Briefing for a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

to where they had shown me how to scramble over the impassable glass. But they were not there. Again the air was filled with the loneliness of the sunset hour. I was melancholy enough to cry, or to hide my head under a blanket—if I had got one, and slide with my sadness into a regression from the light. But the scene was too magnificent not to watch as the sun fell sharply behind the distant blue peaks, and the dark fell first over the sea, then over the forests, and then crept slowly up to where I sat with my back against a tree which was still small and elastic enough for me to feel the trunk moving as the nightbreeze started up. And again I watched the moon rise, though this evening I was so high I could see first the blaze of clear silver in the dark of the Eastern sky, then a crisping sparkle of silver on the far ocean, and then the first slice of silver as the moon crept up out of the water. And again it was a night as mild and as light as the last. I sat watching the night pass, and waited for my splendid beasts. But they did not come. They did not come! And they never came. I did not see them again, though sometimes, when I stand on the very edge of the rock-fringed plateau and look down over the tops of the forest trees below I fancy I see a blaze of yellow move in the yellow-splashed dark, or imagine that by a river which from here is a winding blue-green streak, I see a yellow dot: the beast crouching to drink. And sometimes the loud coughing sound of a beast, or a roaring louder than all the noise of the falling waters makes me think of them—and hope for their assistance for the next traveller who makes his long delayed landfall on this glorious coast. Again the night was short. I may have slept a little, butif so it was a sleep so dazzling with the light which lay full on my lids that in the morning what lay behind me to the time of the sunset was a broad space of time evenly filled with a cool refreshing silver. I thought that I should perhaps try to make my way to the distant mountains when the sunlight had fully come back, but when the light did come—when the little bubble of earth turned itself around so that the patch I stood on stared into the sun’s face, then I saw that the tree I had been leaning against all night grew out of a large flat rock, and that …
    And now I must be careful to set down my mind’s movement accurately. For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower—as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so , just there, and I must turn in the air slightly so that my backbone does not strike that sharp edge. And you do turn in the air, and even have time to think: this fall may hurt me badly, is there someone in the house to help me—and so on and so forth. All this in a space of time normally too short for any thought at all. But we are wrong in dividing the mind’s machinery from time: they are the same. It is only in such sharp emphatic moments that we can recognize this fact. As I was staring at the flat rock, which had unmistakably been dressed, for I could see man-marks at its edges, my mind slowed, while time went faster; or time went slower while my mind speeded—to use our ordinary way of reckoning. Whatever the process, I was suddenly quite remarkably alert and excited, and had even got to my feet without knowing I had, and I was standing upright looking around me. I was looking at the foundations of a great house, or temple, or public building of some sort,which now lay clear to see for a couple of hundred yards all around me in the fresh green grass. But I had not seen anything yesterday but a grassy savannah with some rocks scattered about among low trees. Now the ruinous foundation was unmistakable. It was as if the knowledge of what I would see caused me to see what otherwise I could not—for I already half-believed that my seeing had created what I saw. For it was so hard to believe that yesterday I had clambered up over the