Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri Read Free Book Online Page B

again,’ she screamed, as if distracted.
    â€˜I want to be visible!’ she wailed. ‘I want to be seen!’
    He watched the litter grow smaller. His guide, in a cool voice, said:
    â€˜Do you want to carry on to the square, or do you want to follow her?’
    He watched as the litter stopped in front of a huge set of marble columns. Then, with mounting apprehension, he watched as it disappeared into the splendid facade of a granite temple.
    Her wailing had ceased. The music was gentler. And the singing became more beautiful as it grew fainter.
    Just before she vanished into the temple, he thought he saw her smile. It occurred to him that maybe she too was a paradox. Unaccountably, he sensed that somewhere in the future, in another realm, he would see her again.
    Conscious for the first time that his guide had been communing with him all along, and feeling the awesome mystery of the night stealing into his bones, he continued with his journey towards the square.

14
    He soared with an inexplicable joy when he got to the square. The tender air and the ancient palace, rectilinear and dreamlike, seemed to have drifted in from the happy realms of a forgotten childhood. He couldn’t understand what it was about the square that made him feel as if he had come home after years of wandering.
    The palace dominating the square was of ochred stone, and it rose high up into the maternal darkness. It was so huge that it seemed to be part of the night, and seemed to belong to the substance of all dreams. And yet it was like a spectacular stage set, lit up with coloured flares. Banners and bunting and a night-coloured flag fluttered in the breeze from its highest battlements. Pennants shone below. The palace gate was of the finest and oldest bronze. And on the gate had been carved the most extraordinary shapes of gods, and angels, and sleeping women.

15
    The hidden spaces in the square were vast and full of gentle presences. The open air seemed eternal, as if the wind blew in from great seas. And yet there were buildings all about, partially blocking off the corners of the square. He glimpsed the passageways and the secret streets.
    Opposite the mighty palace was the House of Justice, one of several. A gate of figured bronze shone from the facade of the house. On the far side of the square, he could make out a loggia. It was dark in the loggia, and its darkness bristled.
    He looked all about him and then moved with a wondering heart to the centre of the square. Turning round and round like a child, he gazed at the miraculous architecture with awestruck eyes. He breathed in the charmed open spaces. He drank in the blessed sky. He kept looking at everything, soaking in the strange enchantment of the air.
    He felt as if he had stepped into the great old dreams he had heard tell about, where the dreamers find themselves in that place in all the universe where they feel most at home, and where their deepest nature can breathe and be free.
    He felt he was in that place where he could step out of himself and into unbounded realms.

16
    The truth was that he felt he had arrived at his life’s true destination. He felt it as a mood of at-homeness. Then he felt that the longing for his true destination was itself the mood of the square.
    Suddenly, he had an odd premonition. He sensed that his true destination was a place that he would eventually lose, would set out from, continuing his original search. Then, after finding what he wanted, and discovering that it wasn’t what he really wanted, he would set out, on a sad quest, to the place he had lost, and would never find it again. He felt all this as in a dream.
    At that moment, overcome with a dark happiness, he suddenly sensed that all the magic and the blessedness, the enchantment and the mystery, the wisdom of the civilisation and the majesty of the city, all were doomed. They were doomed the way beautiful things are doomed. But doomed in order to become higher, and