Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [236]
CHAPTER 40.
Provan
He wakened cradled in stillness and looking at a bright full moon. The surrounding sky held a few big stars. His eyes were so dazzled that he rested them on the deep spaces between, but other stars started glittering there, and then whole. constellations; he could not watch a space, however tiny, without the silver dust of a galaxy coming to glimmer in it. With outspread wings his aircraft seemed hanging, slightly tilted, between the ceiling of stars and a floor of smooth clouds which spread, like them, from horizon to horizon, and was that most mysteriously splendid of all colours, whiteness seen by a dim light. This thinned and opened under him and for a moment the craft seemed to overturn, for the bright moon shone through the opening. He was looking down into the sky reflected in a circular lake, reflected and magnified, for a black speck in the centre of the lower moon was clearly a reflection of his bird-machine. The lake, though sombre, had colour of its own. A jet black halo surrounded the reflected moon, and a ring of deep blue water flecked with stars surrounded that. To left and right was a beach of pure sand as pearly-pale as the clouds, and the round lake and its beaches were enclosed by two curving shores which made the shape of an eye. And Lanark saw that it was an eye, and the feeling which came to him then was too new to have a name. His mouth and mind opened wide and the only thought left was a wonder if he—a speck of a speck floating before that large pupil—was seen by it. In an effort to think something else he looked up at the stars but looked down again almost at once, and the eye was nearer now, he could only see the stars reflected in the depth. There was a sound like remote thunder or the breathings of wind in the ear. “Is … is … is …” it said. “Is … if … is ….” He knew that half the stars were seeing the other half and smiled slightly, not knowing up from down or caring which was which. Then, dazed by infinity, he did not fall asleep but seemed to float out into it.
He wakened next in pale cold azure. He was above a plain of snowy clouds with a blue bird-like shadow skimming over them on one side and on the other, not far above the horizon, a small piercing sun which seemed to shoot golden wires at his eyes when he glimpsed it. Sometimes he passed through fountains of birdsong squirting up through rifts in the clouds and looked down for a moment on grass or rocks a mile or so beneath, but the only steady sound was the quietly thudding wings of the eagle-machine muted by the thin air. His body lay relaxed and warm on the firm satin. His face lay in a pool of cold air as refreshing as a rinse of cold water. On the horizon ahead he saw a mountain of white cloud as single as a milk jug on the edge of a bare table. A bird-shaped black dot, casting a fleck of shadow, seemed to cross the side of it. Later, when the peak and precipices of the mountain floated above him, creamy and dazzling toward the sun and toning into blue shadow away from it, he saw that the cloudy plain ended here and a real mountain stood under the cloud one. It had a sharp summit and granite precipices and was highest of a jagged range rising from heathery purple moors. It combined the massiveness of great sculptures with the most delicately imagined detail. A drifting movement on the shadowy side of a glen resolved into a herd of deer. A small loch on the moor had a waterfall spilling out of it and an angler, knee deep, near the edge. He saw differently coloured fields with white farmhouses along a shore, and a bay where the sand under shallow water was lemon-yellow with reddish gardens of weed. Farther out the water was ribbed by sea swells and ruffled all over by little waves that sparkled where the sunlight caught them. He passed over a pale green,