It was intolerable while it lasted, as if two different substances were in conflict, with no doubt of the outcome—but it did not last more than a moment, and when my eyes had lost the feeling of being filled with a swift-beating light, or sound, and my whole body from having been stretched or expanded or invaded, as if light (or sound) had the capacity of passing through one’s tissues, but in a shape as definite as one’s own, then I looked to see if George, who stood nearest to me, was still alive. But he was gone, and when I turned in terror to see where he was, and where the others were, they weren’t there. No one. Nothing. The disc, which had again become a crystal disc, hovering over the waves on the other side of the ship, was lifting into the sky. It had swept away or eaten up or absorbed my comrades and left me there alone. All the ship was empty. The decks were empty. I was in terror. And worse. For all these centuries I had been sailing around and around and around and around for no other reason than that one day I would meet Them, and now at last we had indeed inhabited the same pace of air, but I had been left behind. I ran to the other rail of the ship and clung there and opened my mouth to shout. I might indeed have shouted a little, or made some feeble kind of sound, but to what or to whom was I shouting? A silvery shining disc that seemed, as it lifted up and away into the air that it ought to be transparent but was not? It had no eyes to see me, no mouth to acknowledge my shouting with a sound of its own. Nothing. And inside were eleven men, my friends, whom I knew better than I knew myself. Since we do know our friends better than we know ourselves. Then, as I stood there, gazing into the scene of blue and white and silver that tossed and sprayed and shook and danced and dazzled, sea and air all mixed together, I saw that I was looking at nothing. The disc had vanished, was no more than the shape of a cell on my retina. Nothing.

I was sickened with loss, with knowledge of an unforeseeable callousness on their part. To take them and to leave me? In all our voyagings we had never envisaged that we might simply be lifted up and taken away like a litter of puppies or kittens. We had wanted instructions, or aid, we needed to be told how to get off this endless cycling and into the Southern current. Now that this had not happened, and no instructions or information had been given, only a sort of kidnapping, then I wanted to scream against their coldness and cruelty, as one small kitten that has been hidden by a fold of a blanket in the bottom of a basket mews out in loneliness as it moves blindly about, feeling with its muzzle and its senses for its lost companions among the rapidly chilling folds of the blanket.

I stayed at the deck’s edge. For while the ship needed steering and the sails setting, and for all I knew we had already swung about, I could not handle this ship by myself. I already knew that I must leave her, unless I was to choose to live on board her alone, on the small chance that the Disc would hover down again and discharge my companions in the same way it had taken them off. But I did not think this was likely to happen. And I was afraid to stay.

It was as if that Disc, or Crystal, in its swift passage across or through the ship, across or through me, had changed the atmosphere of the ship, changed me. I was shaking and shivering in a cold dread. I could hardly stand, but leaned clinging to a rope. When the shaking had seemed to stop, and I stood clenching my teeth and waiting for the puppy-warmth of life to come back, then the shaking began again, like a fit of malaria, though this was a sort of weakness, not a fever. Now everything in the ship was inimical to me, as if the Disc’s breath had started a rot in its substance. To say that I had been terrified and was still terrified would be too much of an everyday statement. No, I had been struck with foreignness, I had taken a deep breath of an insupportable air. I was not at all myself, and my new loathing that was so much more than a fear of the ship was in itself an illness. Meanwhile the sails shook and flapped and bellied or hung idle above my head. Meanwhile the ship shuddered and swung to every new shift in the fitfully changing wind. Meanwhile she was a creature that had been assaulted and left to die.

I began making a raft, using timber from the carpenter’s store. I worked feverishly, wanting to get away. It never crossed my mind to stay on her, so strong was my fear. Yet I knew that to set off by myself on a raft was more dangerous than staying. On the ship was water, food, some shelter, until it foundered or crashed on a rock. Until then, it would be my safety. But I could not stay. It was as if my having been ignored, left behind, out of all my old comrades, was in itself a kind of curse. I had been branded with my ship.

I worked for many hours and, when daylight went, I lashed a storm lantern to a spar and worked on through the night. I made a raft about twelve by twelve of balsawood poles. To this I lashed a locker full of rations, and a barrel of water. I fitted a sail on a mast in the middle of the raft. I took three pairs of oars, and lashed two spare pairs securely to the timbers of the raft. In the centre of the raft I made a platform of planks about four feet across. And all this time I worked in a deadly terror, a cold sick fear, attacked intermittently by the fits of shaking so that I had to double up as if in cramp, and hold on to a support for fear I’d shake myself to pieces.

By dawn my raft was done. The sky reddened in my face as I stood looking forward with the ship’s movement, so I saw that the ship had already swung about and was heading back in the grip of the Guinea Current to the Cameroons or the Congo. I had to leave it as quickly as I could, and trust that I could still row myself out of this deadly shore-going current and back into the Equatorial stream once again. I put on all the clothes I could find. I let the raft fall into the sea, where it floated like a cork. And with all the sky aflame with sunrise like the inside of a ripening peach, I swarmed down a rope and swung myself on to the raft just as it was about to bob right out of my reach. I reached the raft still dry, though already beginning to be well-damped by spray, and at once began rowing with my back to the sunrise. I rowed as if I were making towards safety and a good dry ship instead of away from one. By the time the sun stood up in a clear summer-hazy sky three or four hand’s-breadths from the horizon, our ship’s sails were a low swarm of white, like a cluster of butterflies settled on the waves, and well behind me, and I was heading West on my real right course. And when I turned my head to look again, it was hard to tell whether I was looking at the white of the sails or at foam on a distant swell. For the sea had changed, to my advantage, and was rolling and rocking, and no longer chopping and changing. And so I rowed all that day, and most of that following night. I rowed and rowed and rowed, until my arms seemed separate from myself, they worked on without my knowing I was ordering them to. Then one day—I think it was three days after I last saw the sails of my ship vanishing East, there was a sudden squally afternoon and my clothes got soaked, and I lost my spare oars. And two days after that, a heavy sea dragged my last oars from me and since then I’ve been trusting myself to the current that curves West and North. And now I have all the time in the world to reflect that I am still engaged in the same journey in the same current, round and round and round, with the West Indies my next landfall, and poor Charlie’s Nancy and her song, just as if I had stayed on the ship with my comrades. And after the women’s song, just as before, around and around, past the Sargasso Sea, and around in the Gulf Stream, and around in the swing of the sea past the coasts of Portugal and Spain, and around and around. But now I am not in a tall ship with sails like white butterflies but on a small raft and alone, around and around. And everything is the same, around and around, with only a slight but worsening change in the shape of my hope: will They, or the Disc, or Crystal Thing, on its next descent, be able to see the speck of my raft on the sea? Will they see me and find the kindness to give me a hail or a shout in reply when I ask them, How may I leave this Current, Friends, set me fair for that other coast, I pray you?

Yes, I’ll hail them, of course, though now a new coldness in my heart tells me of a fear I didn’t have before. I had not thought once, not in all those cycles and circles and circuits, around and around, that they might simply not notice me, as a man might not notice a sleeping kitten or a blind puppy hidden under the fold of his smelly blanket. Why should they notice the speck of a raft on the wide sea? Yet there is nothing for it but to go on, oarless, rudderless, sleepless, exhausted. After all I know it would be a kindness to land on Nancy’s coast and tell her that her Charlie has met up at last with—what? Them, I suppose, though that is all I can tell her, not even how he felt as he became absorbed into the substance of that shining Thing. Will she sing her song to me on my raft, drifting past, will the women line up along the walls of their summer gardens and sing, and shall I then sing back how the time is past for love? And then on I’ll drift to George’s friend and shout to him how George has—what? And where? And then on and on and on, until I see again my Conchita waiting, dressed in the habit of a nun, where all my wandering and ailing has put her.

Man like a great tree

Resents storms.

Arms, knees, hands,

Too stiff for love,

As a tree resists wind.

But slowly wakes,

And in the dark wood

Wind parts the leaves

And the black beast crashes from the cave.

My love, when you say:

‘Here was the storm,

Here was she,

Here the fabulous beast,’

Will you say too

How first we kissed with shut lips, afraid,

And touched our hands, afraid,

As if a bird slept between them?

Will you say:

‘It was the small white bird that snared me’?

And so she sings, each time I pass, around and around, and on and on.

DOCTOR X. Well, how are you this afternoon?

PATIENT. Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X. I’d like you to know that I believe you could snap out of this any time you want.

PATIENT. Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X. Doctor Y. is not here this week-end. I’m going to give you a new drug. We’ll see how that does.

PATIENT. In and out, out and in. In and out, out and in.

DOCTOR X. My name is Doctor X. What is your name?

PATIENT. Around and …

I think he may very well have reverted to age eleven or twelve. That was the age I enjoyed sea stories. He is much worse in my opinion. The fact is, he never acknowledges my presence at all.

DOCTOR Y. claims he reacts to him.

August 24th

DOCTOR X.

DOCTOR Y. What is your name today?

PATIENT. It could be Odysseus?

DOCTOR Y. The Atlantic was surely not his sea?

PATIENT. But it could be now, surely, couldn’t it?

DOCTOR Y. Well now, what’s next?

PATIENT. Perhaps Jamaica. I’m a bit farther South than usual.

DOCTOR Y. You’ve been talking practically non-stop for days. Did you know that?

PATIENT. You told me to talk. I don’t mind thinking instead.

DOCTOR Y. Well, whatever you do, remember this: you aren’t on a raft on the Atlantic. You did not lose your friends into the arms of a flying saucer. You were never a sailor.

PATIENT. Then why do I think I’m one?

DOCTOR Y. What’s your real name?

PATIENT. Crafty.

DOCTOR Y. Where do you live?

PATIENT. Here.

DOCTOR Y. What’s your wife’s name?

PATIENT. Have I got a wife? What is she called?

DOCTOR Y. Tell me, why won’t you ever talk to Doctor X.? He’s rather hurt about it. I would be too.

PATIENT. I’ve told you already, I can’t see him.

DOCTOR Y. Well, we are getting rather worried. We don’t know what to do. It’s nearly two weeks since you came in. The police don’t know who you are. There’s only one thing we are fairly certain about: and that is that you aren’t any sort of a sailor, professional or amateur. Tell me, did you read a lot of sailing stories as a boy?

PATIENT. Man and boy.

DOCTOR Y. What’s George’s surname? And Charlie’s surname?

PATIENT. Funny, I can’t think of them … yes, of course, we all had the same name. The name of the ship.

DOCTOR Y. What was the name of the ship?

PATIENT. I can’t remember. And she’s foundered or wrecked long ago. And the raft never had a name. You don’t call a raft as you call a person.

DOCTOR Y. Why shouldn’t you name the raft? Give your raft a name now?

PATIENT. How can I name the raft when I don’t know my own name. I’m called … what? Who calls me? What? Why? You are Doctor Why, and I am called Why—that’s it, it was the good ship Why that foundered in the Guinea Current, leaving Who on the slippery raft and …

DOCTOR Y. Just a minute. I’ll be away for four or five days. Doctor X. will be looking after you till I get back. I’ll be in to see you the moment I’m back again.

PATIENT. In and out, out and in, in and out …

New treatment. Librium. 3 Tofranil 3 t.a.d.

August 29th

DOCTOR X.

The sea is rougher than it was. As the raft tilts up the side of a wave I see fishes curling above my head and when the waves come crashing over me fishes and weed slide slithering over my face, to rejoin the sea. As my raft climbs up up up to the crest the fishes look eye to eye with me out of the wall of water. There’s that air creature they think, just before they go slop over my face and shoulders while I think as they touch and slide, they are water creatures, they belong to wet. The wave curls and furls in its perfect whirls holding in it three deep sea fish that have come up to see the sky, a tiddler fit for ponds or jam-jars, and the crispy sparkle of plankton, which is neither visible nor invisible, but a bright crunch in the imagination. If men are creatures of air, and fishes, whether big or small, creatures of sea, what then are the creatures of fire? Ah yes, I know, but you did not see me, you overlooked me, you snatched up my comrades and let me lie squeaking inside my fold of smelly blanket. Where are they, my friends? Administering justice, are they, from the folds of fire, looking at me eye to eye out of the silkily waving fronds of fire. Look, there’s a man, that’s an air creature, they think, breathing yellow flame as we breath H₂0. There’s something about that gasping gape, they think—George? poor Charlie—? that merits recognition. But they are beyond air now, and the inhabitants of it. They are flame-throwers. They are fire-storms. You think justice is a kindly commodity? No, it razes, it throws down, it cuts swathes. The waves are so deep, they crash so fast and furious I’m more under than up. They are teaching men—men are teaching men—to have fishes’ lungs, men learn to breathe water. If I take a deep breath of water will my lung’s tissues adapt in the space of a wave’s fall and shout: Yes, yes, you up there, you, sailor, breathe deep and we’ll carry you on water as we carried you on air? After all They must have had to teach my friends George and Charles and James and the rest to take deep lungfuls of fire. You’re not telling me that when the Crystal swirl enveloped me with the others it was ordinary air we breathed then, no, it was a cool fire, sun’s breath, the solar wind, but there are lungs attached to men that lie as dormant as those of a babe in the womb, and they are waiting for the solar wind to fill them like sails. Air lungs for air, but organs made of crystal sound, of singing light, for the solar wind that will blow my love to me. Or me onwards to my love. Oh, the waves rear so tall, they pitch and grow and soar, I’m more under than up, my raft is a little cork on the draughty sea and I’m sick, oh, I’m so sick, pitch and toss, toss and pitch, my poor poor head and my lungs, if I stay on this thick heavy slimy barnacled raft which is shrieking and straining as the great seas crash then I’ll puke my heart out and fall fainting away into the deep sea swells. I’ll leave the raft, then.

Oh no, no, no, I’ve shed my ship, the good ship Why, and I’ve clung like limpets to my new, hard bed the raft and now how can I leave, to go spinning down into the forests of the sea like a sick bird. But if I found a rock or an islet? Silly, there are no rocks or isles or islands or ports of call in the middle of the wide Atlantic sea here at 45 degrees on the Equator. But the raft is breaking up. It breaks. There were only ordinary sea ropes to fasten the balsa poles side by side and across and through, and what ropes could I ever find that could hold this clumsy collection of cross rafters steady in this sea? It’s a storm. It’s a typhoon. The sky is thunder black and with a sick yellowish white at the cloud’s edge and the waves are blue Stephen’s black and higher than the church tower and all the world is wet and cold and my ears are singing like the ague. And there goes my raft, splitting apart under me like bits of straw in the eddy of a kitchen gutter. There it goes, and I’m afloat, reaching out for straws or even a fishbone. I’m all awash and drowning and I’m cold, oh, I am so cold, I’m cold where all my own inside vital warmth should be held, there along my spine and in my belly but there it is cold cold as the moon. Down and down, but the corky sea upsends me to the light again, and there under my hand is rock, a port in the storm, a little peaking black rock that no main mariner has struck before me, nor map ever charted, just a single black basalt rock, which is the uppermost tip of a great mountain a mile or two high, whose lower slopes are all great swaying forests through which the sea buffalo herd and graze. And here I’ll cling until the storm goes and the light comes clear again. Here at last I can stay still, the rock is still, having thrust up from the ocean floor a million years ago and quite used to staking its claim and holding fast in the Atlantic gales. Here is a long cleft in the rock, a hollow, and in here I’ll fit myself till morning. Oh, now I’m a land creature again, and entitled to a sleep steady and easy. I and the rock which is a mountain’s tip are solid together and now it is the sea that moves and pours. Steady now. Still. The storm has gone and the sun is out on a flat, calm, solid sea with its surface gently rocking and not flying about all over the place as if the ocean wanted to dash itself to pieces. A hot, singing, salty sea, pouring Westwards past me to the Indies next stop, but pouring past me, fast on my rock. Fast Asleep. Fast. Asleep.

NURSE. Wake up. Wake up, there’s a dear. Come on, no, that’s it. Sit up, all right, I’m holding you.

PATIENT. Why? What for?

NURSE. You must have something to eat. All right, you can go back to sleep in a minute. But you certainly can sleep, can’t you?

PATIENT. Why make me sleep if you keep waking me up?

NURSE. You aren’t really supposed to be sleeping quite so much. You are supposed to be relaxed and quiet, but you do sleep.

PATIENT. Who supposes? Who gave me the pills?

NURSE. Yes, but—well, never mind. Drink this.

PATIENT. That’s foul.

NURSE. It’s soup. Good hot soup.

PATIENT. Let me alone. You give me pills and then you keep waking me up.

NURSE. Keep waking you? I don’t. It’s like trying to wake a rock. Are you warm?

PATIENT. The sun’s out, the sun …

Who has not lain hollowed in hot rock,

Leaned to the loose and lazy sound of water,

Sunk into sound as one who hears the boom

Of tides pouring in a shell, or blood

Along the inner caverns of the flesh,

Yet clinging like sinking man to sight of sun,

Clinging to distant sun or voices calling?

NURSE. A little more, please.

PATIENT. I’m not hungry. I’ve learned to breathe water. It’s full of plankton you know. You can feed your lungs as you feed your stomach.

NURSE. Is that so, dear? Well, don’t go too far with it, you’ll have to breathe air again.

PATIENT. I’m breathing air now. I’m on the rock, you see.

See him then as the bird might see

Who rocks like pinioned ship on warm rough air,

Coming from windspaced fields to ocean swells

That rearing fling gigantic mass on mass

Patient and slow against the stubborn land,

Striving to achieve what strange reversal

Of that monstrous birth when through long ages

Labouring, appeared a weed-stained limb,

A head, at last the body of the land,

Fretted and worn for ever by a mothering sea

A jealous sea that loves her ancient pain.

NURSE. Why don’t you go and sit for a bit in the day room? Aren’t you tired of being in bed all the time?

PATIENT. A jealousy that loves. Her pain.

NURSE. Have you got a pain? Where?

PATIENT. Not me. You. Jealously loving and nursing pain.

NURSE. I haven’t got a pain, I assure you.

PATIENT. He floats on lazy wings down miles of foam,

And there, below, the small spreadeagled shape

Clinging to black rock like drowning man,

Who feels the great bird overhead and knows

That he may keep no voices, wings or winds

Who follows hypnotized down glassy gulfs,

His roaring ears extinguished by the flood.

NURSE. Take these pills dear, that’s it.

PATIENT. Who has not sunk as drowned man sinks,

Through sunshot layers where still the under-curve

Of lolling wave holds light like light in glass,

Where still a jewelled fish slides by like bird,

And then the middle depths where all is dim

Diffusing light like depths of forest floor.

He falls, he falls, past apprehensive arms

And spiny jaws and treacherous pools of death,

Till finally he rests on ocean bed.

Here rocks are tufted with lit fern, and fish

Swim shimmering phosphorescent through the weed

And shoals of light float blinking past like eyes,

Here all the curious logic of the night.

Is this a sweet drowned woman floating in her hair?

The sea-lice hop on pale rock scalp like toads.

And this a gleam of opalescent flesh?

The great valves shut like white doors folding close.

Stretching and quavering like the face of one

Enhanced through chloroform, the smiling face

Of her long half-forgotten, her once loved,

Rises like thin moon through watery swathes,

And passes wall-eyed as the long dead moon.

He is armed with the indifference of deep-sea sleep

And floats immune through sea-roots fed with flesh,

Where skeletons are bunched against cave roofs

Like swarms of bleaching spiders quivering,

While crouching engines crusted with pale weed,

Their shafts and pistons rocking through the green …

NURSE. Now do come on, dear. Oh dear, you are upset, aren’t you? Everybody has bad times, everyone gets upset from time to time. I do myself. Think of it like that.

PATIENT. Not everyone has known these depths

The black uncalculated wells of sea,

Where any gleam of day dies far above,

And stagnant water slow and thick and foul …

NURSE. It’s no good spitting your pills out.

PATIENT. Foul, fouled, fouling, all fouled up …

NURSE. One big swallow, that will do it, that’s done it.

PATIENT. You wake me and you sleep me. You wake me and then you push me under. I’ll wake up now. I want to wake.

NURSE. Sit up, then.

PATIENT. But what is this stuff, what are these pills, how can I wake when you … who is that man who pushes me under, who makes me sink as drowned man sinks and …?

NURSE. Doctor X. thinks this treatment will do you good.

PATIENT. Where’s the other, the fighting man?

NURSE. If you mean Doctor Y., he’ll be back soon.

PATIENT. I must come up from the sea’s floor. I must brave the surface of the sea, storms or no, because They will never find me down there. Bad enough to expect Them to come into our heavy air, all smoky and fouled as it is, but to expect them down at the bottom of the sea with all the drowned ships, no, that’s not reasonable. No. I must come up and give them a chance to see me there, hollowed in hot rock.

NURSE. Yes, well, all right. But don’t thrash about like that … for goodness’ sake.

PATIENT. Goodness is another thing. I must wake up. I must. I must keep watch. Or I’ll never get out and away.

NURSE. Well I don’t know really. Perhaps that treatment isn’t right for you? But you’d better lie down then. That’s right. Turn over. Curl up. There. Hush. Hushhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

PATIENT. Hushabye baby

lulled by the storm

if you don’t harm her

she’ll do you no harm

I’ve been robbed of sense. I’ve been made without resource. I have become inflexible in a flux. When I was on the Good Ship Lollipop I was held there by wind and sea. When I was on the raft, there was nobody there but me. On this rock I’m fast. Held. I can’t do more than hold on. And wait. Or plunge like a diver to the ocean floor where it is as dark as a fish’s gut and there’s nowhere to go but up. But I do have an alternative, yes. I can beg a lift, can’t I? Cling on to the coat-tails of a bird or a fish. If dogs are the friends of man, what are a sailor’s friends? Porpoises. They love us. Like to like they say, though when has a porpoise killed a man, and we have killed so many and for curiosity, not even for food’s or killing’s sake. A porpoise will take me to my love. A sleek-backed, singing, shiny, black porpoise with loving eyes and a long whistler’s beak. Hold on there, porpoise, poor porpoise in your poisoned sea, filled with stinking effluent from the bowels of man, and waste from the murderous mind of man, don’t die yet, hold on, hold me, and take me out of this frozen, grinding Northern circuit down and across into the tender Southern-running current and the longed-for shores. There now. Undersea if you have to, I can breathe wet if I must, but above sea if you can, in case I may hail a passing friend who has taken the shape of a shaft of fire or a dapple of light. There, porpoise, am I true weight? A kind creature? Kith and Kind? Just take me South, lead me to the warmer current, oh, now it is rough, we toss and heave as it was in the Great Storm, when my raft fell apart like straw, but I know now this is a good cross patch, it is creative, oh, what a frightful stress, what a strain, and now out, yes out, we’re well out, and still swimming West, but South-West, but anti-clockwise, whereas before it was West with the clock and no destination but the West Indies and Florida and past the Sargasso Sea and the Gulf Stream and the West Wind Drift and the Canaries Current and around and around and around and around but now, oh porpoise, on this delicate soap bubble our Earth, spinning all blue and green and iridescent, where Northwards air and water swirl in time’s direction left to right, great spirals of breath and light and water, now, oh porpoise, singing friend, we are on the other track, and I’ll hold on, I’ll clasp and clutch to the last breath of your patience, being patient, till you land me on that beach at last, for, oh porpoise, you must be sure and take me there, you must land me fairly at last, you must not let me cycle South too far, dragging in the Brazil current of my mind, no, let me gently step off your slippery back on to the silver sand of the Brazilian coast where, lifting your eyes, rise the blue-and-green heights of the Brazilian Highlands. There, there, is my true destination and my love, so, purpose, be sure to hold your course.

There now, there’s the shore. And now more than ever we must hold our course to true. There are no rocks, shoals or reefs here, porpoise, which could stub your delicate nose or take strips of blubber off your sleek black back, but there is the shining coast and of all the dangers of the Southern Current this one is worst, that if we keep our eyes on that pretty shore wishing we were on it, then the current will sweep us on in our cycle of forgetting around and around and around and around again back to the coasts of Africa with hummocks of Southern ice for company, so hold on now, porpoise, and keep your mind on your work, which is me, my landfall, but never let yourself dream of that silver sand and the deep forests there for if you do, your strength will ebb and you’ll slide away southwards like a dead or a dying fish.

There. Yes. Here we are, close in, and the thunder of the surf is in us. But close your ears, porpoise, don’t listen or look, let your thoughts be all of a strong purposeful haul. In. And in. With the wash of the south-dragging current cold on your left flank. In. Yes, and I’m not looking either, dear porpoise, for if I did not reach that shore now and if we did have to slide away falling South and around again and again and again then I think I’d ask you, porpoise, to treat me as men treat porpoises and carve me up for your curiosity. But there, closer. Yes, closer. We are so close now that the trees of the beach and the lifting land beyond the beach are hanging over us as trees hang over a tame inland river. And we’re in. But will you come with me, splitting your soft fat shining tail to make legs to walk on, strolling up with me to the highlands that are there? No, well then, goodbye porpoise, goodbye, slide back to your playful sea and be happy there, live, breathe, until the poison man makes for all living creatures finds you and kills you as you swim. And now I roll off your friendly back, thank you, thank you kind fish, and I find my feet steady under me on a crunching sand with the tide’s fringe washing cool about my ankles.

And now leaving the sea where I have been around and around for so many centuries my mind is ringed with Time like the deposits on shells or the fall of years on tree trunks, I step up on the dry salty sand, with a shake of my whole body like a wet dog.

It must have been about ten in the morning. The sun was shining full on my back at mid-morning position. The sky was cloudless, a full, deep blue. I was standing on a wide beach of white sand that stretched on either side for a couple of miles before curving out of sight behind rocky headlands. Before me, a thick forest came down to the sands’ edge. A light wind blew off the sea and kept the branches in a lively movement. The leaves sparkled. So did the sea. The sands glittered. It was a scene of great calm and plenty and reassurance, but at the same time there was a confusion of light. I was pleased to step out of the sands’ glare into the cool of the trees. The undergrowth was low, and it was easy to walk. From the beach I had seen that the land lifted fast to some heights that seemed as if they might be rock-fringed plateaux. I was looking for a path as I walked Westwards under the great trees, and at last I saw a sandy track that seemed to lead to the high land in front. It was a calm and soothing walk. The pounding of the surf made a heavy silence here. Above, the branches held a weight of silence that was sharpened by a thousand birds. And soon I heard in front of me a thundering as loud as the surf which was now three or four miles behind. I was on the banks of a river which cascaded down through rocks to crash into a lower, wider stream which rolled glossily away to join the sea. The track ran upwards beside the stream, and became a narrow footpath between rocks by the cataract. I walked slowly, drenched by a spray that dissolved the bitter salt of the sea from my face. When I reached the top of the cascade and looked back, I was surveying a sharp, sliding fall in the land all the way along the coast. The river, where it broadened out and became peaceful, after its long rocky descent, was a mile or even more below where I now stood. I could see North and South for miles over the roof of the forest I had passed through, and beyond the forest, the blue ocean that faded into the blue of the sky in a band of ruffling white cloud like celestial foam. Turning myself about, the headlands I had seen from the beach were still high in front of me, for this was an intermediate ridge only. And I was again in a forest, which was rather less tall and thick, and where the gorse and heather of the higher land was already beginning to intrude downwards. This forest had a more lively and a more intimate air than the lower one, for it was full of birds and the chattering of troops of monkeys. There was a heavy scent. It came from a tree I had not seen before. It was rather like a chestnut, but it had large mauvish-pink flowers, like magnolias, and the light breeze had spread this scent so that it seemed to come from every tree and bush. There was no feeling of hostility towards the intruder in this place. On the contrary, I felt welcome there, it was as if this was a country where hostility or dislike had not yet been born. And in a few moments, as I steadily climbed up the track, a large spotted animal like a leopard walked out of the clump of bamboo just off my course, turned to look reflectively at me, and then squatted by the side of the path, watching what I would do. Its face was alert, but benign, and its green eyes did not blink. It did not occur to me that I should be frightened of it. I walked steadily on until I came level with it. It was about six paces away and seemed extremely large and powerful. Squatting, its head was no lower than mine. I looked into the beast’s face with a variety of nod, since I did not think a smile would be signal enough, and then, like a house-cat that wishes to acknowledge your presence, or your friendship, but is too lazy or too proud to move, this leopard or puma or whatever it was simply half closed its eyes and purred a little. I walked on. The beast watched me for a while, followed me for a few steps, and then bounded off the track and away into some large bushes on the banks of the river that glinted and shivered with iridescent light: a hundred spiders’ filaments were catching the light. I went on up. By now it was late afternoon, and the sun was forward of me, and shining uncomfortably into my eyes. Looking back, it appeared to me that I had half covered the distance between the shore and my goal, the rock-fringed plateau, but the great crack or sliding away in the body of the land where I had climbed up beside the cataracts did not show at all: it all seemed like a long, steady slide to the beach, with only some plumes of grey mist to show where the water fell. The land’s fall was marked more by sound, the still audible roar of the falls. If I had not climbed up myself and experienced that rift, I would not have believed in its existence, and therefore in front of me might very well be other falls or slides that were now swallowed and smoothed over by the forest. Here the river poured past me, in a deep-green roll between high banks. It was a paradise for birds and for monkeys, and as I stood to rest and to relieve my eyes for a while of the sun’s glitter here, under trees, I saw on the opposite bank, on a white stretch of sand, some little deer step down to drink. I decided to rest. I found a grassy slope where the sunlight fell through layers of lightly moving leaves, and fell asleep in a dapple of light. When I woke I found the golden spotted beast stretched out beside me. It was getting dark under the trees. I had slept longer than I had meant to. I decided to stay where I was for the night, since I took it that my friend the big cat would stay by me to guard me. Having found a tree laden with a kind of purply-orange fruit, rather like a plum, I made my evening meal of these, the first land food I had eaten for so long it was like eating fruit for the first time in my life, every mouthful a delightful experiment. Then I sat down again and waited as the light ebbed in that hour when everything in nature is sad because of the sinking sun. The yellow beast moved closer to me, so that it was within my outstretched arm’s length, and it lay with its great head on its outstretched forepaws and gazed across the river with its green eyes, and I felt that it was pleased to have my company as the sunlight left our side of the Earth and the night came creeping up from the sea. We sat there together as sight went: first the deeply running river, then the trees on the far bank whose highest boughs held light longest, then nearer bushes, and finally individual blades of grass that I had marked as small guideposts, trying to fix their shapes—as if the heavy down-settling of the dark could be withheld by such small sentinels. Sound came in, with more weight to it in the dark. The thunder of the beaches that were now miles away still made an undersilence, the river’s spiral rolling in its bed was an undersound to its surface splashings and runnings, and the night birds began to stir and talk in the branches that hung very low overhead. And once the great beast lifted its head and roared, and the sound crashed in dull echoes back and forth off hillsides and escarpments I could not see. I heard a movement in the bushes at my back, and thought that perhaps my friend the beast had gone off to hunt or to travel, but when I peered through the thick but sweet-smelling dark I saw that now there were two beasts stretched out side by side, and the newcomer was delicately licking the face of the first, who purred.

The dark lay heavily, but it was not cold at all, there was a moist warmth in the air that I took into my lungs, which were slowly giving up the salt that had impregnated them so much that only now breath was again becoming an earth- rather than a sea-creature’s function. Then the dark glistened with an inner light, and I turned my head to the left and saw how the glade filled with moonlight, and the river showed its running in lines of moving light. The moon was not yet visible, but soon it rose up over the trees that from where I sat on turf seemed close to the sky’s centre. The stars went out, or were as if trying to show themselves from beneath a sparkling water, and the glade was filled with a calm light. The two yellow beasts, not yellow now, their patterns of dark blotched light having become like the spoor of an animal showing black on a silvery-dewed earth, were licking each other and purring and it seemed as if they were restless and wished to move about. And as I thought this I decided to continue my journey by night, since it was warm enough, and the track running up alongside the stream was of sand unlittered by rocks or ruts, and everything was light and easy. I got up, leaving my sweet-smelling glade with regret, and went on up towards the heights, and the two big cats followed me at a few paces, their green eyes glowing in the moonlight when I turned to make sure that they were still there, for they moved so quietly it was like being followed by two silvery shadows.

The night seemed very short. It seemed no time before the moon, as the sun had done earlier, was standing full before my eyes in the western sky, and its solemn shine filled my eyes with its command until it seemed as if the inside of my skull was being washed with moonshine. Then I turned to look back and saw that the morning was colouring the sky pink and gold over the sea. But my two friendly beasts had gone. I was alone again. The river on my left, now grey with the light that comes before sunrise, was no longer a full steady glide, but was wider and more shallow and broken by rocks, little falls and islands. Ahead it was rushing from another but much wider cataract, and the path I was on mounted steeply between trees that had the twisted stubborn gallantry of those forced to live in a mountain air and on a sharp slope where the soil is continually thinned by rain. I was by now very tired, but I thought it would be better to walk on and up until the sun had again moved forward and was shining into my face and eyes. I did walk on, but now it was slow going, for the track was a path, sometimes not much more than footholds in rocks feet apart, and often slippery from the spray of the river.

I went on up and up, half stunned by the crashing of the waters, and by nasty tearing winds that seemed to blow from all sides, buffeting the breath half out of me. Yet I was exhilarated by the liveliness of that air and the fighting to keep my lungs filled, so that everything about me was made distinct twice over—by my clear-minded condition, and by the fresh shadowless light of dawn. The edge of the plateau and its clustering rocks now seemed so close above me that the winds might roll down rocks to crush me, or as if the whole mass might slide in, as lower down the mountainside the weight of earth had already slid away. But I still went on, pulling myself by branches, and bushes, and even clumps of tall reed, which cut my hands and arms. If the wind had not beaten all clear thought out of my head I might by then have become too discouraged to go on, but, although what my eyes saw filled me with foreboding, I continued like a robot. For it was now evident that ahead of me was a narrow cleft, possibly too dangerous to use in my ascent, that above that—should I reach that height—a perpendicular rock rose smooth as glass to the edge of the escarpment. There seemed no way around the cleft. On one side of the sharp rock which it split the waters were thundering down, more through the air than over a rocky bed. All I could see on that side of me were masses of water, mostly spray. On the other side was a very steep shaly slope beneath which was a precipice. It could not be possible to make my way to the right across this slope, for even a small pebble thrown on to it started an avalanche which I could hear crashing into the forest far below. Yet the track had followed the river all the way up here, somebody or something had used that track—and its destination seemed in fact to be this cleft in the rock ahead. So I went on up into it. The morning sunlight was a glitter in the blue sky far above my head, for I was enclosed in a half-dark, smelling of bats. Now I had to squirm my way up, my feet on one wall, my back and shoulders against the other. It was a slow, painful process, but at last I scrambled up on to a narrow ledge against the final glassy wall. Looking down, it was a scene of magnificent forests through which the river went in a shining green streak, and beyond the forests, the circling white rim of sand, and beyond that, a horizon of sea. Up here all the air was filled with the sharp smell of river spray and the flowering scents from the forests below. The evil-smelling cleft I had come through now seemed to have had no real part in my journey, for its dark and constriction seemed foreign to the vast clear space of the way I had been—but that had not been so, and I made myself remember it. Without the painful climb through the cleft I would not be standing where I was—and where I was had no way on and up, or so it seemed. I had to go up, since there was nothing else to do, but I could not go up. The ledge I stood on, about a yard wide, dwindled away into air very soon, as I saw, when I explored it to its ends on either side. In front of my face was this smooth dark rock like glass into which I peered as I had into the sides of glossy waves in the sea. Only here there were no fish staring out at me, only the faint reflection of a face shaggy with many weeks’ growth of beard. And now I did not know what to do. It was not possible to climb up that glassy rock. It was twenty, thirty feet high, and it had no crack or rough place in it. I sat down, looking East into the morning sun, back over the way I had come, and thought that I might as well die in this place as in any other. Then there was a movement in the cleft, and I saw the head of the yellow beast come cautiously up, for it was a tricky climb even for him—it must have been as much too narrow for him as it had been too wide for me. After him came his friend, or his mate. I moved well over to give the big animals room to stand on the ledge, but they did not remain beside me. First one and then the other turned to give me a long steady stare from its green eyes. Their great square tufted yellow heads were outlined against the deep blue of the sky beyond—and then first one and then the other went on up the precipitous glassy rock, in a couple of easy bounds. I saw the two heads, still outlined against the blue sky, peering down at me over the rocks thirty feet above. I got up and moved to the place on the ledge from where these two had just bounded, unable to believe what I had seen, and then I noticed that on the smooth glassy surface was a roughened streak, like a path, which was only visible when the light struck it at a certain angle. This was not as rough as the trunk of a thick-barked tree, but it was as rough as weatherworn granite. Without the example of the two beasts I would never have even thought of attempting to climb like a fly up this ribbon of rough across the smooth, but now I stood as high as I could, reaching up and up with my palms, and I found that by not thinking of how terrible and dangerous a thing it was I was doing, my hands and feet clung to this rough breathing rock face, and I found I had come to the top of the impassable mirror-like rock, and I fell forward among rocks on the edge of the plateau for which I had been aiming. It was at once evident that this height, the summit of my aims since I had landed on the beach far below the day before, was the lowland plain to mountains that rose far ahead, to the West, on a distant horizon, probably fifty miles away. Looking down over the frightful path I had ascended, it now seemed nothing very much, and the sharp glass summit that I had thought impossible to surmount was no more alarming than—anything that one has done, and apparently done easily. The broad river was a shining silver streak. The lower falls ten or twelve miles away where the whole land with its burden of forest slid sharply down was no more than a shadowy line across tree-tops, and a white cloud low over the forest was the miles-long cataract. The high falls, close under this escarpment, whose spray reached almost to the summit, were sound only, for that long tumbling descent was not visible at all.

All the coast lay open to me now, and the blue ocean beyond. And it was as if there was nobody in the world but myself. There was not a ship on the sea, or so much as a canoe on the river, and the long forests lay quiet beneath, and in those miles of trees there was not even a single column of smoke that might show a homestead or a traveller making himself a meal.

On the plateau where I stood, the vegetation was different. Here were the lighter, gayer, layered trees of the savannah, with its long green grasses that would soon turn gold. As I looked West to the mountains that in winter must have snow massed on their peaks which were now summer-blue, the sound of water came from my left. About half a mile South, over a fairly level ground, I found the source of this noise. The river whose course I had traced up from the sea here ran fast along a shallower rockier bed. It was a stream, a wide bird-shrill splashy stream with gentle inlets and beaches a child could play safely on. But this river did not fall with a roar over the edge of the escarpment, and down those glassy sides which indeed looked as if they had at one time been smoothed by water. No, at about half a mile from the cliff’s edge there was a chasm in the riverbed a couple of hundred yards wide. The great mass of water simply slid into it, almost without noise, and vanished into the earth. But it was possible to see where the riverbed had run, thousands or millions of years ago. For on the other side of the hole where the water rushed into the earth, the river’s old bed still existed, a shallow enough channel, but wide, and widening towards the cliff where it had once fallen, and overgrown with shrubs and grass, and very rocky. The channel was worn down more deeply on one side, where the water had believed that it must make a loop in the riverbed, as is the way of rivers which cannot by nature run straight, and whose bodies spiral around and around exerting a pressure on one bank and then on the other. But the water had not known about the plunge over the cliff which lay just ahead and which would make its preparations for a bend useless: the water had crashed straight over the edge, and when I stood there to look down, I saw that the worn smoothed path of the stream when it had been a waterfall still showed among the littered rocks below the glassy coping over which I had believed it impossible to climb. The river emerged suddenly, a hundred feet below, after its long dark passage through the rock. Out it came, as sparkling, clear and noisy as it had been above, before it had ever tasted the air of the under-earth. After its emergence it crashed and plunged and roared and dashed itself to pieces as I had seen that morning while I climbed up beside it.

I returned to look down into the hole in the plain where the river fell as neatly as bathwater into a plughole, and saw that above the great chasm the air swirled with iridescent spray. I was now again looking westwards into the setting sun, and I had to find a place to sleep that night. I was not able, looking back along my days and nights, to remember when I had slept well and calmly. Not since I landed on this friendly shore—for by sleep I did not mean that snatched half-hour while the sun set and the yellow beast watched. Not on the porpoise’s friendly back, and certainly not on the rock or on the raft. Time stretched behind me, brightly lit, glaring, dangerous and uniform—without the sharp knife-slices of dark across it. For when we normally look back along our road, it is as if regularly sharp black shadows lie across it, with spaces of sunlight or moonlight in between. I had come to believe that I was now a creature that had outgrown the need to sleep, and this delighted me.

I decided to watch night fall beside my friends the great coloured beasts, and wandered back in a sunset-tinted world to where they had shown me how to scramble over the impassable glass. But they were not there. Again the air was filled with the loneliness of the sunset hour. I was melancholy enough to cry, or to hide my head under a blanket—if I had got one—and slide with my sadness into a regression from the light. But the scene was too magnificent not to watch as the sun fell sharply behind the distant blue peaks, and the dark fell first over the sea, then over the forests, and then crept slowly up to where I sat with my back against a tree which was still small and elastic enough for me to feel the trunk moving as the night breeze started up. And again I watched the moon rise, though this evening I was so high, I could see first the blaze of clear silver in the dark of the Eastern sky, then a crisping sparkle of silver on the far ocean, and then the first slice of silver as the moon crept up out of the water. And again it was a night as mild and as light as the last. I sat watching the night pass, and waited for my splendid beasts. But they did not come. They did not come! And they never came. I did not see them again, though sometimes, when I stand on the very edge of the rock-fringed plateau and look down over the tops of the forest trees below, I fancy I see a blaze of yellow move in the yellow-splashed dark, or imagine that by a river, which from here is a winding blue-green streak, I see a yellow dot: the beast crouching to drink. And sometimes the loud coughing sound of a beast, or a roaring louder than all the noise of the falling waters makes me think of them—and hope for their assistance for the next traveller who makes his long delayed landfall on this glorious coast.

Again the night was short. I may have slept a little, but if so it was a sleep so dazzling with the light which lay full on my lids that in the morning what lay behind me to the time of the sunset was a broad space of time evenly filled with a cool refreshing silver. I thought that I should perhaps try to make my way to the distant mountains when the sunlight had fully come back, but when the light did come—when the little bubble of Earth turned itself round so that the patch I stood on stared into the sun’s face, then I saw that the tree I had been leaning against all night grew out of a crack, and the crack was in a large flat rock, and that …

And now I must be careful to set down my mind’s movement accurately. For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower—as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly so that my backbone does not strike that sharp edge. And you do turn in the air, and even have time to think: this fall may hurt me badly, is there someone in the house to help me?—and so on and so forth. All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind’s machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we can recognize this fact. As I was staring at the flat rock, which had unmistakably been dressed, for I could see man-marks at its edges, my mind slowed, while time went faster, or time went slower while my mind speeded—to use our ordinary way of reckoning. Whatever the process, I was suddenly quite remarkably alert and excited, and had even got to my feet without knowing I had, and I was looking at the foundations of a great house, or temple, or public building of some sort, which now lay clear to see for a couple of hundred yards all around me in the fresh green grass. But I had not seen anything yesterday but a grassy savannah with some rocks scattered about among low trees. Now the ruinous foundation was unmistakable. It was as if the knowledge of what I would see caused me to see what otherwise I could not—for I already half believed that my seeing had created what I saw. For it was so hard to believe that yesterday I had clambered up over the edge of the escarpment ready to accept anything at all, from peopled cities to men with one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and yet I had not seen what was so clearly to be seen. This city, or town, or fortress, had been of stone. Everywhere around me the floors and foundations lay clearly visible. Everywhere lay pillars, columns and lintel stones. I walked North for a while—but in this direction there seemed no end to this evidence of men having lived here once. I walked West—the city continued well beyond where I tired and turned South. The slabs and hunks and floors of dressed stone continued as far as the riverbank I had walked along yesterday—and had seen nothing of ruins. And they extended right to the edge of the cliff. Once there had stood here, on this escarpment’s verge, overlooking the sea and the forests, a very large and very fine city.

Now it was not possible for me to leave the place. Before the sun had risen, I had intended to travel onwards to the mountains, but now this old place drew me. I could not leave it. And yet there seemed no place I could shelter. I walked back and forth for some time, while the sun rose up swiftly over the blue-green ocean. In my mind was a half-thought that I might find a house or a room or something that might shelter me if it rained or blew too hard. And so it was. Where I had walked—or so I believed, but it was hard now to see exactly where I had moved, in so many stridings back and forth—but certainly where I had looked often enough, I saw ruins standing up from the earth, and when I walked towards them, saw that the mass of stone had once been a very large house, or a meeting-or storage-place. Dry stone walls were whole, reaching up perhaps fifty feet. The matching and working of the stone, which was of a warm earthy yellow, that stone which is time-hardened clay, was very fine and accomplished, with many patterns worked into it. The floor, only lightly covered with blown yellowy earth and rubble, was of a mosaic in blue, green and gold. I stood in a large central room and doors led off at the corners, into smaller rooms with lower walls. But there were no roofs or ceilings. I walked back and forth over the patterned floor, between the many and various walls, and the place was whole, save for the absent roof, in whose place was first a clear sparkling blue, and then the sun itself, pouring down, so that the interior became all sharp black shadows and washes of golden light. There was not so much as a stone loose or fallen from the walls, not so much as a half inch of mosaic lost from the vast floor. And yet I had not seen this building standing quietly among the coloured grasses. I walked to where the door had been, and looked out, and was not surprised at all to see that I was surrounded by the ruins of a stone city, that stretched as far as I could see from the top of these deep stone steps. Trees grew among the buildings, and there had been gardens, for there were all kinds of flowering and scented plants everywhere, water channels ran from house to house, their cool stone beds still quite whole, and as if invisible workmen maintained them. I now had a wide choice of buildings of all kinds for my home, but there was not a roof among the lot of them. Probably these buildings had once been thatched? This sharp tender young grass became, as it aged, the wiry-stemmed reed man uses for thatching? What kind of city was this which was in such good preservation that it seemed it was inhabited by friendly hard-working ghosts—and yet had no roofs? And what stone city of such size and magnificence ever has had thatched roofs?

I chose a smaller house than most, which had a rose garden, and water running everywhere, both in closed and in open channels. It was almost on the escarpment’s edge, and from it I could see clear across to the sea and to the sky, so that the eye made a slow circuit, from the rocky falls beneath the glassy cope, to the falling waters, to the deep shady forests, the beaches, the ocean, the sky, and then the gaze travelled back along the path of the sun until it was staring straight upwards, and flinching because of the sun’s fierce glare, and so it lowered again to my feet, which were planted on the very edge of the cliff.

What should I roof my new home with? This question answered my other: what had the original inhabitants used as roofing? Clay was the answer. Between the stones of the old foundations and the stone channels, the earth showed as clay. And when I splashed water on it, the dense heavy substance potters use formed at once in my palm. Once this city had had roofs of tiles made of this clay, and, clay being more vulnerable to time than rock, these tiles had dissolved away in heavy rain or in the winds that must tear and buffet and ravage along this exposed high edge whenever it stormed. No people, where were the people? Why was this entire city abandoned and empty? Why, when it was such a perfect place for a community to make its own? It had good building material close at hand, it had houses of every kind virtually whole and perfect save for the absent roofs, it had good pure water, and a climate which grew every sort of flower and vegetable. Had one day the thousands of inhabitants died of an epidemic? Been scared away by threat of an earthquake? All been killed in some war?

There was no way of finding out, so I decided not to think about it. I would stay here a while. And I would not trouble to roof myself a house. The walls gave shelter enough from the sun. It was not yet the rainy season, but even if it had been, the rain would soon drain away off this height, and it was not a place to stay damp or cold.

I found a tree which had aromatic foliage, something like a blue-gum, but with finer leaves. I stripped off armfuls of the leaves and carried them to the shelter of a wall. With them I made a deep warm bed I could burrow into if the night turned cold. I picked some pink sweet fruit, in appearance like peaches, that grew bending over a water channel. I drank water—and understood that my needs as an animal were met. I need do nothing but pick fruit and gather fresh leaves when those that made my bed withered. For the rest I could sit on the cliff’s edge and watch the clouds gather over the sea, watch the moon’s growing and declining, and match my rhythms of sleep and waking to the darkening and lightening of the nights.

And I need not be solitary. For this city had an atmosphere as if it were inhabited, as I’ve said. More, as if this city was itself a person, or had a soul, or being. It seemed to know me. The walls seemed to acknowledge me as I passed. And when the moon rose for the third time since I had arrived on this coast, I was wandering among the streets and avenues of stone as if I were among friends.

Very late, when the moon was already low over the mountains, I lay down on my bed of deliciously smelling leaves, and now I did sleep for a time. It was a light delightful sleep, from which it was no effort to wake, and I was talking to my old shipfriends, George and Charlie, James and Stephen and Miles and the rest, and into this conversation came Conchita and Nancy, who were singing their songs and laughing. When I woke, as the sun came up shining from the blue-green sea, I knew quite clearly that I had something to do. My friends were all about me, I knew that, and in some way they were of the substance of this warm earthy stone, and the air itself, but it was not enough for me just to live here and breathe its air. I sprang straight up when I woke, driven by this knowledge that I had work to do, and went to wash my face and hands in the nearest water channel. I admired my fine mariner’s beard, and my hard, dark-brown, salt-pickled arms and face, ate more of the peach-like fruit, and walked out among the sky-roofed houses to see what I could see … it was very strange indeed that I had not noticed this before: among the buildings, in what seemed like the centre of the old city, what might very well have been the former central square, was an expanse of smooth stone which was not interrupted by flowers or by water channels. The square was perhaps seventy or a hundred yards across, and in it was an inner circle, about fifty yards across. It was a little cracked, where earth had settled under it, and some grass grew in the cracks, but it was nearly flat, and it waited there for what I had to do. I knew now what this was. I had to prepare this circle lying in its square, by clearing away all the loose dirt and pulling out the grass. And so I began this task. It took longer than it should have done because I had no tools at all. But I tore off a strong branch and used it as a broom. And when the dirt was all swept away and the grass pulled up, I brought water in my cupped hands from near channels, and splashed it down. But this took too long, and then I searched until I found a stone that had a hollow in it which might have been used as a mortar for crushing grain once, and I used that to carry water. To clear and prepare that circle in the midst of the city took me nearly a week, during which I worked all day, and even at night when the moon came up. Now I lay down to rest between the sun’s setting and the moon’s rising, and worked on under the moon, lying down again to rest between moon-fall and sunrise, if there was this interval.

I was not tired. I was not tired at all with the work. I was not even particularly expectant of anything. I knew only that this was what I had to do, and could only suppose that my friends must have told me so, since it was after my dream of them that I had known it.

Now the moon was in its last quarter and making a triangle, sun, earth, moon, whereas when I had reached that coast it was full, and sitting on the plateau’s edge and staring into the moon’s round face I had had my back to the sun, which was through the earth, and the sun stared with me at the moon. Then the pulls and antagonisms and tensions from the sun and moon had been in a straight line through the earth, which swelled, soil and seas, in large bulges of attraction as the earth rolled under the moon, the sun; but now the tension of sun and moon pulled in this triangle, and the tides of the ocean were low, and the great sky was full of a different light now, a fainter, bluer moonlight, and the stars blazed out. I did not know why I thought so, but I had come to believe that it was the next full moon that I was waiting for.

I moved my pile of drying leaves to the edge of the circle in the square. Now all that expanse of stone was washed and clean, patterns glowed in it, continuous geometrical patterns, that suggested flowers and gardens and their correspondence with the movements of the sky. Even in the thinning moonlight the patterns loomed up milkily, as I lay on my elbow in my pile of leaves. I lay there in the dimming moonlight, and listened to the wind in the grasses, the tinkling of the water that ran invisibly in its channels, and sometimes the hard crackle when one of the dried leaves of my bed cartwheeled and skittered across the stone floor as I watched and watched all night, in case I might be wrong, and the visiting Crystal descended now, in the moon’s wane. When I was ready to sleep, I lay on my back, with one arm out over the stone which held the day’s warmth, and I closed my eyes, and let the moon and the starlight drench my face. My sleep was ordered by the timing of the moon. I was obsessed by it, by its coming and going, or rather, by its erratic circling in wild crazy loops and ellipses around the Earth, so that sometimes it lay closer to the North, and sometimes circled lower over my head, at 15 degrees South, sometimes it looped lower still, so that with my head to the North and my feet pointing to the Antarctic, the path seemed at knee-level. In the dark of space was a blazing of white gas, and in the luminous envelope of this lamp some crumbs of substance whizzed around, but the crumbs farther out from the central blaze were liquefied or tenuous matter, gases or soups also spinning in their orbits, and some of these minute crumbs or lumps of water that spun about had other tinier crumbs or droplets swirling about them in a dance, a dance and a dazzle, and someone looking in, riding in, from space would see this great burning lamp and its orbiting companions as one, a unit; a unit even as central blaze and circling associates, but even more if this visiting Explorer had eyes and senses set by a different clock, for then this unit, Sun and associates, might seem like a central splurge ringed by paths of fire or light, for the path of a planet by a different scale of time might be one with that planet, and this Celestial Voyager with his differently tuned senses might very well see the Earth’s circling streak and its Moon as one, a double planet, a circling streak that sometimes showed double, as when the hairs in a painter’s brush straggle and part, and make two streaks of a single stroke. The Voyager, too, would see the tensions and pulls of the lumps or drops in their orbiting about the sun in a constantly changing pattern of subtle thrills, and currents and measures of movement in the rolling outwards of the solar wind, and he might even see in the little crumb of matter that was the Earth, the tuggings and pullings crosswise of the Moon and the Sun, which were at right angles, this being the Moon’s last quarter and the tides of water and earth and air being low.

The Moon held me, the moon played with me, the moon and I seemed to breathe as one, for my waking and sleeping, or rather, being wakeful and then dreaming, not the same thing, were set by the moon’s direct pressure on my eyes. And then, as it waned, by my knowledge of its presence, a dark orb with its narrowing streak of reflected sunlight, and then at last the two days of the dark of the moon, when the moon, between earth and sun, had its back to us and held its illuminated face inwards, to the sun, so that great Sun and minute Moon stared at each other direct. The sun’s light, its reflected substances, were reflected back at the sun’s broad face, and we received none, instead of being bathed in sun-stuff from two directions, immediately from sun, and reflected from moon. No, the moon had her back to us, like a friend who has gone away. In the few days when the moon was dark, when the Earth was warmed and fed and lit only by the sun, only that part of the Earth which was exposed to the sun’s rays receiving its light, I fell into a misery and a dimming of purpose. In the daytime I walked among the buildings of this city which was whole except for its absent roofs, and watched the turning of the Earth in the shortening and lengthening of shadows, and at night I sat by the edge of the great square of stone where the circle lay glowing—yes, even by starlight it showed a faint emanation of colour—and lived for the return of the moon, or rather, for its circling back to where it might again shed the sun’s light back to us.

As my head, when climbing the last part of the ascent to the plateau, had been filled with the din of falling water and the buffeting of mountain winds, so that I could not think, could only ascend without thought, so now my head was full of light and dark, filled with the moon and its white dazzle—now alas reflected out and away back at the sun, back at space—and my thoughts and movements were set by it, not by the Sun, man’s father and creator, no, by the Moon, and I could not take my thoughts from her as she dizzied around the earth in her wild patterning dance.

I was moonstruck. I was mooncrazed. To see her full face I sped off in imagination till I lay out in space as in a sea, and with my back to the Sun, I gazed in on her, the Moon, but simultaneously I was on the high plateau, looking at the moon’s back which was dark, its face being gazed upon by the sun and myself.

I began to fancy that the moon knew me, that subtle lines of sympathy ran back and forth between us. I began to think the moon’s thoughts. A man or a woman walking along a street gives no evidence of what he is thinking, yet his thoughts are playing all about him in subtle currents of substance. But an ordinary person cannot see these subtle moving thoughts. One sees an animal with clothes on, its facial muscles slack, or in grimace. Bodily eyes see bodies, see flesh. Looking at the Moon, at Sun, we see matter, earth or fire, as it were people walking in the street. We cannot see the self-consciousness of Moon, or Sun. There is nothing on Earth, or near it, that does not have its own consciousness, Stone, or Tree, or Dog, or Man. Looking into a mirror or into the glossy side of a toppling wave, or a water-smoothed shining stone like glass, we see shapes of flesh, flesh in time. But the consciousness that sees that face, that body, those hands, feet, is not inside the same scale of time. A creature looking at its image, as an ape or a leopard leaning over a pool to drink, sees its face and body, sees a dance of matter in time. But what sees this dance has memory and expectation, and memory itself is on another plane of time. So each one of us, walking or sitting or sleeping, is at least two scales of time wrapped together like the yolk and white of an egg, and when a child with his soul just making itself felt, or a grown-up who has never thought of anything before but animal thoughts, or an adolescent in love, or an old person just confronted with death, or even a philosopher or a star measurer—when any of these, or you or I ask ourselves, with all the weight of our lives behind the question, What am I? What is this Time? What is the evidence for a Time that is not mortal as a leaf in autumn? Then the answer is, That which asks the question is out of the world’s time … and so I looked at the body of the moon, now a dark globe with the sun-reflecting segment broadening nightly, I looked at this crumb of matter and knew it had thoughts, if that is the word for it, thoughts, feelings, a knowledge of its existence, just as I had, a man lying on a rock in the dark, his back on rock that still held the warmth from the sun.

Misshapen Moon,

Tyrant,

Labouring in circles,

Reflecting hot,

Reflecting cold,

Why don’t you fly off and find another planet?

Venus perhaps, or even Mars?

Lopsided Earth

Reeling and Heaving,

Wildly gyrating,

Which is the whip and which the top?

We have no choice but to partner each other,

Around and around and around and around and around …

The thoughts of the moon are very cold and hungry, I know this now. But then, enamoured and obsessed, I simply longed. I merely lay and let myself be drunk. But that cold crumb that waltzes and swings about us so wildly is a great drinker of men’s minds. By the time of the first quarter when the moon had again moved a fourth of its journey around the Earth, and there was a week to the full of the moon and the expected landing of my crystal visitor, I was lunatic indeed. I did not sleep, oh no, I could not sleep. I walked or I lay or I knelt or I sat, my neck sunk back into the muscles of my neck, gazing up and up and up, and the cells of my eyeballs were ringing with light like a fevered man’s ears.

This sound shrilled and grew, and late one night, when the half-disc was right overhead, I heard mingled with this another, an earth noise, and I knew that whatever it was was out on the plain beyond the ruins of the city, between it and the distant mountains. I walked through the ruined houses, that had seemed so intimate with me, so close, but now they had set themselves from me, they had turned away, and when I came up to a jut of wall, or the corner of a building, or a threat of shadow, my hands clenched themselves, and my eyes darted of their own accord to every place that might shelter an enemy. Yet I had not once before, since making my landfall, thought of enemies or of danger.

I walked down a broad paved street that rang out echoing answers to my footfalls, and reached the dwindling edge of the city, and saw, under the bright stars and the brightening moon, a mass of cattle grazing out on the plain. There were thousands of them, all milk-white or gently gold in this light, all large, fed, comfortable beasts, and there was no one there to herd them. They had all the vastness of the plain for their home, and they moved together, in a single impulse, a single mind, sometimes lowering their heads to graze as they went, and sometimes lowing. It was this sound that had brought me from the centre of the city to its edge. As I stood watching, there was a sudden frightened stirring on the edge of this ghostly herd, and I saw a dark shadow move forward at a run from a ruin at the city’s edge, and then crouch to the ground. Then one of the big beasts fell dead, and suddenly there was a strong sickly smell of blood on the air that I knew, though I had no proof of this, had not been made to smell of blood before.

And now I understood my fall away from what I had been when I landed, only three weeks before, into a land which had never known killing. I knew that I had arrived purged and salt-scoured and guiltless, but that between then and now I had drawn evil into my surroundings, into me, and I knew, as if it had been my own hand that had drawn that bow and loosed that arrow, that I had caused the shining milk-white beast to fall dead. And fell on my knees as the herd, alerted, thundered past and out of sight, lowing and shrieking and stopping from time to time to throw back their heads and sniff the air which was sending them messages of murder and fright. Soon I was there alone in the dim moonlight with one other person, a young boy, or perhaps a girl in men’s clothes, who had walked over to the carcass and was standing over it to pull out the arrow. And without looking to see who it was, though I knew that I could recognize this person if I did go close enough, and without caring if I was seen by him, or by her, I fell on my face on the earth and I wept. Oh, I’ll never know such sorrow again. I’ll never know such grief, oh, I cannot stand it, I don’t wish to live, I do not want to be made aware, of what I have done and what I am and what must be, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, around and around and around and around and around and around …

I must record my strong disagreement with this treatment. If it were the right one, patient should by now be showing signs of improvement. Nor do I agree that the fact he sleeps almost continuously is by itself proof that he is in need of sleep. I support the discontinuation of this treatment and discussion about alternatives.

DOCTOR Y.

DOCTOR Y. Well, and how are you today? You certainly do sleep a lot, don’t you?

PATIENT. I’ve never slept less in my life.

DOCTOR Y. You ought to be well rested by now. I’d like you to try and be more awake, if you can. Sit up, talk to the other patients, that sort of thing.

PATIENT. I have to keep it clean, I have to keep it ready.

DOCTOR Y. No, no. We have people who keep everything clean. Your job is to get better.

PATIENT. I was better. I think. But now I’m worse. It’s the moon, you see. That’s a cold hard fact.

DOCTOR Y. Ah. Ah, well. You’re going back to sleep, are you?

PATIENT. I’m not asleep, I keep telling you.

DOCTOR Y. Well, good night!

PATIENT. You’re stupid! Nurse, make him go away. I don’t want him here. He’s stupid. He doesn’t understand anything.

On the contrary. Patient is obviously improving. He shows much less sign of disturbance. His colour and general appearance much better. I have had considerable experience with this drug. It is by no means the first time a patient has responded with somnolence. It can take as long as three weeks for total effect to register. It is now one week since commencement of treatment. It is essential to continue.

DOCTOR X.

I did not wait to see the beast cut up. I ran back to the edge of the landing-ground and tried to bury my fears in sleep. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but the fact I was afraid at all marked such a difference between now and then that I knew it was a new condition for me. I could feel my difference. Now, I was afraid of the moon’s rising and its rapid growth towards full. I wanted to hide somewhere, or in some way, but to hide in a perpetual daylight until that night of the Full Moon when—I was certain of this—the Crystal would descend to my swept and garnished landing-ground. But daylight was not a time to take cover in, to use for concealment. I piled branches over my head and lay face down with eyes blotted out and made myself sleep, when I had no need of it, but my sleep was not the sleep of an ordinary man. It was a living in a different place or country. I knew all the time that I was living out another life, but on land, very far from the life of a seaman, and it was a life so heavy and dismal and alien to me that to go to sleep was like entering a prison cell, but nevertheless, my new terror of the night and its treacherous glamorous sucking light was enough to make me prefer that land-lubber’s living to the Moon Light. Yet I woke, and although I had not wanted to, and had decided to stay where I was, watching the skies for the Descent, yet I could not prevent myself getting to my feet, and walking through the now mocking and alien city. This time I went Northwards, and beyond the city I saw great trees, and somewhere under the trees a gleam of red fire. I walked openly, without disguising myself or trying to be quiet, through the patched moon-and-shadow of the forest glades, till I stood, on a slight rise, looking down into a hollow that was circled by trees, yews, hollies and elms. There I saw them. They were about fifty yards away, and the intervening space was all sharp black shadows and gleams of brilliant moonlight, and the leaping running shadows of the fire played all around the scene, so that I could not see very clearly. It was a group of people, three adults and some half-grown ones, and as I leaned forward to stare and settle my eyes against the confusion of lights and shade, I saw that they were roasting hunks of meat on the fire, and singing and shrieking and laughing as they did so, and a terrible nauseating curiosity came over me—but that curiosity which is like digging one’s fingers into a stinging wound. I knew quite well who they were, or rather, I knew what faces I would see, though there was a gulf in my memory, blotting out the exact knowledge of where these people fitted into my long-past life. They turned, as the sound of my footsteps alerted them, and their three faces, women’s faces, all the same, or rather, all variations of the same face, laughed and exulted, and blood was smeared around their stretched mouths, and ran trickling off their chins. Three women, all intimately connected with me, alike, sisters perhaps, bound to me by experience I could not remember at all. And there were three boys, yes, the boys were there too, and a baby lying to one side of the fire, apparently forgotten in the orgy, for it was crying and struggling in tight wrappings, its face scarlet, and I rushed forward to pull the child out of the way of those hostile tramping feet, and I opened my mouth to shout reproaches, but Felicity pushed a piece of meat that had been singed a little, but was still raw and bloody, into my mouth—and I fell on the meat with the rest, pulling gobbets of it off a bloody hunk that was propped over the fire with sticks that sagged as they took fire, letting the lump of meat lower itself to the flames, so that all the forest stank of burning flesh. But I swallowed pieces whole, and at the same time laughed and sang with them, the three women:

‘Under my hand,

flesh of flowers

Under my hand

warm landscape

Give me back my world,

In you the earth breathes under my hand …

Now we reach it, now now,

Now we reach it, now now now,

Now we reach it, now,

Now now now now now now now now …’

and the three boys my sons who were as bloody-drunk and as crazed as their mothers kept up a stamping dance of their own and sang

‘Now we reach it, now, now,’

over and over again. They were all laughing at me, laughing with malicious pleasure because I had joined this bloody feast, and later I saw that it was over, the women were walking soberly away, leaving the fire burning, and the piles of stinking bloody meat lying to one side of it. I looked for the baby, but it was not there. Then I saw that it was dead and had been thrown on the heap of meat that was waiting there, quite openly in the glade, all purply-red and bleeding, for the coming night’s feast. The baby was naked now, a little reddish newborn babe, smeared with blood, its genitals, the big genitals of a newborn boy baby, exposed at the top of the bloody heap. I understood that I was naked. I could not remember when I had lost the clothes with which I had left the ship. Presumably I had landed naked on the beach off the porpoise’s back, but I had not thought once about being naked, but now I needed to cover myself. The bloody hide of the dead cow lay in its rough folds to one side of the glade, where the women and the boys had thrown it. I ran to it, and was about to wrap myself in it, all wet and raw as it was, when I chanced to look up, and saw that the sun stood over the trees and the treacherous moon had gone. And so had the fire, the pile of bloody meat, the dead baby—everything. There was no evidence at all of that night’s murderous dance.

I walked back through the forest, which was now full of a calm morning light, and then across grasslands, and then into the suburbs of the empty ruined city until I reached the central square, and I examined it anxiously to see if the past night had affected it at all. But no, there it lay, exposed and tranquil under the clean sunlight, and there was no sound but the invisible water’s running, and the song of birds.

I was terribly afraid of the coming night. I was afraid of the laughing murderesses and their songs. I knew that when the moon rose that night I would be helpless against its poisons. I tried to think of ways I could tie myself, bind myself, make myself immune to the Moon Light, but a man cannot tie himself, or not with bonds that cannot be undone—can’t, that is, unless he kills himself. There is no way of making himself immune from the different person that may come to life in him at any moment—and who does not know the laws of being of his host. But I was already beginning to doubt that I knew who was stronger, which was host, what was myself and what a perverted offshoot.

Finally I worked out that if I walked as fast as I could away from the city, and kept walking until the moon rose that night, then it would be too great a distance for me to get back to the forest before the sun rose in its turn and banished the witches and their feast. While I was myself, the sun’s child, I would have the will to walk away from what the night would lure me to. And so I did walk, at a fast steady pace, away to the South, skirting the river by going between the great chasm and the cliff’s edge, across the dry riverbed, and then on across the savannah, all through that long hot day, and when the moon rose I was twenty miles away in a higher drier air where there were few trees and those stunted and meagre. I looked back over the plain where I could see the herds of cattle grazing, but, from this height and distance, they were small clusters of light moving on the moon-green of the grass. I could see too, but far away, the tiny dark that was the edge of the forest where the women must be. The moon was three days from its full. I was in despair. I knew that I should rather go on walking all night straight on, straight on and away from the tug of that forest, but I did not. I turned around and walked back, down off this rare highland where the air was so pure and so fine, down, and by the time the moon lay at my left hand, low over the mountains which I would have reached by now and understood had I not been waylaid by the ruined city, I was at the city’s outskirts, and I ran like a maniac through it, but skirting the centre of it, the square with its circle, because I did not want to see the reproach of that clean waiting landing-ground, and then I ran through the suburbs on the other side, and into the forest and there, exactly as I had seen them the night before, were the three women, the three half-grown boys, the baby, dead and festering on the pile of meat. But it was late, the moon was down, and the sun would soon rise. The women were about to move away. I had saved myself by walking so hard and fast in the opposite direction. They all went off into the trees without looking at me, and one of the boys leaped on a young steer he had tethered by its horns, and he went galloping on this crazed beast around the glade, kicking the embers of the fire, the piles of meat, the baby’s corpse, scattering them about. And then he rode off while the beast roared and screamed. And again the glade was empty and clean in a morning sunlight.

I went back to the square, thankful that I had saved myself. But I knew that I was too tired now to walk away for the second night running from the approaching feast. And I knew that there were still two nights of a strong moon before the Full Moon. And I lay down and slept by the square—and that night joined in the bloody banquet under the trees, and this time they had killed the half-grown steer, and all the glade stank of blood and guts and murder, and now I knew that I would never do this again, for I was filled with strength from my sleep of the day and from the meat of the feast, and on that last day I walked twenty miles South as I had before, and turned around as the moon rose, as I had before—very nearly the full moon now—and I walked back through the night, not running, or wanting to go back to the forest, and I did not go back to the forest, for by the time I reached the city, it was too late. For the sun had come up out of a red sky over the ocean, and this was the day of the full moon. But I was tired. I was so very tired. I had not eaten that night, and I had walked forty miles. I washed myself carefully, using the largest of the water channels, sinking myself right down into it, so that the water came to my waist. I combed my beard and hair as well as I could with my fingers, and I watched the foulness run away from me with the water. And I drank and drank water as much as I could hold, hoping that its cleanliness would wash the insides of my body free of its loads of bloody meat that it could still feel from the night before last. And I lay down then to rest and wait. And, in the heat of that day, despite everything I could do, I fell asleep. I slept heavily and dreadfully, and my dreams were of that other life in a damp sunless country where my life was a weight of labour every hour, every minute, and when I woke it was long past moonrise, though I had meant to wake well before that rising; and it was midnight. I had missed the descent of the Crystal, for it was here now.

But I could not see it.

A full white moonlight lay evenly over the empty city, and over the square floor of stone on whose edge I was sitting, dreadfully heavy with sleep and foreboding. The circle in the square was still clean and faintly glowing with colour, though some leaves had blown over it during the last few days’ neglect. That the Crystal was present, there, quite close, a few yards from me, was evident to me because … I knew it was. As I looked it was as if the light there lay more heavily—no, not that, it was not a heaviness, a weight, but more of an intensity. Just there, in the centre, it was hard to see quite through to the buildings on the other side—not impossible, no, but they quivered and hung in the air like stones in the quiver of air that comes off sizzling sand or rock. And more than by sight, it was through my ears that I knew, for they sang and keened so shrilly that I had to keep shaking my head to clear away the sound. It was almost too fine and high a sound to bear. If I had been a dog I would have howled and run away. And the effort of staring in was almost too much for me. My eyes tried to close, because whatever it was that I could not quite see, but was there, belonged to a level of existence that my eyes were not evolved enough to see. And more than that, my whole body, and the level of life in it, was suffering. Beating out from that central point came waves of a finer substance, from a finer level of existence, which assaulted me, because I was not tuned to them. And I remembered how as I stood on the deck of the ship and watched the shining crystal shape, the disc, that was at the same time in an unimaginably fast movement and stationary, a visible flat spiralling, and how when I saw it come in towards me and then envelop me, it was as if my whole being had suffered a wrenching away from its own proper level. I felt this again now. I was feeling sick and low and shaken, strained out of myself with the effort of seeing what I could not really see, and hearing what I could have heard with different ears, so that I had to hear it now as an intolerable shrill note. I got to my feet with difficulty and staggered in towards the centre. As I came closer the noise got shriller, my eyes pulsed and burned, and all my body felt blasted and empty. I knew that what I was doing was futile. I knew I had missed my opportunity—for the second time, for the first had been on the deck of the old ship when the Crystal had taken my friends but left me behind. But although I knew this was an empty attempt, because it had none of the quiet ease of confidence, which is in itself a sign or condition of success, I had to make it. Emptiness was in me and all about me. Pulling my eyes away from that central compulsion, to rest them, I looked about the quiet roofless houses lying there, and saw, first of all, their quality of peaceful trust, a waiting. An emptiness very different from my frantic hunger. But they were turned inwards, to the centre; it was a city which had found its core, its resting place, in that whirl of intensity which laid claims on it and shot it through and through with its own fine substances, as a thought can take over a man and change everything about him. (Oh, for bad as well as for good, as I had learned so recently.) Looking at the houses, and then glancing in at the whirling presence in the centre, and glancing away again, for respite, I managed to come within fifteen yards of the thing—and could not come closer. Again I stood and looked from very near at a wall or sheet of shining substance in which creatures were imprisoned by their nature, as I was imprisoned in the air I had to breathe. From so very close, and by not looking direct, but out of the sides of my eyes, as star-watchers observe stars in, paradoxically, a more delicate and finer vision, I could see it pulsing there, a shape of light; and (almost seen, more sensed, known, recognized) the creatures that belonged to that state in nature. Like the shadows of flames running liquid on a wall of fire, like the reflection of broken water on a fall of water, inside that pulsing light I could see, from the side of my eye, the crystallizations of the substance which were its functions, its reason for being, its creatures. There they were, beings divided away from me as fish in a wall of water are divided from the man six inches away in air, but they were known to me, I knew them, I felt that I ought to slide in there, somehow, in some way, by thinking differently, by breathing that fast-spinning vibration—but I could not go nearer and I knew it was because I had let myself be drawn into the forest with the blood-drinking women, and because I had slept like a dog in the hot sun. I tried to force myself in to the place, although the laws of my density held me back. I felt too ill even to stand. In a last effort of will, which I knew was wrong and useless, I collapsed, and fainted, my eyes blazing light as they were extinguished by dark. And when I woke up again it was morning, the hot sunlight lay everywhere about me, and I knew that the Crystal was gone. The square and the circle inside it were empty. I had been sick and my nose had been bleeding. I lay in blood and the smell of vomit. Where I had been lying smelled vile. And as I sat up, to stare inwards at my terrible loss, I knew again what I had known on the deck of the ship, when all my friends had vanished away with the shining visitor. I had been left behind. I had not been taken. I had failed most dreadfully and through my own fault. I had had nothing to do but wait quietly for the moment of the full moon, and keep myself light and alert and wakeful. But I had not done it.

I stood up and looked about me at a city which seemed as if it had changed, though I could not say how it had. There was a new feeling about it, its peace and silence had gone. It had a look of frivolity, a sort of drunkenness. If a town, or a building, or a shape of stone, could be said to giggle, then it was that: a silly silent giggling, an infantilism, a coarseness. It was like that moment when the women turned towards me in the firelight under the trees, and showed their faces smeared with blood, but they were laughing and smiling, as if nothing much was happening to them, or to me.

I dragged myself off towards the river, to bathe and become fresh again. But I stopped. For on to the square of stone stepped a—but I did not know what it was. I thought at first, that this must be a man, for he stood as tall as one, and had the shoulders and the arms and legs of one, though strained and distorted in its shape. But his head … was it some kind of monkey, who shambled on to the square of stone, and then in right to the very centre? Here he squatted down and looked about him. But the body was covered all over with a fine close hide, shining brown, like the hide of a dog, and the head was like a dog’s with sharp cocked ears and dog’s muzzle. Yet there was a rat-like look about it. The creature had a rat’s long scaly tail. I was afraid. It was bigger and much stronger than I was. I thought it might come over and attack me. But I walked towards it and it looked at me without concern. I was thinking then that I should attack and kill it, for I found it disgusting and ugly, as it squatted there, exactly where last night the Crystal had lain shining and vibrating. I thought that if I killed it then the city would have to be cleansed again. I came close to it. The creature looked idly at me and away, it moved about, scratched for fleas, sniffed the air with its sharp dog’s or rat’s nose. I understood that it probably did not see me, or, if it did, that I was of no interest to it whatsoever.

I stayed where I was. So did the creature. I hated everything about it, it was a creature alien to me in every way. Yet I was thinking that someone standing a hundred yards away might say, at a casual glance, that it and I were of a similar species, for I stood nearly as tall as it did, and I had a head growing where this dog-rat had one, and roughly similar arms and legs. Coming closer this observer would see that I was hairless whereas this animal had a hide … well, not quite hairless. I now had thick curling brown hair to my shoulders, and a deep curling brown beard to my waist and thick dark hair on my chest and from my navel to my crotch. Dark brown hair on skin burned brown by wind and sun. I was covered and decent! Whereas this beast … but I felt too disgusted with it to stay there matching myself point by point, and I walked away off the square, and as I did so the creature gave a high squeaky call, and it was answered by other calls, half bark, half rats’ high shrilling, and on to the stone square came running and scampering and shambling a dozen or so of these creatures. They were all males. They had the genitals of a big dog, large globular testicles and penises like rods, for they all seemed in a state of sexual excitement. Later I saw that this was more or less permanent with them. When they stood upright, they looked as close-haired dogs look when made to stand on their hindlegs, the lower part of the belly all genital. They stood in a group right in the centre and faced outwards. They were on their hindlegs. They had sticks or stones in their hands, and were keeping some sort of a watch. Then I saw others moving in from the avenues in troops. I ran out, to the very edge of the escarpment, where I flung myself down and lay looking out over the land that lowered itself through the deep old forests to the blue ocean. I lay there, with the sun beating down from overhead, and knew that I had to wait another month until the moon again came to the full, and that the city, in which I had lived quite alone, was now full of these hideous dog-rats. I could hear their barking and whistling and scuffling all over the city.

I did not feel I was able to bear living there, waiting, with such companions. I made every sort of wild plan—to go back to the coast again, and build myself a raft from driftwood, to make my way to the mountains and construct there a new landing-ground and hope that the Crystal might take pity on me and descend there instead, or to return to that cold damp country where from time to time I seemed to live, and labour out my time there, giving up all hope of the Crystal … but I knew quite well that I would stay here. I had to. At last, knowing that I had no alternative but to do exactly what I was doing, I went to the river, careful to move out of sight of the Rat-dogs, and washed and bathed. I gathered some fruit. I cut fresh branches of the aromatic bush and laid them down at the edge of the escarpment, looking out and away from the city and its restless, noisy inhabitants. I slept. In my sleep one or more of the Rat-dogs came to examine me, for I saw their spoor and dung when I woke. But they did not harm me. I dreamed of them though, and cried and struggled in my sleep, imagining myself their prisoner.

It was now a question of arranging matters so that I could last out a month without becoming a slave to the moon and being forced back into the bloody ritual in the forest, or falling a victim to the curiosity of these invaders in this city which I had been thinking of as mine.

During the three or four days of the moon’s wane from the full, more and more of these rat-like dogs came in to the city. Since they did not harm me, I decided to move among them and observe them. They did not seem to have any particular pattern to their lives. Some moved about in mixed groups or packs, males and females together, with or without young. These tended to have one animal dominant, either male or female, but not always. They bickered and quarrelled incessantly, and individuals went to other groups, so it was the groups that were continuous, not the individuals in them. Some separated into smaller groups based on a mating couple, and these appropriated separate rooms in the houses. Some were solitary, a great many, and they did not seem to have any particular function in any group, large or small, but they tried to attach themselves to groups and couples, and while occasionally they were tolerated for a short while, more often they were driven away or ignored. These solitary ones sometimes met together in what looked like efforts to relieve loneliness, and sat about in twos and threes, watching the larger groups. But mostly they moved around, watching, and this was an unpleasant mirror to what I was doing, and I imagined that I saw in their sharp forlorn postures and sharply critical but avid eyes, what I might appear like to them—if they looked at me at all. But these were a species which seemed extremely busy all day, or rather, occupied and self-absorbed. They were always moving about, never still, gathering fruit and eating it, moving from room to room and from building to building, settling in one for a day or an hour and then moving on, talking in their gruff squeak in a way that suggested that most of the talk was for the sake of relieving a pressure of energy, scuffling and fighting—and sexual activity. These animals seemed extraordinarily highly sexed, but perhaps it was because of their always displayed genitals. The males I have described. The females had scarlet-edged slits from anus to their lower belly. The males were roused to sexual excitement any time a female of any age approached, and the females were nearly as sensitized. And a greater part of their time was spent in sexual display, in attracting each other’s attention, appropriating each other’s sexual partners and in watching other animals’ sexual behaviour. When a pair had actually come together and had agreed to mate, they went off behind a wall or a bush, for a part-private mating, and these had the variety of human matings. Others came to watch the sexual act, and let out high excited yappings and squeakings, and, stimulated past bearing, fell on each other and went off to near-by bushes or sheltered places. So that one mating might start off a frenzy that could last half a day. It was noticeable that this sexuality was strongest while the moon was nearer the full, and lessened as the nights grew darker. Yet the matings were as common in the day as at night. It seemed that these animals were afraid of the dark, congregating together more as night fell, and this fear was the first time I was able to achieve some pity or affection for them, for they really did seem so very forlorn, and bravely so, rounding up the younger animals as the sun went down, posting lookouts on the high walls, moving about with fearful looks over their shoulders. Yet there was no enemy that I could see. And now I had experienced an impulse of fellow-feeling for them, I began to see them more sympathetically and I disliked them less. For instance, it became evident to me that these animals had only recently begun to walk on their hindlegs, which accounted for their way of staggering, or jerking from a precarious balance to another, at each step, as a big dog does, when made to stand on its hindlegs. And this accounted for more: their most pitiable and characteristic gesture. As their eyes, like a rat’s or a dog’s, were made to be used as they moved forward on all fours, their sharp pointed noses tended, now they were upright, to point upwards to the sky, while their eyes squinted to either side downwards, in their effort for a clear view. And they kept bending their heads down and sideways, first on one side and then on the other as they walked or staggered about, all the time trying to force down their neck muscles. Putting myself in their position I saw that they must have a view of the world as two different semi-circles, one on either side. And unlike men, who are blind at their backs, so that they continually have to turn their heads to one side and then to the other, for the most part on a horizontal axis, and are nevertheless blind around two-thirds of a possible sweep of vision, these animals were always squinting up, skywards, and their head and neck movements were very rapid, to correct this, and this continuous jerking about of the head contributed to their look of general restlessness. It was the younger and more flexibly muscled of them that seemed able to keep open a fairly wide scope of vision by the fast jerkings about of their sky-pointing muzzles, each sideways jerk an interruption in a cross-sweep usually diagonal. These head movements gave the effect of the stills of an old film or cartoon running together not quite fast enough.

I noticed too that when they were tired, or believed themselves to be alone, they would let themselves down on all fours and run about for a time like this. And they ran very fast and ably indeed, for this was how their bodies had been designed to move. But when an individual or a group behaved like this for too long, the others would begin to make irritable movements, and then would set up a chiding, critical chattering, while the culprits looked defiant, then guilty, and sooner or later staggered back to the upright position.

When they were huddled together in their roofless rooms or on the stone of the square, at night when there was no moon, they sat like dogs or monkeys, squatting, their front limbs straight down in front of them for support, and they moved about on all fours much more in the dark. They seemed so very different in these two different conditions: their clumsy half-staggering on their hindlegs, with their awkward jerky vision that gave them such a look of pomposity and self-importance, and the rapid running and scampering when on all fours, that they really seemed like two different species, and I suppose I was unconsciously thinking of them as such, for I do remember very clearly that, at the first appearance of the apes, I did not at once react with alarm at a new invasion, but thought vaguely that perhaps the Rat-dogs were moving in yet a third way.

These apes were of a kind familiar to us humans. They were a variety of chimpanzee, but larger than the ones we keep to show off in zoos. They came swinging into the city through trees and along the walls, and when they saw the Rat-dogs their reaction was not one I could at once interpret. Although they stopped still and massed together, they did not seem particularly afraid, nor did they seem pleased. They conferred among themselves, on the North side of the city, till there were a couple of hundred or so massed there. Meanwhile, the Rat-dogs, turning their squinting eyes this way and that towards the newcomers, also massed together, and did not make any aggressive action as the monkeys came in farther and then scampered and swung all over the city finding out corners and rooms that were not inhabited. There was a great deal of sharp scolding and complaint as the newcomers tried to take places that were occupied, but it seemed as if both species recognized the right of the other to live in this place. More and more of the apes came trooping in. The city was crammed with animals. It seemed that the first kind, the Rat-dogs, saw the monkeys as inferior, and that the monkeys agreed, or were prepared to appear to agree. They would do small services for the big staggering beasts, and tended to move out of their way. Yet to me, a man, the monkeys were altogether more likeable and sympathetic, perhaps because I was familiar with them. I felt no strong antipathy, as I still did for the Rat-dogs, in spite of my growing compassion for them. And it seemed to me that the eyes of the monkeys showed sympathy for me, a comprehension, although they neither made attempts to approach me, nor molested me, ignoring me for the most part, as the others did. A monkey’s eyes, so sad, so knowledgeable, they are eyes that speak to the eyes of a human. We feel them to be human eyes. And what sort of self-flattery is that? For the eyes of most human beings are sharp, knowing, clever and vain, like the eyes of the Rat-dogs. The depth that lies in a monkey’s eyes by no means lies behind the eyes of all men. I found now that I moved around that populated, noisy, scuffling, dirtied city, avoiding the big Rat-dogs when I could, meeting with relief the monkeys who seemed so very much more human. But there were more and more of both species, the city was crammed, and the days were passing, so that only half the moon’s lit face showed on our earth, and then more of a dark back than her lit face, and it was dark, all dark, and I knew that soon, not much more than two weeks away, I must be ready for the Crystal’s descent. Yet all of the central square was always full of animals, as once long ago it must have been full of people meeting to talk or exchange or barter, and every inch of it was littered with fruit-rinds, dung, stones, bits of stick or branch or brown leaves. I might never have cleaned the place.

The dark of the new moon held the city in a warm, bad-smelling airlessness, and all the animals were massed together, watching the tiny sickle of light in the sky, and with sentinels posted on trees and walls everywhere. They were quieter than usual. It was not a good quiet. On the big square were mostly Rat-dogs, except for the monkeys who had chosen to groom them, or play the fool to amuse them. I went boldly into the square late one evening, as the sun went, thinking that perhaps in that sad hour, when every creature seems to be thoughtful, that these creatures would be ready to listen and to understand. I stood there like a fool, and said to them in human speech: ‘My friends, we have only fourteen days. Two weeks is all we have. For they are coming, and they will land here, on this circle in the centre of the square. But they will not land on a place which is foul and littered, so please, for your sake as well as for my sake, for the sake of all the creatures that live on this poor sick earth, let us clean this place, let us sweep it with branches, and then bring water and wash away the stains of the filth that is here.’ I kept my voice steady and I smiled, and I tried to show by gestures what we should do, but they moved about as I spoke, or turned their pointed noses down sideways so that one of their two planes of vision could include me, and the servant-like monkeys hopped closer and looked at me with their sad eyes, trying to understand—but of course they could not understand, how could they? Perhaps I was half-hoping that the meaning of my words would communicate itself to these so differently planned brains, because of the desperation of my need that it should.

The dark came up in a rush from the ocean and the forest, enveloping the plateau and the teeming city, and I went away to the edge of the escarpment and sat there, watching the stars and listening to the multifarious but subdued din from the animals behind me, who were also watching the skies, where the moon’s back was a dark circle with a hairline of light at one side.

Perhaps it was their fear of the dark, perhaps that fear stopped a normal exuberance of movement and of voice and left them banked with unexpended energy; or perhaps it was simply that the city had grown too full for their civility to continue—however it was, that night the fighting started. I knew it first by the smell—the smell of blood, which by now I did know so very well. And there were sudden scuffles much louder than usual, and cries and shrieks. These last sounded like the blood-crazed women around their fire in the forest, and in the morning, after a long dark stuffy night, I walked into the city and saw corpses lying on the central square and also here and there among the houses. Most of these dead were the monkeys, though there were one or two Rat-dogs. And now the two races had separated off, except that a few of the monkeys had chosen to stay as servants or jesters with the big beasts who tolerated them. The city was roughly divided, and now the sentinels on the trees and the walltops watched each other, were turned inwards instead of outwards.

The morning slowly passed in this new, hot, suspicious tension. There was no new outbreak of fighting, and when the sun stood overhead, it seemed as if a truce had been declared in the barkings and squeakings and chatterings I had heard but not understood. Each army sent out representatives and the corpses were dragged away. These were not buried, but pulled through the city and then its suburbs, and thrown into the great hole where the river plunged down into the earth. I cried out to them, ‘No, No, No,’ not to foul the clean river and then the sea, but remembered how men had poisoned all the oceans and rivers so that beasts and fish were dying there, and so, feeling sick and hopeless, I went away, thinking that what corpses succeeded in making their way from out the dark riverine channels through the earth, and out to the waterfalls and cataracts, and from there to the wide level river, and at last to the sea—these corpses would at least be cleaner offal than the lethal filth men feed to the sea currents.

Towards night, and the light’s draining away in sadness in a red-stained sky, the fighting broke out again, and they fought all night, and I sat on my cliff’s edge and tried not to hear it or to follow the carnage too closely in my imagination. There were thirteen days to go to the moon’s full, and I knew I had no hope of cleaning the city, no hope of the Crystal’s coming, unless by some fortune I had no reason to expect, the animals went away from the city again, as apparently casually as they had come.

Next morning the dead lay in heaps, and the whole city smelled of blood. And now these animals, whose food was fruit and water, were gathered around piles of corpses and were tearing off lumps of hairy flesh and eating it. As I came in close to look, I felt afraid for the first time of these beasts, apes and Rat-dogs. I was now, as they were to each other, potential meat. They ignored me, though I was standing not twenty yards away, until I saw three of them become conscious of my being there, and they turned their pointed muzzles to me, with their sharp teeth white and smeared red, and I saw the blood dripping down as I had off the faces of my women. I went back to the edge of the sea and fell into a despair. I gave up hope then. I knew that the fighting would go on. It would get worse. They would now kill for food. I knew that I was in danger and I did not care. In such moods there are many arguments you can find to support the wisdom of despair. The advocates humanity has found to argue on the side of despair have always been more powerful than those other small voices. I laid myself down on the escarpment’s edge and looked down into the deep forests which had taken so many centuries to grow, where my beautiful yellow beasts must be and where birds as brightly coloured as sunset or dawn skies followed the curve of lives as brief as mine. And then I slept. I wanted to sleep away time so that the end would come more quickly.

When I woke it was late afternoon and, while the sunlight still lay sparkling over the distant ocean, beneath me, over the forest, it was almost night. The fighting still went on. I could hear animals chasing each other not more than a few yards away in the buildings that reached almost to the escarpment. I did not want to turn my head to look, for out of the corner of my eye I could see a dying rat-beast rolling and squeaking and kicking up puffs of dust in its death struggle. I looked forward and out again over the forest where Jaguar, Parrot and Lizard blazed and burned, older than man, and then I saw lying on the air in front of me a great white bird which, instead of sailing right past my eyes on its current of air, at the last moment turned and landed beside me on the cliff’s edge, its great wings balancing it to a safe perch. It was not a species of bird I knew. It was about four feet tall as it sat, white plumaged, and it had a straight streak of a yellow beak that gave it a severe appearance. I thought enviously of how in a moment it would let itself slide off on a warm wave of evening air, as a swimmer slides off a warm rock into a swirling sea. As I thought this it turned and looked steadily at me with very round golden eyes. I went to it and it squatted low, like a hen settling in a smother of outstretched sheltering wings over its eggs, and I slid on to its back, and no sooner was I safely there than it glided off into the air, and we were dropping down lightly over the rocky sliding hill, and the waterfalls and then over the deep forest, now silent with the approach of night. The bird’s back, its wingspan, was ten or twelve feet. I sat up, with a fistful of feathers to keep me steady, but a wind that came sweeping up from the sea nearly sent me toppling off and down over and over to the tree-tops, so I lay face down, with my arms on either side of the bird just above where the wings joined. The slopes of white feathers were sun-warmed still, and slippery, and smelled clean and wholesome like a hen’s egg when it is fresh. The light shone off the white feathers immediately below my eyes like sun off a snowfield, and I turned away my face and laid it to one side, and looked down past the bird’s neck and shoulders and we swooped out over the sea and sped along the waves’ crests that still, even though all the land between the shore and the plateau’s edge was plunged in dark, sparked off light from the setting sun. It was a red sun in a ruddy sky, to match the carnage that went on in the city beneath it—which I could just see, white walls and columns in miniature, miles away, high through darkening air. And on we went over the waves and I breathed in great gulps of cold salty air that swept my lungs free of dirt and blood. And on we went until the shore and continent beyond had dwindled to a narrow edge of dark against a sky that was piled high and thick with glowing clouds, and then as my bird dipped one wing to swerve around and back I cried, ‘No, not yet, go on,’ and the bird sped on, while the air whistled past my cold-burning ears and I could taste the salt spray on my lips and beard. And on and on we went, and then I turned over carefully on my back, with my arms bent back and clutching at the finer feathers in the warm caverns under the bird’s beating or balancing wings, and I looked up into a star-sprinkled sky where the moon was with her back to the Earth, and showing a slice of her edge one finger wider than yesterday’s to remind me of my sorrow and my failure. And now in front of us was the coast of Portugal and there was Conchita on her headland looking out to sea. Behind her the red blotch of new suburbs spread out like measles, and below the sea pranced and tossed. She was singing or half chanting, or even speaking—for it was halting, worrying, blocked song, which showed poor Conchita was as little fitted for her nunhood as she had been happy in my arms,

‘Come on, shout!’ the brass sun said,

The peacock sea screamed blue, the turkey houses red,

Sun and sea, they challenged ‘Come!’

The earth sang out, but I was dumb.

Slow, slow, my feet down thick sand dunes,

Curled shells recalling old sea tunes

Cut my slow feet until they bled.

‘Who cannot dance must bleed,’ they said.

Not ape, nor God, to swing from tree to tree,

Or bid the sea be still from fear of me,

Divided, dwarfed, a botched thing in between,

I watched the sky burn on, the grass glow deeper green.

To sing! To sing! To squeeze the flaring afternoon

Like warm fruit in my hand! Then fling it out in tune!

To take the waves, the freedom of their beat,

And dance that out on sea-taught feet.

But blood and nerves are crucified too long

That I should find a sweet release in song.

Not I to sing as free as birds

Whose throat forms only human words.

Renounce the sea, the crooning sands,

My ease, bought not by loosed feet, hands,

Or love which breaks the mind in pain

To make the flesh shine whole again.

These are mine still, but only in the long

Cold reaches where the mind coils strong

To create in patience what the slow

Limbs, bound, knew simply as a song, but long ago.

I called to her, ‘Conchita, Conchita,’ but she did not hear me, she was looking out over the sea, and now my bird had swept around and was heading back and soon we were over the sea’s edge where I had landed, and then over the forests, and then we were on the cliff’s edge again. The alighting of this great white bird frightened a number of monkeys that had been hiding where some bushes grew thickly. They went chattering off, and I sat myself in my usual place, and the bird sat with me a little in silence, and then sailed off again on its white wings into the dark of that night.

And so that night passed, with the screams and the sound of the fighting going on behind me, but now I felt less oppressed by it, for I kept my mind on the long cool flight I had had on the great bird’s sun-warmed back, and on my old love Conchita stammering her separate failure on her separate coast.

I did not go into the city’s centre again for three days, but sat on the cliff hoping to see the bird, but he did not come, and at last I ventured in, and the fighting still went on, and so many had been killed that they could not either eat or dispose of the corpses, which lay in heaps everywhere. All the animals were exhausted from the long fighting. Their fighting had become more frightful and desperate and mechanical. They were very crazy now, and their eyes were reddened, and their fur and hide roughened and dirty. The Rat-dogs no longer attempted to stand upright, they ran about on all fours, killing the monkeys by random snapping bites with their sharp fangs. Again they took very little notice of me as I went across the square to see how I could prepare it for the full moon not much more than a week away now. I saw nothing hopeful, and so went back to my cliff again. Now I abandoned my dream of preparing the landing-ground, and I dreamed instead of returning to the sea, of letting myself slide into the fresh salt like a bird into the air. I sat there as the days and nights came and went, my eyes fixed on the distant ocean, wishing I had slid off the bird’s back into the healthful sea, and there found some plank or spar or fish or floating thing I might have clung to like a barnacle until perhaps the Crystal took pity on me and swept me up at last. And as I sat there on the morning three days before Full Moon, wondering if I should slide back down the glassy wall, and run down, down to the sea, the white bird came back and sat by me, greeting me with its friendly yellow eyes. Again it squatted as I climbed up on to it, and again sped down over the forests to the sea and again circled there just above the breaking waves. But now I understood why the bird had come to fetch me, for the sea was no longer the fresh cold salty well of sanity it had been. There was a sluggishness in its moving, as if it had thickened. There was a taint of decay. Bobbing on the waves I saw hundreds of corpses from the war on the plateau, which had been flung into the great chasm and had been carried by the stream over falls and cataracts to the sea’s edge. And everywhere I saw fishes and sea-creatures floating, bellies up, and on the sea were patches of oil, dark and mineral-smelling. And over the sea, in patches, was a pale phosphorescence like an insidious decay made visible, and these were poisonous gases that had released themselves from the containers man had sunk them in to the sea’s bottom, and elsewhere were sheets of light like a subtle electric fire which was radioactivity from the factories and plants on shores, oceans or continents away. The bird swept me back and forth across miles of ocean in the frying sun, making me look at the sea’s death, and even as we flew there, all the surface of the sea became choked with death, dead fishes and seaweeds and clams and porpoises and dolphins and whales, fish big and small, and all the plants of the sea, sea-birds and sea-snakes and seals—then my beautiful white bird lifted me up and up and up into the sky and sped back over the trees to the plateau, but now it circled down over the city with its roofless buildings and made me see how underneath me all the city, every building in it, was fouled by war, how everywhere lay the loads of corpses, how in every street groups of beasts fought each other, and now so crazed and weary were they that they fought within the species, without even the excuse of a difference in fur or hide or shape of muzzle or eye. They fought monkey with monkey, rat-beast with rat-beast. Fighting had become its own justification and they could not stop. And under every bush and in the corner of every house lay the wounded moaning and licking their wounds. Just as we came sweeping low in a final circuit, not twenty paces from my cliff’s edge, I saw a female Rat-dog, with its sleek brown hide all bloodied and gashed, sitting up with its back to a wall, snapping at a couple of male Rat-dogs, and at the same time she was giving birth. Puppies tumbled out of her scarlet slit in a spout of blood and tissue, while she fought for her life. The two round mounds on her chest, which were her breasts, were swollen and had been torn, so that blood and milk poured out together. Her sharp muzzle had hairy flesh hanging from her teeth, and as she snapped and bit at the two tall staggering males who menaced her, she became so crazed with fear and the need to help her puppies’ birth, that even as she fought, she would give a deadly snap in front, at an antagonist, and then snap downwards at her young, and perhaps wound or kill one, and then another random desperate bite at an antagonist, and then a snap downwards again, and then back at the pressing enemies, so that it looked as if she were fighting her puppies as much as the two males who were as mad with long fighting as she was, for notwithstanding they were trying to kill her (or at least acting in such a way that she had to defend herself) and indeed succeeding, for she sank down in her own blood as we swept past the groups, their sexual organs were swollen with excitement, and one of them attempted to mate with her even as she died. She died in a spasm that was as much a birth- as a death-spasm.

On the cliff’s edge I tumbled off the bird’s warm strong back, and lay face down weeping. Now I believed that everything was ended, and there was no hope anywhere for man or for the animals of the Earth.

But at last, when I lifted myself up, the white bird was still there, and it was looking at me with its golden eyes, its straight yellow beak bent towards me, in its severe but kindly way. It seemed to want me to attend to it, and when I was properly recovered and standing up it began walking in through the houses of the city to the centre. Now I looked up and saw that the moon must be near full, and I could see the sheet of silver stretching up into the sky over the sea where the moon would rise. I wanted the bird to stop, for I was afraid this marvellous creature might be killed by the warring beasts. But it seemed as if they were quieter. The war had worked itself to its end. Scuffling and sparring went on; couples or small groups fought. But packs of both Rat-dogs and monkeys sat licking themselves and whining and moaning. And although they had all been fighting each other to the death for days, now they seemed almost indifferent to each other’s presence, and monkeys licked the sores of Rat-dogs, and Rat-dogs accepted it as homage or submission.

The bird took to its wings and swooped low over the earth along the streets, inwards to the square. I followed. There the bird settled, folding its wings, and standing erect, its narrow yellow beak held stiffly down, with its usual effect of propriety. And just as my heart beat with terror that it would be killed, I saw that all the beasts were afraid of it. Everywhere over the great stone square, animals backed away, the monkeys gibbering and grimacing, and the Rat-dogs back on their feet again, retreating, squinting down one side of their faces and then the other—until they felt themselves safe, when they let themselves drop back on all fours and slunk away.

The bird stood quietly in the centre of the circle. And now I understood it was there to protect me. I began on the work of dragging away the dead animals as far as I could. As I did this, both races of animals came to these piles, and carried their dead right away, probably to the chasm where the river plunged in, or perhaps for a final cannibal feast—though it seemed as if they had lost their taste for flesh again and were tasting and trying the fruits as if these were a new sensation and not their proper food. But I had too much to do, and could not watch them any longer. When the square was clear of the dead animals, I again tore off branches and swept it. Then I had to clear water channels that were choked up with leaves and dirt and dung. And finally I again carried water in the hollow stone that once had been a mortar and I poured water everywhere, and swept that away with sweet-smelling branches. All that night I worked under the blazing white moon, and all the following day under a hot dry sun. There sat the companionable bird, white and glossy, its golden eyes watchful, its severe yellow beak kept in my direction. At the start, some animals came near in a decision to reclaim the square, but when they saw the bird they went away again. At last I realized that they were not in sight at all. Then that I could not hear them. They had gone from the city’s centre altogether. Perhaps they had even left the city. By the end of that day the square and the beautifully patterned and coloured circle it enclosed were clean and fresh, the air smelled of aromatic leaves and water, and as I stood quietly in the dusk I could hear the water running beneath my feet in its stone-lined channels. The air was full of the scent of flowers. A last bird sang from a tree near the square.

Full Moon came straight up from the sea and laid silver light over Earth from the sea’s edge to the towering mountains. The moon rose up through the stars and the white bird lifted its wings and soared up and up and up and away back into the moon.

I walked in now from the edge of the square, and took up a waiting position at the outer edge of the circle, looking in towards the centre.

I hope it may now be conceded that this drug is contra-indicated in this case. After an absence of five days I was shocked at the deterioration in the patient. When I saw him this morning it was clear that he has less grasp of reality than when he was admitted. From what nurse says I should diagnose that he is in coma a good part of the time.

DOCTOR Y.

This case was thoroughly discussed at the conference Thursday at which you were not present. This drug’s effects are often not fully developed for three weeks, as I have already tried to explain. Patient has been on it for twelve days.

DOCTOR X.

There was a pressure of silence, which swirled me into a singing calm. I was inside the Crystal, whose vortex had gathered in all sensation as a dust-devil gathers in dust and leaves from yards around, or as bathwater spiralling its way down a hole exerts its pull on every part of the water in the bath. Looking outwards from it nothing that had been there remained—or so it seemed at first, for the beginning of my being absorbed into the Crystal was a darkness of mind coupled with a vividness of sense that only slowly I was able to balance. It seemed that the Crystal was having difficulty in absorbing my comparative crudeness. This fighting went on in me as well as in it, during the few moments of the beginning. I say ‘the few moments’. But the very thing I became aware of first was that time had shifted gear and vibrated differently, and it was this that was the first assault on my own habitual pattern of substance. To my eyes it seemed as if I was in a world of lucid glass, or perhaps better, of crystalline mist. My body felt a nausea which I became properly aware of as it began to abate, for it had been gripping me in a totality that was basic—of which one is unaware. For instance, as we breathe ordinary air, our lungs are adapted to absorb a poisonous gas (poisonous to other visiting creatures, or to ourselves perhaps, once) called air. The nausea had been a tight vice, locking me in tension against it. It went at last and a delightful lightness took me over. The dragging pain of gravity had gone: this dimension was as free and delicious as skating or flight lying between the wings of a guardian bird. Yet I had a body. But it was of a different substance, lighter, finer, tenuous, though I recognized its likeness to my usual shape of matter. Slowly my senses, my new senses, steadied. I was inside a tinted luminosity, my new body, and this luminousness was part, like a flame in fire, of the swirl of the Crystal, and this burned whitely, an invisible dance, where the centre of the circle in the square had been—and still was, for I could see its outline, but it was the ghost of its outline. And, holding fast to the start or centre of my vision, or, rather, feeling, I let that vision—or perhaps the word was understanding—move out and around. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, allowed it to enlarge, as light spreads, and I saw that this city on this plateau did indeed exist in the new dimension, or level, of vibration. But, as my own body was now a shape in light, though not as fine and high a light as the substance of the Crystal itself, so too was the city: it was as if the city of stone and clay had dissolved, leaving a ghostly city, made in light, like an illuminated mist that has shadows or echoes held in it. Yet the city that rose everywhere about me in the same shape of the city I knew so well was thinner, more sparse. It was a more delicately framed and upheld place. This is not to say that the houses or public buildings, delicately outlined, like a tracery in frost on a window-pane, all a patterning of stars or hexagons, were less firm and distinct than the shapes of the solid city built in stone, but that there were fewer houses and buildings in this shadow city than in the earthy one. As if this tenuous city, which was a pattern and a key and a blueprint for the outer city, only fitted certain parts or areas or individual buildings in the outer city. It seemed as if the delicately fine city ‘fitted’ best over some public buildings and some houses. In between were areas where the mist lay blank, without shapes built into it. And yet I knew very well—since by now I did know so very well the real city where I had walked and watched and waited for weeks—that this ‘real’ stone-built city had houses and buildings here and here and here and there—where there were none in the inner pattern, or template. I seemed to understand as I stood here in my new spritely shape that the areas of the city where the inner pattern was not strong enough to impose itself were where there was an extra heaviness and imperviousness in their substance. Whereas the parts of the city that were mirrored in the inner blueprint had as it were built into the stones a sample or portion of that fine inner light or substance.

And now it was plain to me that when walking in my normal shape through the stone city, and becoming conscious, as most people are at times, of a finer air in this or that house or hall or public place, what I was registering was the places or areas where the inner pattern lay vibrating on its self-spun thought.

Thought … I was thinking … the Crystal was a thought that pulsed and spiralled. My sympathies enlarged again, my mind washed out, and now I saw on the outskirts of this city moving spots or blobs of light. These were in groups or patches, and were moving away from the city. I saw that they were the troops of the Rat-dogs and apes, but again they were fewer than I remembered, just as this new delicate city was thinner and sparser than the outer one. In this inner atmosphere only some of the beasts were mirrored. My mind moved along them like a bird on wings, and I understood that among these poor beasts trapped in their frightful necessities, some sometimes snuffed this finer air, but that most did not. Most of them were as thick, heavy and unredeemed as the bulk of the stone and earth that had no crystalline air kneaded into it. Yet some did have a light in them. And this did not seem to match with any quality of group or pack morality. For instance, one sad little blob of faintly pulsing light, which nevertheless was brighter than most in its constellation, belonged to a beast I was able to recognize—and he was one of the most violent, energetic and busy of them all; and another brave little pulse belonged to a clowning, jesting ape. And yet another marked an ape quite different from either, one much obsessed with her twin apelets, a fussy, nagging, nattering, little animal, yet her star shone as bright as the two assertive male animals’. These flocks of moving lights, or lit drops, like globules of gleaming wet in the swirl of a luminous mist, moved out and away. I understood that if I were to move out there now on my ordinary gravity-subjugated legs, the city would be clear and clean again. The warring and killing beasts had moved away beyond the suburbs of the city and beyond even the forest where I had seen the orgiastic women. This forest I now explored with the tentacles of my new senses and found a paradise of plant, leaf and pattern of branch all structured in light. A scene in the ordinary world nearest to it would be that in a forest after a light snowfall when it is essential shape of branch and tree that is presented in white shimmering outline to eyes used to a confusion of green, lush, loving, lively detail. In this paradisiacal forest Felicity and Constance and Vera were not represented at all, yet as my thoughts hung over the memory of what had been there, a compulsion or pressure or need grew into them: a demand from the excluded, a claim. The memory of the nights I had drunk blood and eaten flesh with the women under the full moon struck my new mind, and there was a reeling and then a rallying of its structure, while I accepted and held the memory, and then I had moved out beyond, but now the women were lodged in my mind, my new mind. I knew, though dimly enough at that time—for so many ‘knowings’ began then—that those frightful nights when I had been compelled away from the city’s centre to the murdering women had become a page in my passport for this stage of the journey. As this thought came in, so did another—or, as I’ve said already, the beginnings of one, these were all beginnings—that the women were now faceted in my new mind like cells in a honeycomb, gleams of coloured light, and that my comrades, whom I had seen flickering, flaming and flowing inside the greater white blaze of the Crystal, were also faceted with me, as I with them, in this inner structure, and that I had understood this from the moment the Crystal had swept me up into itself, which was why I had forgotten my search for them. In that dimension minds lay side by side, fishes in a school, cells in honeycomb, flames in fire, and together we made a whole in such a way that it was not possible to say, Here Charles begins, here John or Miles or Felicity or Constance ends. And so with us all. But while this new swelling into understanding was taking place in my mind, a move outwards into comprehension, only possible at all because of my fusion with the people who were friends, companions, lovers and associates, a wholeness because I was stuck like a bit of coloured glass in a mosaic—there was somewhere close all this time a great weight of cold. I realized that all the time there had been this weight, this pressure of freezing cold, but that I had not been aware of it, as I had not been aware to begin with of my griping nausea. That had been total, and not to be isolated away from my overall condition. This terror of cold was like that. That was when I first became aware of it, or I think it was, for as I’ve said, in those early explorations of my new mode of feeling, it was only afterwards that I was able to trace strands back to a particular bud or start in my thought. But there was no doubt that about that time this knowledge became firmly lodged in me: the cold weight, a compulsion, a necessity, as it were a menace only just held at bay by humanity, and always waiting there, the crocodile’s jaws always there, just under the water. It was a grief and a fear too ancient for me, it was a sorrow bred into the essence of the race. I saluted it, and passed on, for like the early all-pervading nausea, this was part of my living, kneaded into my fibres, a necessity like breathing and associated with it: this cold, this weight, this pulling and dragging and compelling. It was too old a lodestone for any individual to fight, or even accurately to know and place. It was there.

The world was spinning like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, all light. It was the mind of humanity that I saw, but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lower, for just as my having drunk blood and eaten flesh with the poor women had been a door, a key and an opening, because all sympathetic knowledge must be that, in this spin of fusion like a web whose every strand is linked and vibrates with every other, the swoop of an eagle on a mouse, the eagle’s cold exultation and the mouse’s terror make a match in nature, and this harmony runs in a strengthened pulse in the inner chord of which it is a part. I watched a pulsing swirl of all being, continually changing, moving, dancing, a controlled impelled dance, held within its limits by its nature, and part of this necessity was the locking together of the inner pattern in light with the outer world of stone, leaf, flesh, and ordinary light.

In this great enclosing web of always changing light moved flames and tones and thrills of light that sang and sounded, on deeper and higher notes, so what I saw, or rather was part of, was neither light nor sound, but the place or area where these two identities become one. The pulsing ball of light or sound was fitted to the earthy world it enclosed, and as I had seen before with the buildings of the city and with the troops of animals, those poor ravaging beasts, everywhere in the earthy world lay the cracks and seams of higher substance, a finer beat in time, or light, or sound, which formed channels for the higher enclosing sphere to feed itself into the lower. Lying there out in space, I could see through the coloured spinning membrane, as one can see through the spinning walls of a soap bubble as it hangs growing from a fine tube held in lips that blow air into it, and I saw how the coloured world we know, seas and soil, mountains and desert, was all in a spin of pressure of matter, and this creature hanging there in space, surrounded by its delicate outer envelope, was at a first and a very long look, empty, for mankind was not visible until one swooped in close, where his evidence, cities and conglomerations and workings showed as lice show in seams and crevices. Mankind was a minute grey crust here and there in the Earth. Within patches that seemed stationary, motionless, minute particles moved, but in set patterns, so that looking down at one fragment of this crust of matter, smaller than the tiniest of grains of sand or dust of pollen, it seemed that even the curve made by a journey of a group of such items from one continent to another was a flicker of an oscillation in a great web of patterning oscillations and quiverings.

The Earth hung in its weight, coloured and tinted here and there, for the most part with the bluish tint of water … the great oceans had become not more than a film of slippery substance covering part of the globe’s surface. Yes, all that drama of deep blue oceans that held their still unknown and secret life, and roaring storms and crashing restless waves, and tides dragged about by the moon had become a thin smear of slippery substance on a toughly textured globe of matter, and humanity and animal life and bird life and reptile life and insect life—all these were variations in a little crust on this globe. Motes, microbes. And yet—it was mostly here that the enclosing web of subtle light touched the earth globe. It was for the most part through the motes or mites of humanity. Which, viewed from the vantage point of the enclosing web of light (inner or outer as one chose to view it), was not at all a question of individual entities, as those entities saw themselves, but a question of Wholes, large and small, for groups and packs and troops and crowds made entities, made Wholes, functioning as Wholes. Bending closer in the web of understanding which was the nature of this enclosing bell of light, I could see how the patterns of light, the colours, textures, pulses of faint or strong light, were not only similarity, but identity. All over the globe ran these pulses or lines, linking groups of individuals, which groups were not necessarily nations or countries—I saw at moments how a patch of mould or lichen glowed up in a burst of colour (or sound) and this was a civil war or a burst of national emotion, but more often, when an area of colour moved and concentrated, singing on its own note, it was composed of sections of nations or countries that had left or detached themselves from their parent groups and were at war with each other, and it was noticeable how a flare-up of a tiny area was so often the coming together of two fragments or pulses, which then became the same colour, the same sound. But the lines or pulses running and darting everywhere over this globe that were most consistent were not the flare-ups of war but those that were the different professions, so that legislators over the earth were not merely ‘on the same wavelength’, they were the same, part of the same organ, or function, even if in warring or opposing countries, and so with judges and farmers and civil servants and soldiers and talkers and moneymen and writers—each of these categories were one, and from this vantage point it was amusing to see how passionate hatred, rivalries and competitions disappeared altogether, for the atoms of each of these categories were one, and the minute fragments that composed each separate pulse or beat of light (colour, sound) were one, so there were no such things as judges, but only Judge, not soldiers, but Soldier, not artists, but Artist, no matter if they imagined themselves to be in violent disagreement. And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important identities were reduced to a few, was another, different, but in some places matching, pattern, of a stronger rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding colour, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the shimmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and there on the globe, the sea’s children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer shimmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation. The outer web of musical light created the inner earthy one and held it there in its dance of tension. And a scattering of people, a strand of them, a light webby tension of them everywhere over the globe, were the channels where the finer air went into the earth and fed it and kept it alive. And this delicate mesh imposed on (or stronger than) the other pulsing patterns had nothing to do with humanity’s ethics or codes, the pack’s morality, so that sometimes this higher faster beat sang in the life of a soldier, sometimes a poet, sometimes a politician, and sometimes in a man who watched and mapped the stars, or another who watched and mapped the infinitesimal fluid pulses that make up the atom, which atom was as far from the larger atoms that make up that mould or growth, humanity, as humanity is from the stars. And the items of this connecting feeding mesh (like an electric grid of humanity) were one; just as there is no such thing as soldiers but only Soldier, and not clerks but Clerk, and Gardener, and Teacher. For, since any category anywhere always beats on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nourishing web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life—even someone passed on a street corner and smiled at once—these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel, or sense, or recognize, a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie, or Felicity, or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting in this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took, and through this web, these webs, ran a finer beat, as water ran everywhere in the stone city through channels cut or built in rock by men who were able to grade the lift or the fall of the earth.

But yet while I observed this, felt this, understood at last, I was conscious always of that old, that very ancient, weight, the cold of grief I had become aware of so early on after my absorption into this new area of being. There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. There it was, close, always—I acknowledged it and in doing so moved out and on, since now everything was open to me and I floated deliciously, like a bubble in foam or as if lying at ease between a bird’s stretched wings.

The corporeal Earth, like a round boulder, lay revolving erratically at about the distance it would take a shout or a hail to carry. It spun slowly about, wobbling badly. This spinning made a system of streaks, brown, blue and white, show on the surface of the globe, but I knew that these streaks were the seas and continents and ice-caps in motion. The globe lay surrounded by its envelope of pulsing light, through which, however, I could see, as if I were peering through a thin opalescent cloud. I was seeing this Earth spinning in a time that was not humanity’s time. Somewhere behind me, or to one side, was the vast white blaze of the sun, and in this steady blaze the Earth spun. I lay steady, a minuscule planet of the sun, watching the Earth in its spin. Day and night were not visible except as a soft flicker, and the violent rocking back and forth that makes our seasons seemed like a green flush that passed in a wink, and a momentary thickening of the white streaks at north and south poles. At this speed all I could see was a whizzing around on its axis and a whirling around the Sun—and there was the weight of cold grief present here too, the compulsion, but I did not now attend to this, for as I thought of the speed of the planet, it began to slow, and now it was turning no faster than it needed for me to take in a pattern of earth and water before the pattern turned out of sight. Since I was now farther away than before, when the chart of darting impulses had shown itself to me, I could examine in less detail but in more perspective how the illuminated envelope about the Earth thrilled and glowed and changed and shivered in its dance, and I could see very clearly how this envelope which clung to the Earth’s surface like a white summer fog on a warm morning matched and spoke to the areas beneath. A continent, I saw, gave off the same subtlety of shade—not absolutely uniform all over, of course not, but enough to be a recognizable basis to whatever other currents then ran and danced over it in their netting of sympathetic movement. It seemed as if there was something, but I could not see what, which made, let’s say, that mass of land which we call Russia, European Russia, give off a glow which did not change, and this shade was different from that shade which pervaded the mass we call Asia, and these were different, but steadily different, from other areas of the world. Each part of the globe’s surface of course had its own distinctive physical shade, that was its vegetation (or its lack of it), its plant setting for its animal life, but as distinctive, as clearly differentiated as jungle and desert and swamp and highland, was the light that lay above in the aerial map that was its mirror and its sister—its governor. In this map of the currents of the mind and sympathies and feelings, countries—that is, nations—were marked out, and held what was necessary and appropriate to them, and it mattered very much whether a concept ‘nation’ matched with the physical area beneath it, and where these were in discord then there was a discord of light and sound. I had an old thought, or rather, an old thought was transplanted upwards into the keener, swifter air of this realm, that no matter what changes of government or what names were given to a nation’s system of organization, there was always the same flavour or reality that remained in that place, that country, or area—and seen from where I was, where time was speeding so that one revolution of the globe was like a slow human breath, so that I was watching great movements of human event, but as I might, as a human, watch for an hour the change, growth, and sudden destruction of an anthill. I looked close in at little England, catching a quick glimpse as it turned past, and saw how it kept its own pulse, which was a colour, a condition, a note of sound—for all countries, every one, every crust of mould, or part of humanity, were held in laws that they could not change or upset. They were manipulated from above (or below) by physical forces that they did not even as yet suspect—or that they did not suspect at this moment of time because it was part of this little organism’s condition to discover and forget and discover and forget—and this was a time when they had forgotten and were about again to discover. But their terrible bondage, the chains of necessity that grasped them—it was this thought that came in again, bringing the dreadful breath of cold, of grief.

As I thought that I would like to see the Earth speed up a little, but not as fast as before, when a year’s turn around the sun seemed like the spin of a coin, it did speed up, and now I saw other patterns of light, or colour, deepen and fade and marry and merge and move, and as I thought that all these patterns were no more than a composite of the slower individual pulses and currents I had seen earlier, and that they were making up the glowing coloured mist that was the envelope of the globe, it came into my mind that the glowing envelope of the globe seemed to be set, or held, by something else, just as it, in its place, held the rhythms of the Earth, our Earth. My mind made another outward-going, outswelling, towards comprehension, and now I saw how lines and currents of force and sympathy and antagonism danced in a web that was the system of planets around the Sun, so much a part of the Sun that its glow of substance, lying all about it in space, held the planets as intimately as if these planets were merely crystallizations or hardenings of its vaporous stuff, moments of density in the solar wind. And this web was an iron, a frightful necessity, imposing its design.

Now I watched, as the Earth turned fast, but still so that I could see the change and growth and dying away of patterns, how as the planets moved and meshed and altered and came closer to each other and went away again, exerting a pressure of forces on each other that bound them all, on the Earth the little crusts of matter that were men, that were humanity, changed and moved. Just as the waters, the oceans (a little film of fluid matter on the big globe’s surface) moved and swung under the compulsion of the Sun and the Moon, so did the life of man, oscillating in its web of necessity, in its place in the life of the planets, a minute crust on the surface of a thickening and becoming visible of the Sun’s breath that was called Earth. Humanity was a pulse in the life of the Sun, which lay burning there in a vast white explosion of varying kinds of light, or sound, some stronger and thicker, some tenuous, but at all forces and strengths, which fluid lapped out into space holding all these crumbs and drops and little flames in a dance, and the force that held them there circling and whirling in their dance was the Sun, the energy of the Sun, and that was the controlling governor of them all, beside whose strength all the subsidiary laws and necessities were nothing. The ground and soul and heart and centre of this little solar system was the light and pulse and song of the Sun, the Sun was king. But although this central strength, this majestic core of our web, was an essence to the whole system, farther out and away from the centre, where poor dark Pluto moved, perhaps it might be that the tug and pull and pressure of the planets seemed more immediate, perhaps out there, or farther, the knowledge that the Sun is still the deep low organ note that underlies all being is forgotten—forgotten more even than on earth, spinning there so crooked and sorrowful and calamitous with its weight of cold necessity so close. And perhaps, or so I thought as I saw the dance of the Sun and its attendants. Mercury the Sun’s closest associate was the only one which could maintain steadily and always the consciousness of the Sun’s underlying song, its need, its intention, Mercury whose name was, also, Thoth, and Enoch, Buddha, Idris and Hermes, and many other styles or titles in the Earth’s histories, Mercury the Messenger, the carrier of news, or information from the sun, the disseminator of laws from God’s singing centre.

Yes, but farther out, on the third crookedly spinning planet, it is harder to keep that knowledge, the sanity and simplicity of the great Sun, and indeed poor Earth is far from grace, and so it was easy to see, for at that tempo of spin that enabled me to watch clearly the marrying of events on Earth and in the rest of its fellow planets, I watched how wars and famines, and earthquakes and disasters, floods and terrors, epidemics and plagues of insects and rats and flying things came and went according to the pressures from the combinations of the planets and the Sun—and the Moon. For a swarm of locusts, a spreading of viruses, like the life of humanity, is governed elsewhere. The life of man, that little crust of matter, which was not even visible until one swooped down close as a bird might sweep in and out for a quick survey of a glittering shoal of fish that puckered a wave’s broad flank, that pulse’s intensity and size and health was set by Mercury and Venus, Mars and Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, and their movements, and the centre of light that fed them all. Man, that flicker of life, diminished in numbers and multiplied, was peace-loving or murderous—in bondage. For when a war flared up involving half the earth masses of the globe, or when the Earth’s population doubled in a handful of years and for the first time in known history, or when in every place that men lived they rioted and fought and scuffled and screamed and killed and wept against their fate, it was because the balance of the planets had shifted, or a comet came too close—or the moon spoke, voicing the cold, the compulsion, and now, bending in as close as I dared to watch, I saw how the Earth and its Moon cycled and circled and how both earth and water pulsed and swelled and vibrated on Earth, as matter swelled and moved and vibrated on the moon, on the cold Moon, on the cold dead Moon, the warm Earth’s cold sister, the step-child, the terrible Moon who sucks and leeches and clutches on to the warm earth that was alive, for the Moon wanted to live, the Moon would live, the Moon was like a poor sad stillborn babe, but the baby would live, it fought to live, as eggs drag lime from hens’ bones, and foetuses pull life from their mothers, the Moon sucked and leeched and was like a dragging magnet of need that was the earth’s first metronome in the dance of the planets, for it was nearest, it was the deprived and half-starved twin, the earth’s other self, the Necessity.

Here was the frightful cold weight of sorrow that had lain on the edge of my mind since I had first been absorbed into the Crystal—the knowledge of the Moon and its need. So close was the Moon, so much part of earth, that it was earth—for seen even from that short distance they looked like a pair of brothers always in movement about each other. The Moon was so very close, the always present force that is easiest overlooked when the tiny human mind looks for reasons and answers. Much easier to look out—right out, beyond even the farthest orbits of Uranus and Pluto—out to Riga, even to that other mirror, far Andromeda and beyond that to …

Oh yes, that’s what our mind does most easily, but right here, in close, so close it is locked with us in a dance that moves waters and earth in tides twice a day, and swings in our veins and arteries and the tides of thought in our minds—close, flesh of our flesh, thought of our thought, the Moon, Earth’s step-child, setting our stature, setting our growth, feeding appetites and making them. Moon spinning closer in to Earth makes animals and plants such and such a size and Moon lost or disintegrated or wandering farther away changes animals, plants, the height of tides and probably the movement of land masses and ice masses, changes life as draconically as a sudden shower in a desert will change everything overnight. On the surface of the little Earth, a little green film, and part and parcel with this film, being fed by it, the crust of microbes, mankind, mad, moonmad, lunatick. To celestial eyes, seen like a broth of microbes under a microscope, always at war and destruction, this scum of microbes thinks, it can see itself, it begins slowly to sense itself as one, a function, a note in the harmony, and this is its point and function, and where the scummy film transcends itself, here and here only, and never where these mad microbes say I, I, I, I, I, for saying I, I, I, I, is their madness this is where they have been struck lunatic, made moonmad, round the bend, crazy, for these microbes are a whole, they form a unity, they have a single mind, a single being, and never can they say I, I, without making the celestial watchers roll with laughter or weep with pity—since I suppose we are free to presume compassion and derisiveness in the guardians of the microbes; or at least we are free to imagine nothing else—compassion and amusement being our qualities but who knows what sort of a colour or a sound laughter, tears make there in that finer kind of air?

Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the long path of this race of man between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, some sort of a terrible falling away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning back (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said I, I, I, I, I, I, I and cannot, save for a few, say We.

Yes, but what awful blow or knock? What sent us off centre, and away from the sweet sanity of We? In a moment I’ll know, I’m being sucked back like a mite revolving in the vortex of the bathwater, eddying into the mill-race, back, back, and then Crash! the Comet, it comes hurtling out of the dark of space, gives Earth a blow to midriff, and, deflected in its course, rushes off into the dark again, taking some of the atmosphere with it, and, leaving Earth no longer circling sane and steady, but wobbling back and forth, gyrating like a top, and all askew, which is when the seasons were born, beloved of poets, but worse, the air changed, the air that they breathed which kept them sane and healthy saying we in love and understanding for the developing organ in a celestial body which they were. The air that had been the food of sane and loving understanding became a deadly poison, the lungs of these poor little animals laboured and changed and adapted, and their poor brains, all muddled and befuddled, laboured to work at all, and worked badly. A machine all awry, but always teased and tormented by a queer half-memory of the time before they became poisoned and spoiled and could not think, and hated each other instead of loving. And there hung poor Earth, a casualty, all amiss, but soon they forgot, their newly poisoned air became their normality, a forgetting by vanity, and … but Crash, look, I’m on the other side of the Catastrophe, I’m before it. Though I’m free, too, to say ‘after’, since like ‘up and down’ it is interchangeable and entirely how you look at it, how you are situated, as is backwards and forwards. But man-wise, microbe-wise, I am before the Crash and in a cool sweet loving air that tings with harmony, is harmony, IS, yes, and here am I, voyager, Odysseus bound for home at last, the seeker in home waters, spiteful Neptune outwitted and Jupiter’s daughter my friend and guide.

All men make caves of shadow for their eyes

With hats and hands, sockets, lashes, brows,

So tender pupils dare look at the light.

In Northlands too where light lies shadowless

A man will lift his hand to guard his eyes;

It’s a thing that I’ve seen done in strong moonlight.

At any blaze too fierce, that warden hand

Goes to its post, keeping a dark;

Like cats’, men’s eyes grow large and soft with night.

New eyes they are, and still not used to see,

Taking in facets, individual,

With no skill yet to use them round and right.

Think: beasts on all fours we were, low,

With horizontal gaze kept safely from

That pulsing, flaming, all eye-searing bright.

Yet had to come that inevitable day

A small brave beast raised up his paw to branch,

Pulled himself high—and staggered on his height.

Our human babes have shown us how it was.

They clamber up; we, vigilant,

Let them learn the folly of their fright.

At that first venture, light stooped in salute,

Like to like, a shimmer in the mind,

And the beast thought it ‘angel’—as indeed we might.

One paw, earth-freed, held fast the slippery branch;

The other, freed, waited, while the eyes

Lifted at last to birds and clouds in flight.

And so he balanced there, a beast upright.

And the angel, saving what he’d hardly won,

Jerked up that idle hand to guard his sight,

In that most common gesture that is done.

Man may not look directly at his sun.

I gotta use words when I talk to you. Probably that sequence of words, ‘I’ve got to use words’, is a definition of all literature, seen from a different perspective.

Enmeshed like a chord in Bach, part of a disc as exquisitely coloured as a jellyfish, all pulsing harmonies, the disc being a swirl or spiral, made up of sun and planets and baby planets and all their accretions, enmeshed too in Andromeda time, Galaxy time, Moon time (Oh, woe and alas!), looking at the thing from any point of view but Earth Time, it is possible a change of emphasis from Saturn to Jupiter involving a change in all conditions on Earth and taking centuries (our time) may perhaps have had to find its message thus: That Jupiter fought Saturn (or Zeus Chronos) fair and square in mortal (or immortal) combat and—not killed—but defeated him, and thereafter Jupiter was God to Earth. But here is a thought and not for the first time—of course not, there is no thought for the first time—why God? The vastest, most kingly and, so they say, most benign of planets whose rays envelop Earth in justice and equanimity (so they say) and touching certain sections of humanity, that grey mould struggling for survival in its struggling green scum, with more particularity than other sections. And on Mount Olympus bearded Jove, or Jupiter, lorded it over the subsidiary Gods—not without a certain magnificent tetchiness. But why Father? Why Father of Gods and Men? For who is our Father? Who? None other than the Sun, whose name is the deep chord underlying all others, Father Sun, Amen, Amen, as the Christians still pray. Why not Father Sun, as Lord on Olympus, why Jove, or Jupiter, Zeus? For on that mountain Phoebus Apollo was a god like others, among others—very odd, that! Of course, man cannot look directly at his Sun. Gods go in disguise, even now, as then they were, or might be, Pillars of Fire—Forcefields, Wavelengths, Presences. It is pos-possible that the Sun, like other monarchs, needs deputies, and who more suitable than Jupiter, who is like a modest little mirror to the Sun, being, like the Sun, a swirl of coloured gas, and having, like the Sun, its parcel of little planets. After all, Sun is an item in the celestial swarm on an equal basis with the other stars, chiming in key with them, and having its chief business with them—for this is nothing if not a hierarchical universe, like it or not, fellow democrats. Sun can probably be viewed, though for any mortal to think such a thought comes hard, a lèse-majesté indeed, as an atom on a different time-and-motion scale, having comradeship with other, equal atoms, all being units of the galaxy, while galaxies are units and equals on another level, where suns are as tinily swarming as men (that broth of microbes) are to planets. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes!—and this is why it is not unreasonable to imagine the Great Sun, giving Jupiter a careless nod: ‘Be my deputy, my son! I have other more important business to attend to in my peer group!’

Why Jupiter at all, if Saturn once held that place?—or at least, so the old myths do suggest. But why is it unreasonable to suppose that planets, as indeed, stars—like people—change character; for a weighty responsible old planet in its maturity may give a very different report of itself than the same creature in its skittish youth. Perhaps Jupiter grew into the post, Lord of the Gods, (as butlers are lord in the servants’ hall, the Master and Mistress being too far out of sight to count) a deputy God, while Saturn got too bad-tempered for the position. After all Saturn ate his children. They do say that Saturn’s rings are the smashed remnants of former planets.

Who knows but that our little system is an unfortunate one, and peculiarly vulnerable to visiting comets and intermittent visitors of various kinds? Or perhaps all stars, planets, planets’ planets are as subject to sudden calamity as men are, and the correct government and management of a star and its planets, or indeed, a galaxy and its suns, is a prudent balancing and husbanding of probabilities and substances? Who knows but that beings are not moved about among the planets, in one shape or another, as plants are moved about in a garden, or even taken indoors when frost is expected? When that comet came winging in from the dark beyond Pluto and went Bang! into poor Earth, perhaps there were warnings sent then from Jupiter (or Saturn, if it was his regency)—‘Take Care, Earth!’ the message might have gone. Or even: ‘Poor Earth, would you like to send us some of your inhabitants to live out a hundred or so generations as Our guests, until the unfortunate results of that Collision subside. Not on Us, of course: pure flame We are, burning Gas, like our Father, the Sun—but one of our planets would do nicely, with a little adaptation on your part.’ For we may suppose, I am sure, that Planets are altogether gentler and more humane than poor beast Man, lifting his bloody muzzle to his lurid sky, to howl out his misery and his exhaustion in between battles with his kind.

And who would convey these messages? (They have to use words when they talk to us.) For one may imagine that Hermes or Mercury (or Thoth or Buddha), the planet nearest to the sun our Father, may transmit messages from the Gods by the fact of his condition, the shifting and meshings of the planets causing him (at certain times) to shed substances on Earth as invisible to Earth’s senses (though not to her new and her soon-to-be-invented or re-invented instruments) as the solar wind. But why Mercury—why Mercury messenger to Jupiter … there is an idea of doubleness here, of substitution, like Jupiter with the Sun. For consider how Athene, Minerva, is as much a messenger as is Mercury, the Sun’s nearest child. We may play with the idea—why not? Gnats may sing to kings, and their songs have to be guessing games. Gnats are sure they have a few ideas of their own, for the seconds their lives last. But perhaps Minerva, Jupiter’s daughter, has the same position vis-à-vis Jupiter as Mercury with the Sun. Our great lump of cold glassily ringing Moon, planet to our planethood, is in intimate enough relation with us, what of Jupiter with his—is it now twelve?—subsidiaries? Perhaps the largest of them, a healthy, bouncing, rather managing girl, but handsome enough with her flashing eyes, runs errands for her father. A pulse darts earthwards from Jupiter’s child, a synchronizing in the machinery of Jupiter, the other planets, his planets, makes an impulse that becomes thoughts in the minds of men.

Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: ‘Father, isn’t it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven’t you punished him enough?’

‘I?’ says her Father. ‘You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I’m as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn’t me at all—surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours.’

Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sang? Oh, the sea, of course … but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moonmadness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon’s creature and slave.

Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4,000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they’ll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that—oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the Earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilizations; they can’t even begin to concede that civilizations might have very old histories. The Earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilization is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archaeological school and the definition of civilization. We, now, are civilization, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium B.C.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superstition. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to think of previous civilizations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back—a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a top layer of a city has been laid bare, which takes a high form of human living (one dare not say civilization) back ten thousand years, and underneath that layer are many other layers, still unexcavated … but do the specialists say: ‘We cannot make any pronouncements at all about human history, because our knowledge (or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug’? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is—is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities—available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by God in person.

That they understood that words had to be used for their benefit—and understood what the words were symbols for.

That long before the Roman Gods and the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Peruvian Gods and the Babylonian Gods, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of substitution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events—why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world’s great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun’s being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets—and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity’s resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

‘Father,’ says Jupiter’s efficient and bossy daughter. ‘Why don’t you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It’s not fair, you know. It’s not just.’

‘Well, you see to it then, daughter,’ says Jupiter, a busy man. Sun’s deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother with her large brood. ‘You just see what you can do, but mind you, don’t forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller’s journey. No, it’s a harmony, it’s a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, every thing spiralling up—but yes, it’s the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time—thanks for reminding me.’

‘Timing is everything,’ murmurs Minerva the Flashing-Eyed, bustling off to find Thoth, or Hermes, and finding him speeding around the sun in an orbit so dazzling and so lively and so gay and above all so many-sided and accomplished that it was hard to keep up with him.

‘Ah,’ says he, ‘it’s time again, is it? I was thinking it must be.’

‘You sound reluctant,’ said Minerva.

‘I’ve just been visiting Venus.’

‘Everyone always likes her best,’ says Minerva, drily. ‘As everyone knows, she and I don’t get on. She’s so silly—that’s what I can’t understand. People say I’m jealous—not at all. It’s that damned stealthy dishonesty I can’t tolerate—that appalling hypocrisy, I’ve never been able to understand how it is that intelligent men can put up with it—but there you are. And I didn’t come to talk about Aphrodite. I’m here about poor Earth, poor traveller!’

‘Your kind heart does you credit. But don’t forget, it was partly their fault.’

‘Stealing the fire?’

‘Of course. If that fellow hadn’t stolen the fire, then they would never have known what a terrible state they are in.’

‘You, Mercury, God of letters and of music and of—in a word—progress, complaining about that! You wouldn’t want them still in that dark and primitive state, would you?’

‘They don’t know how to use it.’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘All I’m saying is that knowledge brings a penalty with it—of course, it was enterprising of him—what’s his name, Jason, Ali Baba Prometheus, that fellow—in his place I might have done the same. Eating the fruit when I was told not to …’

‘Stealing the fire,’ says Minerva, always with a tendency towards pedantry.

‘Come now, don’t be so literal-minded, that’s to be like them,’ says Mercury.

‘And there’s the other thing,’ says Minerva, rather stern—at her tone Mecury began to look irritated. For Minerva was also a bit of a blue-stocking; her feeling of justice and fair play (regarded as childish by some of the Gods who regarded themselves as more advanced, philosophically) usually led her to the question of women’s rights, and men’s vanity.

‘All right,’ says Mercury, ‘understood.’

‘But is it?’ says she, severe. ‘His mother was an earth-woman, certainly, but who was his father? Well?’

‘Oh don’t start, please,’ says Mercury. ‘You really are a bore, you know, when you get on to that.’

‘Justice,’ she says. ‘Fair play. I’m my father’s daughter. And who was his father? With such blood, or rather, fire, in his veins, he was not to be expected to live like a mole in earth knowing that Light existed, and yet never reaching out after it.’

‘There was reason to believe,’ says Mercury, ‘that he was in it all the time. He walked in the Garden with God.’

‘And then he ate what he should not have done. He stole the Apple, dear God of Thieves. And paid for it.’

‘And in short everything is going as was expected, and according to plan, and with Our assistance.’

‘Progress has to be seen to be made.’

‘All right, I’m ready to leave when the Time is Ripe.’

‘Are you quite sure of your mandate?’

‘Dear Minerva! Is it any different this time?’

‘It is always the same Message, of course …’

‘Yes. That there is a Harmony and that if they wish to prosper they must keep in step and obey its Laws. Quite so.’

‘But things are really very much worse this time. The stars in their courses, you know …’

‘Fight on the side of Justice.’

‘In the long run, yes. But what a very long run it must seem to them, poor things.’

‘Partly through their own fault.’

‘You sound very severe today. Sometimes we even seem to change roles a little? You must remember that you are God of Thieves because you inspire, if not provoke, curiosity and a desire for growth, in such actions as stealing fire or eating forbidden fruit or building towers that are intended to reach Heaven and the Gods. Punishable acts. Acts that have, in fact, been punished already.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t always easy to take responsibility for our progeny? Is it, dear Minerva? For acts can be our children … Tell me, is it easy for your Father, or for you, to recognize as kith and kin acts of justice that are in fact the results of your influence—can in a sense be regarded as you, though in extension of course? Justice is Justice still, in the sentencing of a thief to prison—and the thief has stolen books because he has no money to buy them. In such a drama both you and I are represented—and there’s little doubt which of us appears more attractively? Are you sure you aren’t finding my celestial role rather more attractive than yours, and it is that which accounts for your concern—which I very much value, of course.’

‘I should have known better,’ says Minerva. ‘Only an idiot gets into an argument with the Master of Words. Well, I can’t really wish you an enjoyable visit, when things have never been so bad.’

‘But one hopes, and indeed expects, that they have a potentiality for good in proportion to the bad—for that is how things tend to balance out.’

‘The sort of remark that I usually make, if I may say so—and which tends to irritate you, dear Messenger. But you are right. This particular combination of planets will be really so very powerful—the equivalent of several centuries of evolution all in a decade or so. I don’t think I am exceeding my mandate if I say there is anxiety. After all, no one could say they have ever been distinguished by consistency or even ordinary commonsense.’

‘I am sure the anxiety is justified. But I expect there’ll be the usual few who will listen. It’s enough.’

‘So we must hope, for everyone’s sake.’

‘And if the worst comes to the worst, we can do without them. The Celestial Gardener will simply have to lop off that branch, and graft another.’

‘Charmingly put! Almost, indeed, reassuring, put in such a way! But so much trouble and effort have already been put into that planet. Messengers have been sent again and again. The regard of Our Father (as of course it comes down to us through his Regent, my own Father) is surely expressed by the long history of Our concern? And there was that Covenant—the fact they continuously disregard it is not enough reason to abandon them altogether. After all, when all is said and done …’

‘You are tactfully referring to that ancestry business again? Well, whatever the stark and dire nature of the shortly-to-be-expected celestial configurations, and whatever man’s backslidings, the fact that I am about to descend again (yes, I grant that I say that with a bit of a sigh) shows that our respective fathers are well aware of the situation. And more—that there is confidence in the outcome.’

‘I’m glad I find you in such good heart.’

‘Dear Minerva, do come out with it. You want to give me some good advice, is that it?’

‘It’s just that—well, after all, there are a dozen or so of us, Jupiter’s children, and it is an enlarging family, and some of us are not unlike Earth, and as the oldest sister you must see that I have had so much experience and …’

‘Dear, dear Minerva.’

‘Oh well, I didn’t really mean to irritate you. I’ll leave you, then.’

‘Yes, do, goodbye.’

And Minerva flies off.

As for Mercury the Messenger, he divides himself effortlessly into a dozen or so fragments, which fall gently through the air on to Earth, and the Battalions of Progress are strengthened for the Fight.

Ah yes, all very whimsical. Yes, indeed, the contemporary mode is much to be preferred, thus: that Earth is due to receive a pattern of impulses from the planet nearest the Sun, that planet nearest on the arm of the spiral out from Sun. As a result, the Permanent Staff on Earth are reinforced and

The Conference

was convened on Venus, and had delegates from as far away as Pluto and Neptune, both of whom normally asked for transcripts to be sent. But this time, everyone in the solar system would be affected. The Sun Himself was represented. But his Presence was general and pervasive; the light glowed more strongly after a certain point in the proceedings, and a silence fell for a moment—that was all. But everyone knew how rare an event this was, and the sense of urgency deepened.

Minna Erve was in the Chair. A forceful and animated woman, with particularly arresting eyes, she was the obvious choice, because of her position as Chief Deputy’s oldest daughter.

The conference was already nearly over, with not much more than the Briefing to come. Already those who were not in on the Descent were getting up and collecting their gear.

Minna Erve was still speaking. ‘In short, this is the worst yet. The computers have checked and double-checked—and checked again. This was on advice from on High’—here the Light pulsed in acknowledgement—‘but there is no doubt. The balance of planetary forces already exercises strong adverse pressures, which will reach a peak in about ten to fifteen years from now. Their years, of course. Before you leave, I’d like you to watch this second film, Forecast (Detail).’

Delegates glanced at each other, but sat down again. Minna might be over-conscientious, but it was true enough that until most of them had reached here and had been hit by the atmosphere of this particular conference, they had not really appreciated the urgency.

They had already seen the Forecast Film, showing Earth as an item in its place in the solar system. Earth had showed it was under pressure, as it and the other planets moved into the expected positions, first of all by the increased activity of the surface. This was slight to begin with, but earthquakes, tidal waves, excessive movements of all kinds became increasingly noticeable. The weather, always inhospitable to life on that planet, became more extreme. The ice-caps melted slightly, causing havoc among the seaboards. The Comet added its quota of disturbance to the already delicate enough balances between Earth and its neighbours. The representatives of Mars and Venus had sat with particularly long faces. What happened anywhere in the System (and, of course, beyond) affected everyone, but near neighbours were bound to feel it first: the last time Earth was in crisis, both Mars and Venus had suffered, and the memory of that time was still strong. But it had not been possible for any delegates, not even those from Pluto and Neptune, to whom the Earth’s inhabitants were alien indeed, to watch the end of the Forecast Film without awe.