Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ and empty? Why, when it was such a perfect place for a community to make its own? It had good building material close at hand, it had houses of every kind virtually whole and perfect save for the absent roofs, it had good pure water, and a climate which grew every sort of flower and vegetable. Had one day the thousands of inhabitants died of an epidemic? Been scared away by threat of an earthquake? All been killed in some war?

      There was no way of finding out, so I decided not to think about it. I would stay here a while. And I would not trouble to roof myself a house. The walls gave shelter enough from the sun. It was not yet the rainy season, but even if it had been, the rain would soon drain away off this height, and it was not a place to stay damp or cold.

      I found a tree which had aromatic foliage, something like a blue-gum, but with finer leaves. I stripped off armfuls of the leaves and carried them to the shelter of a wall. With them I made a deep warm bed I could burrow into if the night turned cold. I picked some pink sweet fruit, in appearance like peaches, that grew bending over a water channel. I drank water—and understood that my needs as an animal were met. I need do nothing but pick fruit and gather fresh leaves when those that made my bed withered. For the rest I could sit on the cliff’s edge and watch the clouds gather over the sea, watch the moon’s growing and declining, and match my rhythms of sleep and waking to the darkening and lightening of the nights.

      And I need not be solitary. For this city had an atmosphere as if it were inhabited, as I’ve said. More, as if this city was itself a person, or had a soul, or being. It seemed to know me. The walls seemed to acknowledge me as I passed. And when the moon rose for the third time since I had arrived on this coast, I was wandering among the streets and avenues of stone as if I were among friends.

      Very late, when the moon was already low over the mountains, I lay down on my bed of deliciously smelling leaves, and now I did sleep for a time. It was a light delightful sleep, from which it was no effort to wake, and I was talking to my old shipfriends, George and Charlie, James and Stephen and Miles and the rest, and into this conversation came Conchita and Nancy, who were singing their songs and laughing. When I woke, as the sun came up shining from the blue-green sea, I knew quite clearly that I had something to do. My friends were all about me, I knew that, and in some way they were of the substance of this warm earthy stone, and the air itself, but it was not enough for me just to live here and breathe its air. I sprang straight up when I woke, driven by this knowledge that I had work to do, and went to wash my face and hands in the nearest water channel. I admired my fine mariner’s beard, and my hard, dark-brown, salt-pickled arms and face, ate more of the peach-like fruit, and walked out among the sky-roofed houses to see what I could see … it was very strange indeed that I had not noticed this before: among the buildings, in what seemed like the centre of the old city, what might very well have been the former central square, was an expanse of smooth stone which was not interrupted by flowers or by water channels. The square was perhaps seventy or a hundred yards across, and in it was an inner circle, about fifty yards across. It was a little cracked, where earth had settled under it, and some grass grew in the cracks, but it was nearly flat, and it waited there for what I had to do. I knew now what this was. I had to prepare this circle lying in its square, by clearing away all the loose dirt and pulling out the grass. And so I began this task. It took longer than it should have done because I had no tools at all. But I tore off a strong branch and used it as a broom. And when the dirt was all swept away and the grass pulled up, I brought water in my cupped hands from near channels, and splashed it down. But this took too long, and then I searched until I found a stone that had a hollow in it which might have been used as a mortar for crushing grain once, and I used that to carry water. To clear and prepare that circle in the midst of the city took me nearly a week, during which I worked all day, and even at night when the moon came up. Now I lay down to rest between the sun’s setting and the moon’s rising, and worked on under the moon, lying down again to rest between moon-fall and sunrise, if there was this interval.

      I was not tired. I was not tired at all with the work. I was not even particularly expectant of anything. I knew only that this was what I had to do, and could only suppose that my friends must have told me so, since it was after my dream of them that I had known it.

      Now the moon was in its last quarter and making a triangle, sun, earth, moon, whereas when I had reached that coast it was full, and sitting on the plateau’s edge and staring into the moon’s round face I had had my back to the sun, which was through the earth, and the sun stared with me at the moon. Then the pulls and antagonisms and tensions from the sun and moon had been in a straight line through the earth, which swelled, soil and seas, in large bulges of attraction as the earth rolled under the moon, the sun; but now the tension of sun and moon pulled in this triangle, and the tides of the ocean were low, and the great sky was full of a different light now, a fainter, bluer moonlight, and the stars blazed out. I did not know why I thought so, but I had come to believe that it was the next full moon that I was waiting for.

      I moved my pile of drying leaves to the edge of the circle in the square. Now all that expanse of stone was washed and clean, patterns glowed in it, continuous geometrical patterns, that suggested flowers and gardens and their correspondence with the movements of the sky. Even in the thinning moonlight the patterns loomed up milkily, as I lay on my elbow in my pile of leaves. I lay there in the dimming moonlight, and listened to the wind in the grasses, the tinkling of the water that ran invisibly in its channels, and sometimes the hard crackle when one of the dried leaves of my bed cartwheeled and skittered across the stone floor as I watched and watched all night, in case I might be wrong, and the visiting Crystal descended now, in the moon’s wane. When I was ready to sleep, I lay on my back, with one arm out over the stone which held the day’s warmth, and I closed my eyes, and let the moon and the starlight drench my face. My sleep was ordered by the timing of the moon. I was obsessed by it, by its coming and going, or rather, by its erratic circling in wild crazy loops and ellipses around the Earth, so that sometimes it lay closer to the North, and sometimes circled lower over my head, at 15 degrees South, sometimes it looped lower still, so that with my head to the North and my feet pointing to the Antarctic, the path seemed at knee-level. In the dark of space was a blazing of white gas, and in the luminous envelope of this lamp some crumbs of substance whizzed around, but the crumbs farther out from the central blaze were liquefied or tenuous matter, gases or soups also spinning in their orbits, and some of these minute crumbs or lumps of water that spun about had other tinier crumbs or droplets swirling about them in a dance, a dance and a dazzle, and someone looking in, riding in, from space would see this great burning lamp and its orbiting companions as one, a unit; a unit even as central blaze and circling associates, but even more if this visiting Explorer had eyes and senses set by a different clock, for then this unit, Sun and associates, might seem like a central splurge ringed by paths of fire or light, for the path of a planet by a different scale of time might be one with that planet, and this Celestial Voyager with his differently tuned senses might very well see the Earth’s circling streak and its Moon as one, a double planet, a circling streak that sometimes showed double, as when the hairs in a painter’s brush straggle and part, and make two streaks of a single stroke. The Voyager, too, would see the tensions and pulls of the lumps or drops in their orbiting about the sun in a constantly changing pattern of subtle thrills, and currents and measures of movement in the rolling outwards of the solar wind, and he might even see in the little crumb of matter that was the Earth, the tuggings and pullings crosswise of the Moon and the Sun, which were at right angles, this being the Moon’s last quarter and the tides of water and earth and air being low.

      The Moon held me, the moon played with me, the moon and I seemed to breathe as one, for my waking and sleeping, or rather, being wakeful and then dreaming, not the same thing, were set by the moon’s direct pressure on my eyes. And then, as it waned, by my knowledge of its presence, a dark orb with its narrowing streak of reflected sunlight, and then at last the two days of the dark of the moon, when the moon, between earth and sun, had its back to us and held its illuminated face inwards, to the sun, so that great Sun and minute Moon stared at each other direct. The sun’s light, its reflected substances, were reflected back at the sun’s broad face, and we received none, instead of being bathed in sun-stuff from two directions, immediately from sun, СКАЧАТЬ