Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 6

It must have been about ten in the morning. The sun was shining full on my back at midmorning 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 sand's 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 rea.s.surance, 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 pa.s.sed 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 mauveish-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 housecat 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 spider's 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 sh.o.r.e and my goal, the rockfringed 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 gra.s.sy 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 purpley-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 gra.s.s that I had marked as small guideposts, trying to fix their shapes-as if the heavy downsettling 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 his 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, for 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 clearminded condition, and by the fresh shadowless light of dawn. The edge of the plateau and its cl.u.s.tering rocks now seemed so close above me that the winds might roll down rocks to crush me, or as if the whole ma.s.s 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, and that above that-should I reach that height-a perpendicular rock rose smooth as gla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses of water mostly spray. On the other side was a very steep shaley 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 gla.s.sy 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 s.p.a.ce 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 end on either side. In front of my face was this smooth dark rock like gla.s.s, 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 a faint reflection of a face s.h.a.ggy with many weeks' growth of beard. And now I did not know what to do. It was not possible to climb up that gla.s.sy 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 gla.s.sy rock, in a couple of big 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 gla.s.sy 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 impa.s.sable mirrorlike 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 gla.s.s summit that I had thought it 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 the escarpment, whose spray reached almost to the summit, was 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 n.o.body 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 gra.s.ses that would soon turn gold. As I looked West to the mountains that in winter must have snow ma.s.sed on their peaks which were now summer-blue, the sound of water still 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 gla.s.sy 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 gla.s.sy coping over which I had believed it impossible to climb. The river emerged suddenly, a hundred feet below after its long dark pa.s.sage 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 underearth. 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 sh.o.r.e-for by sleep I did not mean that s.n.a.t.c.hed half-hour while the sun set and the yellow beast watched. Not on the dolphin'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 s.p.a.ces 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 impa.s.sable gla.s.s. 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 nightbreeze 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 pa.s.s, 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 a.s.sistance 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 s.p.a.ce 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 around 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 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 s.p.a.ce 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 standing upright looking around me. 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 gra.s.s. But I had not seen anything yesterday but a gra.s.sy 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.ses. 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 gra.s.s 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 hardworking 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 gla.s.sy 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 flowers and vegetables. 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 the 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 pa.s.sed. 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 peachlike 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.s 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 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 that all 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 gra.s.ses, 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, 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 s.p.a.ce was a blazing of white gas, and in the luminous envelope of this lamp some crumbs of substance whizzed around, but the crumbs further 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 s.p.a.ce, would see this great burning lamp and its...o...b..ting companions as one, a unit; a unit even as central blaze and circling a.s.sociates, but even more if this visiting Explorer had eyes and senses set by a different clock, for then this unit, Sun and a.s.sociates, 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 at one, for my waking and sleeping, or rather, being wakeful and then dreaming, not the same thing, was 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 on 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 s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ce 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 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 gla.s.s, 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 grownup 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 head sunk back into the muscles of my neck, gazing up and up and up and the cells of my eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 ma.s.s 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 I 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 carca.s.s and was standing over it to pull out the arrow. And without looking to see who it was, though I knew that I could recognise 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 I must be, no, no, no, no, no, no, around and around and around and around 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, goodnight!

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 fewer signs 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 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 glamourous sucking light was enough to make me prefer that landlubber'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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, into my mouth-and I fell on the meat with the rest, pulling gobbets of it off a b.l.o.o.d.y 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,