Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

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.