The Tree of the Sun by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

second’s evolutionary delay in the serpentine hand of the mechanic at one’s side, in igniting the ammunition of a star, could make all the difference between life and death. The third hand at one’s side became the enemy—a fraction of a second’s delay made him (or it) into the enemy. And the third hand on the enemy’s gun became yourself, your friend. A fraction of a second’s delay there might save your life, by allowing you to fire first. That was my father’s theory of targets of genesis through which to assemble a maker of worlds within the premature or precipitate materials in the very beginnings of creation. It was nothing to do with the size of the blanket of death or life (or the size of the gun, the size of the thunder) but rather with the mystery of survival, the mystery of conception in a third hand or ghostly recruit at one’s side. All evolution is the subtlest marriage of opposites within a scene of conflict….”
    The paint on his lips cracked and much that he said seemed to vanish into the ground as the sensuous bullet Leonard fired hit him on the lips with which he kissed Eleanor with sudden zest, with limbo zest.
    “Perhaps they both aimed and missed each other,” cried Eleanor scrambling up and tidying her dress as she saw Queen Julia turn and begin to descend towards the Serpentine .
    *
    Da Silva’s Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park had been painted with open stretches and with clumps of trees—oak, horsechestnut, ash, elm, cedar, beech, lime, willow.
    Silver-grey roads of marvellous summer light tincturedby autumn and spring ghostly mechanics in the barks of trees wound their way from Bayswater Road to Kensington Road and Knightsbridge, from Hyde Park Gate around the Serpentine canal to Broad Walk.
    Distances in each painting foreshortened themselves or deepened themselves into underground links or streams or rivers.
    He brushed in a number of children’s swings within a hundred yards of Bayswater Road.
    An intimacy of line and tone, the flashing wings of a gull over the Round Pond, shone through a slanting element like the thinnest lines of rain that rocked a miniature ocean upon which to embark around the globe from the sunrise of the early sixteenth century into resurrections of dawn in the late twentieth century.
    It had been a long apparently stable cloud of night over the sun’s delayed apparition and a swan or night-headed duck settled on da Silva’s ocean as though an egg of cosmos were hatching within the hands of the foetus of the gods as it floated backwards and forwards in time….
    These were in part Julia’s thoughts as she descended with Francis from the black/brown/white child clutching a riddled toy ship in which a letter to posterity had been posted. A letter from the grave of the Round Pond to the grave of the Serpentine. A letter from nondescript child to Shelley’s dead wife, Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself one cold winter night in the early years of the nineteenth century.
    Posterity lies in the past as much as in the future.
    Eleanor was playing the part of Harriet in the glare of television suns. It was an important film that would be transmitted by satellite to America. There was a green summer dress on her breasts like paint and yet it may have been an illusion for as Julia shaded her eyes the floating body of the actress in the water seemed curdled into winter foam and furs.
    Julia stepped back herself from her lady-in-waiting who had flown from a Wild West studio in Italy (as if it werea bench in the park) to the Serpentine; turned away and stepped back herself into deeper recesses of the night-headed duck that sat on Leonard’s head, stepped through shell upon shell of pigmented camera to sail in another time from limbo port to limbo port of romantic oblivion.
    The noises of twentieth-century London were momentarily stilled as the cameras clicked to paint each ghost. A fleet of children’s twentieth-century toy ships and dive bombers sailed on the