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The densely massed foliage of the jungle swells like a sea
of huge black cushions against the last phase of the night
sky, where a faint transparency is already perceptible in
the east. One after another the big bright stars are losing their
brilliance; they fade and go out one by one.
The nebulous lightening of the east extends and intensifies, opening
out into a great rose-gold fan, its incandescent sticks being the advance
rays the rising sun shoots ahead over the horizon - blazing upward
streams which produce an effect not unlike that of the aurora borealis,
except that they substitute heat and colour for icy dazzle.
Life is j ust beginning to stir in the depths of the dim leafy ocean
below. When suddenly, from the deepest and darkest thickets of
this tropical forest unexplored by man, comes an extraordinary musical
chiming, as of innumerable crystal bells; an amazing sound, utterly
unexpected in that place, melodious and of limpid purity, which is
only the prelude to the still more astounding chorus that follows.
All at once, many voices, none of them human, burst into song
together, rising and falling in eerie harmony; their sound doesn 't
belong to this world at all. At the same time the sun leaps into the
sky, gilding the sides of tree-trunks and branches and lighting gold
flames on myriads of leaves.
Only somebody up in the sky would be able to watch the stir
that begins now in the topmost branches of certain trees, which
seem to be blowing about in a strong wind, restricted to these trees
alone, as the mysterious singers start moving, singing as they go,
towards another outburst of similar singing not far away. From the
ground it's quite impossible to see them leaping lightly from tree
to tree; they are the whole time completely hidden by the dense
foliage, the violent swaying of which, only visible from above, affords
a clue to their size, as well as tracing their rapid progress.
11

The legend of the dog-headed man is said to have originated in
these rare man-sized lemurs which are called Indris, now almost
extinct, found nowhere but in the forests of this one remote trop­
ical island.With perfect balance and muscular control they fly through
the air like birds in great effortless bounds, all their movements
soundless in spite of their size, and as sure and accurate in the
dangerous tree-tops as a human being's on solid ground. When the
two choirs meet there is no need of adjustment, they simply con­
tinue singing together in perfect unison, so that the surrounding
forest rings with their combined voices.
Even the youngest of them join in, though they, out of sheer
high spirits, have been indulging in all sorts of pranks and acro­
batics as they travelled along, using the lianas as airy swings and
walking precarious tightropes on the slenderest, loftiest boughs, but
never letting these gymnastics delay the others.
The song has a distinct, regular rhythm, sinking to a gentle croon
between the mounting waves of the central refrain; which is con­
sistently repeated throughout, always clearly distinguishable, although
with numerous variations and elaborations of the main theme, the
singers showing great virtuosity in this proliferation of musical sounds.
The uncanny strangeness of the singing, totally unlike man-made
music, has its own fascination. But the most extraordinary thing of
all is the way the song - in spite of its wordlessness and its in­
human quality - seems closely related to all forms of life on this
planet, towards which it expresses an attitude entirely different from
ours, as if giving a glimpse of another, quite different life, which
could be lived here on earth - possibly even is being lived already
somewhere in secret.... Attempting to translate into human terms,
one can only say the singing is the symbol of aspiration . .. of that
deeply felt longing for something or somewhere else ... with which
we react instinctively to the violence and cruelty endemic in our
existence.
The concert ends as suddenly as it began. Not once during the
performance have the Indris been visible from the ground; and they
are no more visible now, screened by the many leaves of the tallest
and largest trees, where they recline at ease or play in the branches,
with many affectionate interludes, innocent caresses and kisses ex­
changed in a spontaneous overflowing of their general happiness
and goodwill. The goodwill extends to their whole environment: in
feeding each other with flower petals they detach the blooms with
12

the utmost delicacy - not a leaf is accidentally damaged, not a twig
broken or bent. Now that their singing is over, they are as silent as
they are unseen, so noiseless in all their movements that a human
watcher could actually be under the tree where their varied activi­
ties were taking place, and still remain unaware that the lemurs
were anywhere near.
They have no enemies in their jungle world. And one naturally
shrinks from naming that ferocious enemy who must have taught
them their protective invisibility, so that they pass their whole lives
unseen, never leaving the inmost secrecy of the forest. Their happy
harmless community seems content with this hidden existence, spend­
ing the hours among the crowding massed leaves in peace, playful­
ness and affection, until the setting sun gives the signal for their
second concert: which starts off with the same suddenness, and in­
corporates many of the same harmonies as the first, but is by no
means a mere repetition of the dawn chorus. Indeed, as it con­
tinues, so many modifications are introduced that the result is a
quite different complex of musical sounds, and conveys a quite
different feeling ... subdued, even melancholy....
Constantly falling cadences keep suggesting the end of some­
thing. The plaintive melody builds up a sense of loss, of finality, of
nothing more being left, which is profoundly sad.
Yet, in the midst of the mournful passages, again and again there's
a reprise, the original refrain reappearing as an assurance that there's
been no break in continuity, a reaffirmation of the singers' former
declaration of otherness ... other values ... introducing a hopeful
note at the very point where a tragic climax might seem imminent
and inevitable.
But then, immediately afterwards, sombre low notes restore the
later version, so that two different conclusions are presented simul­
taneously and without any perceptible bias towards either.... In
the end one is left to choose between them; a choice implying the
non-existence of a fixed or final form of reality, for which is sub­
stituted the idea of all eventualities being equally plausible or unlikely.

13

2

T

HE man who'd brought the car round from the hotel
garage stood beside it, waiting rather unhopefully for his
tip. As the owner came down the steps he looked as if tips
were far from his thoughts, wearing the aloof, somewhat forbid­
ding expression that was habitual to him, although it was not in
fact natural, but had been assumed years before to conceal the se­
cret of his isolation. He always felt this as a lack in himself, as if
some quality essential to human beings had been omitted in his
case, so that he was perpetually at a disadvantage, and incapable of
contact with them. Words and gestures that came naturally to every­
one else, he could reproduce only by a deliberate effort, having
failed to acquire even the small change of conversation. He frowned
now when the other man saluted and asked politely how far he was
going; but was compelled by his social uneasiness and the desire to
hide it to answer briefly: 'Just to see some friends in the country.'
'Weather forecast's not too good, sir. They say we're in for a
real freeze-up.'
Making a non-committal sound, Luke felt in his pocket and handed
over a substantial tip, which enabled him to drive off without any
more talk. The fear, involved even in exchanging the barest
commonplaces, of betraying his secret and thus incurring hostility
or suspicion, increased the vicious circle of his isolation. However,
he was resigned to it on the whole (only at rare unnerving mo­
ments feeling as though he weren't real and would finally be con­
signed to oblivion without having lived at all), and spent most of
his time in tremendous travels in remote parts of the world. Now,
having just returned from a long stay in the tropics, the thought of
freeze-ups was almost welcome to him.
*

14

It seemed much colder in the country, and, after driving for a
long time, he found his thoughts turning nostalgically to a certain
tropical forest and its inhabitants - weird singing creatures that
had caught his imagination - but was forced to concentrate on the
car. Darkness had already fallen and he knew he was lost - he should
have arrived hours ago. Apart from occasional glints
struck by the headlights from crusts of ice in the ruts of the narrow
lane, there wasn't a gleam of light anywhere. He might have been
driving through uninhabited country. Cold, anxious, depressed, he
suddenly felt more alone and lost than he ever had in his adventurous
travels; and exasperatingly helpless, trapped by the meanderings of the
deserted lane, longing for a signpost to point the way to a main road.
Gradually he was beginning to wish he'd never embarked on this
expedition. Of course he'd wanted to see Luz and her husband before
doing anything else, as they were his only close friends.
But he should have rung up beforehand to ask the way, instead of
deciding to pay them a surprise visit. He wouldn't admit to
any doubt as to the wannth of his reception. Nevertheless, his care­
fully fostered but not very real confidence had been shaken by
the man at the garage where he'd stopped to fill up with petrol,
whose words seemed to have cast an inauspicious blight over the
entire project.
*

The friendly, cheerful young man, looking more like a fann-hand
than a mechanic, hovers round the car, full of admiration for this
new model, the first he has seen; and Luke, feeling obliged to re­
turn the compliment by saying something, asks if he knows how
far it is to the village he's making for and whether he knows it.
Oh yes, he knows it all right. He's even been there in the summer
- he thinks it's another ten miles or so. He still sounds as friendly
as ever, but somehow contrives to convey that no one but a
lunatic would go to such an out-of-the-way spot at this time of
year, adding that he'll never find it unless he gets there in day­
light. Since there's no chance of this as dusk is falling already,
the last remark seems meant to arouse apprehension, in spite of its
cheery tone.
Wanting to get away from the man at once, Luke cuts short the
directions he's giving and drives off, ignoring his shout, which must
be intended as a warning that he's in a one-way street, for a policeman
15

stops him next moment and sends him back. All the same, he doesn't
want to pass the garage again, and to avoid it, turns down a narrow
alley which leads to a perfect maze of back streets, from which,
owing to the complex system of traffic control, he has some diffi­
culty in extricating himself, wasting ten minutes or more in the
process; so that by the time he finally reaches open country it has
got quite dark.
*

Although he told himself he didn't attach any significance to the
fellow's remarks, he wished they hadn't been made; wishing still
more that he hadn't interrupted his complicated directions - not
that he could see to follow them.The headlights revealed only wayside
vegetation and an occasional cottage or barn. There seemed to be a
few more buildings here: but, as they flashed past, they all had the
same dark, deserted look, and, as far as he could see, were all equally
dilapidated. His nameless uneasiness grew stronger, associated now
with these neglected dwellings and with the leafless unpruned hedges
towering like secretive walls on both sides of the road. A vivid
memory, retained from his last visit, of lush smiling summer coun­
try, absolutely refused to be reconciled with his present impression
of general decay. It was possible, though extremely unlikely, that
the road avoided all the villages ... but why should the scattered
buildings he passed all be unlit and apparently in varying stages of
disintegration, as if they'd been abandoned and left to fall down? It
almost looked as if a wholesale catastrophe had devastated the dis­
trict while he'd been away....
His discomfort intensified as he gradually got tired and hungry.
His eyes started to ache from the close watch he had to keep all
the time on the frozen road. He'd quite forgotten the strain of hours
of night driving on rough icy slippery country lanes, which made
the garage man's words seem less unreasonable. He'd never been
very robust physically, and the wandering exile's life he had cho­
sen in the hope of escaping from his own shortcomings had to some
extent undermined his constitution. A few years back a severe at­
tack of jaundice had been complicated by a tropical fever, and he
still hadn't entirely got over the after-effects of this serious illness,
which had been followed by a protracted enforced convalescence
at a hotel in the south. It was here that he had first met Luz, who
later married his friend Chas.
16

*

It's winter and there's hardly anyone staying in the place. On the
evening of his arrival he looks gloomily round the almost empty
dining-room, anticipating a future of dismal boredom, and half wishing
himself back at the clinic he has just left.
Next moment, he gets a shock, startled suddenly by the extra­
ordinary hair of a girl sitting near him - loose, flowing, shoulder­
length, it is silvery-white, like an albino's. Her whole appearance
is slightly odd, even without that bright floss of hair. She is ex­
tremely pale and excessively thin he feels he can almost see through
her, almost as if she were made of Venetian glass. There seems to
be some pathos in her heart-shaped face, which has a look of timid,
childlike submissiveness and big bright eyes the indefinable colour
of clean stones under very clear water. He never notices girls as a
rule; but he can't stop looking at this one, experiencing each time
the same queer little shock, which seems to be half a shudder and
half a thrill.
His long illness has left him physically weak and depleted, and
in a rather peculiar mental state. He has a curious sense of having
been through some form of punishment, or purification, which he
connects with the attraction this fragile glass girl immediately has
for him, with her delicate bones, silvery spun-glass hair, and pale,
flawless, almost transparent skin. The very next day he gets to know
her mother, who, bored in the out-of-season hotel, wants someone
to talk to, and is glad of his company.
His progress with the daughter is much slower. She's always
withdrawn and quiet, seems listless and lacking in energy, as if she
too were recovering from an illness - far from discouraging him,
he regards this as a sign of a mysterious bond between them. Each
day he's more fascinated, drawn to her irresistibly, at first without
realizing that his feeling is based on something slightly perverse.
As soon as it strikes him that everything about her - her docile
obedience to her mother, the resigned poses her frail graceful body
assumes, her inordinately large anxious eyes - suggests a predestined
victim, he makes up his mind to marry her, so that he'll be in a
position to protect her from the brutality of the world, which her
fragile, vulnerable aspect seems to invite.
He is considerably amazed by his own decision, for intimacy has
never seemed possible for him. A nameless barrier always prevents
him from making contact with anyone. He feels in some obscure
-

17

way less real, different, from other people, and liable to arouse their
antagonism for this reason, and has condemned himself to a life­
time in exile in order to hide his failure in human relations.
His sudden falling in love is all the more astonishing since, at
the present moment, he hasn't got even the physical energy re­
quired for a normal courtship.But this fact doesn't worry him: without
thinking about it consciously, he has allowed the idea of an under­
standing between them on some other plane to establish itself in
his mind, so that there seems no need for him to make any effort.
Although he never tells Luz he loves her or gives any sign of
doing so, he's convinced she knows all about it. He even persuades
himself that she's about to return his affection - all he has to do is
wait. In the meantime, with good-natured indifference, he lets the
mother make use of him, acting frequently as her escort.
With Luz herself he is seldom alone.He always recalls with delight
a rare occasion when he was able to drive her to a Roman villa
above the town, where, on her own for once, she becomes much
gayer and more lively, laughing and talking quite easily to him.
The outing is a great success altogether, and encourages him to
believe that she's fond of him.
And yet, as time goes on, it still never occurs to him to declare
his own fondness. He never thinks about marriage at all in a con­
crete way. Now and then he wishes he could detach the girl from
her dominant relative, who appears to hold her in complete subjec­
tion. But the wish remains vague, unthought-out, and he does nothing
to make it come true, even deriving a certain unacknowledged satis­
faction from the thought of her being enslaved.
In due course winter comes to an end. The hillside above the
hotel is terraced with olive groves, and under the gnarled old trees
wild tulips begin to show swelling buds in the warmer air. There's
a sense of life stirring afresh everywhere. Suddenly the wild scarlet
tulips burst into dazzling brilliance under the ancient trees. New
visitors arrive at the hotel. Chas arrives, a carefree, good-looking
young painter, sociable and amusing, who at once becomes popular
and a friend of Luke's. The mother promptly deserts her winter
companion for this livelier newcomer, who suggests all sorts of
picnics and expeditions, which naturally includes Luz.
Now at last the girl seems to be waking up; changing into her
more relaxed, more normal self, of which Luke has already caught
a brief glimpse. Encouraged by the exhilarating spring atmosphere,
18

she starts talking to people and gradually comes out of her shell
altogether. No one now could describe her as listless; she swims
and plays tennis all day and dances away half the night.
Both sunshine and moonlight seem magical in that warm, gentle
climate. The young man feels, as the tulips flame under the silver
trees, that he's watching the revival of a fairy-tale princess who
has just been set free from a witch's spell. He is happy simply to
see her happy. And as he likes Chas and thinks he's a splendid
fellow, doesn't mind her going about with him, feeling she's per­
fectly safe in his care. Only when the two of them take to disap­
pearing together for whole days, does it strike him that she's spending
more and more time with the painter, while he is seeing her less
and less.
This of course comes as a horrid shock. When he notices how
attentive Chas is, he has a painful sense of urgency, of being abruptly
recalled to his conscious self, and his own conduct appears atro­
cious - how monstrously, madly, presumptuous of him to take every­
thing for granted, doing nothing whatever to gain her affection, instead
of exerting himself to the utmost. Now that his relationship with
her is in danger, he at last realizes the extent to which it has been
a product of his imagination - to translate his romantic dream into
instant reality becomes absolutely essential....
But, having arrived at the point where he has got to do some­
thing, he hasn't the faintest idea how to deal with the situation, and
is assailed, moreover, by a dreadful suspicion that it's already too
late and that she has slipped out of his reach.
In desperation, he persuades her to come with him again to the
Roman villa (pleasant memories retained from their previous visit
make him fancy the place is friendly), in the hope that its beneficent
atmosphere will work in his favour and inspire him with the right
words. However, nothing of the kind happens. The girl isn't particu­
larly interested in the semi-ruin, and evidently has none of his senti­
mental liking for it. Nor does she respond to any of the allusions
by which he tries to remind her of incidents they have shared during
the winter. Seeing this, he grows increasingly agitated, hardly knows
what he's saying, and lapses finally into speechless dismay.
Outside is a terrace, overlooking the wide blue sweep of the sea,
the town below, and the undulating vista of hilly country planted
with grey olive trees, receding in waves to the mountainous back­
ground. Wandering out here, oblivious of his distress, she leans
19

against one of the ancient columns, gazing absently at the view, as
if she has forgotten that he exists. The warm wind moulds her light
dress to the slight curves of her fragile figure, and blows the strange
silvery hair back from her smooth white forehead, which is bright
in the sun. Her face is lit up too by a new radiance he has never
seen there before, and wears a serene, dreaming, half-smiling look
which is too much for him to bear.
Rushing up, nearly frantic, he implores her in a distraught voice
not to abandon him - to see a little more of him in future. After
all, they've known each other the whole winter, whereas Chas....
'Don't desert your old friends altogether,' he pleads; 'that would
be too cruel!'
It seems she has to come back from the far distance to answer;
her head slowly turns on the thin, graceful, stemlike neck, her
large, limpid eyes bring him gradually into focus, and then she
says calmly: 'But I always thought it was my mother you were
interested in ....'
This practically stuns him. Stupefied by a misapprehension so
vast and incredible, he can only stare at her in horrified consterna­
tion. Her face remains tranquil, her gaze untroubled, as she stands
there utterly inaccessible to him. In a sudden frenzy, he starts pouring
out a flood of protestations, explanations ... which merely lose them­
selves in the huge, lovely, indifferent view without in the slightest
degree promoting his object. Once more he falters into hopeless
silence. Now at last the words 'I love you!' burst out of him of
their own accord, but seem to echo in the ensuing silence with a
hollow and empty sound, as if uttered by a ghost.
Again she surveys him with those uncannily no-coloured eyes,
which darken, dilate and regard him mistrustfully: though the next
moment they seem to be looking right through him as if he's not
there at all; and soon afterwards return to the panorama and the
town below, where Chas is doubtless waiting impatiently.
Total despair overwhelms Luke. Of course he has never succeeded
in making himself real to her, cut off, as he always is, by the fatal
secret of his unbreakable isolation, different from everyone else in
the world. Convinced that she is finally, fatally lost to him, he goes
back to the hotel in a daze - almost in a state of collapse - and the
following day, hurriedly and almost furtively, departs, without tell­
ing anybody beforehand.

20

*

The sad little story still depressed him as much as ever.Luz was the
only human being he'd ever loved. His love for her was the one
anchor he had in life; his solitary connection with the living world.
Yet now he found himself wondering, as he'd wondered so often
before, whether his love was real or just an invention; whether perhaps
he was attracted only because she was a glass girl and not quite real,
with whom no real contact was possible. Surely, if he'd really been
in love, he would have tried harder to get her away from Chas....
Unwilling to acknowledge these familiar doubts, he deliberately
transferred his thoughts to the man he had at first liked and admired
so much, fearing him later as if he'd belonged to some totally different
race of people, threatening to himself. By succeeding where he had
so lamentably failed, Chas had demonstrated his triumphant reality,
while casting further doubts on his own. Then, after the marriage,
his attitude towards the painter had changed again, in response to
the latter's friendly invitation to visit them. That was two years
ago.During his subsequent travels, he had never ceased to be grateful
for the way he'd been welcomed and accepted by both of them at
that time, without reference to the past. By their continued friend­
ship, the pair had seemed to give him a share in the human warmth
from which his own nature debarred him. In order to suppress the
envious sufferings the sight of their happiness caused him, he'd
built up a sort of mystique round the marriage, coming to regard
their undisguised mutual devotion as something more precious than
painful, which he would not have changed if he could.
Nevertheless, he did suffer abominably, and would doubtless con­
tinue to do so. In spite of the intervening years, he still hadn't got
over the shock of his failure with Luz. Far-reaching psychological
consequences of the event were evident in the headaches and in­
somnia he'd endured ever since, which had forced him to become
dependent on tablets he hardly dared swallow because of the dreams
they brought - unspeakably hideous, heavenly dreams, inspiring in
him horror, shame and ecstatic excitement.
His normal self rejected these dreams even more emphatically
than it refused to acknowledge that his true feeling for Luz could
be questioned. And now he concentrated all his attention upon the
road in an unsuccessful attempt to drive them out of his conscious­
ness altogether. But this evidently was one of the occasions when
he had no control over the diabolical images he longed to disown.
21

Independently going their separate way, his thoughts persistently
pursued the atrocious visions, in which the pale girl always ap­
peared as the victim, her tortured delicate body twisted and tom
and supremely desirable. Hating himself for indulging in these sa­
distic fantasies, he desperately struggled to cast them off as he drove;
yet he knew all the time he was fighting a losing battle he didn't
even whole-heartedly want to win.
Suddenly he had to swerve to avoid a large stone, and the car
went into a skid on the icy road. He regained control of it immedi­
ately. But in that fragment of time, in an instantaneous flashback,
barely interrupting the previous train of ideas, his inner eye recog­
nized a strange upright boulder standing alone in a field like some
primitive unfinished sculpture, which, as a small boy, he'd been
told the glaciers had deposited there in the course of their slow
retreat after the ice-age. White flakes were starting to fly at the
windscreen out of the dark; he just had time to suppose that the
association of ice and snow had recalled this long-forgotten memory,
before his thoughts reverted wholly to the earlier theme they had
never entirely left.
Giving up the struggle at this point, he surrendered voluptuously
to the shameful pleasure stirring his blood. The warmth in the car
contributed to his warm sense of well-being as he looked out at a
desolate waste, upon which snow was steadily falling....
The dead white landscape is broken only by a few blackish, twisted
tree-stumps or distant boulders, and one quite near him, which ap­
pears to have been roughly hacked into the crude shape of a man
with hugely enlarged genitals and rudimentary limbs; to which the
girl's trembling naked figure is bound.
The watcher stares, fascinated, never taking his eyes off her. She
does not look at him. Her head is turned away slightly but not
enough to prevent him from seeing her wide eyes, dilated with ter­
ror, fixed on a glistening white circular wall of ice, of which she is
the centre, as it slowly approaches.
Suddenly the pace of the advance must quicken, though he doesn't
actually see this, for now the outer fringe of the ice cliff has already
reached her ... already set, hard as concrete, over her feet and her
thin ankles.
She throws her head back, turning it wildly from side to side in
the only movement of which she is still capable, her whole delicate
body convulsed, writhing frantically in its bonds.
22

Uncontrollable delight flaring in all his veins, the onlooker sees
the ice mount implacably to her calves ... to her knees ... hears
her thin, long-drawn, agonized cry as it finally climbs to her thighs ...
forcing them apart....
The delectable, detestable vision, fading into present reality, immedi­
ately started to slide out of his memory: and he saw all at once that
he had crossed another road without noticing it. He was about to
tum back in search of a signpost when he changed his mind and
looked more attentively at what was visible of the scene in front.
The headlights revealed something vaguely familiar about it, and
he decided to keep on up the hill; he might be on the right road
after all. Only a few moments later, the strong lights dramatically
lit up a deserted farmhouse he was almost certain he recognized as the
place where they'd stopped for a picnic lunch when he was here
before. But now, in midwinter, the ground white with snow, things
looked so different ... besides, he'd only had such a brief glimpse....
In the end he wasn't sure that it really was the same spot.
*

The shadows of the trees move on, leaving the bank where they
ate their lunch in full sun. Luke moves a few steps higher up to sit
in the shade of an old pear tree growing beside the door of the
empty farm. Chas gets up too and goes down to the car on the road
below, extracting his sketchbook from it and waving carelessly, before
disappearing into the dense greenery of the beech woods.
Luz is the only one who still lies, relaxed, in the sunshine; while
Luke, chewing a grass stalk, sits watching her. He's very conscious
that this is the first time they have been left alone together, and
wonders if she is too - if so, she makes no sign. Motionless, her
hands clasped over her eyes, she might be asleep. The slight curves
of her almost childish body are clearly visible through her thin dress,
which is sleeveless, so that he can see the tiny bright beads of
sweat in her armpits against the slight darkness and roughness of
the shaved skin. Almost as if to himself, he says now: 'I had to
come and make certain that you were happy.'
She can't be asleep, for she reacts instantly, twisting round to
face him in a strained, tense, sprawling position, while he tries to
reassure her by going on lightly: 'Don't worry
1 shan't bother
you any more. Now that I've seen just how happy you are, 1 can
vanish again into the great trackless swamps.'
-

23

But the effect is nil. She only stares at him silently in that odd
twisted posture that would be ungainly in another person, support­
ing her weight on her hands, her bare arms widely spread. The
abruptness of her movement has disarranged her dress, exposing
one leg right up to the thigh, and he takes it as a measure of her
disturbance that no instinctive modesty prompts her to pull down
her skirt. The low-necked dress hangs away from her body so that
he, sitting slightly above her, can see the shadows between her
breasts and even the small protruberances of the nipples, which in
conjunction with the bareness of her arms and legs produces the
momentary illusion that she is naked before him.
The pupils of her eyes have grown dark and enormous, expand­
ing wider and wider. He watches these hugely dilated eyes deepen
into two black bottomless pools, which amalgamate finally, and engulf
the victim's pale fragile body in spite of its struggles. Her head
comes up once, mouth wide open to scream or gasping for air. But
before she can make a sound or take a breath, the black flood pours
down her throat, choking her ... obliterating her altogether. .. .
The slight breeze which has been rustling the beeches expires
suddenly; heat and sunshine become excessive. Unbearably hot all
at once, Luke unfastens his shirt - his jacket already lies on the
grass beside him. At the same time he hears the distant thud of the
painter's returning footsteps, followed by the most unexpected sound
of his own voice: 'Remember that if you're ever in any trouble I'll
always come back to you.'
The words are so unpremeditated that he seems to have no fore­
knowledge of them.They might almost have been spoken by someone
else, in that low, intense tone, unfamiliar to him.
Breaking her immobility though not her silence, his companion
jumps up. For a second he sees her eyes glitter among long
flickering lashes before she turns away, and, keeping her face
averted, collects the debris of the picnic, and carries it down to
the car.
He can hardly stop himself following her. But the husband is
already quite close, mopping his brow as he approaches, sitting
down beside him under the pear tree - now he can't go without
being pointedly rude.
Not hearing a word that's said to him, he sits on, hoping only
that Chas doesn't notice his preoccupation, or the way his eyes
keep straying towards the car.
24

Not that Luz is to be seen down there. She seems to have wan­
dered off by herself, and doesn't reappear until it's time to drive
home; when she insists on sitting alone at the back of the car, and
doesn't open her mouth the whole way.
*

The road climbed steeply between high banks, as if he were in a
cutting between giant earthworks, or crawling along like a beetle
between huge stones.His knowledge of the hidden devastation around
him made the night seem ominous. A lingering self-disgust had
resulted in his unadmitted fear of the dark and its dangers, as though
he were surrounded by threatening secrets.
Suddenly an opening showed ahead in the towering banks, the
approach to a group of buildings, clotted above in a menacing, fortlike
mass. This forbidding outline, a dream-distortion of the row of cottages
he half remembered, also brought back a dim recollection. But then,
catching sight of collapsing walls and empty window-holes like wide­
open screaming mouths, he decided not to trust his memory, since
such deterioration was hardly possible in the time he had been away.
There could be no doubt, however, about the tall single tree he
saw growing in a triangle of frosted grass, which must be the chestnut
they used to sit under when they came to the village pub for a
drink. It was unmistakable. Or would have been, but for his inex­
plicable conviction that this was a dead tree, no more able to pro­
duce the deep shade he remembered than the nondescript semi-ruin
behind it could produce a drink.
Confused by these half-recognitions and contradictions, he still
wasn't sure that he had come to the right place: though there couldn't
be many roads which ended, as this one did, in three sides of a
triangle and went no further, as if there were no way of reaching
the top of the hill. Taking a chance, he made for a matted black­
ness of ivy and evergreens; and, sure enough, the headlights picked
out the whitish chalky gleam of the lane leading to his friends'
house, worming its way through the dark tangle. A moment later
he again wondered whether he'd been mistaken, when the track
became almost impassable, a narrow deeply rutted tunnel between
untended hedges that met overhead. As there was nowhere to tum,
he was obliged to keep on somehow; and suddenly a fresh recol­
lection emerged - if he really was on the right track, the next bend
would reveal a gate where the beech woods began.
25

Yes, there it was, a five-bar gate as broken-down as he'd by now
come to expect. And there too, some distance beyond it, was his
destination, at which he looked in astonishment, not because of its
dilapidated air (he'd begun to take this decomposing night-world
for granted), but because he wasn't expecting to see it yet, having
made no allowance for the much longer vistas afforded by the leafless
trees.
Instead of being cheered by the sight, he was overcome by gloom
and despondency. Had it been possible to turn back here he would
have done so; as it was not, he had to go on, but decided not to
enter the house when he got there. All of a sudden he felt extra­
ordinarily tired, as if he'd been driving in the dark for an eternity
on these winding, treacherous, slippery country roads. The head­
ache he'd hardly noticed before thrust itself on his attention. He
ought to have brought some aspirins with him. He was rarely with­
out them, and wondered how he'd come to overlook them today.
Well, he could ask Chas for some. But he no longer wanted to see
his friends. The fact was, in his present condition, he couldn't bear
to see them so happy together. But neither, apparently, could he
bear not to see them, for instead of turning the car at the top of the
hill, he drove in at the gate, propped open by heavy stones - one
of its hinges had gone, he observed in passing.
Giant yews, centuries old and of vast diameter, loomed over him,
massive, threatening, looking substantial as black towers. He'd always
disliked yews ever since he was a boy, running through forbidden
coverts to meet a friend, when one of these black churchyard trees
had obstructed him, and he'd been captured and punished by the
angry gamekeeper.
His main attention focused elsewhere. The thought at the back of
his mind scarcely registered that, ever since that remote occasion,
the same tall black forbidding shape had stood before every human
being he tried to approach, blocking his way, prohibiting any contact.
He stopped in front of the porch, and for a startled second had
the impression that the wall beside it was crumbling; until he saw
how massed invasive creepers produced this illusion, their thick
entwined strands matted together and resembling chaotic piles of
masonry in the glare of the car lights. Like all the other buildings
he'd passed, the house was dark and appeared empty, not a chink
of light showing anywhere. Of course his friends must have gone
away.He jumped at this simple explanation of the surrounding neglect,
26

at the same time perfectly aware that it didn't account for the wide­
spread desolation all along his route. The deserted scene brought
on another wave of depression, and he was on the point of driving
away when the door of the house was noisily flung open by some­
one he couldn't see.
It most certainly wasn't Luz. He supposed Chas must be stand­
ing there in the dark porch, but he couldn't be sure that it wasn't
someone else of similar build, who seemed to radiate violence and
resentment in a way that was most unlike his amiable friend. How­
ever, he could no longer doubt his identity when he came right up
to the car and looked into his face, saying: 'So it really is you'.
The man sounded more astonished than pleased, and gave a short,
disconcerting laugh before going on: 'A minute ago I was thinking
of you as thousands of miles away on the other side of the world;
and here you are suddenly, on my doorstep.'
'I've just got back,' Luke replied. 'I meant to arrive much ear­
lier - to give you a surprise - but I lost my way.' Puzzled by the
alteration in his friend's manner, which indeed could hardly be
described as friendly, he suddenly realized that, though he'd sup­
pressed his own negative feelings, he had all the time felt an inter­
mittent uneasiness in their relations. In confused disappointment,
he continued: 'I know it's too late to drop in at this time of night
- I'll go now that I've seen you.' He put the car in gear, but that
was all; he was powerless to leave without seeing Luz, or at least
hearing about her. He tried vainly to look into the house, which
seemed to be all in darkness.
'Oh, you surprised me all right,' Chas said drily. His voice,
malicious or mocking hinted at something that was not clear.
Luke now felt definitely rebuffed, and was prevented from leav­
ing on the spot only by his desire for news of Luz. As it already
seemed too late for him to ask after her directly, he repeated: 'I'll
be off now . . .'
'Nonsense!' The other suddenly changed his tone, speaking as if
he were smiling, though no smile appeared on his face. 'Of course
you're not going. Come along in!' He sounded hearty, but still there
was no real friendliness about him; it was more as if he were imitating
his old cordiality.
Not knowing what to make of his odd behaviour, wondering whether
he could be drunk, Luke got out of the car and let himself be pro­
pelled into the porch as if sleep-walking.
27

'Well, here we go again!' All at once becoming boisterous, the
painter took his arm and pulled him through the door, which promptly
blew shut behind them. Equally confused by his changeability and
the dark interior, the visitor felt trapped. He couldn't recall how
the rooms were arranged, the hall seemed larger than he remem­
bered. 'Mind your head on that beam!' he heard. But he wasn't
warned about a forgotten step down, and stumbled into the living­
room, which also seemed larger, the feeble light leaving the cor­
ners in darkness and all detail obscure. A faint warmth still came
from the open hearth. Chas kicked the remains of the fire ineffectu­
ally, then piled on heavy logs, which almost extinguished its last
few sparks. 'Stay here and warm up while I scout round and see
what I can find....' His voice trailed off into the dark silence out­
side the door.
Luke automatically rearranged the logs to give them a chance to
catch, noting dust on the mantelpiece as he straightened up. He
grew extremely uncomfortable looking round the room he knew so
well, which now had the strangeness of something remembered out
of a dream. Not only Chas himself, but the whole house, was different,
its former tranquil happy atmosphere replaced by something related
to the deterioration outside. He discerned a slight untidiness, a faint
air of neglect, the room made an uncared-for impression he couldn't
reconcile with his fastidious glass girl - what was she doing in this
ambience? Where was she? Why hadn't Chas mentioned her? The
omission could hardly be accidental....
The fire had started to flicker feebly. Suddenly the logs burst
into flames, just as the man he was thinking about reappeared, hold­
ing a bottle of wine. In the sudden blaze of light his changed
face gave Luke a shock.It looked quite different, almost a stranger's,
scored by deep lines, the full, rather sensuous lips tensed and
narrowed. How much of this was due to the leaping flames?
A generally slightly disintegrated appearance, as if the whole
athletic muscular body had been infected by the decay outside,
must be an illusion.. . . Realizing how he was staring, he extri­
cated himself from these speculations in time to hear the words
'Well, here's to our friendship!' uttered with a sort of phoney exub­
erance, while the speaker, pouring out the wine carelessly as though
he were drunk, or pretending to be drunk, emptied his glass at one
gulp.
Struck by a curious unpleasant sense of falseness pervading his
_

28

behaviour, Luke wondered uncomfortably what the man's motive
could be in putting on this act. He himself felt more uneasy than
ever, oppressed by the whole situation, unable to fix his attention
on what was said. He didn't attempt to keep pace with the other
man's drinking, and was surprised, when the bottle was pushed to­
wards him, to see that his glass was empty; he had no recollection
of drinking, and covered it with his hand, not wanting to drink any
more. His headache was getting worse all the time, he was dead
tired, and if he hadn't had such a craving to see Luz, he would
have made an excuse to leave there and then. Yet, when his com­
panion urged him to drink up, he allowed his glass to be refilled
out of sheer inertia.
Chas sat watching him without speaking, in apparent amusement.
The greenish eyes at least were unchanged; but what were they
seeing? Not what they used to see of him, Luke was sure; they
seemed to look at him like a stranger's; like the eyes of someone
who hardly knew him. Suddenly they started to wink, darting sly,
equivocal glances in his direction, accompanying the words 'It's
funny, you know - you and I sitting here like this.. ..'
Not understanding, suspecting malice, he asked with defensive
sharpness: 'What's funny about it?' But immediately afterwards lost
all interest, overcome by the heat of the fire, which seemed to have
reached an unbearable intensity. He tried to push his chair away,
but it wouldn't move.He had to be satisfied with throwing his overcoat
back as far as possible on his shoulders. To take it off, he felt,
would commit him to staying; and he was determined to go as soon
as he'd found out about Luz. It occurred to him that Chas must be
keeping quiet about her deliberately, j ust to spite him. But he was
again distracted by an unpleasant physical sensation, his forgotten
hunger reasserting itself as an interior void, where the wine he had
drunk was queasily sloshing about. Protestingly, his stomach emit­
ted a dismal growl; the need to stabilize it became so acute that he
had to ask if he could have something to eat.
'But of course.' Chas got up, then stood looking at him with a
distinctly spiteful expression over the table on which stood the
now empty bottle. 'It really is damned funny, the two of us
drinking together.' He laughed shortly, a humourless, obnoxious
sound.
Luke, taken aback, said, in acute embarrassment: 'I don't know
what you mean ...'
29

'Think: it out, then!' The other had already left the room: which
next moment was echoing with his shouts, barely mufHed by the
intervening wall. 'Luz! Luz! 'What the hell are you doing? Come
down at once and get us some food!' Silence followed, broken only
by his heavy steps pounding upstairs.
Luke, who had jumped up in alarm, was astounded to hear him
use this angry, abusive, peremptory tone to the girl he had adored
- with whom he'd been absolutely infatuated two years before.
Hurrying to the door, he stood listening, wondering whether he ought
to follow and be ready to protect her if necessary - his first im­
pression of the man's violence seemed to have been correct. But
all remained quiet. It wasn't for him to interfere, he decided, retir­
ing instead to his chair, where he sat for an unmeasured period,
holding his aching head in his hands, quite stupefied by the heat
and this last most unexpected change in the situation.
When he looked up, the fire had reached its hottest, incandescent
stage, so that he received the wave of intense heat full in the face,
like the blast from a furnace. For a second it made him feel dizzy,
the room began to revolve around him, then gradually slowed to a
standstill. His head still ached abominably, and his coat had again
slipped forward - his first deliberate act was to push it as far back
as he could with both hands.
'Why don't you take it off'?'
Though he instantly recognized the soft voice, to answer it seemed
beyond him. Nor did Luz appear to expect a reply, quietly putting
bread, butter and cheese on the table in front of him, followed by
three bowls of soup.
'Is that the best you can do?'
Without even his fake geniality now, the painter sounded quar­
relsome and vindictive. Luke was again almost dazed by astonish­
ment at the incredible hostility he had developed towards his wife.
It simply wasn't to be believed .. . he must be dreaming .. . none
of this could be really happening....
Nobody spoke as they started eating; the host's heavy silence
effectively put a stop to all conversation. He'd produced another
bottle of wine, and, uncorking it, signed to Luz to hold out her
glass, his big, strong hands looking brutal by contrast with the almost
transparent one she extended obediently. Luke couldn't stop watch­
ing her, fascinated by that brittle-looking hand and wrist ... it was
as if he'd forgotten her extreme fragility ... yet knew his inmost
30

self never for one moment forgot her frail, delicate, victim's body.
She remote, listless, as when he first met her, sitting with bent head
within her shower of strange white shining hair, pale as an albino's.
He tried to will her to look at him, but couldn't even induce her to
raise her eyes. She hadn't spoken to him except for her one ques­
tion; had showed not the slightest surprise at his sudden arrivals.
He began to feel that she too had become a stranger.
Did he still love her? The old question arose, mechanically circ­
ling round his tired brain. Had he ever loved her? Hadn't it always
been just a pretence, as he'd never done anything about it?
For a moment he put his hand in front of his eyes, feeling weary,
muddled and sad. His headache was starting to have a confusing
effect: he longed to be out in the air; why didn't he get up and go?
But, much as he wanted to escape from this impossible silence that
went on and on, he didn't like to make a move without even knowing
whether the meal was supposed to be over. His soup-bowl was empty;
but Luz had hardly touched hers. His eyes went from one silent
figure to the other, and his confusion intensified; he felt more than
ever that he must be dreaming. It was quite beyond his powers to
identify these speechless strangers with the friends he had come to see.
*

Alone in the living-room, Luke sits on the step of the wide open
window, facing into the summer garden. Like all the others, this
last day of his visit is warm and sunny. Everything here is already
idealized in his mind. He feels a boundless grateful affection for
these two precious, wonderful people, who, by being his friends,
have for the first time in his life brought him into the warmth of
human companionship. Lost in a sort of day-dream, he is sitting so
still half outside the room, that Luz doesn't notice him when she
comes in with a big bunch of flowers and starts arranging them in
a tall jug. She is singing quietly to herself, and continues to be
unaware of his motionless presence, starting violently when he finally
turns to smile at her, saying: 'That settles it ...'
'Settles what?' The anxiety that comes so easily to her face di­
lates and darkens her big eyes.
Still half dreaming, he doesn't realize how much he has startled
her. For the moment his thoughts are far off in a tropical forest
with his favourite animals, the weird, man-sized, singing lemurs
called the Indris, supposed to be the origin of the legend of the
31

dog-headed man. Very few people have ever seen these almost extinct
creatures, and fewer still have heard their uncanny song, which has
a tremendous fascination for him. He explains now how she and
Chas remind him of the Indris, because they too are kind and loving,
gentle and playful, and live together so happily here in the trees.
'And now that I 've heard you sing, the resemblance is complete. '
Charmed by his notion, he isn't seeing her objectively, although
his gaze is fixed on her slender figure, outlined in its light dress
against the shadowy room. It's not the same dress she wore at the
picnic, he notices vagely, but one very like it, sleeveless and with
rather a low neck.
' You heard me singing? '
I f he was attending, he'd surely wonder why she sounds s o hor­
rified, and turns her head aside like a little girl caught in the act of
some childish misdeed; the fact being that she was singing for joy
because he 'll so soon be gone. Besides, she always has a deeper
sense of gUilt in relation to him which she doesn't understand she would never have come in here if she'd guessed he might be in
the room, and she is trying feverishly to think how to escape with­
out seeming rude.
'Do you often sing to yourself? I've never heard you before. '
'Only when I 'm specially happy. ' Having suddenly realized that
she needn't worry as he can't possibly know what 's going on in
her mind, her face lightens and she smiles almost mischievously.
His thoughts are still half with the lemurs. He doesn't ask why
she ' s so happy just now, but begins to talk about the creatures he 's
so fond of, and their idyllic, innocent life in the jungle, at peace
with all its inhabitants, eating flower petals in the tree-tops, caressing
each other, and singing their melodious, unearthly songs. The strange
beasts are almost an obsession of his, their eerie voices enchant
him. He loves speaking about them and has often described
them to her before. But no amount of description of their endear­
ing ways has any effect on the inexplicable aversion she ' s
always felt towards them and their unnatural music. Wishing
he 'd talk about something else, she hardly listens as she finishes
arranging her flowers, until he exclaims: 'I love you and I love the
Indris . . . nobody, nothing, else in the world - it's perfect that you
should be like them ! '
His dreamy state has passed into one almost of exaltation. He's
not at all clear as to his own meaning, and certainly doesn 't realize
32

what he has just said. His everyday common sense would never
countenance such an extraordinary statement, which his hearer can't
be expected to understand.
She is, in fact, gazing at him in amazement. Anxiety, always as
close to her as her shadow, has returned to her face. Again she
wants to get away from him, and, merely saying that she 's going to
pick ferns in the wood for another floral arrangement, she steps
quickly past him, out into the shady garden.
He neither moves nor speaks, staring after her almost as if in a
trance, watching her recede, the light lingering on her pale hair and
bare arms and legs with a faint greenish tinge from the surrounding
woodland. The secluded garden is deep in the beach woods, hidden
away from the world in silence and secrecy, isolated by the count­
less great trees pressing close on all sides, their ancient enormous
trunks ranked close together like walls . . . like impassable prison
walls . . . the dense massive foliage pierced here and there by only
a few small scattered rings of light, which give no idea of how the
sun is blazing down on the world outside . . . .
The tremendous ocean of leaves, encroaching everywhere on the
small open space, fills the air with a green liquid transparency, and
this fluid greenery arches up in colossal waves, overhanging and
threatening the house . . . collapses and surges forward in a vast
green tide, overwhelming everything . . . sweeping the girl away . . . .
She turns once; he sees her dilated victim' s eyes gaze wildly,
imploringly, at him, before she is engulfed by the assaulting flood.
*

Luke pressed his hand to his forehead, repeating the gesture after
a pause, in the hope that someone would see that he was in pain
and offer to get him some aspirin. But though he kept his fingers
pressed on his eyelids until fiery flashes appeared on his retina,
nobody took any notice.
A paralysing lassitude enveloped him now. Above all things he
wanted to go. He knew it must be very late and that he ought to
go. But, checked and chilled by the prospect of driving all the way
back to town in the icy, hostile darkness, he stayed huddled up in
his chair, one hand over his eyes. He was half asleep when he
heard: 'And what's brought you back so suddenly from your travels?'
Looking up, he saw that Chas had risen and was standing above
him; and was instantly shocked wide awake by meeting his
33

penetrating, perspicacious, unfriendly glance in one of those revealing
glimpses of another person which infrequently, disconcertingly, pierced
his isolation, disclosing the obscure, dangerous, misleading territory
of human relations. How much the man must dislike him.
' You were sent for, 1 take it. Such superlative timing could hardly
be a coincidence. ' This was said in a much lower voice, inaudible
probably to the third person present. The green glinting eyes snapped
maliciously at him out of the virile, vicious, flame-distorted face.
As he only stared back blankly, the low voice added: ' I refer, of
course, to the superb timing of your reappearance.'
Luke was far too taken aback to answer, unable to marshal his
scattered wits into any semblance of order, not even grasping what
the words meant. They struck him as totally inexplicable, incom­
prehensible, uttered in that quick, knowing, spiteful undertone which
seemed to deal secret blows he was too numbed to feel yet, seeing
only the sharp green eyes, fixed on him with dislike, with disgust
almost. They vanished suddenly, the painter turned away to search
for something on the shelves by the door, then swung round again
with a record in his hand. ' Let's have some music if you've got
nothing to say. '
'Oh no, ehas - not the singing ! 1 can't stand it! '
Luke got a fresh shock, hearing this sudden outcry from the girl
who'd been silent so long.
Luz seemed to know that her protest would be ignored, for she
jumped up, exclaiming 'I won 't listen to it! ' and made a dash for
the door. Before she got there, her husband's big hand seized her
in a policeman' s grip: grinning maliciously but saying nothing, he
held her helplessly tethered to him, while his other hand put on the
record and started the mechanism. His prolonged grasp must have
been hurting her thin wrist, for she kept trying to struggle free, her
face contorted in a childish grimace of pain.
Luke drew in his breath sharply, clenching his fists, but did nothing
to help her. The record was circling with a low whirr that merged
with the sighing of the wind in the trees; the soft, soporific murmur
reminded him of nights spent in this house, when he 'd seemed to
fall asleep to the sound of a quietly breathing sea. His mesmerized
gaze never left the slight form of the victim, whose hair shimmered
round her head in a silvery cloud as she twisted and turned. Un­
consciously moistening his dry lips with the tip of his tongue, he
leaned forward, hungrily staring, thrilled and tormented by the strained,
34

unfamiliar poses her slight body assumed in its futile struggles.
Suddenly, without warning, the subdued murmur filling his head
swelled to a wailing that seemed actually inside it, welling up louder
and louder, pounding against his temples.
Somehow he eventually recognized in these discordant sounds a
distortion of the magic song of the Indris, a record of which he had
left with his friends as a parting gift after his last visit. Yet they
were totally unlike the enchanted music he loved. The lemurs' singing
had always seemed to him not of this world, so that he 'd come to
identify it with another and happier life, regarding it as the symbol
of all that he held most precious . . . of a world where intelligence
and affection were cherished, and destructiveness and cruelty had
no place.
Now the lovely, unearthly melody was transformed into these
hideous discords, harshly insisting that all the things he most valued
were irretrievably lost, that destruction had after all triumphed, and
that this was the only world. The message was far too painful to
him . . . he couldn 't bear it . . . wanting only to escape from the
atrocious dissonance which had replaced the harmonies he adored.
Without noticing any transition, he found himself out in the hall,
which was dark and extremely cold after the heat of the fire. No
one had followed him and the door was shut. But, though the un­
canny singing was muted here, he could still hear how horribly it
had changed . . . to get right away, out of earshot, remained his
sole object. Pulling his overcoat round him and buttoning it, he
groped his way towards the door to the outside world, thinking
only of making a quick escape from the sounds penetrating the
other door behind him; while the excruciating cacophony vibrated
inside his skull, rising and falling with his erratic pulse.
To his profound relief, a blessed silence fell suddenly. He paused
to listen, half expecting the hideous noise to burst out again. How­
ever, all he heard was the soft rustling of trees in the wind outside;
or so he thought, until he realized that this sound was indoors and
quite near him - was, in fact, the rustle of a woman's dress.
He looked round and saw Luz coming towards him, her slender­
ness outlined against a dim light behind. She was her usual self,
perfectly calm and quiet, her pale hair smoothly combed. Of her
recent struggles there was no sign, which puzzled and briefly dis­
turbed him. Was he imagining things? And if so, which version
was real? So far he hadn't noticed what she was wearing: but because
35

he himself felt cold out here, even in his thick overcoat, he now
observed the short sleeves and rather low neck of her simple dress,
which was very much like those she used to wear in the summer,
and looked scarcely warmer.
As she approached, the feeble light revealed her protruding col­
lar-bones, showing deep pits of shadow at the base of her neck.
Her thinness seemed exaggerated by the uncertain illumination . . .
she looked far too thin . . . emaciated, almost, like a famine victim.
He was not unaware of the pathos of her appearance, but when she
extended her hand, his attention instantly became riveted on the
projecting wrist-bones - with a spasm of the old hateful joy, he
feels he could snap them between his finger and thumb. . . .
Snow is falling heavily, and on the dead white background her
naked flesh is milk or ivory coloured . . . except where the cords
binding her wrists have bitten in deeply, leaving them encircled by
angry red savage rings. The steadily falling snow encloses the two
of them in its lonely tent, settles in big white flakes on her shrink­
ing body, whitening still further the strange bright hair falling over
her breasts , in which she seems to be trying pathetically to clothe
herself. . . .
'I 've brought you some aspirin . . . .
For a second, the low voice had no meaning for him; he seemed
to be looking down at two exceptionally large and solid snowflakes.
Then recognizing the two tablets in the palm of her hand, he scooped
them up awkwardly, faintly embarrassed by the dissolving image
he was already forgetting . . . which , by the time he had swallowed
them and returned the glass of water she'd handed him, had been
obliterated from his mind without trace. The urgent need to escape
once more in control, he went on to the door and out to his car,
hardly noticing that she stood crushed against the side of the porch
as though afraid to come any further.
She said nothing until he had climbed into the driver's seat, when
she called out 'Do you remember . . . ? ' so softly that the last words
of the sentence failed to reach him. Since she neither moved nor
repeated her question, he saw that he 'd have to get out of the car
to discover the end of it. But, at that moment, wild horses couldn 't
have dragged him back to the house; so he pretended not to have
heard her at all, and, after several attempts, managed to start the
engine.
The car began to move; he turned, waving goodbye, and, as the
36

headlights passed over her face, he saw it appear to break up into
conflicting planes as if she were crying. He forgot the effect at
once, for a man's tremendous arm , black and swollen with muscle
like an executioner's, suddenly shot out of the doorway, and a huge,
brutal hand gripped her with such violence that she swayed and
started to fall. . . . Simultaneously and abruptly, everything vanished
- the giant arm and hand, the bright collapsing head and frail shoul­
ders, melting at the same time into each other and into utter black­
ness, until nothing at all remained visible.
Luke drove on, deciding he must have imagined the gigantic hand
- nothing so fantastic could possibly have been real. Besides, his
recollection of it was already blurred and beyond the periphery of
normal perception. He was passing the yew trees' ominous black
towers when the muted slam of the house door made him glance
back, though without realizing what the sound implied. Still nothing
whatsoever was to be seen behind him; neither the two figures, the
trees nor the house itself . . . and his head seemed correspondingly empty.
From then onwards absolute darkness encompassed him, out of
which flurries of snow flew intermittently, so that he faced a con­
fused white whirling wall, and drove for the rest of the time in a
vast black vacancy.
*

Arriving so late at the garage, he finds that the lift isn't working,
and having put his car at the top, he has to walk all the way down
the ramp, round and round endless, windowless, claustrophobic spirals
between concrete walls devoid of relief or colour. However, as soon
as he reaches the street, the memory of the garage evaporates in
the freezing air, and so does his headache. He doesn't feel tired
any more.
It isn't snowing at the moment, though a deep, unmarked layer
of pure white covers street and pavement. There are no pedestrians,
no traffic, the snowbound city lies deserted, in the icy small hours.
He turns the comer, expecting to confront the entrance to his hotel;
but instead finds himself in a street he doesn't know.
The lights bums indifferently in the white vacancy of the long,
straight street, stretching into the distance. The traffic-lights at
the intersections keep up their useless changes; the spotless
snow reflects in incessant sequence a faint red glow, an orange
glow, a green glow, reverting to orange and red. Every window
37

has the same white trimming; the same depth of white is piled in
every doorway. All the houses look exactly alike with their white
decoration. The snow, the emptiness, the distant constellations of
coloured lights, winking on and off simultaneously, create a con­
fusing sameness, bewildering to the eye. There is nothing to distin­
guish this street from any other, or one house from the next. Yet he
seems to know where he's going, and walks briskly, the snow crunch­
ing under his feet.
Here is an entrance from which the snow has been swept - a
striking distinction in this white waste land of similarity - and he
goes in without hesitation. An attendant escorts him to a curtained
door, enjoining silence, his finger on his lips. The door opens at
once from the other side, admitting Luke to a small, crowded theatre,
lit only from the stage, where a solitary figure is dancing. The at­
tendant has gone back to the entry, and whoever let him in, instead
of waiting to show him to a seat, has already vanished. He can't
see where there's an empty place among the rows of crouching,
faceless, identical figures, and decides to stay where he is until the
lights go up. Although right at the side, he can see very well, being
so near the stage.
The blonde dancer looks half starved, her bones seem on the
verge of perforating her delicate skin. Yet her body is graceful,
though hardly likely to appeal to patrons of a late-night show, since
its curves have an almost childish fragility. Only the torso moves,
her feet remain trapped in a tiny circle midstage. Perhaps in an
attempt to compensate for what is lacking in mature sexual allure,
a dead white spotlight paints her flesh with intense, melodramatic
shadows, and in this hard, strong light her slender limbs appear
actually frangible. The mutilations inflicted by the black shadows
support the impression of helpless surrender and dread produced
by her miming, showing her as the victim of some archaic ceremony,
about to culminate in human sacrifice.
With unexpected abruptness the dance reaches its climax. Her
ankles bound presumably, she is still immobolized from the waist
down, though she throws her head back and twists the upper part
of her body so violently that a faint sheen of moisture starts to
glisten on the smooth flesh . . . her mouth opens wide in a sound­
less scream . . . .
Too absorbed in the dancer to notice whether there's any ap­
plause, Luke sees that she looks completely exhausted as she leaves
38

the stage. Already she is in deep shadow, receding towards total
darkness in the wings, out of which comes an enormous hand, which
clamps itself over her mouth, while another seizes one brittle-look­
ing ankle and tugs her forward. Without a sound she topples into
the dark and is instantly devoured by it . . . .

39

3

T

HE position is not uncomfortable, except for the cord to
ensure that she's posed correctly, exactly as she was yester­
day, which Chas has tied rather too tight. She doesn't com­
plain about it, vaguely hoping that if she submits to everything,
without ever making trouble, he will love her again and her happiness
will return. This is not even entirely believed; and certainly not
thought out rationally in an adult fashion. Her mind works more like
that of a little girl, obedient and docile, who has nevertheless
unaccountably lost the love of a grown-up person and feels it must be
her own fault, without being able to imagine how it possibly can be.
She adores him and would do anything for him. It's such a small
thing to act as his model; all through the summer she has gladly
posed for him in the nude. It's only now, in the midst of this ex­
ceptionally severe winter, that she gets so terribly cold and can
hardly bear to keep still. Already her arms and legs have turned
numb; though this doesn't prevent her from feeling the cord bite
viciously into her flesh. She wonders unhappily what the time is. It
must be long past the period when she's supposed to have a few
minutes' rest. Chas often forgets the rest periods these days, and
she doesn 't like to remind him. Making a great effort to stop think­
ing about herself, she turns her eyes to the window. Although it's
far too dark to see anything outside, she seems to catch a dissolv­
ing glimpse of white moths swarming against the glass - it must be
snowing again.
Snow . . . . Perhaps because she's always lived before in warm
climates, snow has a peculiar effect on her, like something super­
natural - like some kind of magic, fascinating but dangerous. Even
the thought of it makes her feel strange . . . . Suddenly she's acutely
aware of her numb frozen limbs and can't suppress a convulsive
shudder, which shakes her from head to foot.
40

'Keep still, can't you?' The man at the easel sounds angry, then
looks at his watch and exclaims: 'Good God! we ought to have
stopped long ago - why on earth didn't you tell me?' Still seeming
more annoyed than sorry, he unties her quickly, his expression an
odd mixture of exasperation and guilt, afterwards wrapping her in
a blanket, keeping his arm round her while he kicks open the doors
of the stove.
Relaxing against him for a blissful moment she leans on his strength.
But all at once he abruptly seems to forget all about her, withdraw­
ing both his support and his attention completely and at the same
time, so that she recovers her balance only at the last moment.
Meanwhile he has gone back to stand in front of his easel, staring
at the canvas as though she no longer existed.
*

Husband and wife sit facing each other across a table, on which
is the remains of their evening meal. They have finished eating
some minutes ago, but don't move. Neither do they speak. It is to
be felt that the silence in the room has lasted a long time. The man
is unconscious of it, deeply preoccupied, perhaps still thinking about
his work. The girl too seems to be thinking of something else - or
of nothing at all - and to be exhausted, ill, miserable, or suffering
from some neurosis, sitting there in a drooping posture, her head
resting on her hand.
Presently she gets up and, still without saying a word, collects
the used plates and cutlery on a tray, and carries it out to the kitchen.
As if he has been waiting for this move of hers, Chas stands up
then and leaves the room by a different door. Returning to find
him gone, Luz looks troubled: hesitating a moment, she goes after
him; but suddenly stops dead in the passage outside a closed door
through which comes the sound she detests above all others. What
she hears is a kind of music - non-human voices singing together
in rhythm, rising and falling in successive regular waves, sinking
to a murmur while the next wave builds up its mounting volume,
which culminates in a prolonged chord, sounding to her more like
a howl.
It is of course the recorded song of the Indris, left here by Luke
as a parting gift. How she hates it! How she hates everything con­
nected with those uncanny lemurs! If only he hadn't come to stay
here and talked so much about them! She doesn't know why she
41

has always felt so antagonistic to the weird creatures, to which he
once compared her. She has always thought the comparison gro­
tesque and outrageous, but now it seems to be something worse she 's appalled by the mere idea of a possible resemblance between
her and the infernal singers, whose voices continue to bombard her
ears with what sound like atrocious discords, until she feels like
howling herself. Yes, her nerves are exacerbated to such an extent
that she could actually lift up her chin and howl like a dog each
time the sound-waves assault her; and her face contracts each time
as with the pain of a physical blow. . . . There's something alto­
gether terrifying and unearthly about the sound.
Why is Chas, who has never shown any interest in music before,
so enchanted by this record. that he listens to it day and night? He
seems absolutely spellbound by its atrocious rhythms . . . at this
moment she really believes the music has some diabolical magic
power, which will finally be her undoing.
At last it comes to an end, and she takes a deep breath of relief.
But immediately the hateful dissonance is renewed. To hear the
record again is more than she can endure; in her distraught state
she simply can't stand it. Quite beside herself, she jumps at the
door, flings it open, rushes frantically into the room and stops the
mechanism so forcibly and abruptly that the voices cease on a high
wailing note of anguish.
'What do you think you're doing, bursting in here like a maniac?
Have you gone off your head? ' The man stands up, rather red in
the face, but otherwise calm.
She, on the contrary, has lost every atom of self-control. Tears
springing out of her eyes unchecked, she accuses him incoherently
of playing the record so often simply because he knows it upsets
her and that she loathes the wretched Indris. ' You used not to care
about music so much,' she sobs, childishly brushing away with her
fingers the falling tears she doesn't attempt to hide.
'Do you expect me to sit in dead silence, like a deaf-mute?' Enor­
mous suppressed resentment comes out in his hostile tone. 'You
never open your mouth these days, and I can't ask anyone here
because you're so damned unsociable . . . . ' His indignation increas­
ing, he works himself into a rage at the thought of all he has to put
up with. 'You'd like to keep me shut up alone with you in solitary
confinement, I know . . . . But you won't succeed . . . if you go on
like this you're much more likely to lose me altogether. ' A scowling
42

glance accompanies this threat, and he strides out of the room, slam­
ming the door behind him.
The weeping girl doesn't try to follow him or call him back, but
sinks down on the floor by his chair and buries her face in the
cushions, sobbing without restraint. Happiness is not for her - she
has always known it. For a time she enjoyed it illegitimately and
so she feels guilty . . . though really it's Luke she feels gUilty about,
heaven knows why . . . she's certainly never given him the least
encouragement. She only wanted to forget all about him, and was
shocked when his visit was first suggested. But Chas, laughing,
had said she musn't live entirely in a dream-world and shut every­
one out. That was during the time of her lost happiness, when his
love had built round her a protective wall, which for a brief period
had seemed unassailable, indestructible, just the two of them to­
gether inside, everything intimate and secure. She'd felt so bliss­
fully safe and happy in those days. What strength, what confidence
he had instilled into her. As long as he loved her, she could laugh
at the world outside. With him she had even laughed at her domi­
neering mother, who in the past had reduced her to nothing. It had
been so miraculous not to feel inferior any longer, but a real per­
son with her own place in life - above all, secure, loved and wanted.
Happiness must have gone to her head. She'd been over-confi­
dent, far too sure nothing could pierce the wall. She should have
prevented Luke coming at any cost. It was then that the wall had
begun to totter and crumble. There had been an invisible crack in it
from the start - her relations with Luke, in which some disloyalty
seems inherent, although she has never been disloyal in any way.
Throughout his visit she longed for him to be gone; and yet she
still has this guilty feeling about him. At the same time, she detests
him and his diabolical lemurs; between them they've destroyed her
happiness as if by magic, and she is powerless against them.
The situation deteriorates rapidly from day to day. She and Chas
quarrel, or else are silent, when they are together; which is not
often, as he goes out more and more with people she doesn't know,
leaving her alone. Every morning she wakes to a horrible hollow
feeling, a gnawing pain that goes on till she next falls asleep, and
is caused by the knowledge that she' s in the process of losing
him. Every night as she goes to bed she dreads waking up for another
day.
And yet she does nothing . . . makes no effort to change . . . doesn't
43

lift a finger to keep him. Now that the wall is in ruins, security
gone, all confidence fatally undermined, she has relapsed into her
childish sense of helpless inferiority. She's always alone, hardly
speaks to a soul, nobody takes the slightest notice of her. It's al­
most as though she doesn't exist any longer. She feels she's only a
kind of nothing . . . a ghost who can't possibly alter the course of
events or influence anyone . . . nobody would listen to her.
Already she has almost forgotten the joy of loving and being
loved. The memory of her happiness seems unreal, like a dream
remembered from long ago. All that's left for her now is the horror
of being alone and the pain of loss . . . of being terrified, aban­
doned, betrayed . . . the one person she has loved and trusted with
all her heart transformed into a stranger, alien, untrustworthy, unkind.
*

Night is the worst time, when her vitality sinks to its lowest ebb
and she's frightened of everything. Unable to read or do anything
else, she wanders about the house like a woman living with ghosts,
who can't find the way or the will to return to the living world.
She stops by a window to see if there's a light in the studio (she
knows very well there isn't), and pulls the curtain aside. Where­
upon she forgets everything but what's in front of her eyes. Instead
of the wintry darkness she is expecting, she sees the surrounding
trees lit up as by a stupendous conflagration above. Vast corruga­
tions of intense, pulsing, rainbow light move in slow, stately undula­
tions over the northern sky, while spectacular serpentine streams of
pure incandescence shoot across them, emitting a frigid unearthly
brilliance. Sparkling with frost, the bare branches of the trees re­
flect the sky 's blazing uncanny light, so that the whole wood seems
on fire, burning resplendently with cold mineral flames.
She hurries out and stands on the frozen grass, staring up at the
dazzle, absolutely astounded, until it dawns upon her that she must
be witnessing a display of the northern lights. But that's impossi­
ble - the aurora borealis is never seen so far south. The staggering
spectacle suddenly seems supernatural, terrifying . . . and with a special
significance for her personally, as if the illumination up there dis­
guised a celestial messenger sent to warn her, as of the date of her
execution, that the day for her to leave Chas is at hand . . . .
This fatal message becomes an obsession, it's rarely out of her
thoughts. Every day she feels herself more unreal . . . destroyed without
44

knowing how or why . . . swept along towards God knows what
ghostly place of shadows . . . her happiness all a dream. Or perhaps
she has never existed at all, and is simply an agonized shade in the
mind of a dying person.
*

The man has ceased to recognize her as the carefree girl he was
once so fond of. For a long time he has suspected her of a secret
liaison with Luke, and her present melancholy neurotic attitude seems
to confirm this, so that the last faint remnant of his affection ex­
pires and he detaches himself from her altogether. He can't bear to
be in the house even, rushing away every morning, not coming
back until after she has gone to bed.
She too often feels an urge to escape, and wanders aimlessly
through the beech woods for hours on end. One day she finds her­
self in a small open space near the top of the hill from which their
house can be seen far below, and her eyes fill with tears as she
remembers how she used to think it looked from here like a friendly
animal, waiting to welcome her back.
Now, although she's prepared for a change, its hostile aspect ap­
pals her. A premature twilight, a sort of blight, has suddenly come
down on the afternoon, which was sunny when she set out. Look­
ing up, she sees solid masses of great black storm-clouds racing
across the sky, towards the one tiny patch of blue that's still left,
symbolizing her doomed happiness, which is engulfed as she watches.
Instinctively she lowers her eyes from the ominous clouds, just as
their shadow covers the house, turning it into an evil black trap
hidden among the trees purposely to catch her. A sudden cold wind
makes her shiver . . . last year's leaves rustle and scurry along the
ground . . . . All at once she is seized by a dread of winter, which
seems to be lying in wait for her, only just out of sight. . . . Already
she can feel its ice-cold breath on her face.
For a second reality fades, and, as in a dream, she sees a new
ice-age approaching, great cliffs of ice flowing like lava over the
face of the world . . . over mountains and seas and cities . . . men,
fish, birds, animals, and machines that fly to the moon, all entombed
together . . . preserved for ever in the ice of their common grave.
She is petrified momentarily by this terrifying vision of doom, of
polar ice advancing implacably to destroy all life.
But then the known world returns and she sees only what she
45

has seen so often: smooth column-like beech-trunks, some old tar­
nished ivy leaves on a bank. The foliage of the beeches is still
thick enough to cast a black shade under the darkened sky. Every
so often, a leaf silently flutters down like a stealthy threat of aban­
donment . . . isolation . . . a frightening reminder which makes her
shiver again and clutch her coat tightly round her, overcome by her
superstitious fear of winter's trap lying in wait - who will save her
from it, now that Chas doesn't care any more?
Icy, iepulchral despair infiltrates the gloomy daylight. Alone in
the midst of a frozen, enemy world, she is seized with the kind of
panic a child feels when it first realizes the absence of familiar
figures, and knows it is lost in a crowd.
On the point of crying and calling for help, in her despair, she
suddenly feels something never felt before - a wild desire to be
somewhere else, a desperate longing to escape from her present
hopeless predicament, so strong that it almost amounts to a resolu­
tion to run away.

46

4

A

SINGLE blast of the ship's siren had already warned visi­
tors to · go ashore; but very few of them had taken any no­
tice of it, the great majority waiting for the two final blasts
which, any minute now, would indicate that the actual sailing time
had arrived. Meanwhile they stood about chattering, wandered aim­
lessly round the decks, or collected in groups, which obstructed
free circulation and were a source of annoyance to the few people
who had any definite purpose in moving about.
One of these, who'd been literally searching the ship, subjecting
everyone to a close scrutiny, without ever catching sight of whom­
ever he was looking for, now seemed to be losing hope. Sick of
pushing his way through the crowd, he stopped on the fringe of a
group collected around a professor holding forth on his coming tour,
and stood leaning against the rail, still gazing, though with dimin­
ished expectancy, at the ever-shifting mass of strangers.
He'd got up very early to come here; his head was aching, and
he was tired after his abortive search. His always rather gloomy
face grew still gloomier. Irritable frustration sank to a lower de­
pressive level now that he was no longer hurrying from deck to
deck, going methodically through public rooms, knocking on cabin
doors, darting in and out of unoccupied staterooms, thinking the
whole time he must, must, must find her. . . . Well, he hadn't found
her, and his chances of doing so were getting less every second.
Probably she was not on the ship at all. He had no real reason to
suppose she was . . . except that he'd seen . . . that he'd imagined. . . .
Suddenly he felt a fool, trusting to a mere personal hunch and one
or two vague clues, which now appeared like products of his
imagination.
The question arose, as it did periodically in his mind, as to whether
it was sensible, or even sane, to go on like this - dedicated to
47

finding someone who'd vanished utterly - living in a sort of sub­
merged world consisting of endless journeys and endless streams
of faces, none of them ever the right one. But he seemed to have
no choice in the matter. It was as if he had been condemned . . . .
He recalled an occasion - whether a long or short time ago he was
unable to say, since his search already seemed to have lasted for an
eternity - when, in some crowded station or custom-shed, he'd been
startled by meeting the gaze of a pair of sharp greenish eyes which
had seemed familiar, and had wondered if Chas could be searching
too. A mass of bodies had at once intervened, separating them, so
that he'd never been able to answer the question. But for some
reason the problematic glimpse of the man who had been his friend
had had the effect of rousing him momentarily from the curious
uneasy sub-life to which he'd now reverted, restless as a fever dream,
filled with incessant movement directed not by reason but by vague
suspicions, guesses, omens and things half seen.
The cold wind brought a sudden gust of music, sweeping it away
again before he'd recognized the tune. He knew the ship's band
started playing only a few minutes before the time of departure.
There seemed no point in staying on board till the last, and he
decided to go ashore at once, thus avoiding the worst of the crowd.
He was moving away when a sudden screeching commotion made
him look at some gulls squabbling over the ship's refuse, just as a
much larger gull of a different kind swooped down on a special
morsel, dispersing the rest in a flurry of flapping wings. Next moment
the big bird sailed past him with barely a movement of its enormous
wing-span, gliding up as if drawn at the end of an invisible string.
He watched it rise over the boat-deck, which had been deserted
when he inspected it earlier. Since then a solitary figure had ap­
peared there, at which he stood staring incredulously - a girl whose
extreme slenderness was not disguised by a thick grey hooded coat,
rather like a schoolgirl's. Her back towards him, she seemed to be
watching the people who'd disembarked and were standing on the
quay, gesticulating and shouting incomprehensibly to friends on board.
All at once his face changed and brightened, he eagerly hurried
forward, convinced that she was the girl he'd been looking for every­
where. In spite of the distance between them and the fact that he
hadn't seen her face, he was positive that he'd recognized her.
To reach the boat-deck he had to pass the group around the pro­
fessor. Envying the big gull its effortless flight, he plunged in among
48

all these people, who, determined not to miss a word now that time
was so short, persistently obstructed him by pressing closer in a
compact mass, so that he couldn't get through. He had made hardly
any progress when the siren he was expecting and dreading sounded
its two last fatal blasts with ear-splitting violence.
All those who were not sailing immediately surged towards the
gangway en masse, sweeping him along with them. It was quite
impossible to escape being caught up in this tide of determined
humanity, which relentlessly bore him away from his objective and
off the ship.
Once on the jetty, he saw the girl on the boat-deck again. She
was now considerably further away and kept her head turned towards
a woman who'd joined her, so that her face was still hidden. The
doubts which had already invaded his mind increased as he watched
the pair carrying on an animated conversation - surely this lively
girl wasn't the one? He decided he must, after all, have been mis­
taken . . . but strange to say, he was quite unable to tell whether
the discovery was a relief or a disappointment.
Suddenly the object of his attention turned, he saw her full face,
and all his doubts disappeared in a flash, he forgot everything he
had just been thinking, and once more felt certain of her identity.
She seemed to be looking straight down at him, and he waved
enthusiastically, an involuntary smile, of which he was unaware,
lightening his usually sombre features, while he pushed his way to
the water's edge as if he intended to jump across the dividing gulf.
His gesture, however, passed unnoticed amidst that forest of waving
hands, and he let his arm drop, resuming his habitual pessimistic
expression. Of course she hadn't been looking at him, but at the
scene in general. Now she'd turned once more towards her com­
panion, the hood partly hid her face, and he began to be doubtful
all over again: but nevertheless he went on pressing towards the
gangway, which was abruptly pulled up just before he reached it,
as the steamer started to move very slowly away from the pier.
Luke looked appraisingly at the imperceptibly widening strip of
water, which he could have jumped easily; noting at the same time
that the position of the decks made this impracticable. The boat­
deck was too high above him, its height increased by the rail; while
the lower deck was equally inaccessible, being covered in, so that
if he did jump across he would land on its roof. These calculations
occupied him until the gap had broadened beyond any question of
49

jumping it: whereupon he began shouting and waving his arms,
endeavouring to attract the girl's attention, but without success.
The people he'd pushed aside were already glaring at him indig­
nantly; and his shouts caused other more distant faces to turn to­
wards him as if in astonishment. He was quite oblivious of them,
entirely absorbed in the girl on board, still unable to make up his
mind about her. One moment he was certain she was the girl he
knew; the next just as sure she was not - the latter impression
strengthened when she pointed at somebody in the crowd and burst
out laughing - possibly at his own eccentric behaviour, for he was
still trying to catch her eye by waving his arms like a semaphore.
At last, noticing the annoyed or amused gaze of people near him,
he abruptly ceased these antics: but still kept his eyes fixed on her
receding and now indistinct figure, although common sense told
him it was impossible to recognize anybody at such a distance,
which moreover was increasing each moment.
The boat was now moving faster out into the harbour, its passen­
gers united with those on land only by the flimsy paper streamers
they threw one another. He himself, he discovered, was clutching
one of the tight little paper rolls - how he'd acquired it was a
mystery - which he hurled with all his might over the widening
gap. He had an obscure notion that the unfurling ribbon was bound
to reach her if she was the girl he wanted: and indeed it did actu­
ally get to the boat-deck, twining itself round the rail only a few
inches from her - she could easily have picked it up without even
moving. But, still chattering to her companion, she failed to ob­
serve its arrival.
The man on the quayside clenched his fists so violently that the
semicircular imprints of his nails still marked his palms minutes
later. But even now he didn't know what was causing him such
intense anxiety - was he so urgently willing her to see the streamer,
or not to see it? The boat had changed direction and was beginning
to catch the full force of the wind, which blew a strand of hair
across the girl 's face, concealing it altogether. At the same moment
his streamer was torn from the rail and whirled into mid-air, where
it fluttered dementedly for an instant before falling into the chaos
of tangled fluttering streamers below.
Stretched to their utmost, all the frail paper ribbons were break­
ing, hanging over the ship's side, floating for a second or two be­
fore they sank in the churning water. His spirits sank with them.
50

His thoughts began circling in endless claustrophobic spirals, which
had all been there before and led nowhere. If he really loved Luz,
surely he'd have taken some decisive action, instead of simply allow­
ing her to disappear. . . . But of course he wasn't certain this girl
was Luz. All the same, he surely wouldn't have risked losing her
if. . . . He should have discovered her identity at all costs. . . . A
terrible sense of finality accompanied the realization that she was
lost to him irretrievably . . . the loss began to assume a monstrous
significance.
'That was a splendid throw of yours - what a pity your friend
didn't see. '
Frowning, he turned his head sharply. The speaker was a middle­
aged woman he 'd never seen in his life, wearing a long shapeless
beaver-lamb coat like a disguise. She smiled at him amicably, full
of generalized goodwill - she couldn't have chosen a more unre­
sponsive recipient for it, or one to whom it was less welcome. He
was so preoccupied that his politeness was quite in abeyance, and
he merely said shortly, ' It's a futile custom in any case', relieved
when she walked off without another word, doubtless taking offence
at the rebuff.
Not aware of it, he stayed where he was, gazing sightlessly into
the water at the bottom of the sea-wall which plunged straight down
at his feet, reflected only as a fluctuating darker strip in the depths
below. Even here in the harbour the water was too disturbed to act
as a mirror, blown continually into small waves, its surface blurred
by passing flurries of wind.
When next he looked up, the woman and most of the crowd had
gone, while the' ship was a good way out, executing the tum that
would bring it round facing the open sea. Its decks were deserted
now. Of a grey hooded coat there was no sign.
Nothing was to be gained by waiting any longer. But he couldn't
bear to lose sight of this last, dubious, unsatisfactory link with the
vanished girl, and went on standing there, watching the wide graceful
curve of smooth water the ship left behind in turning, a calm path­
way like the swathe of a scythe, over the turmoil created by its
propellers, which had engulfed all the debris of sodden paper.
Little waves kept lapping the foot of the embankment, lifting the
strands of fine seaweed, which seemed to come to instantaneous
brief life, while they floated, glossy and green, only to be left limp
and brown again on the stone. All at once a larger wave, perhaps
51

caused by the ship's evolutions, perhaps by the rising tide, struck
the wall with a loud slap, and he hastily stepped back from the
spray. Looking round now, he had a puzzling sense of alteration in
his surroundings. Not a soul was to be seen on the waterfront. He
couldn't make out what had become of the huge metal gates through
which he had entered, until he realized that an enormous crane had
silently moved up behind him and was hiding them from view,
though the men working it must have gone for their tea-break. When
it occurred to him that these gates would probably be shut and
locked soon, he at last turned his back on the harbour and started
walking towards them.
He was quite near the crane when the cold wind carried a mournful
hoot over the water, announcing that the boat was leaving the har­
bour's shelter and heading out to sea. He paused to look back at it.
Already meeting the offshore waves, it looked absurdly small, a
toy boat, intermittently disappearing behind the sullen grey masses
of water charging along the skyline. To see it already at vanishing­
point caused him a fresh pang. The whole world seemed to have
become one great grey waste land, in which the fragile girlish figure
had vanished without trace. Where should he start looking for her
now? How would he ever find her again? If only he knew for certain
whether she had, or had not, been the girl he'd seen on the deck. . . .
Over and over again his tormenting thoughts revolved in the same
futile groove, leading him in a circle. The only consolation he could
find anywhere was in his old notion that the two of them were
united by some obscure metaphysical bond . . . and even this seemed
merely a bond between two dreamers, neither of whom could wake. . . .
In the course of these unhappy, fruitless meditations, his eyes
had strayed away from the ship; and now, when he looked for it
again, he wasn't sure he could see it - it could just as well have
been any small smudge on the distant horizon. What was the use of
looking after it, anyhow? That wouldn't bring it back . . . and, in
any case, he wasn't certain . . . .
Sighing wearily, he walked on once more. All he could do was
continue his interminable and hopeless search - wandering for ever
all over the world, without any respite or real chance of success.
He felt tired, depressed, pessimistic, discouraged. Chilled through
and through by the cold wind blowing down the back of his neck,
he automatically turned up his coat collar and thrust his hands deep
into his pockets as he strode along.
52

As soon as he'd passed the crane, he at once saw the towering
gates standing open before him, each with a row of large black­
backed gulls perched on the top of it, all facing into the wind, as
motionless and identical as if they had been stuffed and put up
there as a decoration.

53

5

I

T was early morning and bitterly cold. Luz was on the deck
of the car-ferry, leaning against the rail, taking no notice of
the other passengers waiting to disembark. The landing-stage
was quite near, a row of fir trees behind it standing out more distinctly
than anything else in sight. Later there would be sun; but at this hour
the sky was still overcast, a light mist hiding most of the landscape.
In the misty light the houses clustered at the end of the pier
looked insubstantial, like houses of cloud, liable to change shape at
any moment. She found their indefiniteness disturbing, and at once
looked back at the trees. They were solid and gloomy enough, and
so close now that they appeared to be presenting each separate black
needle for her inspection.
In front of them, a few people had collected to await the ship's
arrival. But from these she deliberately averted her eyes, not want­
ing to see any human being just then, apparently as oblivious of
them as of the passengers crowding all round her. Divided by the
rapidly narrowing strip of water, those on shore stared fixedly across
at the people on board, the two groups confronting each other with
oddly similar blank expressions.
Luz had successfully made herself unaware of both parties. And
when presently a latecomer rushed up with a bag in each hand,
almost bumping into her, she turned her head automatically but
didn't really see him, immediately returning her gaze to the trees,
at which she stared as though an exact description of them would
be required from her at some future date. When the engines stopped,
she was startled by the sudden silence, broken only by the thin
cries of gulls and the swish of water against the sides of the boat,
gliding forward under its own momentum.
*

54

Furious with the steward for forgetting to call him, the belated
passenger had dressed in a violent hurry and rushed out on deck,
grasping a bag in each hand: only to see that the crowd already
waiting to go ashore was much too densely packed for him to in­
sinuate himself among them and reach a favourable spot for disem­
barkation. He'd have to stand right at the back, and would prob­
ably be one of the last to get off the ship.
In his haste and exasperation he barely avoided colliding with
the nearest person, a young woman in a thick grey coat with a
hood rather like a schoolgirl's. It vaguely struck him as odd that,
despite his preoccupation, he should notice what she was wearing,
and even think that hooded coats seemed a winter uniform among
women this year - he saw them everywhere, wherever he went.
The wearer looked round then, giving him such a shock that all his
ideas were thrown into wild confusion.
Luz herself seemed to have looked at him briefly, without rec­
ognition. He told himself that, of course, it couldn't possibly be
Luz - Luz couldn't possibly not have known him. Nevertheless,
the resemblance was extraordinary, so startling that he still felt stag­
gered by it minutes later. He wished she 'd look round again; but
she never moved, leaning on the rail as if detached from what was
going on around her, holding herself aloof from the crowd.
The likeness which had so astonished him left behind a curious
residue of uneasiness. He couldn't help looking at the girl all the
time: her stillness seemed disturbing and unnatural. And her posi­
tion now struck him as strangely ambiguous, a contradictory mix­
ture of resistance and resignation. If she'd been tied to the rail, she
couldn't have kept more motionless, staring, like everyone else, at
the land. Perhaps she was watching for friends or relatives who
were to meet her; though he saw nobody who looked at all suit­
able, the group on the jetty consisting mainly of fishermen, idly
gazing across at the passengers, who gazed back as if petrified,
with identical blank faces.
The engines stopped. A collective movement of anticipation went
through the waiting crowd; people picked up their hand luggage, or
held their papers ready, with varying expressions of eagerness or
anxiety. Only the girl looked as detached as ever, as though land­
ing didn't concern her. She was still in the same posture, and the
man found himself thinking how easily bonds could be concealed
under the voluminous coat - a thought he instantly banished, since
55

it belonged to an unacceptable part of his being which he was always
trying to suppress out of existence.
A barrier was removed, people started to advance slowly, an open
space appeared behind the backs of those just in front. He waited
for the girl to step into it; then, as she did not do so, he went
forward himself, glancing at her inquiringly as he passed. Although
she seemed not to notice, he felt more uneasy, as though he should
have told her the place was rightly hers. Yet, having taken it, he
was reluctant to draw attention to what he had done.
*

She watched the gangway pushed out and seized by some of the
men standing on the pier. Looking at them for the first time, she
saw that they were all dressed alike, as if in uniform, but the uniform
of a past era, its main item a full black belted tunic that seemed to
be padded, which gave them a somewhat outlandish aspect, and did
nothing to lessen the wholly unfavourable impression they made
upon her. In all their faces she seemed to discern something fierce
and frightening, much more alarming than the distrust of strangers
common among peasants in remote localities. Thinking she wouldn't
like to fall into their clutches, she looked away from them to the land.
The mist was gradually rising and breaking up, disclosing a wild
scene of rugged, desolate beauty. The countless inlets, islands and
jagged rocks of the coastline were backed by snow-capped moun­
tains, their lower slopes covered in dense black fir forests like the
close-clinging pelt of some wild animal. She tried to get excited,
stimulated by the thought of landing in this strange northern coun­
try, so unlike the other countries she'd known; but succeeded only
in feeling nervous and reluctant to do so. The nearer it came, the
less she liked the idea of going ashore.
Although they were now more distinct, the houses still retained
their unstable aspect, and looked curiously amorphous - some even
seemed to be collapsing in ruins. Ghostly threads and tendrils of
mist floated in the air, giving everything a hallucinatory appear­
ance, which was intensified by the first evanescent glimmer of sun­
shine, come and gone again in a flash, like an illusion.
What was she doing here? Starting to feel odd and unreal herself
under the influence of these deceptive appearances, she couldn't
suppress her alarm at the prospect of visiting a place at once so
indefinite and so intimidating.
56

*

The slow progress towards the gangway continued, depending
on the length of time each person took to display his papers. Shuffling
along with the rest, Luke still felt obscurely troubled and even looked
back once or twice, half hoping to see the slight figure in the grey
hooded coat advancing indignantly to claim his place. But she never
moved, and standing alone there, apart from everyone else, had an
abandoned air. Quite a long stretch of deck separated them now.
Why he found her immobility so disturbing, he didn't know: but
his uneasiness had become a definite anxiety on her account - he
even considered going back and offering to see her safely ashore;
which amazed him, as he hated talking to strangers.
At this point an interruption occurred in the slow procession. A
man he'd already seen among the cars on the lower deck was now
advancing like a strong swimmer against the tide of passengers moving
the opposite way, pushing through them as if they weren't human
beings but insentient objects obstructing him. Previously he'd no­
ticed this individual only as the owner of a big black shiny
Thunderbird, by far the grandest-looking car on board. Now he was
disagreeably impressed, not only by the arrogant, inconsiderate way
he was elbowing people aside, but by his whole appearance. Yet he
supposed the pushing stranger would be considered handsome . . . .
All of a sudden the haughty aquiline profile reminded him of a
picture, seen long ago, of the pirates who had once sailed from
here in their high-pro wed ships to terrorize half of the world. That
was it: the chap looked like a pirate and was behaving like one. As
he thought this, he realized with dismay that the object of his criti­
cism was making for the girl in the grey coat; in fact he called to
her at this moment: 'What's the matter with you? Why are you still
standing there? Have you gone to sleep? '
*

Lost in vague ruminations and staring towards the land, Luz had
failed to observe the newcomer's approach. The sound of his voice
gave her such a fright that she experienced a wild impuse to run
back and hide in her cabin . . . jump overboard . . . anything to escape going ashore with him . . . .
She herself could not have said what it was about the man that
affected her so strongly. A fierce, primitive sort of vitality radiated
from him - from his compelling eyes and inscrutable countenance,
57

from his silence and strangeness - powerful as a magician's wand,
which had touched her and brought her helplessly under his spell.
Since he monopolized her body and soul, it was most strange that
at this moment she should have noticed, for the briefest fraction of
time, another masculine face watching her in the crowd; a face
which aroused a momentary flicker of hope by its familiarity, be­
fore it vanished, and she instantly forgot having seen it.
The onlooker was astonished to hear his own language spoken
with barely a trace of an accent, and wondered if only the girl' s
reaction made him think the expressionless voice concealed the hint
of a threat. She had swung round as if terrified out of her long
immobility, not speaking a word. Even as far off as he was, he
could see the hugely dilated pupils that made her eyes look black,
blind and unfocused. Then, suddenly becoming conscious of the
fixity of his own gaze, and that none of this was any business of
his, he turned his back, occupying himself ostentatiously with his
luggage. By an effort of will he banished the pair from his thoughts.
But he looked round for them as soon as there was a hold-up, though
it was obvious that they weren't in sight. His brain refused to ac­
cept this. He was still looking about for them when a bleak official
voice drew his attention to the fact that he was the only passenger
left on board. He was amazed to see that this was so; even those
who'd been standing far from the gangway had disembarked and
were already some distance along the jetty.
When he himself had walked about half its length he glanced
round in case a grey hooded coat had appeared behind him; but no one
at all was to be seen, either on the landing-stage or on the ship.
The ship . . . the ship where . . . the last place where. . . . He stopped
abruptly. After being so struck by that astonishing resemblance,
how could he have let the girl go without making sure of her iden­
tity? Back came his old painful uncertainties about his own feel­
ings; to be violently rejected this time. All his doubts had suddenly
vanished. Luz was the only human being he'd ever loved. An intol­
erable pain pierced him. He was totally lost without her . . . estranged
from his life utterly, and from the world. This was the world into
which he'd been born; the only world he would ever know. Yet
nowhere in it did he feel in the slightest degree at home. She was
his home . . . his one sanctuary upon earth . . . the only place of
safety for him in the whole universe. But he had lost her . . . and
consequently was condemned to absolute loneliness in an alien, frozen
58

vacancy . . . at the mercy of something huge, insensate and merciless
as an eclipse . . . . For a moment his isolation was so agonizingly
intense that it seemed impossible to go on living. He longed only
to plunge into the black pit of annihilation opening before him.
Then a sudden sense of urgency seized him. There wasn't a second
to lose. He must do something immediately . . . .
He took a few hurried steps, then broke into a run. His mind in
confusion, he was unaware of how his two suitcases impeded him,
bumping into him with every step as he rushed on, obsessed by the
necessity for speed, bounding over the lobster-pots and fishing-nets
which littered the quay, at times coming dangerously near the un­
protected edge. Too agitated to take any notice of obstacles, he
might easily have come to grief on the slippery stones, some of
which were covered in a slimy treacherous growth either of moss
or seaweed. It was by sheer good luck that he · escaped the various
hazards and reached the end of the pier without any mishap.
Directly in front of him now were the grey indeterminate houses
along the waterfront, a narrow street leading between them to an
inner square, where he could see the station. Pausing to get hi�
breath back, he heard a train whistle and afterwards travel rapidly
out of earshot. Only a few scattered figures were moving about the
streets, all wearing the regional dress, and not in the least like the
passengers off the boat, who had all disappeared; they'd either gone
into the houses or left by the departed train.
A feeling of helplessness and frustration had replaced his un­
bearable loneliness, and he stood without moving, not knowing what
to do next. The only idea which occurred to him was to make in­
quiries at each house in tum, and this he at once discarded as futile.
Of course these insular peasants wouldn't answer his questions. As
a foreigner he'd automatically be suspect - regarded as a lunatic or
a criminal; probably both.
He'd stopped beside a bookstall at the end of the pier, and the
papers and periodicals in different languages spread out there gradually
began to engage his attention. One of them, weighted down by four
pebbles, was open at a picture headed ' Sea Rescue', showing an
enormous black male arm clutching a fair girl against a background
of stormy waves. The photograph seemed to have been taken by an
amateur, as it was badly out of focus, the whole perspective so
distorted that it seemed to record an act of violence instead of a
rescue. The upper part of the girl's thin body was bent back so that
59

her blonde hair hung down, mingling with the spray from the rag­
ing waters, into which the impossibly huge arm might have been
thrusting her. The photograph seemed vaguely familiar, as if he 'd
already seen it somewhere . . . perhaps in the earlier editions he
had read during the journey. Probably it was this very distortion
that made him remember it. . . .
Suddenly his expression changed, he forgot all about the picture,
and looked round anxiously to see whether anyone was watching,
overcome by embarrassment at the thought of his recent sprint. What
an idiot, what an absolute bloody fool, he must have looked, leap­
ing over lobster-pots as if in an obstacle race, and dashing along
the pier with his bags. Anybody who'd seen him must have thought
he was crazy, particularly if they 'd noticed him standing here for
the last few minutes, doing nothing whatever . . . just idling away
the time at the bookstall . . . as if he was in no hurry at all and had
all the time in the world . . . as if he 'd never hurried in his life, and
intended to waste the rest of the day idly staring at magazines . . . .
Nobody, however, was anywhere near him. It was lunch-time and
the streets were almost deserted. None of the few distant figures
was looking his way. So, since the bookstall had been left unattended,
he felt he could safely suppose that his temporary aberration had
escaped notice.

60

6

D

RIVING away from the ship, Luz could feel the silence of
the village above the Thunderbird's low humming. By this
time the sun had consumed the mist altogether. Yet the
houses looked no more solid than they had from the boat, their
outlines no more distinct. Many, she saw, really were collapsing in
ruins, producing the queer amorphous effect she'd already noticed.
The high-walled, narrow lanes seemed claustrophobic: and, in addition,
she got an impression of emptiness, solitude, absence of life, in
these winding, deserted alleyways, which was not adequately ex­
plained by the fact that most people were indoors, eating their mid­
day meal.
Once a town of importance with its fortified harbour, this place
of silence and toppling grey stones had now been reduced to a
village, too big for its inhabitants, with only numerous massive aban­
doned structures to testify to the more prosperous, warlike past.
Decay was ubiquitous; occupied buildings indistinguishable from
ruins; cobbles merging without intervening pavements into heaps
of rubble and subsiding walls. Instead of giving the walls defini­
tion, the bright light seemed to rob them of a dimension: nothing
was stereoscopic. And the fiat effect of a drawing seemed to her
slightly disturbing in the thin, clear, heatless sunshine - frightening
in its suggestion of unreality.
Nothing she saw was familiar enough to inspire comparison with
other places she'd known; so that the idea of nothing here being
real followed almost inevitably, and was confirmed by the house to
which she was taken.
It was the last house, its imposing mass marked the village bound­
ary, and was the centre of a group of more or less intact original
buildings, which dwarfed the later dwellings to insignificance and
stood out like a fortress against the pale blue sky. She'd been watching
61

this impressive landmark for several minutes before the car turned
into a short cul-de-sac terminating in front of it, where the cobbles
widened into a sort of courtyard. This approach resembled a pri­
vate road, all the neighbouring structures being derelict, the end
house the only one to show signs of occupation. Built originally as
an integral part of the great wall encircling the village, it still had
the forbidding aspect of an armed fort. Looking at its blank fa�ade,
windowless but for a few slitlike apertures high up near the roof,
she could scarcely believe such a place was lived in by present-day
people. Yet when her companion told her it had been the home of
his ancestors for hundreds of years, she at once saw how well it
suited his lean, muscular, militant figure, his grim, good-looking
marauder's face.
She had to make an effort to leave the car, which seemed an
anachronism, blocking the narrow street. Reluctantly and with trepi­
dation she passed through a huge ancient arched door, topped by
armorial bearings, barred and ornamented with iron, heavy and massive
enough for the door of a prison, the fortified walls looming far
over her head. The interior, however, seemed - to a first glance, at
least - reassuringly civilized, the sparsely furnished main rooms
unexpectedly spacious and elegant, their polished floors reflecting
the glimmer of dim old chandeliers.
Away from the street, the windows overlooked parklike stretches
of grass, broken by groups of trees and jagged grey rock, sloping
down to the fiord. Across and around the water, black fir forests
gloomily climbed the first mountain slopes, spreading darkness
throughout the scene, even in bright sunshine.
The slow striking of a clock somewhere reminded her that the
ship they had come by stopped here only a very short time and must
be due to leave. Simultaneously realizing that she was about to
lose the last link with her past and with the known world, she opened
a window and leaned out, hoping for a final glimpse of it. The boat
had already gone. But although there was no sign of it, she still
kept her eyes fixed on the fiord, which dominated the view in a
rather oppressive fashion. No one looking out of any of these win­
dows could possibly escape the sight of the grey-green water, blackish
where it reflected black trees, curving away in the shape of a drag­
on's tail between wooded banks which occasionally rose into cliffs.
There seemed to her to be something faintly menacing about the
way it obtruded its motionless, mirrorlike, lakelike surface, which
62

closed every vista, and looked as if frozen solid in its dead calm.
The tall handsome housekeeper who came to show her to her
room seemed to take an instant dislike to her, judging by her icy,
aloof manner. Without speaking a word, she strode ahead along
dark winding corridors, turning at right angles again and again, never
looking back to see if the girl was still following, until the latter
was too bewildered to know whether they were in the same house
or traversing labyrinthine adjoining ruins.
At last her intimidating escort paused momentarily at the foot of
a steep narrow stair, rising into black shadow, informing her, still
without turning her head, 'These are your stairs' , putting a pecu­
liar, mystifying emphasis on the personal pronoun. Up she went
then, her tall black figure forbidding, her back, stiff and straight as
a ramrod, radiating dislike, disapproval, and passed through a small
lobby at the top before opening the door of the room beyond.
Luz was too breathless from hurrying after her to say more than
thank you, so relieved by the woman's departure that she forgot to
ask how she was to find her way down again.
Now the room claimed all her attention. It was like no other
room she had ever occupied and struck her as very strange - its
strangeness seeming far in excess of its unusual features. What most
impressed her was the absolute silence, which was unnatural, no
sound penetrating either from outside or from other rooms. Later
on, when she discovered how completely it was cut off from the
rest of the house, the narrow stairs leading nowhere else, so that
whatever happened in it would be inaudible beyond its four walls,
she understood why she had been given this particular room.
The few pieces of furniture were arranged in such a way as to
leave the centre of the polished floor bare and empty, like a dance
floor. A tremendously wide bed stood on a raised platform covered
in sheepskin, and the soft, deep-textured skin combined with a warm­
shaded lamp to produce a luxurious effect. The entire wall facing
the bed was hidden by a gigantic mirror, more suited to a theatre
than a house in a remote village. Confronted by her reflection here,
she felt as though she were on the stage; and the theatrical sugges­
tion might have been planned deliberately to augment her growing
sense of being unreal.
*

Alone in the silent, isolated room, the only room to which the
63

steep stairs give access, knowing no one can hear what takes place
there - that no one is meant to hear - she feels totally vulnerable,
at the mercy of the man with the pirate's face, who enters without
knocking, without a word. Since she always sees him first in the
mirror, he acquires the frightening unearthliness of the through­
the-Iooking-glass-world: a mysterious, sinister stranger - how con­
ceivably connected with her? - whose gloomy phantasmagoric ar­
rogance is that of a pirate born out of time, defrauded of his blood­
thirsty triumphs, yet convinced of his absolute right to despoil and
ravish, overriding all opposition by his characteristic high-handed
assurance, his inscrutable, haughty, contemptuous silence, his ab­
solute determination to have his own way.
His eyes, always haunting the depths of the glass, icy grey-black
like the fiord, are endowed with the destructive power of the dead­
liest weapons, piercing her eyes, penetrating her inmost self, and
inflicting wounds through which her whole being drains into stupe­
faction . . . drowns in their frigid depths . . . while she is seized and
taken as if under narcosis.
*

It is late at night, but the rose-shaded lamp by the bed is still on.
Once again the words ' Have you gone to sleep?' are quietly spo­
ken with a just perceptible accent by the voice that seems to hide
an undefined threat beneath the absence of all expression.
The girl sits up abruptly but doesn't answer, watching the in­
truder implacably coming nearer to her through the glass with that
slightly rolling gait pirates are supposed to have; and when he reaches
the bed she bends her head, keeping her eyes lowered.
The man ' s hand finds its way under her chin, the extended
finger and thumb stretching from ear to ear, and, pressing effort­
lessly on the jawline, forces her to raise her face. No matter how
hard she tries to resist, she has to give way to the merciless pres­
sure that tilts her face up, obliging her to meet his eyes, into which
her eyes are drawn helplessly. She has the sensation of falling
bodily into the bottomless abyss of his gaze . . . fixed on her with
such persuasive mesmeric power that, as his hands fasten upon her
shoulders and push her down, she sinks back obediently, and even
makes small unconscious compliant movements shaping her body
to his . . . .
Later, he is sitting on the edge of the wide bed, still keeping a
64

predatory hand on his prey, lying there at his mercy - so still as to
seem dead. or entranced. Amidst the disarray of the bedclothes, his
fingertips stray over her thighs, her stomach, her naked breasts;
then trace the delicate outline of face and throat. Finally he slides
his hand under her pale hair, again forcing her to lift her head and
expose the large, darkly dilated, drugged eyes . . . into which he
forces the inscrutable gaze of his own icy, impenetrable troll's eyes,
then silently looks away. Withdrawing his hand, he lets her head
fall back on the pillow, limp as a doll's, and without giving her
another glance, leaves the room . . . where the soft click of the latch,
the sigh of the closing door, his barely audible footsteps descend­
ing the stairs which lead nowhere else linger stealthily . . . threat­
eningly . . . until silence once more reigns supreme.
An interval passes before the girl 's reflection sits up in the mir­
ror, her hair dishevelled, her expression blank, disorientated, lost
and abnormal, like that of someone emerging slowly from deep
hypnosis. Naked and shivering, she sits there in the middle of the
big bed, now disordered as by a struggle, the coverings spilling
over the edge of the platform and spreading along the floor.
The room is very cold, and her shivering grows more violent.
But some more moments pass, as though there's a block in her
brain - as if the message of cold has to reach her by some long,
roundabout route - before she bends, stiff as a blonde clockwork
doll, grabs the blankets, puts out the light and huddles down under
the untidy covers, all in one automatic continuous movement. She
has not uttered a word the whole time.
*

Her new unreal self is caught, imprisoned in the glass, where, no
matter how hard she tries not to look, sooner or later she's bound
to see it, frozen in poses of hypnotized acquiescence, a pale ghost
with the mechanized motions of a walking doll, which eventually
becomes indistinguishable from the real Luz.
As a foredoomed victim, she has had no alternative . . . her sur­
render seems preordained to this marauder armed with a sorcerer's
powers, who all his life has taken whatever he wants without thought
of payment. The moment he 's attracted by anything, he has to have
it . . . it's a sort of obsession, against which resistance is useless. In
her case there has been none, he has advanced into territory sub­
dued beforehand, encountering no opposition. Conquered without a
65

struggle, she falls prone and helpless before him, as if she has been
subject to him ever since time began . . . .
She even derives a certain relief from his savage embrace: his
brutal love-making, depriving her of will - of her reality as a human
being - reduces her to the status of his possession, and as such she
feels more or less safe. Except when his cold, hard, statuesque face
changes, sliding into an even more frightening murderous mask at
moments of sudden rage . . . or when he withdraws into one of his
terrible silences, lasting for hours, for days, leaving her entirdy
abandoned, utterly alone and forgotten.
On the far side of the looking-glass time is elastic and can't
be measured. The bright, short, cold, northern days slip through
her hands like beads. Winter has come very close to her and is
still on her track. But although she knows winter must soon over­
take her, unreality sets her fears at a distance . . . puts a remoteness
between them.
A shadow herself among shadow actors, she plays her
uncomprehended part in a foreign language . . . surrounded by de­
vious looks . . . crooked smiles . . . half-heard alien voices whisper­
ing secrets.

66

7

O

F

course there was no hotel in the village. It was not
the sort of place to attract visitors. Usually a room could
be had at the cafe, but repairs were being done there at the
moment, so even this accommodation was not available. The
proprietor could provide only meals for the stranger, and suggest
that he make use of a spare room in his sister's house, which was
not far away.
The room turned out to be dark, depressing and devoid of con­
veniences. Its one concession to the twentieth century was an
electric bulb dangling from the middle of the ceiling, where it lit
neither the bed nor the table. In any case, the presence of an oil­
lamp and a candle suggested that the supply of electricity was un­
reliable.
Little or no preparation, he noted, frowning, seemed to have been
made to receive him. Numerous pieces of dark, heavy, old furni­
ture crowded into the room without regard for appearances made it
seem like a store-room, where someone had just made the bed and
filled the big ewer with cold water. His frown, however, was auto­
matic, part of his lifelong struggle to hide his isolation by imagin­
ing and then imitating the behaviour of other people in similar
circumstances - he frowned merely because he believed dis­
pleasure would be the normal reaction, not because he him­
self was displeased by the room. Although he was used to a high
standard of living within the framework of civilization, by far the
greater part of his life was spent in solitary travel in remote places,
and under conditions far worse than these. Without investigating
the thought, he vaguely supposed that his present surroundings were
'suitable'. And it was true that the room matched his gloomy, severe
expression; though this almost certainly was not what he meant.
His two suitcases, one on top of the other, occupied the only
67

space previously left vacant by the furniture, directly in front of
the window, where he stood looking out at the remains of an ancient
protective wall, which had encircled the village in the old days.
Now half in ruins, its upper part had collapsed in a cascade of
rubble on to open ground sloping down to the fiord. The yard that
must once have divided the house from the wall no longer existed,
this area too being full of the debris nobody had bothered to clear
away, piled up nearly to the height of the window.
There was a knock at the door. The frown still on his face,
he called out 'Come in! ' and an elderly, poorly dressed woman
entered.
' Here's the key. ' Stopped, probably, by his frowning face, she
remained just inside the door, without relinquishing the big heavy
key in her hand, surveying him with an expression no more ami­
able than his own, until she finally said: ' You won't forget to lock
up after you, will you? '
As he'd already given an assurance on this point when asking
for the key so that he needn't disturb her if he came in late from
the cafe, he replied irritably that she need not worry - hadn't he
told her he would see to it?
She said nothing, but still went on standing there, watching him
suspiciously, twisting the key in her gnarled fingers with their en­
larged joints, as if she couldn't bear to part with it; and he realized
that she was regretting having agreed to let him the room when her
brother had urged her to do so for the sake of the money. Probably
she was afraid of having a strange man, and a foreigner into the
bargain, in the house where she lived alone; perhaps wondering
whether he was a criminal who would murder her in her bed. . . .
With an effort, he again recited the story concocted on the spur of
the moment: that he was a perfectly respectable traveller who merely
wanted a quiet room in which to work undisturbed on the book he
was writing about his journeys. But the repetition appeared to have
no effect. She continued to look at him so distrustfully that he saw
she might really decide to throw him out even now, in spite of her
obvious poverty - a serious matter, since there seemed to be no
alternative accommodation - and that he must somehow persuade
her to let him stay.
In exasperated silence, he produced his notecase, extracted several
notes and laid them on the top of the suitcase in front of him - the
money would talk more convincingly than he could. The amount
68

was ridiculously excessive for such a poor, comfortless room, and
it occurred to him, too late, that his eagerness to take it as demon­
strated by this lavish overpayment, might only increase her suspicions.
It would have been quite enough to display the sum she had asked
for, which indeed was already much more than the room was worth.
To his relief, however, avarice apparently overcame her fears at
the sight of such wealth, and she handed over the key, snatching
up the notes immediately afterwards as if afraid he might change
his mind.
*

As soon as the visitor came in after lunch, he went straight to
the window and stared out so intently that he seemed to be looking
for someone, although as usual there was no sign of life out there;
nothing moved.
The scene had a rugged, sombre impreSSIveness, but was gloomy
in the extreme, composed entirely of shadings of black and grey,
which awaited only the imminent stark white of snow to add the
finishing touch to its desolation. His eyes fixed themselves on the
fiord which was its centre - anybody who didn't know would take
it for a lake, it was so motionless, the slow ebb and swell of the
tides perceptible only during exceptionally stormy weather. No other
houses were visible from here, this one being on the very edge of
the village. Even the remains of the massive wall soon collapsed
altogether, leaving just the bare sloping ground, now covered in
dead vegetation. At the foot of the slope, the glassy water, exactly
reflecting black trees, looked lifeless, funereal, in its dead calm,
emitting a pallid and ghostly gleam. Something malignant seemed
to be rising from it -: suddenly it appeared to him as the source of
the surrounding gloom. No wonder the local people believed it was
bottomless and the home of some kind of monster. . . . Before his
eyes, the forest was taking on a threatening impenetrable aspect,
the whole wild mountainous landscape assuming an air of ferocity
it derived from the fiord . . . from something savage and prehistoric
which dwelt in its unplumbed depths . . . something always hungry
for victims . . . perpetually demanding a living sacrifice . . . .
These last thoughts were just below conscious level, and, as if to
avoid recognizing them, he moved away, taking several turns up
and down the restricted space, before he seemed drawn back to the
window.
69

Immediately then he leaned forward, staring out with a fresh in­
terest. Although he couldn't see it, he knew that a narrow path
skirted the fiord, running on into the forest, and he seemed to have
caught sight of a woman down there, just before she vanished among
the trees. His impulse to rush off in pursuit was checked by consider­
able doubt as to whether he'd really seen anyone, since he'd had
the same impression before and followed it up, without ever finding
the person he'd hurried after, or anybody at all. Nevertheless, he
turned to pick up his coat, still lying on the bed where he'd thrown
it a few minutes earlier; but, having done so, stood in uncertainty,
holding it in his hands. His hesitation was mainly due to the idea
that the figure he seemed to have seen was a kind of delusion; but
now the landlady was involved as well. He was sure she kept a
close watch on his movements, and she would undoubtedly feel
inquisitive as to why he was going out again now, just after he had
returned from the cafe.
Oh, to hell with that! Suddenly furious with himself, he thrust
his arms violently into the sleeves of his coat, his decision made
for him. This was one of the times when the importance he at­
tached to the opinions of others enraged him; when he felt only
abysmal contempt of the diffidence and desire for conformity thus
implied.
Eager to show his independence, he went to the door; but instantly
hurried back to the window, opened it, and stepped easily from
the sill on to the heaped rubble outside, pulling the window
shut after him with the tips of his fingers, before climbing over the
wreckage. With conflicting feelings, he strode rapidly down the slope,
elated at having hit on this method of evading his landlady 's
supervision, but also astonished and rather embarrassed by his
own eccentric act, which seemed most out of keeping with his
usual behaviour.
*

He always avoided the village, which struck him as being en­
tombed in its violent past like Lot's wife in her pillar of salt: its
inhabitants seemed more behind the times than many primitive tribes,
fixed as they were on a lost warlike supremacy, even their clothes
based on obsolete military uniform. Apparently the present day meant
less to them than their former world-invading expeditions of con­
quest, rape and rapine, of which they must have been constantly
70

reminded by the derelict fortifications they lived among. The con­
sistently hostile attitude they'd adopted towards himself was only
to be expected, and suited him very well. He was glad that, even
now after he'd been coming to the cafe for some days, no one ever
spoke to him there except the proprietor, and he only in a pro­
fessional capacity.
His long, solitary, daily walks were always in the direction of
greater loneliness, into the sombre, mountainous country that ap­
peared to stretch on and on endlessly, and to be totally uninhabited.
Not once in the course of his wanderings had he encountered a
single soul. Nothing could have astounded him more than to hear,
returning at twilight one evening, several voices speaking together
quite near him, although nobody was in sight.
Its feeble lights coming on one by one like a dim cluster of glow­
worms, the village was still some distance away, and he was cer­
tain there were no houses nearer. Having stared all round without
discovering where the voices came from, he turned to the fiord.
But there was no sign of a boat on the flat expanse of water, which
looked solid enough to walk on, like a sheet of glass or dark ice.
In that lonely stillness, and in the fading light, the apparently dis­
embodied voices sounded unearthly. The uncanny effect was in­
creased by a number of vast, rounded boulders, torn from the
mountainside in some prehistoric upheaval, which lay together at
the water's edge, looking like severed heads after a mass execution
of giants. Each was as big as a cottage, and all appeared much the
same shape in the dimness. Only when a lamp showed yellow against
the blue dusk did he realize that one of them was the work of man,
and the place where the speakers had congregated.
Suddenly curious about such an improbable gathering in this wild,
remote spot, he left the path and approached the lighted window,
stopping before he was close enough to be seen from inside. His
footsteps were soundless on the thick grass. In any case, the others
were making far too much noise to have heard them.
The small, low-ceilinged room was crowded; there was much
smoke, many raised voices talking at once. At first he was too con­
fused and dazzled to make anything of the disconnected scraps of
talk that were audible, or to recognize the various gestures, limbs,
faces, swimming in the haze as in a tank full of smoke and uproar.
So many outlandish figures in their archaic dress, all packed tightly
into this small space, their faces red as if reflecting flames, thick
71

smoke swirling all about them, reminded him of some primitive
picture of hell.
The first person he recognized definitely was an elderly man de­
scribed by the cafe proprietor as a leading figure, employed, as
most of them were, by the owner of the last house in the village,
who seemed to stand in a sort of feudal relationship to its inhabi­
tants. The old fellow's daughter, housekeeper at that same house,
was the one woman present in the room crowded with men. The
onlooker recalled the proprietor's words to the effect that she was
'worth any two men in the district', which could have been more
than a manner of speaking, for the handsome, forbidding female
was nearly as tall as her father, and had the same stem, resolute,
unrelenting expression.
The old man seemed to be telling a story, though few people
could have heard what he said. His voice went on steadily as if
relating something he knew by heart, the actual words mainly in­
audible. From the few phrases that reached him, the listener gath­
ered that he was recounting an old local legend which must have
been familiar to all those present: every winter, a beautiful young
girl had to be thrown into the fiord from the high rocks to appease
the dragon that lived in its lowest depths. Swirling up to the sur­
face, the hideous monster, which had a snake 's body and doglike
head armed with long pointed teeth, tore the living victim to pieces
before the eyes of those making the sacrifice.
Some connection between the present gathering and the story
had prompted the telling of it. But this the man outside could
not follow, although the noise had slowly begun to subside. Hear­
ing a reference to rumours from further north, followed by some­
thing unintelligible about ice melting or moving, he recalled snatches
of talk he had caught at the cafe, in which these same rumours
had been mentioned, but he remained as much in the dark
as ever.
Silence fell by degrees. People stopped talking among themselves
to listen to the narrator, who was now giving details of the actual
ceremony, speaking all the time in the present tense and as if he
himself habitually took part in the sacrifice. 'We tie her hands, but
not very tightly, and leave her feet free so that she can struggle a
bit. If the dragon didn't see her struggling he might think we'd
palmed off a dead girl on him. . . . As soon as she's kneeling at the
edge of the rock, the water below starts boiling . . . we can see the
72

dragon's great scaly coils . . . . We hurl her down, and the whole
fiord becomes a maelstrom, blood and foam fly in all directions . . . . '
The last words were uttered with dramatic satisfaction into dead
silence: but immediately afterwards a perfect babel of voices broke
out, everyone again talking at the same time, so that the listener
caught only unrelated fragments of what was said.
To his surprise, all the dour, glum faces had suddenly become
eager and animated; and from this fact, rather than from any­
thing he could hear, he concluded that they were discussing the
sacrifice with the same gusto and personal interest they would
have displayed over a football match between their own and a rival
village. It was, obviously, a topic with which everyone in the
room felt passionately concerned, and in no mere theoretical
way either.
'There aren't so many good-looking girls as all that - why should
the dragon get the pick of the bunch?'
This new loud facetious voice spoke just inside the window, every
word came clearly through the pane, causing a lot of laughter and
exclamations.
'And why should we sacrifice one of our girls, anyhow,' it went
on, 'when an outsider would do just as well? Some girl who isn't
connected with us . . . . ' The meaningful tone of the assertive voice
conveyed the idea that the speaker had a particular individual in
mind, and that the others would know who was meant - evidently
they did, for this new suggestion started heated arguments all over
the room.
The meeting divided itself finally into two opposing groups: the
elders, who wouldn't hear of any change in the established ritual,
and the younger men, determined not to lose an attractive girl.
'You can't play tricks on the dragon! ' The angry voice of the
old man who'd related the legend drowned the rest. 'The dragon's
been starved far too long already . . . . '
Now an extraordinary interruption occurred: his daughter, who'd
said nothing so far and was busy across the room filling the mugs
and glasses extended by massive hands, looked up suddenly and
shouted at him, though she was too far off for her voice to be
heard through the window. The onlooker just had time to see the
outraged expression on the old man's face before he swung round
to answer, so that his words were lost too.
Putting down the jug she was holding, the housekeeper pushed
73

through the crowd of men and confronted her father with arms folded
and flashing eyes, apparently challenging him. She looked so in­
tense and intimidating that the watcher instinctively took a step
back, again missing what was said. So far he hadn't heard a word
and had no idea why they were arguing, but, approaching again, he
was amazed by the distortion of the woman's mouth - she seemed
to spit the furious words at her father, whose face was on a level
with her own.
'I tell you, it's got to be done! '
She was almost screaming, shouting at the top of her voice, so
that every word was distinct as she launched out into a venomous
tirade against 'pale, thin girls who looked as pure and angelic as if
they were made of glass . . . . I'd like to smash them all to smither­
eens! ' was her furious conclusion. 'I'll hurl her down off the rock
myself, if none of you have the guts to do it! '
Breathless, her chest heaving, she turned her head to gaze all
round the room, her blazing eyes shooting invisible rays of scorn
at the men, who shifted uneasily or muttered among themselves,
taken aback by her viciousness. The father lifted his clenched fist
as if meaning to strike her down; but she was quite undaunted by
his threatening pose, again standing face to face with him, drawn
up to her full height, her expression contemptuous and utterly without
fear.
A hush had fallen upon the villagers, who were all watching with
round, avid eyes - such a public scene between two of their lead­
ing personalities must have had immense drama - when, before the
raised fist had time to descend, a new voice that had not been heard
broke the charged silence with a seriousness and urgency which
immediately diverted the general attention and relegated the quarrel
to unimportance.
' Stick to the point! Stop wasting time over side issues! We've
got to act, and act quickly . . . . Don't you realize there's hardly any
time left? My brother who's come down from Nordkaap used to
hear the glaciers roaring closer each night! '
The words raised a storm of voices in the small room. But, at
this point, the listener out in the dark turned abruptly and walked
away from the cottage as fast as he could. These peasants were
worse than savages, he was thinking, noticing at the same time that
he was half frozen - it served him right for standing there all that
time listening to such a ridiculous rigmarole. Since when had he
74

become so interested in village gossip? Angry with himself for in­
dulging in this grotesque eavesdropping, he walked back to his lodg­
ings as fast as was possible in the darkness.
As soon as he 'd taken his coat off indoors, he got out the note­
book in which, to pass the time as much as to confirm the reason
he'd given for wanting the room, he'd begun writing down all he
remembered about a certain tropical island, the one place in the
world inhabited by a race of mysterious singing lemurs known as
the Indris. He had a curious, deep, almost mystical feeling for these
rare, gentle, tree-dwelling creatures and their weird, fascinating songs,
and in thinking about them quickly forgot the barbarous talk he'd
been hearing.
He had just described his long search for the Indris, struggling
for days through dense jungle without finding a trace of their presence,
until he'd begun to wonder if they had any existence except in
local legend and imagination. The whole subject was of intense
interest to him, occupying his mind so frequently that he wrote
without effort, the sentences seeming to form of their own accord.
Now, however, he paused and sat motionless, pen in hand, gazing
at nothing. He had reached a climax of his narrative and was re­
calling the wonderful day when, just before sunrise, from the trees
all round him, had burst a pure, sweet, melodious chiming, as of
hundreds of golden bells - the overture to the unearthly music he
was about to hear for the first time. Even then he hadn't managed
to see the lemurs; and they still remained invisible when they re­
peated their strange concert at sunset. This state of affairs went on
for several days longer, the shy singers always keeping out of sight,
hidden in the tops of the great trees, where they conducted their
secret life screened by the many layers of leaves, moving swiftly
and silently through the branches, while he blundered after them
on the ground, hacking his way through the undergrowth, with only
their morning and evening chorus to guide him.
This period he regarded in his own mind as a time when, in
some obscure way, he 'd been put on trial and eventually not found
wanting. Yet he'd never understood why the Indris had at last de­
cided to trust him, accepting him as harmless and even friendly . . .
appearing before him quite openly from then on, allowing him to
fondle them and play with the young ones . . . .
Instead of writing all this down, he went on sitting in a sort of
waking dream, brooding vaguely over the music which had haunted
75

and held him enthralled ever since that original hearing. The peculiar
spell the singing exerted over him was so potent that he gradually
seemed to be hearing a faint echo of it in the midst of his rumina­
tions . . . a sound which by degrees grew louder and more compel­
ling, until it filled his head, inducing an almost entranced condition.

76

8

T

HE room with its own staircase lost none of its strangeness
for the girl who occupied it without ever feeling at all at
home there. Yet she often retreated to it, the one place she
could call her own in the vast, rambling, fortress-dwelling; the one
room where she was not apt to be suddenly startled by the silent
approach of the formidable housekeeper. The woman intimidated
her more and more as time passed. On some days she actually seemed
to pursue her with spiteful looks and comments, as though driven
by a compulsive urge to vent her unremitting antagonism, incom­
prehensible to its object, who was too innocent, or too preoccu­
pied, to guess its probable reason.
Now she was trying to concentrate on a book and ignore her
surroundings; but her attention kept wandering towards a suppressed
idea she refused to acknowledge . . . until it began to come between
her and the printed page . . . forcing her to realize how her eyes
were continually being drawn to the great mirror by an attraction
that threatened to become irresistible at any moment. . . . Where­
upon she jumped up, quickly put on her heavy coat, and, feeling
unpleasantly nervous, hurried along dark twisting corridors which
were now familiar, and left the building.
The air outside was so cold that it took her breath away for a
second. But the sun was shining brightly - which she hadn't noticed
indoors, as the small, deeply recessed windows were difficult to see
out of - and was sparkling on the white slopes of grass in front of
the house, where each separate blade was now stiffened with rime.
Glittering with frost, the wild, sombre landscape looked less for­
bidding, only the trees still radiating their usual gloom. The sinis­
ter black forest spread everywhere, it was impossible to avoid it.
However, she took a path she knew well by the water, which dipped
only briefly into the trees, soon coming back into the open.
77

The cold intensified as the narrow track entered the forest, where
black tangled branches made almost a solid roof, penetrated only
by a spattering of gold sunspots. The chaotic masses of trees shut
out the view entirely, showing nothing but an occasional glint of
water. Suddenly she looked for the fiord, failed to find it, and in­
stantly felt uneasy. It seemed a long time since she'd last seen it why was she taking so long, much longer than usual, to get out of
the trees?
Anxiety quickened her steps. But it was impossible to hurry in
the forest. Immediately an unseen root tripped her, so that she almost
fell . . . a branch, simultaneously tugging her back, caught in her
hair, lashing out at her viciously when it was disentangled. The
trees seemed to obstruct her intentionally, with deliberate malice . . . .
Trying not to see how alarmingly they were closing in, she stared
round intently for the fiord, without which she couldn't even tell
whether she was walking the right way. But nothing was visible
except the black tent of the forest; and seeing that it was no longer
pierced by gold pinpoints of sunshine, she was at once seized by a
new fear, thinking the sun might have set already, overcome by a
childish terror of these black trees surrounding her, horrifyingly
tall, their utter stillness suggesting concentrated attention. If only
something would move and attract their attention from herself. But
she alone moved. Everything else was frozen, immobile. The whole
forest had frozen in watchful attentiveness, far too full of its un­
canny, malevolent life, which was draining away her own. She was
growing less real every second . . . more spectral . . . a ghost-woman,
imprisoned by black walls of towering trees on all sides . . . caught
by the forest as in a monstrous trap.
It all seemed to have happened to her before. She seemed to
know this terror darkening the air. The past, that was where it came
from, the fear she felt now . . . this sensation of weakness and un­
reality in all her being . . . these shivers running down her spine.
She 'd already experienced them, and now they'd again overtaken
her. The anguish, the terror, the derealization, were part of a re­
petitive pattern . . . the pattern of the victim, swept along helplessly
to her destruction, doomed without knowing why.
Just as she was sinking in total despair, the steely cold gleam of
water appeared through the dark mesh of branches. But her relief
was only momentary. She was not really reassured, even when she
finally extricated herself from the trees. Unnerved by the savage,
78

desolate landscape, she felt the primitive dread of something alert
but invisible, watching her, waiting to pounce; and this superstitious
fear made it only too clear that she had escaped nothing by running
away.
She was afraid to look up, but now nervously forced herself to
raise her eyes to the mountain slopes, bristling with trees like guns,
in stark black outline against a lurid red sky. So the sun really had
set. And she must be miles from the village. She'd never get back
in daylight.
For a moment she stood petrified, while the absolute silence and
loneliness of the scene grew quite horrifying, hiding unspeakable
terrors, and the immutable seemed poised on the edge of change,
no longer static, the atmosphere turning fluid. Under the spell of
the approaching night, everything was starting to slide into night­
mare before her eyes . . . the mountains an impassable fortified wall,
beneath which the massed trees assumed the menacing solidity of
an encamped enemy army, and closer crouching clumps of bushes
disguised the lairs of unimaginable monsters.
Invaded by sudden panic, she began running towards the fiord,
which had taken on the incredible look of an icy volcanic crater
about to erupt, its black waters enclosing a baleful, incandescent
heart, which was the reflected sky. Ghostly tentacles of steam or mist
were rising all over the surface, one of these spectral shapes gliding
straight towards her. It was already almost upon her before she saw
it . . . and stopped, with a stifled cry, arrested by its clammy touch,
enveloping her in a chill, ectoplasmic substance, resisting her most
desperate efforts to throw it off until, in its own time, it withdrew,
pursuing a swift, erratic course, flitting furtively about the land­
scape, occasionally intertwining with other similar pallid ghosts.
At once she ran on, not daring to leave the water, her only guide,
but averting her eyes, afraid of what might emerge next in this
livid half-light, where any horror was to be expected. Pools had
accumulated among the dead reeds, over which she jumped wildly,
but often not far enough, so that she shattered the ice, sending up
fountains of spray, barely conscious of the freezing shower-bath, or
of anything but the appalling sound of another runner's feet thud­
ding just behind her. She was too exhausted to recognize the thumping
of her own heart, until, just as it seemed about to burst through the
walls of her chest, she saw the scattered lights of the village in
front of her.
79

Panting, hardly able to stand, she leaned again a tree-trunk, taking
great gasping gulps of cold air more like sobs of relief. But when,
as soon as she'd recovered slightly, she hurried on again, she was
aware of a different sort of anxiety - fear of being seen by the
housekeeper, her implacable enemy, who was sure to make cutting
remarks about her dishevelled state and might even pass on a dis­
torted account of it to her employer. At the same time, she felt
ashamed of her own inability to stand up to the woman, who was
only a subordinate, yet she knew she'd never be able to, seeing
herself indistinctly as the victim and target of all ill-feeling,
who
.
must accept every wound and indignity.
In the hope of avoiding a meeting, she was making for a side
door that was little used and generally left unlocked during the
day. The last faint pallor of twilight was still in the sky, against
which the threatening medieval mass stood out pitch-black with its
towers, turrets and battlements which wouldn't have withstood modem
weapons for half a second, yet looked as grimly indestructible as
the jagged peaks of the mountains behind. Groups of firs buttressed
the place with the extra blackness of their shadow, through which
she advanced cautiously over a carpet of frozen needles.
No light was showing inside, and, as she'd hoped, the door had
not yet been fastened. But, although she was wet through and shaking
with cold, she hesitated, inexplicably unwilling to enter.
*

All of a sudden, she remembers her lost happiness. For an infini­
tesimal fraction of time she again experiences that almost forgotten
sense of security and belonging . . . the bliss of loving and being
loved, transfonning life into supreme happiness, such intense joy
that the surrounding air vibrates and sparkles with gaiety. In a flash
it's all over. She's back in her aloneness. No vibration, no sparkle,
no happiness. Gaiety is unthinkable. Happiness is dead, finished,
nothing . . . perhaps it never existed.
She is left with a vague impression that the illusion has visited
her for some urgent reason which she fails to recognize. And when
she finally makes the effort of going through the door, it's as if the
old inescapable forces of destiny are inside, awaiting an appoint­
ment with her made long ago. Once more the thought that she's
escaped nothing by coming here goes through her head. But now
remoteness has settled on her again, putting everything at a dis80

tance. Her whole life here in this fortress seems quite fantastic,
unreal. She even distrusts the reality of what is before her eyes,
confronting an open door into a dim hallway with a staircase she's
never seen before. A life-sized Apollo stands at the foot of the
stairs, upholding a lamp, or perhaps a lyre: and where the other
newel post ought to be, a stem-faced, winged Mercury, poised for
flight, seems to be staring straight at her, as if she's to be the re­
cipient of his baleful message.
Of the housekeeper there's no sign. The whole huge cavernous
building is silent and seems deserted, as, her hands stretched out in
front of her, she feels her way along the walls of the dark corri­
dors, afraid a light will draw attention to her arrival. Without meet­
ing anybody at all, she slips into her lonely room, quietly shutting
the door. She's safe from the housekeeper now, but has no sense of
having reached security. The room is coldly unfriendly, its atmos­
phere alien, strange as always. Its walls withhold their protection
from her. The book, lying forlornly where she has dropped it, gives
the effect of a room from which people have fled in terror.
*

Tonight she has gone up to bed early, feeling more comfortable
than usual in her peculiar room because the pirate-faced man is not
in the house. Of course his absence is only temporary. He will be
back tomorrow. But for tonight at least she need fear no intrusion.
With an agreeable sense of relief and freedom, she curls up on the
bed in her dressing-gown, and reaches out for a book on the table
under the lamp.
The movement draws her eyes to the mirror, where her reflected
arms resemble the stalks of two etiolated plants, reaching out to
the light. The sight of that hallucinatory through-the-Iooking-glass
world, where she sees herself floating in space, at once abolishes
her relaxed mood. She forgets the book, her customary uneasiness
returning, and vaguely watches the two pallid arms uncertainly waver­
ing in the glass, reminding her of strands of pale weed under water.
Suddenly her heart gives a tremendous leap, and goes on beating
rapidly and erratically, as, in the mirror, she sees the door slowly
opening. To her amazement, this time it's the housekeeper who
comes in, with no preliminary knock, her black figure menacing
and tall as a tree, and standing silently just inside the room.
A wave of acute apprehension overwhelms the girl on the bed,
81

who suddenly knows that something frightful is about to take place . . .
something that's been coming to her from the very beginning. It's
no mere accident that has left her unprotected tonight. All at once
everything appears prearranged. The end of this scene has been
planned in advance long ago, rehearsed many times in secret, and
now nothing can stop its being played out to the appointed end.
Just as nothing can stop the expression of terror she feels congeal­
ing upon her face, as she slowly turns from the glass to look di­
rectly at the dread, motionless form at the door, and sees, straight
away, the expected glint of merciless triumph in the hooded eyes.
At the same time she dimly discerns another tall shape, masculine
but unidentifiable, standing in blackest shadow.
'What do you want?' She brings out the whispered words with
the utmost difficulty, scarcely able to speak at all, or even to breathe,
her heart is racing so wildly.
There's no reply: only the basilisk stare fixed upon her, increas­
ing her sense of foreboding. Nobody says a word. The silence swells
to horrific proportions, enormous, filling the room. And yet the pro­
found stillness of the lonely room seems only a premonition of
some even deeper silence awaiting her . . . a still greater isolation.
The tableau has crystallized in the mirror, where the reflected
girl stares back as if mesmerized, out of eyes so widely dilated that
they look black, like two deep pits of terror. While the girl on the
bed, hands agonizingly clasped on her breast, so exactly resembles
her double that there's no possible doubt they are one and the same.
Her eyes too are hugely black with dread of the fate she already
half knows by intuitive nightmare foreknowledge.
They all remain suspended or as if turned to stone, until at length
the forbidding woman commands 'Come here! ' in a harsh, peremp­
tory voice, the two syllables crashing like stones into the glassy
hush . . . which does not break, but simply absorbs them, as it ab­
sorbs the tranced motions of the girl, who obediently steps down
and approaches the speaker, whose emanations of vicious hatred it
absorbs too, along with the forward move of the shadowy form in
the background.
The two tall, powerful figures, elderly man and woman in the
prime of life, grab the arms of the victim and tower over her as
over a slight, terrified, helpless child, whose feeble cries and strug­
gles they suppress instantly.
The room watches this climax with satisfaction. It has won. It
82

has been inimical to the end, and is now ejecting the intruder for
ever. She far removed in her victim's trance, in a dim, instantaneous
flashback, returns with her mind to a different existence, another
world, millions of years away . . . and a pellet of mangled and bloody
flesh, the pill of food regurgitated by an owl, which small com­
pressed bolus of crushed flesh and bone and internal secretion she
has now become.

83

9

T

HE song of the Indris, lingering in the man's head, changes
to a sound between a wail and a howl, then expires abruptly,
while at the same time all thoughts connected with them
are completely erased from his mind.
A full moon shines overhead, small, cold and exceedingly bright,
high up in a sky flashing with big frosty stars. Tall, perpendicular
rocks support the flat horizontal rock, powdered with frozen snow,
on which he is standing. It might be a high-diving platform, except
that its projecting ends dimly suggest rudimentary arms - in fact,
the whole strange rocky formation faintly resembles a crude, in­
complete, primitive monument, and seems vaguely familiar to him.
Yet he is sure he has never been here before, where stark towering
cliffs rise straight up out of the fiord, the edges of which are frozen,
he observes from his lofty position, although further out, at the
foot of the promontory, black, mirror-bright water is reduplicating
the moon.
This doubled moonlight reveals everything very clearly. He has
already recognized the frail, shuddering, naked girl, huddled at the
end of the platform just in front of him, on whom all his attention is
fixed. The whispers and restless fidgeting of a crowd of people behind
him scarcely impinge on his notice; he isn't interested, and doesn't
even look round, never taking his eyes off the helpless figure ahead.
Her hands are tied loosely behind her back. But at some period
she must have struggled against her bounds, for, with a sudden
surge of the old detested excitement, he sees how deeply the cords
have cut into the tender flesh of both wrists. Her struggles have
now ceased. Cold, exhaustion and terror have reduced her almost
to the point of collapse. Her legs, bent under her, seem to have
given way; which does not detract from the grace of the thin white
body so near him . . . under his eyes . . . within reach of his hand.
84

Impulsively, one hand moves forward, but he checks the gesture
at once . . . . His eyes are fastened on the delicate wrists, no thicker
than the bone he believes he could snap with his bare hands. A
familiar, hideous thrill runs over his nerves . . . an overwhelming
sensation, far beyond control . . . a sort of illicit, unholy joy. He
wants to watch her suffer, to see her bleed. . . .
The end comes far too quickly for him. The old fellow who re­
lated the legend at the cottage meeting approaches with two burly
fishermen, forcing him to draw back slightly. But the moonlight is
so strong that he can still see distinctly the huge, darkly dilated
eyes of horror the victim turns to her executioners. Finding no pity
on their faces - or on his either, for that matter - a pathetic child­
ish grimace contorts her face . . . big tears spring from her eyes,
which the moon transforms into diamonds as they roll down her
cheeks without a sound. Her bound hands twitch ineffectually once
or twice, like wounded birds, in an instinctive, hopeless attempt to
free themselves.
The unseen crowd is growing impatient; there is a muttering and
a stamping of feet on the iron-hard ground. Without further delay,
the three men seize the weeping girl, who looks like a child compared
with their muscular massive maleness, and hurl her over the end of
the rock. White as a falling star, she plummets down in the moon­
light, her bright hair streaming behind like a comet's tail. Her thin
last piteous scream is drowned by the ensuing splash, and, with a
hateful, ecstatic sensation, the onlooker sees the black water spurt
up and wash over her in a flood, filling her eyes and throat and
tearing her limbs apart, possessing her fully, as he never has done.
The whole fiord immediately becomes convulsed. The ice breaks
up with cracks loud as pistol-shots. The threshing tail of the monster
sends great waves dashing against the upstanding rocks, bursting in
wild cascades of spray. Oblivious of the freezing drops showered
upon him, the watcher sees the slimy, repulsive coils of the dragon
protrude obscenely, like swollen intestines, from the agitated wa­
ter, forming a loathsome circle, within which he catches an instan­
taneous glimpse of a white frantically struggling shape, like a big
fish in a net, before the armoured jaws snap shut on their prey.
The seething commotion of the water he has never seen anything
but dead calm creates a nightmare effect, crowded, horrible, chaotic,
reminiscent of some ancient, over-detailed representation of the end
of the world, intended to terrify and confuse the beholder. Enormous
85

waves continue to crash on the rocks and explode in great fountains
and fans of shimmering spray, while other waves race towards one
another, meet and collapse in turmoil, or hurl themselves high in
white water-spouts as if trying to reach the moon. Flakes of mingled
blood and foam fill the air, whirling everywhere, forming a scum
on the water, where the murderous long teeth, still shedding gouts
of blood, flash like knives in the moonlight; which glitters too on
the scales of the serpentine body, as its loops alternately sink and
emerge amidst the conflicting tumult of waves.
*

The man pressed his hand to his head, which was hot and heavy.
He must have dozed over his writing, for he noticed that the pages
of the notebook were creased as if he'd been leaning on it heavily.
After smoothing them out as well as he could, he stood up, still
feeling muzzy, and went to his suitcase to get some aspirin. Since
he'd never unpacked the case, its contents had got more and more
jumbled and untidy each time he dived into it for something he
wanted, and the aspirin bottle was not in the comer where it should
have been.
Giving up the search, he poured out some water, filling the basin
and plunging his whole face into it. The icy cold shock revived
him slightly, but he continued to feel confused, and worried about
his unaccountable drowsiness. As he always slept badly, and never
by any chance in the daytime, such a deviation from his normal
bodily habits seemed to indicate a profound, as yet undiscovered,
disfunction.
His anxiety increased when he glanced at his watch and saw that
it was already past the hour he was supposed to be at the cafe.
There was nothing whatever to do after dark in the village, so most
people went to bed early, and the proprietor had specially asked
him to be on time for the evening meal so that he himself wouldn't
be kept up much later than usual. Although this was the first occa­
sion when the visitor had not been punctual, he nevertheless had a
spasm of guilt.
Hastily leaving the room, he was visited by an extremely
odd sensation: his overcoat felt strange to him, heavy and
unfamiliar, as if he'd put on someone else's by accident - a feeling
so peculiar that he again wondered uneasily if something
was wrong with him. However, during the next few seconds, both
86

the overcoat and the situation seemed to adjust themselves
round him.
The ground floor of the house was divided in half by a passage,
the stairs at one end, the front door at the other, and the doors of
two rooms in between, one of which opened a little way, to reveal
the landlady 's unfriendly face, peering at him distrustfully as he
passed. She didn't speak, and he was too preoccupied and in too
great a hurry to do more than mutter good-evening, without paus­
ing or really looking at her, hurrying on to the outer door and shut­
ting it firmly behind him.
Outside, it was unexpectedly dark. The feeble street-lights, few
and far between, seemed much weaker than usual, as if the electric
current were giving out, their uncertain glimmer insufficient to show
a new pile of stones, fallen since he last came by, into which he
stumbled, almost losing his balance, and, in recovering, he happened
to glance at the sky. It was heavily overcast by black storm-clouds,
and instead of continuing on his way, he stood still, receiving a
shock he couldn't account for from the sight of the black roof of
cloud, which appeared to sag threateningly over his head like a
ceiling on the point of collapsing.
But in his dream there had been brilliant moonlight. . . . He started
forward as if stung as memory came flooding back, bringing a look
of nausea to his face, submerging him fathoms deep in a guilty
shame, blacker than the darkest night. Intense self-loathing and disgust
overcame him: appalled by his own hideous conduct, he walked on
blindly, seeing nothing else. The outer world was invisible to him,
his inner eyes fixed inexorably on the unspeakable scenes he had
just witnessed, as on some frightful atrocity film he was condemned
to watch. Passing his destination without a glance, he was unaware
of the proprietor's face at the window, presumably looking for him,
though no attempt was made to attract his attention. No such at­
tempt could have succeeded, in any case. He was completely ab­
sorbed in contemplating the sadism he detested so much but could
never eradicate, hurrying along the dark dismal lanes as if trying to
outdistance it. Yet the worst thing about it was knowing that it was
inescapable . . . an infection he carried everywhere in his blood,
which would last as long as his life, always liable to break out in
savage demonstrations of cruelty to the girl who had such a fatal
fascination for him. Never would he be able to resist the tempta­
tion of using her as a victim delivered into his hands . . . her gentle,
87

submissive nature stimulated all that was most base in him. All the
time he was being tormented by remorse and self-hatred, he still
continued to suffer the other torment of those terrible last pictures . . .
again and again subjected to the sight of her white flesh in the
moonlight, the unbearably touching fragility of her naked body . . . .
He had no idea how long he endured this torture before gradu­
ally, by slow degrees, his surroundings began to take shape again . . .
but in a distorted form, as if they were visions conjured up by his
disturbed mind. He didn't recognize the ruins looming round him,
which appeared to be the remains of buildings larger and grander
than the rest of the village, though far gone in decay, yet, in spite
of their massive size, had a desolate dream-aspect and seemed to
lack permanence or even precise location. A certain inevitability
that was dreamlike too conducted his eyes to the terminal house of
the cul-de-sac he was in, which was as lifeless and blank as its
neighbours. At first he was too bemused to know what gave him
the impression it might be occupied . . . . He felt strange and empty,
as if he 'd collapsed inwardly, as if something inside him had fallen
to pieces.
With an effort he realized that a large object in front of the house
was a car, and one, moreover, he had already seen . . . on the car­
ferry. At the same time he recalled the pair in whom he'd taken
such an interest, but thoughts and pictures of them came back to
him only evanescently, each sinking out of sight again in confusion,
as the next arose from the chaos filling his head.
In the midst of these muddled recollections, it suddenly struck
him that the girl living here with the car's owner was in danger
and must be warned at once. He alone could do it . . . nobody else
knew . . . . He advanced towards the grim edifice with this inten­
tion, then paused, uncertain what he meant to do, taking a few
steps backward until stopped by a projecting buttress, against which
he leaned. A moment ago he'd distinctly seen the peasants crowded
into the small smoky room, like the damned in a painting of hell.
Now he couldn't remember what they were plotting . . . the picture
was fading already . . . becoming blurred and remote . . . like an
illustration to an improbable story he'd almost forgotten.
All trace of it was obliterated from his memory by a pool of
light as the iron-studded door opened and the man resembling a
pirate emerged. The principle of distortion was still at work, making
him look larger than life . . . stark, savage, archetypal, a symbol of
88

destructive force, his face carved in ferocious planes, bloodthirsty,
insatiable. . . . When he took a gun from somebody inside the house,
put it into the car and climbed into the driver's seat, the weapon
seemed so much part of him that the onlooker never even won­
dered what he could be going to shoot in the middle of the night.
Instead, he suddenly recalled the scene on the deck of the car-ferry
so vividly that it seemed more actual than the present moment,
with which it was inextricably confused, so that he was afraid he
might be accused of prying into the other man's private affairs . . .
spying . . . too interested in matters that did not in any way con­
cern him.
To his relief, however, the driver of the Thunderbird drove off at
once, not even seeing him, passing without a glance. As the car
disappeared, with perfect timing, the light was extinguished; leav­
ing him the impression that what had occurred had been a scene on
the stage, though he couldn't decide whether he'd been an actor in
'
it or a mere spectator. Now that it was over, he moved away, re­
tracing his steps, since the road went no further. He felt more con­
fused than ever, tired and vaguely upset, still haunted by that sense
of inner collapse. His head was aching badly and seemed strangely
empty - it contained no thought of his guilt, or of anything else, as
he walked on without even thinking where he was going, until he
suddenly found himself facing the old wall, in which there was a
large breach at this point.
The sky had lightened considerably, he could see the mountains
outlined against it, as well as the nearer slopes and the black masses
of trees. The fiord's ghostly gleam caught his eye, and he stopped
to look at it, sunk like a bowl below the level of its surround­
ings . . . a receptacle into which drained all the savage ferocity of
the wild landscape.
Something evil seemed to emanate from the water, rising in
steamlike mist shapes that became wraiths, meeting, separating,
blending, flitting from place to place with a peculiar effect of fur­
tive haste, accelerated by the wind, which he now noticed for the
first time, swishing through a group of trees not far from him, and
making a noise that reminded him of the sea, of waves breaking on
some remote, lonely shore. The sound brought him a sudden new
thought, and his face changed in the darkness, expressing both re­
lief and alarm. He'd been labouring under a gross illusion in think­
ing about the fiord as if it were a lake. His muzziness now really
89

perturbed him - how could he have been so muddle-headed as to
forget that fiord and sea were one? His notion of a sort of sink of
iniquity became ludicrous, mere melodramatic imagining, as he re­
membered how, every day, the water was cleared of all impurities
by that great natural cleanser. . . . The crazy way he'd been evok­
ing demons from the very element that was of its essence, pure and
antidemonic, seemed only to be explained on the basis of some
physical disability. Again he wondered whether he could be ill,
although, apart from the headache, he had no symptoms, and cer­
tainly wasn't ill enough to be so mixed up. Perhaps he'd caught a
chill, standing all that time in the freezing cold . . . . Where.? When?
Why? His memory was full of great gaping holes, but his uneasi­
ness about them was less insistent than the desire to get back to his
room and lie down. Moving on again, he took the first turning that
looked as if it led in the direction of his lodgings which proved to
be a short cut and brought him back within five minutes.
In his dreary overcrowded room, the light was dimmer than he'd
ever seen it and flickered continuously. He deliberately stood near
the lamp as he took off his clothes, so tired that he let them lie
where they fell among the dark, ponderous pieces of furniture, which
tonight seemed to press round him inquisitively. The electricity failed
finally just as he put on his pyjamas, leaving him in pitch-darkness.
Reaching for the lamp, he proceeded to fumble with it, striking
innumerable matches and twisting the wick up and down without
producing any result. Exasperated, he seized the candle, which was
also within reach; by the time he'd lighted it, the floor had turned
to ice under his bare feet, and he at once climbed into bed, without
waiting for the precarious flame to establish itself. But then he could
find no flat surface near him where he could put the candlestick
down, and as the feeble, blue-edged flicker was on the point of
expiring, he let the whole thing slide out of his hand and clatter on
to the floor.
Only then did it occur to him that he hadn't taken the tablets
without which he was seldom able to sleep. But the effort of re­
lighting the candle seemed beyond him, and he lay back on the
pillow, meaning to rest a minute before attempting it.
The memory of his dream - if that was what it had been - had
not returned to him. In the fog of his mental confusion, he was
aware of it, and of its accompanying remorse, only as a faint, un­
defined anxiety he assigned to no special cause, which troubled
90

him merely in a submerged and half-conscious fashion. Lying there
in the dark, he soon forgot all about it, and the tablets as well,
drifting over the borderline of sleep in a few moments.
All night long he continued to sleep soundly and dreamlessly,
not even altering his position. It was years since he'd last enjoyed
a night of such long, deep, natural, undisturbed sleep. He woke
next morning feeling thoroughly rested, so much the better for it
that the deficiencies of his memory sank into oblivion, completely
forgotten.

91

10
Z started out of her dream with a startled cry, feeling the
pirate-faced man's ungentle hands on her throat and mouth,
half believing, in the confusion of waking, that he had come
to kill her. She still felt confused when she understood that he wanted
to keep her quiet - why should that matter in this room where no
one could hear them?
'Dress quickly,' he told her. 'We're leaving at once. But not a
sound - nobody must know ! '
Leaving? Her wide, sleep-dazed eyes, all black pupil, gazed
wonderingly at his partly seen face, above and outside the restricted
radius of the lamplight, her lips soundlessly shaping 'Why?'
' It's the only chance. Every road will be jammed the moment
the news spreads . . . . ' Silent as a shadow, he drew back from the
light and was gone.
She wasn't sure, in her bewilderment, whether she'd heard or
imagined the words' . 'The ice is coming' , now echoing ominously
in that part of her mind where the secret dread of winter had its
perpetual abode.
For a second she stood in her nightdress, still warm from sleep,
watching in the great glass a pulse above her right collar-bone,
which caught her eye and the light simultaneously, beating so fast
that a small independent animal seemed to be struggling to burst
through the almost transparent skin. The bone below it looked brit­
tle, projecting too far; the enduring skeleton seemed to be thrusting
itself prematurely through the ephemeral flesh, already dissolving
in shadow and frantic beat. She was deeply disturbed by this des­
perate struggle going on in her own protoplasm, dissociated from
consciousness; and the indescribable, undefined uneasiness if aroused
continued, also below conscious level, while she put on her clothes
and collected a small bag she'd been told to pack long ago with

L

92

bare essentials for a sudden journey to an undisclosed destination.
The man came back for her then, not trusting her, apparently, to
make no noise. His whispered 'Quiet ! ' startled her like a shout on
the shadowy, dim-lit stairs. A shadow-figure himself, both phantas­
mal and threatening, he loomed over her so repressively that she
forgot her questions and followed him like a sleep-walker out to
the car in the freezing cold darkness.
He drove off immediately, still without speaking, skirting the sleep­
ing village, taking a narrow road across the few fields separating
the houses inside the crumbling wall from the black living wall of
the forest, which seemed to press forward with ferocious vitality,
as if to engulf them. Apprehensively, she watched the advancing
tree-wall, a mysterious white fume smoking along its crest, like
spray blowing back from the crest of a breaking wave. She'd hardly
noticed the few insignificant frozen flakes drifting down as they
left the house. Only now seeing, for the first time, the flickering,
shimmering white thickening the air about them, she instinctively
turned a dismayed face to her companion who, however, remained
silent and unapproachable, merely giving her a piercing hard look
out of his frigid troll's eyes, his coldly forbidding expression adding
to her obscure alarm, so that she looked quickly away, not daring
to ask where they were going and why.
She sat looking out at the forest, fearsomely strange with its white
floor and branches furred thickly with snow, while the car filled
with silence, with tension, and nameless dread. The road had deterio­
rated and become hard to follow. The driver seemed to have for­
gotten her in the effort, his set face giving the impression that he
hurled the big car forward at full speed over all obstacles by a
sheer effort of will. His hands on the wheel might have been grip­
ping a cutlass - seeing them, she felt a sudden fright, a sense of
alienation. She had no access to him, or to anything else in this
country where everything seemed hostile, and even the forest trees
conspired against her with an odd vitality, depriving her of her own.
Pallid daylight presently filtered down, the snow stopped at last.
But the silence went on as if it would last for ever. The cold was
all the time increasing, some freezing exudation of the black trees
seeming to congeal underneath them. Nothing was to be seen but
the gloomy masses of firs, the dead and the living often tangled
together, often with a dead bird caught in the branches, as if deliber­
ately. Surrounded by this vast entanglement of trees she grew more
93

and more nervous. Trees in their millions, in battalions and armies,
pressed round her on every side, their interminable ranks stretching
away to infinity in all directions. Another trapped bird caught her
eye, its already half-decomposed wings flapping in the wind of the
car's passing, as if even so far gone in death it was struggling to
get away from the murderous tree.
She shivered suddenly, the fear she'd suppressed since seeing
her mirrored flesh dissolve into pulse and shadow emerging now as
a conscious threat. All her hidden fears fed and magnified by this
extraordinary flight, and still more extraordinary silence, she was
overcome by a sudden dread of being caught by the forest like the
dead bird . . . of the trees weaving black branches round her in an
imprisoning deadly net.
Terror forced her to look again at the man beside her, urgently
and imploringly this time, twisting right round in her seat. But he
ignored her and seemed totally unaware, oblivious and indifferent.
His haughty features, against the white trees, looked dark and hard
as if carved out of stone. His deep-set mesmeric eyes, his whole
arrogant stranger's face, appeared strangely phantasmal . . . the utterly
alien face of a man from somewhere altogether different in time
and place. All at once he looked ghostlike, inhuman, to her; entirely
out of her reach. The security she had felt as his possession had
become an illusion. No reassurance, no protection could be expected
from him. She felt a sudden unreasoned shame at the magnitude of
her mistake. How could she ever have supposed she was of any
value to him?
She looked away, tears blurring the endless background of forest,
already darkening towards dusk. It was as if her whole life had
consisted of nothing but this eternal menacing forest, where no one
else ever came, and they seemed the last two left alive on a ruined
and dying planet. All day long she'd seen not a soul; so that signs
of human life gave her a shock, she looked incredulously at two
log huts, a gate between them blocking the road - unless it was
opened they could get no further. She hardly glanced at a board
with frontier regulations in three languages, her attention fixed on
the gate, which was rushing towards them and had every appear­
ance of being immovably shut. Of the sort used at level crossings,
strengthened with various crossbars and reinforcements of woods,
wire and metal, it was racing forward at breakneck speed, appar­
ently invisible to the driver. She held her breath, waiting for him to
94

put on the brake at the last moment; instead of which, without change
of expression, he drove straight at it.
She ducked instinctively as the window beside her shattered, a
long thin pointed sliver of glass slicing the air just over her head
and embedding itself in the upholstery. There was a metallic screech,
a tremendous rending, tearing and smashing; fragments of wire and
wood flew about. For a timeless moment, the car swayed sicken­
ingly on two wheels, about to tum over. She'd slipped into the
comer, crushed against the door, and, clutching the edge of the
seat, felt the imminent fatal crash locked in conflict with the man ' s
will which, against all the laws o f probability, eventually triumphed.
By some miracle of strength or skill, or pure Will-power, he brought
the Thunderbird back on to its axis and drove on as if nothing had
happened.
Automatically sitting up straight again, she heard, without look­
ing round, shouts burst out behind them; a few desultory shots popped
insignificantly and fell short, before the small commotion subsided
and was left behind. Since the collision she'd almost ceased to think,
only dimly reminded by the ice-cold wind whistling in like a con­
tinuous sequence of knives through the broken glass of a somewhat
similar sound she'd once heard, or heard about, a sort of unearthly
keening, made by strange forest creatures . . . . It had entangled her
in a coil of dreadful events. But past and present seemed equally
meaningless now, merged in one dimly receding blur. Pulling down
the hood of her coat until it almost covered her face, she crouched
low in her seat, while the car sped along a wider and better road.
Projecting his acute hearing beyond the sound of the engine, the
man driving heard nothing. Nothing had occurred since the last shot.
It was obvious they were not being followed. To be on the safe
side, however, he drove on for another ten miles and as many min­
utes, before he pulled up, glancing at the same time at his com­
panion. It seemed to him that she'd behaved pretty well during the
recent episode, and if she'd been looking, he'd have rewarded her
with a smile. As sl;1e remained huddled up as if half asleep, her
face hidden by the hood, he transferred his interest to the car, which
in any case was his main concern.
Snowy moorland had invaded the forest, so that the sky was again
vi sible. Just enough light remained for him to examine the
Thunderbird, remove the wire and other debris festooning it, and
satisfy himself that no serious harm had been done. Pleased by the
95

result of his inspection, he came back to his seat and informed her:
' No damage that can't be put right in half an hour. ' The long pre­
ceding silence he simply ignored.
*

The girl says nothing, looking at him as if from afar. For her
this is a most curious moment. She has longed for him to take
some notice of her. But it's too late now, when she feels frozen,
struck dumb, and he doesn't even seem human.
For a moment he keeps his eyes levelled on hers. But that com­
pelling look of his doesn't work any more. The time seems sud­
denly to have gone when he could subjugate her with those eyes,
trained upon her like guns, paralyzing her, stunning her into a helpless
compliant doll for him to treat as he pleases. Now something comes
between her and his magnetic gaze. She seems to have no feeling
about him. Through the thickness of the grey coat she doesn't even
feel his hand graze her shoulder when, with unheard-of concern for
her comfort, he leans over to stuff his scarf in the hole in the win­
dow. To her, this unprecedented consideration seems highly un­
likely, removing him even further. Their faces are close, almost
touching as he leans across; she catches the cold astringent smell
of his skin. Yet she still seems to see him as if from a distance,
and doesn't utter a word. And he, faced with such unresponsive­
ness, at once turns away and drives on again, his thoughts already
switched over to other things.
All she feels is a transient wonder at the sight of his cold mask
profile beside her, vaguely wondering what can be going on in his
head . . . she might as well try to guess the thoughts of a sabre­
toothed tiger.
Perhaps it's the after-effect of shock that's making her feel so
remote and strange. In any case, whatever came between her and
his eyes now divides her from everything, even herself. She doesn't
seem there any longer. It's as if she has been swept up by a hurri­
cane, carried far off towards terrifying unknown regions she can't
even imagine yet. She seems to be drifting somewhere in space, a
bit frightened and dizzy, but otherwise dissociated from her own
being.
Then the headlights come on abruptly, calling her back, as they
obliterate the last of the dying day. The car swings round a bend,
passing right through a wraith of mist that happens to be in its
96

path, dispersing the intangible stuff, which instantly constructs a
different shape further off. For a second, it seems familiar to her in
the artificial glare, like an incomplete, primitive sculpture she has
seen somewhere before, whose fluid, changeable consistency she
somehow seems to share.

97

11
UKE was up so early on the first day of the voyage that
patches of the deck were still wet when he began to walk
round it. He was feeling unusually cheerful, as if the familiar
sounds of scrubbing and hosing-down which had reached him in
his cabin first thing had given the day a propitious start. He always
enjoyed being at sea, and this voyage would be especially pleasant,
since it was the prelude to a new life, taking him away for good
from the world where he'd always felt isolated, unhappy and lost.
Everything had changed now, because, for the first time, he had a
definite and absorbing objective before him. Suddenly he felt a new
man, confident, contented, on the verge of a worthwhile achieve­
ment at last.
He couldn't imagine why he'd taken so long to make up his
mind to leave the unfriendly north and return to a certain small
tropical island inhabited by an almost extinct race of large singing
lemurs, known as the Indris, the study of which was to be his future
life-work. This was the resolve that had made such a difference to
him. As he'd always been fascinated by the Indris, it seemed inex­
plicable that he' d only just decided to devote himself to writing
about them, instead of starting his researches long ago. However,
the unaccountable delay made the prospect no less inspiring, and
he strode into the cold wind feeling exhilarated, looking forward to
the dedicated future which was to cancel out the lonely, dismal
years he had wasted in pointless solitary travels.
He was so accustomed to being on board ship that he didn't even
notice the heavy swell, his balance adjusting itself automatically as
the deck tilted under his feet, without interfering with what went
on in his head. His thoughts were idly dwelling on last night's
embarkation scenes, when it suddenly struck him, with a consider­
able shock, that he remembered almost nothing of what had been

L

98

happening immediately before then. At first he couldn't believe it;
but it was true enough; an extreme, extraordinary vagueness af­
fected his memory of the last few days or weeks - could it even be
months? Still incredulous, he gave himself a sort of mental shake,
which made no difference whatsoever . . . the fact remained that no
single incident belonging to the period just over was clear or com­
plete in his mind. He could recollect only a few scattered, incon­
secutive details, and even these seemed confused and uncertain. As
he considered his memory better than the average, he was quite
astounded by the way recent events seemed to have been wiped
out. However, this was not an appropriate moment for investigat­
ing his inexplicable amnesia, and, determined to keep his present
unaccustomed sense of well-being, he deliberately started to think
about other things.
Most passengers were still in their cabins this rough, blustery,
cold first morning. Among the few who had emerged, he vaguely
noticed a pair striding round the deck, proudly showing off their
sea-legs, who now passed him again and seemed to be trying to
catch his eye. Not feeling in the mood yet for becoming involved
in the pseudo-friendliness of the ship's social life, he evaded them
by going up to the boat-deck, which was open to the sky and com­
pletely deserted.
Some of the cheerfulness he was so resolved to hang on to seemed
to have escaped already; and the remainder began to evaporate up
here, where the bleak, sunless, stormy day, threatening rain, forced
itself on his notice. A big sea was running. The huge, blackish
corrugations of the smooth swells stretched like giant furrows to
the horizon, irregularly patched with foam, under the iron lid of
grey sky, beneath which separate blacker clouds were racing before
the wind. Confronting the gloomy scene, he found it impossible to
repress his uneasiness, or the thought of the amazing loss of memory
that had caused it. A slight feeling of guilt increased his anxiety,
convincing him that the forgotten period included something of special
importance it was vital for him to recall. But all his efforts to re­
member were unsuccessful; nothing would bring it back. The gap
was still just as blank when he was eventually distracted by · the
wind, tugging so violently at his hair and clothes that he had to
retire to comparative shelter behind one of the lifeboats.
The height of this deck above the water accentuated the ship's
roll. He watched the rail swing high up into the flying clouds, and
99

then plunge down, down, down among the vast, dark, marbled,
whalelike swells, which broke into a welter of foam at the touch of
the hull. The hiss of the water was so loud out here in the open air
that, unless he strained his ears, he couldn't hear the engines. His
spirits revived as he caught the steady beat of the powerful ma­
chinery, carrying him so inevitably to the new life and work he
had chosen. Nothing could stop the ship's progress, or make it tum
back; nothing could prevent him from arriving at the destination he
longed to reach. Slipping into fantasy, he thought how he'd get the
natives to build him a hut near the forest haunts of the mysterious
lemurs, where he could stay indefinitely, devoting himself to his
new project without any distractions, and finding his own simple
recreations when his day's work was done.
In place of the sombre seascape, his imagination provided him
with a charming, childish, unrealistic scene, where branches gilded
by tropical sunshine were heavy with ripe luscious fruit and bril­
liant with flowers. Cool jade green in the shade, sparkling diamond
bright in the sun, a little stream wound through the glade, descend­
ing in a series of miniature falls to a natural swimming-pool sur­
rounded by rocks, which the palpitating wings of enormous butterflies
decorated with an exotic living mosaic. Iridescent wings shimmer­
ing round him, he dived through the rising rainbow cloud into lim­
pid water, swimming a few strokes, floating on his back, and letting
the waterfall bubble over him in a refreshing shower before he fi­
nally climbed out again. Now he stretched himself full length on
the grass to dry in the sun, which was deliciously warm on his wet
skin but intensified instantly to a fierce scorching blaze. In a flash,
the searing heat became intolerable, so that he had to move . . .
into the shade of an old pear tree growing beside a deserted farm­
house. At least, he seemed to be there . . . though he was confused
by pictures of sea and jungle, which seemed to exist at the same
time, giving the effect of different exposures accidentally super­
imposed on the same negative. Luz was lying on a sunny bank just
below him, her flimsy sleeveless summer dress revealing the slight
curves of her slender body. She 'd clasped her hands over her eyes
to shield them from the glare, so that her raised arms exposed the
hollows beneath, in which minute beads of sweat showed bright on
the darker surface of the shaved flesh . . . .
The heat still seemed insufferable, even now. As he'd already
removed his jacket, he could only rip open his shirt, which he did
100

so impatiently that a button flew off as he pulled the clammy damp
cotton away from his skin, to which it was adhering. Half dazed
for a second, he pressed his hands over his eyes, and at the same
moment heard a voice he hardly recognized as his own say with
startling intensity: 'Remember that if you're ever in any trouble . . . .
He was remotely aware of the low, urgent voice going on to
finish the sentence, although it was left incomplete in his mind, as
he didn 't hear the last words. All his attention had suddenly
been transferred to the girl, who'd twisted round to face him and
was supporting her weight on her hands in a posture that would
have been awkward in anyone else, but in her case merely em­
phasized a touching youthfulness. The simple little girl's dress she
wore had a rather low neck, and, rucked up by her abrupt
tum, now exposed her thighs, which, as her arms and legs were
bare, produced the momentary impression that she was naked
before him . . . .
Clattering crockery on the deck below indicated that bouillon was
being carried round to those passengers who had ventured out. Later
in the voyage, ice-cream would be substituted at mid-morning, but
not until they were in much warmer waters and the ship's person­
nel had changed into white tropical uniforms. None of the stewards
came up to the boat-deck now, doubtless assuming that people had
more sense than to expose themselves to the weather there.
The squally wind had got rougher, and during the last few min­
utes it had started to rain. Yet for some reason Luke stood quite
still until the clink of china had died away, and only then hurried
under cover.
'

*

The day having failed to live up to its promising start, he went
to his cabin early that evening. But no sooner was he lying down
with a book than the idea that he'd forgotten something most im­
portant, which had been more or less submerged by what went on
around him, again sprang into the forefront of his attention. Ex­
tremely perturbed now by the huge incomprehensible gap in his
memory, he gave up trying to read and concentrated on attempting
to recall the recent past. What on earth was the important thing
he'd forgotten? Now, in addition, it seemed essential for him to
remember the end of the sentence he'd spoken so urgently. But
again, all his efforts were useless; he had no more success than
101

before. No matter how hard he tried to recall them, the words and
the whole complex of events remained stubbornly missing.
The book slipped off the bed, hit the floor with a thump, and
immediately began to glide to and fro on the polished surface in
time with the ship's rolling. Bending down, he discovered that it
was just out of reach. But then he forgot it, fascinated by the motions
his dressing-gown was making, swinging out from its hook with
each roll, parallel to the floor, executing a staid pirouette as if in a
stately ceremonial dance, before it returned to its normal place on
the wall. When he detached his eyes from these moves, they went
on to a window nearby. Like the old-fashioned porthole it replaced,
it was fitted with an inner cover of thick, heavy glass for use in
bad weather, which was now tightly screwed down. Through it he
could only just discern the water outside, which looked like a con­
tinuous solid wall, except when it intermittently surged against the
pane as if trying to burst its way in; while the glass calmly went
on reflecting the reading-light over his bed. The dressing-gown was
no longer in his field of vision, so he was astonished to see it swing
out from the wall again. . . . Only it wasn't his dark silk dressing­
gown any more, but a gigantic masculine arm lunging threaten­
ingly out of nowhere . . . .
Once more he watched the black, brutal, tremendous arm de­
scend on the pitiful fragile figure, which crumpled beneath it, but
not before the girlish voice had called to him piteously: 'Do you
remember . . . ? '
The words he hadn't heard properly at the time instantly restored
the lost end of his own sentence, to which they related: suddenly it
was obvious that Luz had tried to remind him of his promise to
come and help her if she was ever in trouble . . . .
The cabin seemed to shiver in front of him in the light of this
revelation. He experienced a strange shattering shock, like an ex­
plosion, which went on reverberating in the depths of his being
long after its first devastating blast. It was inconceivable that he
should have forgotten . . . impossible to believe. Yet there was the
incontrovertible fact, which could not be denied. He couldn't face
the enormity of his forgetting . . . he refused to look into that yawning
crater, deeper than comprehension . . . it was too fearful to contem­
plate. He felt a transient hopeless despair at the loss of the new
purposeful individual he had so briefly been: but this was at once
overwhelmed by his astounded incredulity - how could he possibly
,

102

have dreamed of dedicating himself to the Indris after the promise
he'd given? What devilish aberration had brought him aboard this
ship, on which he'd have to stay until the next port of call?
At last he was beginning to realize something of the stupor
he must have been in ever since leaving his uncomfortable, over­
crowded room in the village. But his memory was still faulty, he
was still partially stupefied, unable to recall the details of his de­
parture or to grasp anything fully. All he could feel at the moment
was a vast, all-embracing bewilderment and dismay, such as might
be felt by a simple traveller, setting off, as he believes, on his ap­
pointed path, only to be told, days later, that it's the wrong one,
and that he must go back to the starting-point and begin his journey
all over again.
*

The wrong path. . . . He is puzzled by the complex geography
of the trails between forest and fiord, until he finds that only the
one by the water leads anywhere - all the others just peter out, so
that, after losing himself in the trees, struggling through dead,
shoulder-high weeds, clambering over boulders and down deep ra­
vines, he always has to return finally to the same waterside track
he already knows.
Tonight he seems to be out much later than usual. A full moon
shines down on the savage terrain through which the path winds on
and on endlessly. A recent fall of snow, sparkling with diamond
prisms in the bright white light, gives the scene a wild, eerie beauty
which somehow seems ominous. He tells himself he's often been
here before and knows the path well, but in fact he doesn't recog­
nize anything - certainly not this high promontory of strange up­
ended rocks, projecting far into the fiord, and topped by a narrow
platform, as if meant for high-diving.
In the fashion of dreams, without any transitional stage, he
finds himself at the top of the lofty, snow-powdered rocks, and
from here he can see two moons: one shining up from the black
water to meet the white light the other pours down from the sky.
The edges of the fiord are frozen. Not a ripple dims the reflected
moon, and this doubled illumination shows everything as clearly as
daylight, including the shivering girl, kneeling or crouching naked
before him.
He stands motionless, staring down at her fixedly. The moon is
103

so bright that he can even see the exceptionally delicate texture of
her white skin. There's hardly room for them both on the platform,
and she is very close to him . .. under his eyes ... within reach of
his hand.... One hand starts to move towards her, but the gesture
is checked immediately. His hand hasn't really moved.
The cord loosely binding her frail wrists - which look as if they
would snap at the pressure of a finger and thumb - has marked
them deeply in the course of her futile attempts to escape. She has
stopped struggling now. Her hands jerk occasionally like injured
birds - a motion caused by the violence of the shudders convulsing
her ceaselessly. Her head droops in exhaustion, she seems · on the verge
of collapse, her silvery hair hangs forward, concealing her face. .. .
He presses his hand to his aching head, feeling he's going out of
his mind ... finding himself again in the dappled shade of the old
pear tree by the empty farm, although other scenes exist too, con­
tinually changing places with one another. He still sees the girl's
pathetic form in the moonlight, naked and bound at his feet; plung­
ing down like a white shooting star to the cruel black icy water.
Her fragile figure confronts him melodramatically in a stage spot­
light, under the slashing blows of black shadows, twisted in agi­
tated disarray on a grassy bank.
He can't escape her. Wherever he looks, some variation of her
frail body is waiting . . . turning towards him a white, imploring,
terrified face, framed in shining, dishevelled hair, which empha­
sizes her pathos and helplessness, the face of a victim of some
calamity.
*

Luke passed his hand over his forehead. He was sitting up in
bed in his cabin. An odd scraping noise he couldn't place, not very
loud, made him look down; the book was still sliding backwards
and forwards on the floor with monotonous regularity. Remember­
ing that he couldn't reach it, he left it alone; and kept his eyes
away from the window and his dressing-gown. Some compUlsion
seemed to prevent him from looking at anything in the outer world,
drawing his attention relentlessly inwards, and focusing it on the
unbelievable hiatus in his memory, forcing him to accept it as real.
Once he'd done that, he had to accept the reality of everything else
- of all those atrocious visions he'd just been having. It followed
like a corollary that he mustn't see Luz again. The danger was too
104

great, the evil side of his nature too strong. His sadism was the
calamity to which she had fallen a victim.
While thinking this, he was all the while seeing her as he had at
first, the white fire of her arresting albino's hair a flickering aur­
eole round her head, her fragility and her almost transparent skin
making a glass girl of her, a being who seemed not quite real, with
the expression, both docile and apprehensive, of someone at once
foredoomed and resigned, as if she accepted her fate in advance. It
flashed through his mind that every girl who'd ever attracted him
even slightly had had something of that same vulnerable, submis­
sive aspect - something of the pathos of a toy, constructed only to
be destroyed. But immediately afterwards he was filled with resent­
ment and thought of nothing but protesting violently against fate. It
was hideously unfair . . . he'd never wanted a victim. All he had
ever hoped for was a little contact with someone to make him feel
less isolated in the world. What injustice that he should have to
suffer all this. How diabolical of fate to involve him with the very
person who appealed so irresistibly to his sadistic impulse, which
otherwise might have remained in abeyance.
His head was aching violently, as though it would burst from the
conflicting pressures inside it, and without knowing he did so, he
clutched it with both his hands. He felt dizzy, as though he were
falling . . . a rushing noise in his ears made him think the sea must
have broken through the thick glass and be pouring into the cabin . . .
The ship was rolling so much he'd be thrown out of bed, to drown
in the rising flood.
His mind groped for something to cling to, but he couldn't find
his hands. Still clamped round his head, they remained incompre­
hensibly missing in this extremity . . . useless, unavailable to him.

105

12

HE
T

sun is shining with a peculiar pale intensity, as if de­
termined to condense into a brief hour or two all the light
it spreads over a much longer time further south: its heatless
radiance, flooding down from the cloudless, colourless sky, gives
this northern city an almost chimerical aspect. The limpid bright­
ness seems to hide more than it shows, for only a bare impression
of a city emerges, its streets and big buildings suggested rather
than seen. Countless polished windows reflect the sun, which flashes
too on the bright metal parts of small boats and ferries, and dances
and sparkles on wind-ruffled water at the end of the main street,
where the harbour, shimmering like a mirage, comes right into
the town.
The sun is describing so Iow an arc that it shines straight
into people's eyes. Luz shades hers with her hand, as she hurries,
half running, down the main street. But as she ' s facing the
water, she can't help catching an occasional blinding flash from---­
the burning snakes wriggling along the tops of the waves,
which keep blazing up, bursting into sudden flames in mid-air,
filling the whole atmosphere with their incessantly shattering and
reviving fires.
Slightly bemused by so much dazzle and movement, she mur­
murs apologetically without dropping her hand, when she bumps
into one of the other pedestrians she can hardly see in all the glare.
Their looming shapes are mysterious, indistinct as shadows, but,
contradictorily, much more solid than she, and seem to impede her,
either intentionally or by accident, so that they ought really to be
held responsible for the collision.
She has now almost got to her destination, a huge public build­
ing facing the sparkling water of the harbour across a wide open
space. Perhaps intimidated by its sheer size, she gradually slows
106

down as she approaches it. There' s something queer about the
place, which, like everything else, has the odd vagueness so much
dazzle imparts; and moreover, there's something very strange about
its design.
A tall windowless gable, several storeys high, towers above
shallow steps rising from the street to a row of pillars; these
meet at right angles a similar row of vertical uprights above an
identical flight of steps, which are surmounted by another gable,
looking away from the first. Each gable-wall confronts a single,
separate, giant column, which stands like a punctuation mark; but
fails to terminate the structure according to any accepted rule of
architecture, so that the total effect is one of profound uncertainty
as to where the imposing edifice begins or ends . . . or how . . . or
even if. . . .
The whole place seems to swell up to monstrous, impossible,
dream-proportions, as she puts her foot on the bottom step . . . thinking
only of how to escape as quickly as possible from her conspicuous,
vulnerable, exposed position on these wide steps, raised above the
heads of the passers-by. At the top, she hurries through a dark entry
behind the pillars, leading into an ante-room, which leads in tum
into a great hall of stupendous size, dark after all the dazzle out­
side. She peers around nervously at the indistinct mosaics, the marble,
the gold decorations she can't see properly.
Her eyes appear to get used to the dimness quite suddenly.
But she sees the next moment that this i sn ' t really what ' s
happened, a s strong light is streaming down from an unseen
source, and presumably has been all along. How can she have
made such an extraordinary mistake? To have imagined it was dark
when it was all the time so brightly lit gives her a shock. Her
grasp of reality seems to be slipping. Especially as she only now
notices the grim figures in uniform standing at intervals, who all
have her under observation. Her nervousness increasing, she gets
the idea they are eyeing her with suspicion and wonders what she
ought to do next - if only she'd found out the correct procedure
beforehand . . . .
For once she' s in luck, as it happens: a stranger entering from
the street shows her what to do by consulting a board on which the
names of different authorities are inscribed. As soon as he moves
on, she goes over to look at it, and finds she'll have to go up to the
third floor. But how on earth does she get there, when there's no
107

sign either of stairs or a lift? the watchful guards, or whatever they
are, have remained still as waxworks till now: when they suddenly
startle her by all pointing the same way at once in a rapid, identical,
perfectly synchronized gesture. Perhaps, after all, they mean to be
helpful, but somehow she doesn't think so, as she hurries in that
direction - only to be confronted by a fresh problem, in the shape
of a strange apparatus she has never seen in her life. With no vis­
ible means of propulsion, small boxes or cages the size of a tele­
phone-box are rising and falling in endless sequence as if
demonstrating perpetual motion. Are they meant to take people from
floor to floor, and, if so, how is she to stop one? Or is she sup­
posed to jump in while it's moving? Not seeing any directions, or
any way of controlling the mechanism, she gazes at it dubiously,
by no means certain that it's a lift at all.
Once again a casual arrival from outside gives her a lead, step­
ping into one of the boxes during the infinitesimal time it is at
floor level without the least hesitation or interference with the ma­
chinery. The complete nonchalance with which he is borne aloft
makes her ashamed of her uncertainty, and she takes a flying leap
into the next box that arrives. After all, the thing's only a sort of
escalator. . . . But what on earth would happen if one failed to get
off and was carried right up to the very top?
Forgetting this marginal anxiety, she springs out at the third
floor and opens a door opposite, leading into a great room so
overcrowded that she can hardly get in. Only her exaggerated slim­
ness enables her to slip between the people standing just inside,
who, instead of pressing closer to make room for her, seem rather
to be silently resisting her entry. She can't be sure of this because
one of them looks at her - she doesn't catch even a glimpse of a
single face; but she can't rid herself of the notion that they're all
opposing her like so many inanimate objects. There really is some­
thing exceedingly odd about them: they're so silent and motion­
less, and so persistently keep their faces turned away from her.
And how tall they are! It's as if she were closely surrounded by
tall trees . . . .
Crowds always make her nervous; she wants to rush out of the
place at once. But just at this moment, the melancholy hoot of a
ship in the harbour reminds her of the urgency of the business she
has come to transact here, and, pulling herself together, she de­
cides to stay. To make sure she's got everything she'll require for
108

the coming interview, she opens her bag; but she can't move her
arms in the appalling crush, and is obliged to peer down awkwardly
into its dark recesses. Her money, passport, etc., all appear to be in
order: and, after this investigation, there 's nothing for her to do
except wait, tightly jammed in the midst of the silent and face­
less throng.
They hardly seem to be moving forward at all towards the pre­
siding officials at the end of the room, whom she can't see, although
she now and then hears their stem voices, which sound the reverse
of encouraging; she only knows some slow progress is being made
because she's not so close to the door. It suddenly strikes her that,
at this rate, the place will close long before she gets anywhere near
the officials, so it's futile to stay any longer. She might just as well
go now and come back another day. Relieved by this thought, she
looks back towards the door; but then relief changes immediately
into alarm as she sees how far she is from it, and how many people
intervene between it and herself. She'll never be able to push her
way to the exit past all those towering, forbidding forms; which
certainly won't make room for her to pass . . . .
The undefined fears, which have been at the back of her mind
all the time, refuse to be suppressed for another instant. She
fights against them, telling herself to keep calm - if she loses
her head, she'll be done for. Why should she be frightened, any­
how? All she has to do is explain politely that she must leave
the room. But somehow this seems beyond her. Acute anxiety pre­
vents her from speaking calmly and naturally, or indeed at all. She
knows that it's essential for her to say something, and yet she can't
bring out a word, as if the ominous silence of the crowd has in­
fected her.
Crushed, pressed upon from all sides, unable to move a muscle,
she stares desperately at the tall shapes hemming her in. Their faces
- if they have faces - remain obstinately averted, while she searches
among them with feverish intensity for one single human face . . .
for the face of someone who once promised to save her . . . without
any such reassuring physiognomy coming to light.
Gradually panic invades her. The situation has become super­
natural and horrifying - unendurable. She simply must escape some­
how. Her eyes dart wildly about the huge room until they come to
a window; where they remain fixed, with an expression of terror
and incredulity.
109

Unbelievable as it seems, outside it is snowing hard. Under the
black sky, a swaying, shimmering, close-woven fabric of white fills
the air like a curtain shutting out everything. But that's not poss­
ible . . . a minute ago there was brilliant sunshine . . . not a cloud
was in sight. . . . Since the weather can't possibly change so fast,
she can only suppose she must have been here much longer than
she thinks.
Turning her head, she looks at a big round clock on the wall
beside her. Its hands are large and black, its numerals clearly marked;
and yet their position means nothing to her. After staring at the
clock face for nearly a whole minute, she's still none the wiser it's precisely as though she'd never been taught how to tell the
time. This discovery shocks her more than anything has so far, and
completes her demoralization.
The worst thing about it is that it's all happened to her before . . .
she knows this insane terror only too well. She has experi­
enced already this sensation of helpless weakness, of unreality.
The anguish she feels now is part of a recurring pattern, of her
victim's fate, which suddenly breaks through the everyday aspect
of things in a world which has never been what it seemed. . . . She
doesn't know where she is in it any longer, or even who she's
supposed to be.
These are not people crowding around her, but great, tall, threat­
ening shapes of phantoms or trees, dark as firs in the snow, and
bristling with savage hostility, terrifyingly strong. Utterly at their
mercy, paralyzed, speechless, enmeshed by ghosts, she stands trapped
by the white weaving snow, which has already obliterated the real
world.
A new ice-age seems to be starting. Tremendous towering
cliffs of solid ice, mountain-high, move down from the pole.
Their terrible white glistening spearheads pierce and pulverize
the highest mountains, level the Alps, engulf forests and cities,
freeze oceans with all their fish and whales, crush out the life of
the planet.
Smooth, shining, unearthly, without a break, the white walls loom
all round her, a vast, glacial, nightmare encirclement, implacably
closing in.
The light of day fades in its eerie dazzle. All is distorted, phan­
tasmal. In the dead silence, the weird, iceberg-glittering mirage­
light of this colossal circuit no trace of reality can penetrate.
1 10

Imprisoned within the impassable walls of the locked, lifeless
polar world, all that is left for her is a deathly cold isolation, numbing
her senses and freezing her brain. The world lost, the light lost, the
mind lost, the coldly gleaming, relentlessly moving ice has become
her sole and final reality.

111

13

T

HE ship wasn't moving in any direction, merely wallowing
in heavy swell. It was early morning and exceedingly cold;
unnaturally cold for the latitude and the season, according
to which it should have been daylight, even at this hour. Yet
all was black as midwinter outside the portholes of the captain's
cabin; the dim light mainly illuminated the owner's bald head and
the papers outspread before him, over which he stooped with
both hands flat on his desk, simultaneously conversing inaudibly
with a colleague.
There was an abbreviated knock and the passenger entered, with­
out waiting to be called in. The other two looked up sharply,
their hostile disapproval felt rather than seen, since their faces
were almost hidden, so heavily were they muffled against the cold.
Their sole response to the newcomer's greeting was a couple of
grunts; after which they resumed their muttered confabulation as if
still alone.
Checked in his intended leave-taking, the passenger stopped in
front of them, the centre of a circle of isolation. He was aware of
their antagonism but too remotely to be affected by it. His mental
state just then was slightly abnormal, the sleeping-tablets he 'd
taken too recently for their effect to have quite worn off were con­
fusing his thoughts, and he still felt muzzy from last night's fare­
well drinking.
Remembering how late he'd gone to bed after the party, he ex­
perienced one of his not infrequent spasms of self-dislike and con­
tempt. Why couldn't he resign himself to his isolation, instead of
making these futile, undignified, periodic attempts to pretend it didn't
exist? How ridiculous, how despicable he must have appeared to
the other people last night . . . how they must have laughed at his
asinine efforts to seem one of them.
1 12

The disgust he felt for himself didn't last this time, but dissolved
next moment in his general vagueness, leaving him without a single
definite thought in his head. He was still standing in the same place,
bemused, when the captain abruptly looked up to ask whether he'd
changed his mind about going ashore - a question too superfluous,
in his opinion, to need an answer; though the harsh voice paused
as if one was expected before adding, in a tone the reverse of friendly,
'All I can do then is wish you luck. '
It sounded more as if he wished him in hell, but they both auto­
matically started the gesture of shaking hands, abandoning it at once
as if by mutual consent, the captain resuming his previous mutterings.
There was no further reason for the passenger to remain; by rights
he should have now left the cabin. For some reason, however, it
didn't occur to him to move, and he stayed where he was, sus­
pended, staring at nothing in particular, as if half asleep. When a
slight movement behind the two mumbling forms drew his eyes to
a third man in uniform he couldn't identify in the deep shadow, his
vague ruminations began to revolve around the question of whether
this person could have come in without his noticing, or had been
there all along. Nobody spoke to him. But the increasingly tense
atmosphere, and the sombre looks surreptitiously aimed at him,
indicated that he was the object of a unanimous enmity, the cause
of which was not clear. The captain, apparently, could hardly wait
for him to go. Growing more impatient each second, often inter­
rupting what he was saying to stare insistently at him, he finally
burst out uncontrollably: ' How much longer are you going to hold
us all up? '
Since there couldn't have been any delay so far, his exasperation
seemed excessive, inexplicable, to the passenger who, at the same
time, suddenly grew aware of his own muddle-headedness and aimless
loitering and hurriedly left the cabin with a muttered apology, fol­
lowed by the man from the background, whom he now recognized
as the chief officer.
The cold became more intense as they reached the deck, on which
snow was steadily falling. Letting the other pass, the traveller paused
in bewilderment, wondering what could have happened to the cli­
mate. A dim suspicion that he'd been brought to the wrong place
seemed so fantastic that he at once lost sight of it in the snow's
complex fluctuations.
The countless snowflakes, eddying in the wind, created a curious
1 13

foglike gloom in the upper air, excluding daylight almost completely,
swarming round the few lights and reducing them to the feeblest
glimmer. The small flakes came crowding down persistently, in­
exhaustibly, as if they would go on without ever ceasing, falling
for weeks . . . months . . . years . . . . This was just how they'd been
falling last night, and they certainly hadn't stopped since for a single
second.
Noticing that the officer was already almost hidden from sight,
he shook himself into motion, groping after him, forced to go care­
fully to avoid colliding with various parts of the ship's superstruc­
ture, which became visible only when they loomed up, glistening
with ice, just in front of him. Looking about with vague expect­
ancy, he caught the tail end of the thought that some of last night's
drinking companions might be coming to see him off; and, dis­
gusted all over again by the absurd self-delusion, he made a re­
solute effort to clear his head. But the numbing cold wasn't conducive
to mental activity: the wind driving the snow against him seemed
to blow straight off the polar ice.
Bearlike in many wrappings, a seaman lumbered past with his
suitcases in mysterious silence all footsteps were soundless on the
snowy deck. The silence, now that he'd noticed it, seemed uncanny,
uncannily emphasized by the continuous low throbbing under his
feet. The faint sound initiated a new train of thought, and sent him
hurrying after his escort, whom he addressed for the first time in a
voice that sounded surprised: 'The engines - they haven't stopped . . . '
' You bet they haven't! The skipper can't wait to tum about. He's
been cursing you for days for making us put in here.' The words
were maliciously spoken, with the same unexplained animosity that
had been so noticeable in the captain ' s case, though this man
couldn 't control his curiosity, asking : ' Why have you come,
for God ' s sake? '
'I have to find someone. '
The frigid, curt voice prohibited further questions or comments,
and, without exchanging another word, they arrived at the rail, which
was thickly encased in ice, and had a rope-ladder dangling down
from it towards the invisible water. Hearing the sound of a motor
down there, the mystified passenger leaned over the side, but saw
only the involved, ever-changing patterns of the snow.
' Harbour's frozen over. They can only keep open a narrow
channel, so we've got to put you ashore by launch. ' Having
-

1 14

supplied this information, the officer swung one leg over the
rail and descended the ladder with practised ease, not offering
any assistance.
Luke followed him awkwardly. He needed both hands to cling to
the rope, so that the snow blinded him and he didn't see who pulled
him into a rocking boat; where he immediately became a target for
hostile stares, as if all those manning it had a personal grudge against
him, though he didn't notice this either. Nor did he see a hand
reach out to push him towards a seat, into which he went sprawl­
ing, as the launch instantly shot forward at full speed.
He had difficulty in keeping his balance even while he was sit­
ting down, for the small boat plunged and reared like a bucking
horse and bounced wildly from swell to swell, sheets of spray­
flying over the tiny cabin. And, in the midst of all this violent
chaotic motion, he remained unaware of the grim, obdurate faces
around him.
The ship they'd just left had already vanished into the blizzard.
It had been cold there, but it was a thousand times colder down
here on the water. The cold was brutal, paralyzing: he'd never felt
anything like it.
The sky was invisible, still blurred and darkened by the queer
snow-fog, against which the white falling flakes wove their con­
tinually changing designs like an intricate, fluid lace. He stared at
these complexities so long that they began to assume peculiar shapes
- distorted forms of mermaids and men, pallid masks of the drowning
or drowned. To exclude them, he covered his face with his hand,
sinking into a kind of daze of cold and discomfort.
He was roused suddenly by an extraordinary long-drawn-out yell,
which was really more of a howl and sounded alarmingly close,
although nothing could be seen through the welter of snow and
spray. Jumping up, the officer shouted back unintelligibly through
a megaphone, and after several exchanges resumed his seat with
the laconic remark: 'One-way traffic. '
Luke looked at him blankly, not understanding, then followed
his gesture towards a distant indistinct commotion, which gradually
defined itself as a spectral ship, motionless as a rock by contrast
with the frantic activity of the crowd of small boats seething round
it, all struggling desperately to get near enough for their occupants
to climb aboard, each for himself at the expense of the rest, all the
time jostling, ramming and even capsizing each other in their mad,
1 15

panic-stricken, relentless competition, at which the passenger gazed
in horror.
Although the launch steered clear of the frenzied melee, he couldn't
help hearing the confused hubbub of shouts, screams, thuds and
splashes pursuing them long after the scene itself had been left
behind, finally turning to his escort with an unspoken query - what
could be happening here?
He was told: ' You know as much as I do - you heard the news.
How people are fighting to get away, crazy to get on to any ship
that'll take them. We've got room for a few ourselves. But the old
man won't wait long enough to pick them up. '
Abruptly the violent movement stopped, speed dropped to dead
slow, and the speaker, interrupting himself, hurried outside and re­
mained there, calling down incomprehensible steering directions at
intervals.
Left alone with his remembered disturbing vision of battling small
craft, Luke was distracted from it only when an oscillating gust
caught the opaque fabric of snow, lifting it to give him an aston­
ishing glimpse of his surroundings. They were in a channel be­
tween ice-fringed walls, beyond which extended a waste of white
hillocks and hummocks that was the frozen harbour. The monotony
of so much white had a baffling effect on his eyes; he couldn't
judge the size of the abandoned hulks, dotted about like houses,
immovably embedded in the thick ice, and almost believed he'd
imagined them, when the white curtain came down again, blotting
everything out, even the icy walls that were nearly close enough
for him to touch with his hand.
It was as though he had dreamed that arctic scene. And he as­
sumed the weak, flickering lights that next appeared in the distance
were some sort of optical illusion, coming and going continuously,
like will-a' -the-wisps, in the vicinity of the unseen horizon. They
couldn't possibly be real. Real lights would have got bigger and
brighter as they approached; whereas these were just as dim and
evanescent when presently the launch stopped moving, and the officer
put his head into the cabin to announce their arrival.
*

The traveller at once gets up and goes out: but then stops and
stands motionless, clutching the roof of the cabin and staring ahead.
The lights are invisible at the moment. He sees only the eternal
116

snow, now falling even more heavily and in larger flakes, which
settle on his shoulders like weightless birds.
The suspicion of having been brought to the wrong place again
crosses his mind. He can't believe this is his destination. Not a
building is to be seen, there's absolutely no sign of a town. All he
can make out is the immediate foreground, with a flight of steps
coming down to the water from the sea-wall, which has an iron
ring cemented into it. One of the crew inserts a boat-hook into this
ring, pulling the launch alongside, while another jumps out with
his suitcases, deposits them at the top of the steps, and returns at
the double.
By the time the seaman resumes his place, the passenger has
ceased to see anything whatsoever, overtaken by absence and vague­
ness, as he was in the captain's cabin, unaware that everybody on
board is staring at him fixedly, waiting for him to move. As they
lean forward in tense watchful poses, their faces express the utmost
hostility and infuriated impatience, in striking contrast with his own
blind, blank look. Tension mounts in a rapid crescendo in the gla­
cial hush, which the indifferent pulse of the motor hardly disturbs.
The dreamer remains oblivious of the faces round him . . . if he
suddenly saw their murderous expressions he'd surely think they
were part of the nightmare by which he 's immobilized.
As the seconds pass and he still stands there, the sailors grow
more and more enraged, starting to mutter among themselves, trucu­
lently, vituperatively . . . the officer decides it's high time he took
charge of the situation, and he does so by seizing the other man's
arm, meaning to drag him ashore by force.
His threatening grip instantly recalls Luke to himself. Shaking it
off, he says, as if to explain, or even to make a joke of his hesita­
tion: ' It was so damned cold sitting still in the boat. I was frozen
stiff . . . couldn't move for a second. ' He actually contrives a wry
smile, then, without further delay, jumps on to the steps, feeling at
the last moment his familiar desire for acceptance, approval. He
wants to make a normal impression, to speak and act as he believes
other people would in his predicament. But the attempt is a failure;
his behaviour seems false and serves only to remind him of his real
isolation.
The launch has already shot off, and disappears now in churning
white whirlpools where snow meets spray. The waves of the wake
chase each other along the channel, swelling over the lower steps,
1 17

subsiding quickly to mere surface undulations, which soon cease
altogether; while he stares down in amazement at a strange silky
film forming on the blackish water, which is freezing visibly.
The motor of the receding boat is no longer audible. Suddenly
he grows aware of vast silence and loneliness all about him. When
he turns away from the water, he seems to be facing a wide open
space, uniformly flat, white and empty, the boundaries of which
are lost in the falling snow. Deep snow already covers the ground,
on which millions more flakes hurriedly settle each second. Nothing
suggests the proximity of a town . . . or of anything else . . . . He is
reluctant to advance into that forbidding cold vacancy. The silence,
the emptiness, the total absence of any sign of life, seem alien and
unnerving.
Now, however, the elusive lights reappear, and instinctively he
starts towards them, since they are the only indication that human
beings exist anywhere near him, quite forgetting his luggage, which
has already become indistinguishable from the white background.
Walking proves unexpectedly difficult, his progress is very slow.
The blizzard slams the frozen snow into his face as he battles against
it. The countless white dots, ceaselessly surging out of the dark
hole where the sky ought to be, seem to increase the slight mental
confusion that has never left him. Veering all round the compass,
the wind whirls them at him, first from one side, then from the
other, or sends them showering down in utter chaos from all sides
at once, until his head starts to spin round with them. The distant
lights seem as remote as ever, coming and going bewilderingly,
reminding him of old tales of travellers lured to destruction in bogs
and quicksands. The marsh lights in those old ghost stories always
stayed far away . . . and, like them, the glimmers ahead of him keep
vanishing too, always reappearing in a different spot, as if deliber­
ately trying to mislead him . . . .
His footsteps become slower and more laboured . . . he's gradu­
ally being worn out by the cold and the effort of struggling on. It
seems a long time since he started walking . . . . But there's still
nobody . . . nothing . . . only the everlasting snow, inexhaustibly falling,
encircling him like a round white curtain that keeps pace with him
as he moves, but doesn't prevent him from knowing he is the centre
of a huge unseen emptiness, reaching to infinity on all sides.
With no obstacle to break its force, the wind is charging fiercely
across the plain, driving the snowflakes straight at him, parallel
118

with the ground. Suddenly it starts whirling them round him in
crazy spirals so violent that he has to stand still, his head down. At
once he feels frightened and dizzy, lost in this dreadful inhuman
whiteness where nothing is to be recognized. In his confusion, he
actually wishes he 'd never left the steps, which were at least ident­
ifiable . . . the one place that had some definition . . . where human
beings had been . . . .
When the wind abates slightly, it's all he can do to move for­
ward again. It's a terrible aching effort to keep on walking. Snow­
flakes seem to be whirling round in his head. The snow has become
an illness, his own and the world's, the sick sky endlessly vomiting
its white flux. A knot of pain forms in his head, with which the
snow intermingles - suddenly his pain and the snow are one, locked
together like lovers, heaving and swaying . . . rocking and rolling
deliriously . . . .
A nameless disorder has invaded the world. Gangrenous, distended
with frozen wind, puffed by white swellings, the sick ground seems
to wince and shudder and undulate strangely. On the periphery of
his vision, the snow starts to coagulate. Shapeless, churning white
revolves on itself to create a miracle of erectness . . . the incredible
upright shape of a human form. A kind of bright shiver goes through
him, as, out of the vortex, comes a figure he knows . . . .
At once the snowflakes grow bigger, more elongated, and fall
more thickly, clotting into an opaque screen through which he can
hardly see the frail ghost-girl approaching him. Snow wraps her
round like a garment, less bright than her hair. The apparition makes
him forget his tiredness. Longing to see her more clearly, he re­
peatedly parts the falling snow in a swimmer's gesture, not notic­
ing when his hands lose all sensation. Blinking away the heavy
flakes that catch in his lashes, he frowns, his intent, screwed-up
eyes strain in the effort to penetrate all the white dots swarming
madly between them. Even now she's quite close, he can't see her
at all distinctly. Their two figures remain separate, disconnected.
No contact is possible while the snow shimmers down between them
like spray and relentlessly keeps them apart.
Suddenly the wind shifts, blowing it out in great fans, beyond
which the girl grows fainter still, more wraithlike, less substantial,
until she 's no more than a phantom, an unclear vision conjured out
of the storm . . . the snow 's brightness, refracted through her, gives
her a spectral transparency. He tries to call, ' Stay with me! Please
1 19

don't leave me! ' But before his frozen lips shape the words, a furious
arctic blast falls upon him, filling his eyes with water, so that her
half-seen face splinters in brittle fragments.
Her spun-glass hair ripples fanwise, grows longer and whiter still,
becoming indistinguishable from the snow. White flakes flicker among
the shreds of her disrupted image, which is finally swept away by
the wind.
ley needles of pain transfix him, piercing his eyes . . . their empty
and bleeding sockets glare vacantly at the dark, where there's nothing
left . . . no town, no lights . . . no ghost of love. . . . He is alone
with his isolation, with the everlasting snow and the bludgeoning
wind, which attacks him suddenly with a shriek . . . with a strident,
unearthly howl. . . .
Blast after murderous polar blast sends him reeling, agonizingly
lashing his face. Blind, dazed, bent double, he staggers and falls
into a darker and deeper night . . . a bottomless crevasse of blank
emptiness.

120

14

F

EW

visitors ever found their way to this obscure tropical
island resort, but, for the benefit of those who did, a small
hotel had been built on the beach, surrounded by several
cabins that were used as sleeping-quarters. Made of bamboo and a
tough substance woven from palm leaves, all these huts were alike,
consisting of a bedroom with bathroom behind, and a wide veranda
which served as an outdoor sitting-room, overlooking the so-called
garden, where a few flowering plants straggled between the palms.
Then came a long row of sand-dunes, stretching both ways as far
as the eye could reach, hiding the ocean and muffling the noise of
the surf. Because of their height, which exceeded that of the cabins,
the sandhills were generally thought to detract from the amenities
of the place; but they compensated for restricting the view by act­
ing as a protective barrier against the high tides and storms that
would otherwise have threatened it at certain seasons.
At the back, the palms grew much closer together, intermingling
with dense bushes and tall forest trees in an impenetrable equa­
torial tangle. Yet impenetrable was not the right word, for a
road had been hacked through the solid, indestructible-looking veg­
etation, and was the only approach to the hotel, widening in
front of it to form a parking place, and give cars room to turn. A
year or so previously this dirt road had been improved by the addi­
tion of two narrow, tarred, parallel strips, the same distance
apart as the wheels of a car; which now needed repairs in so
many places that they constituted more of a hazard to motorists
than a convenience.
However, the native driver employed by the proprietor was per­
fectly familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the route he travelled sev­
eral times weekly in the course of his duties. Always a bit of a
dandy, today he was looking especially elegant and debonair in
121

green and gold silk; completing the ensemble by picking a scarlet
hibiscus as he strolled to the car, twisting it into his hair, and then
flinging a light European jacket over his brown shoulders in a care­
less gesture.
Lunch was over, and most of the staff had collected to watch
him go, envying his control of the powerful American car, and his
freedom to show off when he got to the town - the last based on a
misconception, for he'd been ordered to come straight back immedi­
ately with the visitor who was expected to arrive by steamer. His
only chance of showing off, therefore, was here and now, in front
of his present audience. And he took full advantage of it, driving
away at high speed, demonstrating his skilful steering by effort­
lessly keeping the wheels on the tarred strips with one hand, while
he waved a casual goodbye with the other.
The Cadillac disappeared in the dusty haze at the bend of the
road, terminating the small stir its departure had created; and, yawning,
in ones and twos, the servants drifted towards their quarters for the
afternoon siesta.
Now the hot, heavy, seemingly lifeless hush peculiar to this time
of day envelops the hotel and its dependencies, broken only by the
intermittent clash of palm leaves in the wandering wind, and the
softer, more regular cough of the waves breaking beyond the dunes.
Nothing moves. No living creature is visible anywhere - no dog or
lizard; no bird, either of sea or land. Even the many insects are
stilled by the soporific heat, which seems to subdue the very
colours of flowers and sky.
The driver would have been flattered to know that someone be­
sides his compatriots was interested in his journey. As usual, most
of the cabins were empty. But one was occupied by a young woman
who'd just retired there, and, instead of lying down, she went straight
into the shuttered bathroom and opened the door used by the ser­
vants - not so wide as to catch the attention of anybody outside,
but enough to give free access to every sound. Thus she was able
to note the exact moment when the car set off on its long drive,
and listen to its gradually dwindling hum, until this finally was
extinguished.
Even then she didn't move or shut the door, which was so heav­
ily overshadowed by the black living wall just outside that scarcely
any light entered. In the dimness, her whitish hair had a ghostly
gleam, as she continued to stand in a listening posture, although
122

the only sound was the intermittent rattle of palm leaves, even the
sea's heavy breathing being inaudible on this side.
Several tedious moments dragged past before her straining ears
at last caught the expected sound (which only someone listening
intently for it would have noticed): the very faint buzz of a rapidly
receding car, already far inland. From her own observation, she
knew how the narrow road ran for a considerable distance across
flat, fertile fields, before beginning to climb the sharp-pointed foot­
hills, whose steep slopes were now throwing back and magnifying
sufficiently for her to hear the engine noise which had previously
been lost among the low-lying rice fields. It soon died away. But
she waited until she was perfectly sure it was not going to be heard
again before quietly closing the door and going to lie down, first
removing her three flimsy garments.
Stretched out flat on the bed's palm-leaf webbing, her pale, thin,
somewhat underdeveloped body kept so still that it might have been
laid out there, lifeless. But presently she moved to look at the time,
trying to estimate in her mind how far the car would have got by
now; a movement and exercise she repeated at intervals, in the
obsessional manner characteristic of anxiety states, all the while
half aware of the dull, ominous pounding of the surf on the beach
in the background.
*

Here, practically on the line of the equator, the sea was smooth,
dazzling, pellucid, pearly; colourless but for mysterious aquamar­
ine shadings that came and went like footprints left by invisible
beings strolling about on the water. No division being apparent
between sky and sea, the antiquated steamer, zigzagging from one
island to the next, seemed to float in mid-air, looking incredible,
ponderous yet unreal, and totally inappropriate to the boundless,
burning translucence in which it moved. These pure, serene, el­
emental transparencies seemed profaned by the noise and smoke of
the engine, and by the chattering passengers crowding the deck with
their friends, families and paraphernalia, among a sprinkling of
motionless, stem, aloof or indifferent priests.
The solitary European on board looked as detached as the holy
men squatting near him. Apparently oblivious of his surroundings,
he paid no more attention to the scavenging seabirds diving and
skirmishing round him than to the rowdy Coca-Cola drinkers, whose
123

empty bottles periodically sailed past his head on their way into
the sea.
His destination appeared, mirage-like, on the horizon, its central
mountains wreathed in perpetual cloud - secret, still almost unex­
plored mountains, covered in dense jungle, they were the home of
countless legends of ghosts and demons besides that of the weird
singing creatures, whose abode they were said to be. Skirts swished,
sandals clicked, bare feet thudded across the deck, as a general
move was made to his side · to see the distant island. Ignoring the
crowd, he never budged from the post at the rail he had taken up
hours ago in a patch of shade from the bridge. From time to time
the shade moved an inch or so with the ship's slightly changing
course; and whenever this happened he too made a fractional move­
ment to avoid being exposed to the blistering sun straight over his
head - otherwise he remained motionless.
His thoughts never left the pale fragile girl he was going to meet,
who had occupied them ever since he woke before dawn, though
not in any fresh or constructive way. Indeed, the only difference
between his present inconclusive thoughts, which engendered nothing
but more uncertainty, and all the preceding ones, was that he'd
now equated his negative attitude towards her with his general failure
as a human being. Without knowing how he'd reached this conclu­
sion, he was convinced that only by a full and open acceptance of
their relationship could he establish his identity as a real person.
Yet, in spite of this conviction, in spite of having followed her all
this way, he still wasn't sure what he wanted to do about her, and
felt more alarmed than anything by the prospect of their meeting.
It seemed so long since he last saw her that he couldn't suppress
the furtive idea that everything ought to be over between them.
Once upon a time he had envisaged for himself a supremely satis­
factory dedicated existence. . . . But how unfair to blame her for
turning it into a glimpse of unattainable paradise . . . . Ashamed, he
tried to concentrate on the attraction she had always had for him;
but his memory picture proved so elusive that he couldn't even see
her face distinctly in his mind. Suddenly, then, it struck him that
he never had seen her as she really was, but only in the role he had
imposed upon her . . . as a sort of unreal blessed innocent . . . a
lamb led to the slaughter . . . viewing her always from the privi­
leged position of her executioner. . . .
For an instant her victim's image branded its burning excitement
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upon his nerves. Next moment he felt lacerated, he could have thrown
himself overboard, genuinely shocked and appalled because he 'd
used their relationship as a kind of psychological masquerade for
the indulgence of his own sadism. Yet, only a second later, he seemed
exonerated by the thought that it was she who had loosed the sadistic
demon in him . . . a cloud of pretence and confusion obscured his
brain, concealing his past acts and motives. By thinking of her as
if she was a demon in the process of destroying him, he gave his
attitude the definition it had hitherto lacked - of course he didn't
want to see her, and began to consider how best to avoid the meet­
ing. It should be easy: he had only to stay where he was and let the
ship take him on to another island. But suppose she came to the
port to meet him? Supposing she actually came aboard? And now,
with hideous clarity, he saw himself hiding below, sweating with
apprehension in the stifling heat of his airless cabin . . where he
wouldn't be safe for two seconds . . . some officious fool was bound
to bring her straight to him there. . .
The picture was insufferable. Too undignified. Too unedifying.
He dismissed it from his mind. But it was beyond his power to
imagine the alternative, which therefore seemed all the more un­
nerving, and equally unendurable. Yet one or the other he must
face; there was no escape.
Outwardly as calm and aloof as ever, he began to feel almost
frantic with indecision as he watched the island grow larger, close
enough now for the figures on the waterfront to be seen distinctly.
Below the clouds, he could even make out individual trees in
the dense jungle which covered the mountain slopes in a minute,
burnished, emerald patterning, like shagreen. Among the gaily
dressed group assembled to welcome the arriving passengers, people
were already waving in frenzied excitement. The ship's siren gave
a piercing shriek, and every dog on the island started barking hys­
terically. At the same moment, a single puff of smoke soared
high into the sky, trailing its transparent shadow across the deck.
The engines stopped, the boat stopped moving, and without the faint
breeze stirred up by its motion, the afternoon heat fell upon him
like an oppress: ve weight.
Zero hour had arrived, and he still didn't know what to do. His
heart had started to beat uncomfortably fast. He pressed his hand
to his forehead and brought it away wet - more on account of his
uncertainty, he felt, than the heat. The gangway crashed down, and
.

125

immediately the chaos on deck became indescribable. Everyone was
shoving and shouting at once, the whole disorderly crowd seeth­
ing around him, so that he 'd have been swept away from the
rail by the solid mass of struggling humanity if he hadn't clung to
it so tightly that his knuckles stood out like bleached bones
under the taut skin. Apart from this effort, he still contrived to dis­
sociate himself from what was happening, and didn't move, look­
ing away from the surging mob to the tropical sunshine, which
blazed down dazzlingly on the water, casting dense black shadows
on land.
A few rowing-boats had already appeared round the ship and
were rocking gently on the brilliant water, which was tinged
yellow by the sandy floor of the harbour, and wore, like medals on
its full, burningly bright breast, weird wreaths and circular clusters
of pallid seaweed. Further out, the open sea rippled a darker, purpler
blue, meeting the yellowish harbour water in a line so straight
that it might have been ruled, while the mirror-haze just beyond
was alive with flotillas of flimsy sailing-boats skimming along
like white butterflies, in a breeze conspicuously absent from
the shore.
Having observed all this without really seeing anything of it, he
looked more attentively at the water' s edge, where he was thankful
to see no one he recognized, and nothing of interest. He was begin­
ning to experience an incipient relief when, with startling sudden­
ness, a big American car swept round the end of a row of warehouses,
sounding its hom continuously, scattering people to right and left,
and pulled up with a flourish right opposite him. Its only occupant
was the native driver, who emerged in a leisurely fashion, strolling
across to the end of the gangway, where he stood in a somewhat
consciously nonchalant pose, a scarlet hibiscus flower tucked jaunt­
ily behind one ear, watching the passengers disembark.
The man on the boat groaned aloud - a small despairing sound
lost immediately in the general din - and, in a last desperate at­
tempt to decide what to do, raised his eyes, as if unhopefully im­
ploring heaven to send him a message. But nothing unusual was
visible overhead. He saw only a pair of frigate-birds sailing past,
opening and shutting their tails like scissors; banking steeply against
the molten sky, they swept back again in a wide curve, one of
them circling round slowly, hardly moving its long wings, while
the other settled on top of the mast, where it remained quite
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motionless, as if it had been stuffed and put there as a decora­
tion. The big, black, fierce-looking birds of prey were common
in this part of the world, and no pronouncement of any sort could
be read into their appearance; so, unable to go on staring into
the blinding glare, he lowered his eyes to the car which had just
driven up. Undoubtedly it was the hotel car, and had been sent to
meet him.
Message or not, he now discovered with faint surprise that a change
had taken place in his outlook during the last few moments. The
pandemonium on board was subsiding, only a few passengers were
still pressing towards the gangway, and he at last moved to join
them without either reluctance or apprehension, no longer thinking
she would be at the hotel and that he 'd soon have to face her indeed, this had ceased to seem true. He might really have been the
recipient of a wordless message to the effect that his meeting with
Luz would not take place, and that she 'd have left the hotel by the
time he got there.
*

Dressed again after her siesta and holding a comb in her hand,
the young woman who occupies one of the hotel ' s beach huts stands
in front of a mirror hung on the wall. Her lustrous pale hair, slightly
disordered after its contact with the pillow, looks too heavy for her
extremely slight, almost childish form, which it seems to weigh
down, pouring over her shoulders in a silvery flood. It appears par­
ticularly abundant because she has washed it today; besides, it's
really much longer and thicker than usual, as there 's no one on this
remote tropical island to cut it for her. The islanders wouldn't do
so even if they could. Though of course she doesn't know how her
albino hair fills them with terror, white being for them a demonic
colour, so that nothing would induce them to touch it, and they
think she ' s a witch - hence the horrified glance she received from
the houseboy she asked to help her rinse it.
She vaguely wonders why he turned and fled, as she now plunges
the comb into the silver mass, through which she has to tug it at
first, encountering less resistance each time she repeats the action,
until the lustrous strands end by falling obediently in their custom­
ary sleek curves. But even now the hair, especially soft and light
after its recent washing, still stirs at the slightest movement, the
surface hairs continually quivering with tiny motions imperceptible
127

in themselves, which produce the effect of surrounding her head
with a tremulous silvery cloud.
She goes out on to the veranda in front of the cabin and sits
down there with a book. At her feet, a few steps lead down to the
garden, where a prostrate plant spreads a thick mat brilliant with
orange trumpets she doesn't see, since, from the higher level, her
eyes automatically cross the sunk garden to the sandhills beyond,
where there' s nothing to hold her attention. She isn't concentrating
on the book either. Motionless and unoccupied, she gazes straight
before her, except when from time to time she lowers her eyes to
her watch. Apart from this minimal move, she is utterly still, with
a stillness the reverse of relaxed, which suggests an acute suspense.
Still there is no life, no movement, about the hotel. The waves
keep up their continuous muttering, but the palm leaves rattle at
longer and longer intervals, as the wind gradually sinks with the
setting sun. In the shade of the dense trees behind the main build­
ing, large drum-shaped containers have been put out to await re­
moval by a truck which will collect them during the hours of darkness;
and these tightly sealed cylinders containing the day 's garbage pres­
ently attract an emaciated stray dog, which persistently sniffs and
limps round them on three legs, until finally it slinks away, de­
feated. But this solitary manifestation of life is outside the girl 's
field of vision.
The air grows steadily heavier, hotter and more oppressive. With
a characteristic gesture, she gathers her hair in one hand and lifts it
for a second to cool her neck; and, as she lets the soft shimmering
mass fall back, the sun dips behind the dunes, and the intervening
hollow at once fills with shadow.
Dusk doesn't exist in this part of the world, the light starts to
fade immediately. Her hair glints like water, swirling on her shoulders,
as she suddenly swings round to face inland, having just caught the
first faint fugitive mechanical sound of the returning car, still a
long way off'. Travelling downhill on the return trip, it is soon crossing
the flat land, coming rapidly nearer, the volume of noise increasing
each second. Still she remains, as if petrified, in that uncomfort­
able, twisted pose, listening to the hum of the engine, until its ris­
ing pitch fills her ears and the whole world. In a moment now, the
car will reach the hotel - she knows this, not only by the sound,
but from the increasing sense of urgency and approaching climax
pervading everything around her.
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Suddenly jumping up, she hurries down the steps and across
the garden, passing between the dunes to emerge on the beach
beyond, which is still in sunshine. The long curve of white sand is
completely deserted, as it always is unless visitors from the
hotel have come down for a swim, as the islanders consider the
beach unholy and never go near it, believing that demons live
in the sea. The girl is now out of sight of the hotel. Iridescent
spume floats in the air like a ghostly rainbow, drifting in from the
breakers, whose muted crash on a far-out reef drowns the noise of
the car. A slight, solitary figure on that long empty beach, she walks
at the edge of the demon-infested sea, dangling her sandals
from one hand, on the wet sand which doesn't retain her footprints
for half a second. Pink where it reflects the sunset, the dry, untrodden
sand stretches ahead for miles, white as snow. The last slanting
rays of the setting sun outline her head with brilliance, caught
in the shining mass of her hair that shifts in silver eddies with
every step.
The sun is so low now that it seems to rest on the rim of the sea
which, in an instantaneous snap human eyes are too slow to fol­
low, grabs the fiery ball in its jaws, swallowing it down into the
maw of darkness. At once the shallows tum milky and opalescent,
while further out deep water darkens to indigo in preparation for
the approaching night.
*

The lonely stroller has reached a hollow, which may be the bed
of a roaring torrent when rains flood down from the mountains.
She looks up and is suddenly frightened, seeing the waves above
her. Sudden terror invades her, the horror of icy walls implacably
rising . . . . The fearful shape of her impending fate, closing in, hangs
over her like an imminent murder . . . and she is trapped by it. The
glassy incoming wave meets the pale piled-up sand to form a com­
plete circle, within which she is imprisoned. The sea noise sud­
denly grows louder . . . an ominous loud booming . . . .
As if obeying an order, she fixes her eyes on the point where
the water' s transparent wall joints the segment of sand . . . where a
man's familiar face now appears . . . now his whole body . . . entering the double prison which confines her . . . to be irrevocably shut
in with her.
He stops. Time stops with him. The poised, motionless silhouette
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terrifies her afresh by its immediacy, so close to her, unmistakable,
even though indistinct in the failing light.
She is speechless, immobilized by the unaccountable guilt she
always feels in the presence of this man. In some mysterious, almost
magical fashion, she seems to have been involved with him ever
since time began . . . and yet he' s a stranger of whom she knows
only that he is a danger to her and a constant threat. From
what dark place of chaos, with what evil intention, is he approach­
ing now?
A sudden uncanny light touches the stem mask face with un­
canny whiteness, turning it into a statue 's. It doesn 't look like a
man's face any longer but like an effigy in white stone. The waves
break behind her with the sound of a succession of warning cries.
She has the momentary illusion of watching a sculptured Mercury
poised above her, bringing his message of doom. That pallid menac­
ing shape belongs to a different category of beings . . . another world
altogether. No contact between them is possible . . . they should
never have met . . . could never meet . . . and yet they have met that's what's so appalling. She has done nothing . . . and yet she
has committed a crime, just by being with him. Simply for them to
be together constitutes an offence in itself.
Horrific mysteries loom around her like the walls of a labyrinth,
in which the two of them are trapped without hope of escape . . .
both wandering, lost, there, and bound eventually to stand face to
face. Something irremediable will then happen . . . something un­
bearable . . . something she must avoid at all costs . . . .
In a sudden new spasm of terror, she turns and starts running in
the only direction she can run away from him - towards the mon­
strous encircling wave, towering sky-high, its crest already begin­
ning to bend and break . . . its whole concave glistening bulk about
to crash down upon her.

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15

UKE

absently passes his hand over his head, vaguely aware
that it has started aching. He feels slightly bewildered, as
if waking suddenly in an unfamiliar place, and looks up,
half expecting to see a big bird, a stuffed one possibly, somewhere
over his head. Instead, he finds himself surveying a slatted ceiling
in need of repair, where lizards of assorted sizes are frisking about,
whisking their flexible tails. The big, bare, shabby room is full of
the noise of surf, so that huge breakers seem to be exploding out­
side. Yet the sea isn 't even visible; all he can see is a luminous
sunset sky over sandhills stretching both ways as far as the eye
can reach.
The memory of a hot uncomfortable drive from the port comes
back to him as though he 'd dreamt it, together with his premon­
ition that Luz won't be here; which the neglected, abandoned as­
pect of the hotel at once confirms . . . while at the same time it
seems to remind him of something in his own past. . . . But the
place must be occupied, after all, for before he can recall the asso­
ciation, he 's confronted by a youth whose nude torso matches the
batik pattern of his skirt, which in tum merges with the shadows
beginning to coagulate in the room, so that his figure is altogether
somewhat indefinite, even ghostly. Disconcerted by his sudden, silent,
unexpected arrival, Luke wonders where on earth he has sprung
from . . . then, assuming he ' s one of the houseboys, asks whether a
fair-haired girl is staying there, and if so, which is her cabin. He
has to repeat the question, and still isn 't sure it has been under­
stood, as the other only makes a vague gesture, and immediately
afterwards vanishes as suddenly as he came.
Again Luke is considerably taken aback. And, as he 's already a
bit confused, he gets the impression he must have imagined the
incident . . . or else that he 's just seen an apparition. He has no

L

131

intention of investigating any of the cabins; so his bewilderment
increases when he finds himself climbing the steps of one . . . . All
this seems to be happening to him in a dream . . . . However, since
he ' s here, he decides that he may as well look inside, and peers
into the bedroom; which is too dark for him to make out anything
clearly. Something white hanging on the wall might be a coat or a
dressing-gown; there ' s no reason, anyhow, to connect it with Luz.
And the other white blur of the mosquito-net over the bed is as
impersonal as a small diaphanous cloud.
At least he has established the fact that Luz herself is not in the
hotel. Suddenly, thinking this, he feels he has done all that can be
expected, needn't bother about her any further, and hurries outside
again. Instantly his eyes and thoughts tum to the distant mountains,
which are the home of the legendary singing lemurs he loves so
much - his feeling for them is almost metaphysical. More than
anything in the world, he wants to devote himself to them, and
now he must surely be free to do so, as he hasn't found the girl.
But the point seems doubtful. The mountains themselves have with­
drawn from sight into the approaching darkness. Although sunset
rose still lingers over the sea, the sky inland has already retired
into night. Besides, he feels none of the euphoria, the sensation of
confident rightness he experienced when he first decided to dedi­
cate his life to the study of the strange singers.
Disappointed, he slowly descends the steps to the darkening
garden, the dunes looming ahead like a fortified wall between
dark and day. But his mood swings upward when he notices the
car he came in still standing at the door of the main building. On
the spot he ' s convinced that it's waiting for him . . . the driver must
know by telepathy that he means to leave . . . or why is he still
there? Everything ' s going to work out right for him after all. He
has only to get back into the car and be driven away from this
place for ever. As he hurries along, eager to get going, his feet
seem to avoid by instinct the various plants and obstacles it's already
too dark to see.
He keeps looking at the car, expecting the driver to emerge and
speak to him. But he doesn't . . . there ' s not a sound . . . no move­
ment is visible in the dim interior of the vehicle, although he fan­
cies he can distinguish a huddled figure behind the wheel. Thinking
the fellow must have dropped off to sleep, he ' s about to shout to
him when he steps on a fallen branch which saves him the trouble,
132

snapping under his weight with a noise like a rifle-shot, loud enough
to rouse anyone.
Still nothing happens. Nobody stirs in the car, even now. And at
last he ' s forced to realize that it's empty; he has just imagined the
figure inside. Of course the driver had plenty of time to walk off
while he was seeing his ' apparition '. And while there was still enough
light, it never occurred to him to look and see if a real person was
sitting in the big car.
*

Apparition? Telepathy? With faint astonishment, Luke found the
two words circulating in his head, unrelated, apparently, to any
particular happening. He would have to wait for this confused feel­
ing to wear off . . . this vagueness . . . before deciding what to do
next. In the meanwhile he walked on mechanically and crossed the
garden without noticing it, hardly conscious of his feet sinking into
the coarser, looser sand of the dunes, still warm from the sun.
His head was aching, but this didn't worry him specially. A sort
of woolliness obscured his thoughts, but in no way interfered with
his climbing up and down sandy slopes. No grass, no vegetation of
any kind, grew here, so he didn't have to bother about invisible
obstacles, which was fortunate, as he couldn 't see where he was
putting his feet. The sunset had faded out almost entirely, reduced
to one pallid streak in the process of being obliterated by blue­
black darkness spreading over his head. Behind him big stars were
coming out one by one, disseminating a faint glaze, which resem­
bled, but wasn't exactly, light - the moon would soon provide that,
a paler patch of sky already indicated where it would rise.
So far he hadn't caught sight of the sea, and its sound was still
muffled; he must be walking parallel to it, he supposed vaguely. It
was easy walking here, even pleasant, in spite of deep cuttings between
the dunes made by flood-water or the encroaching tide - avoiding
these without difficulty, he kept on at an easy pace, as if walking
on soft warm cushions. The moist tropical air was slowly cooling
off now that the sun had gone. Nevertheless, the effort of walking
was making him sweat, though he was unaware of this, only dimly
reflecting how smoothly everything seemed to be going.
Too smoothly . . . . An ominous sense of fatality abruptly insinu­
ated inself among his confused ideas, as if fate were conducting
him to an unavoidable, unknown, but certainly unpleasant conclusion.
133

He suddenly felt helpless and almost frightened, like someone who
begins to suspect he is the victim of a huge, cruel, grotesque prac­
tical joke. His alarm increased, as, in a barely describable flash of
insight, he saw himself involved in something immense, insensate,
incomprehensible, that was happening all round him . . . involved
in it up to the hilt, without the remotest chance of escape . . . ut­
terly at the mercy of this nameless thing, for which even the con­
cept of mercy was non-existent. . . .
The sound of the breakers suddenly loud in his ears, he pulled
himself up abruptly and just in time, the ball of his foot crumbling
sand on the edge of nothing. At the same moment, the moon sprang
into the sky, flooding everything with white light, revealing how
precariously he was balanced on the crest of one of the highest
dunes, just where its sandy lip crumbled into a sheer drop, the ocean
outspread before him. Hastily stepping back to a safer position, he
had the momentary illusion that there were two moons . . . that he
was seeing double . . . until he realized that one was the reflection,
floating and flickering in the shallows, of the one sailing majesti­
cally up the sky.
*

With his first glance, he has already recognized the nude girlish
figure, slight as a child's, in the hollow below him . . . remember­
ing rather than seeing the dark terrified glitter of the dilated eyes in
the paper-white face she lifts towards him. The moon grows more
brilliant each second, and seems to focus on her like a stage spot­
light, painting unnatural black pits of shadow in the hollows of her
white flesh. Her white albino hair sparkles like running water, shim­
mering round her head in a dazzling sheen of light and feathery
spray. His mind blank, he stares down at her as if mesmerized,
from that high edge of sand, between the moon and the sea.
Suddenly she spins round, white dazzle still ringing her head,
and takes a few stiff, unsteady, running steps away from him like a
clockwork toy . . . the mechanism of which abruptly breaks or runs
down . . . perhaps she trips over some piece of detritus, or catches
her foot in loose sand . . . begins, anyhow, for whatever reason, to
stagger and stumble and start falling . . . .
With no recollection of slithering down the steep slope, he finds
himself close beside her, where she' s half kneeling, half crouching,
on the white sand, her head bent and her face hidden. The moon
134

has become still more brilliant, unpleasantly, almost unbearably,
bright. He notices this even though his attention is concentrated on
the small firm globes of her breasts, tipped with pagoda-shaped
nipples. The flood of light falls like white fire from the sky on her
glittering hair, the ruffled surface of which is stirring continuously
in minute complex convolutions - he seems to feel them weaving
crazily in his head, and looks away, dazzled.
But there' s the same brutally bright moonlight wherever he looks,
the same relentless white blaze pours down upon everything. The
whole beach is a glaring white dazzle, each small wave as it breaks
leaves behind a semicircle of glistening foam; and all these white
intersecting curves combine with the bright sand in a twofold bril­
liance, like a long stretch of dazzling snow, where the occasional
sharp edge of a broken shell glitters icily.
With an impatient movement, he again changes the direction of
his gaze. But still the moonlight is inescapable. He's disgusted to
see it glinting on the buttons of his jacket: simultaneously feeling
the flare of white light pounding down on his head and shoulders.
The weight of the entire sky seems to press on the top of his head,
which now aches as if about to split open. He can't stand the press­
ure . . . it's insufferable . . . . He clenches his fists, struggling des­
perately against the hateful thrill of excitement it generates in him,
listening at the same time to his own rapid breathing . . . or is it the
little waves he hears lapping the sand with a sound like hurried,
excited gasps?
His eyes are drawn back irresistibly to the trembling victim, whose
slender limbs slash across his eyeballs in brilliant flashes. Her hair
falls around her in sparkling showers, sending out blinding flashes
like electricity.
A long thin glittering blade of delirious joy pierces his head . . .
his hand imperceptibly starts moving towards her. His eyes never
leave the back of her frail neck, where there ' s a pathetic little hol­
low between two prominent sinews, a tender, vulnerable spot, into
which a knife would sink without any resistance . . . which deep­
ens, intoxicatingly exposed, as her head bends lower. Emitting sparks
of white fire, her hair glides over her shoulders in two dazzling
cascades . . . deep into his brain. . . .
Something blindingly bright strikes his forehead, as, with set teeth,
he seizes her arm, which jerks feebly and frantically in his grasp.
Just for an instant he 's aware of the blows of the moon thudding
135

silently on his head and shoulders . . . then only of the insupportable complexity of the excitement surging within him . . . while he
grips her other arm, dragging her up and towards him . . . .
Terror, like an electric shock, galvanizes her into violent strug­
gles, gives her demented strength. And he, unprepared for such sudden
intense opposition, has to let her go. A whole flight of fiery blades
pierces his head like a burst of meteors, splitting it wide open, so
that he clutches it with both hands, trying to hold it together . . .
forgetting everything else temporarily . . . feeling as though his brains
were trickling away into the soft dry sand . . . . His thoughts are in
utter chaos . . . he 's a whirlpool of inexpressible emotions . . . .
When after a timeless confused interval he slowly comes back to
himself, his excitement has left him completely - it's as if it had
never been. He doesn't even see his companion at first, blinded by
the sweat or tears running down his cheeks.
She is standing only a few inches away from him, her face deathly
white in the glare of the moon, panting from the tremendous physi­
cal effort of freeing herself, her whole slight body shaken, as it
would be by violent sobs, by her quick, painful breathing. Probably
she is incapable of further movement. And as he doesn 't move ei­
ther, they keep these relative positions, separated by a small gap,
staring into each other's moon-blanched faces.
Until, suddenly, at exactly the same moment, with the same strange,
despairing, spontaneous impulse, they move closer, and, without
embracing or speaking, simply stand clinging together, like two terri­
fied children.

136