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By Root 1104 0

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 substance, 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