Eden River by Gerald Bullet Read Free Book Online

without speaking, till having crossed the open space lying between the camp and the forest proper they came into shadow again. There with a common impulse they stopped, loosed hands, and turned to look at each other, face to face, under cover of the darkness. And Abel stood entranced by the quality of this moment: the sighing forest, the sheen of the night sky filtering through rifts in the leafy roof, and, at the very heart of the mystery, a woman, a dream in being, warm and personal. She is herself as I am I, his mind said. She thinks as I do. She lives behind the eyes that I see shining upon me; she is the light of those eyes. And after a long silence he opened his mouth and said to her: We’re alone, Zildah, even as Adam andour mother Eve were alone in the first day. But that day is not: there’s no time but this time, no place but here. We are the body of all life, and the life that is divided in us shall in us be joined. He spoke not from his mind but with the voice of prophecy, and Zildah answered him: Your words are strange to me; there’s darkness in them. But when she came closer to him, putting her hands on his loins, her head on his breast, he came out of his still mood and embraced her; and night was heavy with their love.

7
    Almond-Eyed Larian was more placid but not less enticing than her sister Zildah. Each in her own way was beautiful; each was generous of herself; and neither Cain nor Abel could have said which was the more dear to him. These four were careless and happy in their loves. Their affections were deep-rooted in the fact of a common life, a common enjoyment of earth and sun; passion was swift and light; and amorous pleasures, being undenied, held no greater room in their minds than any other good thing. During the later days of their virginity the matter had been much in the men’s half-conscious thoughts, a nucleus of feverish conjecture and nagging ambition; but now it was as if that darkness had been cast out of them, so that they forgot it had ever existed. Larian had brought with her a knowledge of many new crafts. Her fingers were cunning in the manipulation of reeds and grasses; with a pointed stick she could make marks upon the sandy river bank at the ebb of the tide which would put you in mind at once of what she wasthinking—of antelope or lion or fruit-laden tree; she found new foods and mixed them in new ways; she had a quiet audacity in all her dealings with nature. Abel spent much time in her company. It was his pleasure in the early morning, even though his night had perhaps been spent in the arms of Zildah, to wander in the woods with Larian: in whose presence, whether by reason of her intimate contact with such things or for another reason, the trees and the grass and the cobwebs glistening with dew, last year’s leaves elastic under foot, the smell of the soil, the hurrying insects, the birds and friendly beasts, all had a quality which they had lacked in her absence. It was nothing that she said, nothing indeed that she knew: it was simply that he lived, for the time being, with sharpened senses, looking no longer into himself, where much of his time had been spent in the days before the coming of the women, but outwards, upon the green and growing world. Zildah, with a look or a touch, could on occasion make his blood shout and the visible world dissolve in fire: that was her quality. Larian, by no visible devices, gave him the world in new colours. Either could release him from himself into a boundless country; and both, though in their absence he gave themlittle thought, were precious to him.
    Look, Larian, he said: there’s a black cloud falling out of the sky. And Larian, looking in the direction of his pointing finger, flashed away from him without a word, to reappear presently with a couple of skeps which for some days past he had watched her making of dried reeds matter together. Where is your cloud now? she asked him. It has come to rest, he