Clear the sky and bright the stars, but a few small wisps of cloud...
A howling pack of red-eyed things, twisting along our trail... Shadow... Green-eyed... Shadow... Yellow... Shadow... Gone...
But dark peaks with skirts of snow, jostling one another about me... Frozen snow, as dry as dust, lifted in waves by the icy blasts of the heights... Powdery snow, flour-like... Memory here, of the Italian Alps, of skiing... Waves of snow drifting across stone faces... A white fire within the night air... My feet rapidly numbing within my wet boots... Star bewildered and snorting, testing each step and shaking his head as if in disbelief...
So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow...
A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth... Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars...
Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain... Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass...
Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze... The cough of a hunting cat... The shadowy flight of a bounding, deerlike beast... Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more...
Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing... A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go...
Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops... Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist... Moths dancing in the night light...
The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet... To every star its double... A halo round the dumbbell moon... The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes...
The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still... Stability... Inertia... The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits...
Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west... Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth...
West, west... Somewhere a river with broad, clean banks to ease my passage to the sea...
Thud of hoofs, shuttling of shadows... The night air upon my face... A glimpse of bright beings on high, dark walls, shining towers... The air is sweetened... Vision swims... Shadows...
We are merged, centaur-like. Star and I, under a single skin of sweat... We take the air and give it back in mutual explosions of exertion... Neck clothed in thunder, terrible the glory of the nostrils... Swallowing the ground...
Laughing, the smell of the waters upon us, the trees very near to our left...
Then among them... Sleek bark, hanging vines, broad leaves, droplets of moisture... Spider web in the moonlight, struggling shapes within... Spongy turf... Phosphorent fungus on fallen trees...
A clear space... Long grasses rustling...
More trees...
Again, the riversmell...
Sounds, later... Sounds... The grassy chuckling of water...
Closer, louder, beside it at last... The heavens buckling and bending in its belly, and the trees... Clean, with a cold, damp tang... Leftward beside it, pacing it now... Easy and flowing, we follow...
To drink... Splashing in its shallows, then hockhigh with head depressed, Star, in it, drinking like a pump, blasting spray from his nostrils... Upriver, it laps at my boots... Dripping from my hair, running down my arms... Star's head turning, at the laughter...
Then downriver again, clean, slow, winding... Then straight, widening, slowing...
Trees thickening, then thinning...
Long, steady, slow...
A faint light in the east...
Sloping downward now, and fewer trees... Rockier, and the darkness made whole once again...
The first, dim hint of the sea, lost an odor later... Clicking on, on, in the nightsend chill... Again, an instant's salt...
Rock, and an absence of trees... Hard, steep, bleak, down... Ever-increasing precipitonsness...
Flashing between walls of stone... Dislodged pebbles vanishing in the now racing current, their splashes drowned in the roar's echoes... Deeper the defile, widening... Down, down... Farther still...
Now pale once more the east, gentler the slope... Again, the touch of salt, stronger...
Shale and grit... Around a comer, down, and brighter still... Steady, soft and loose the footing...
The breeze and the light, the breeze and the light... Beyond a crop of rock... Draw rein.
Below me lay the stark seaboard, where rank upon rank of rolling dunes, harassed by the winds out of the southwest, tossed spumes of sand that partly obliterated the distant outlines of the bleak morning sea.
I watched the pink film spread across the water from the east. Here and there, the shifting sands revealed dark patches of gravel. Rugged masses of rock reared above the swell of the waves. Between the massive dunes-hundreds of feet in height-and myself, there high above that evil coast, lay a smashed and pitted plain of angular rocks and gravel, just now emerging from hell or night into dawn's first glow, and alive with shadows.
Yes, it was right.
I dismounted and watched the sun force a bleak and glaring day upon the prospect. It was the hard, white light I had sought. Here, sans humans, was the necessary place, just as I had seen it decades earlier on the shadow Earth of my exile. No bulldozers, sifters, broom-wielding blacks; no maximum-security city of Oranjemund. No X-ray machines, barbed wire, or armed guards. None of these things here. No. For this shadow had never known a Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and there had never been a Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa, nor a government to approve their amalgamation of coastal mining interests. Here was the desert called Narnib in that place some four hundred miles to the northwest of Cape Town, a strip of dunes and rocks ranging from a couple to a dozen miles in width and running along that forsaken coast line for perhaps three hundred miles on the seaward side of the Richtersveld Mountains, within whose shadow I now stood. Here, unlike any conventional mine, the diamonds were scattered as casually as bird droppings across the sand. I, of course, had brought along a rake and a sieve.
I broke out the rations and prepared breakfast. It was going to be a hot, dusty day.
As I worked the dunes, I thought of Doyle, the little wispy-haired jeweler with the brick-red complexion and wens on his cheeks, back in Avalon. Jewelers rouge? Why did I want all that jewelers rouge-enough to supply an army of jewelers for a dozen lifetimes? I had shrugged. What was it to him what I wanted it for, so long as I was able to pay for it? Well, if there was some new use for the stuff and good money to be made, a man would be a fool... In other words, he would be unable to furnish me with such a quantity within a week? Small, square chuckles had escaped through the gaps in his smile. A week? Oh, no! Of course not! That was ridiculous, out of the question... I saw. Well, a quick thanks and perhaps his competitor up the way might be able to produce the stuff, and might also be interested in a few uncut diamonds I was expecting in a matter of days... Diamonds, did I say? Wait. He was always interested in diamonds himself... Yes, but he was sadly deficient in the jewelers rouge department. A raised hand. It might be that he had spoken hastily with respect to his ability to produce the polishing material. It was the quantity that had disturbed him. But the ingredients were plentiful and the formula fairly simple. Yes, that was no real reason why something could not be worked out. Within a week, at that. Now, about the diamonds...
Before I left his shop, something had been worked out.
I have met many persons who thought that gunpowder explodes, which of course is incorrect. It burns rapidly, building up gas pressure which ejects a bullet from the mouth of a shell and drives it through the barrel of a weapon, after having been ignited by the primer, which does the actual exploding when the firing pin is driven into it. Now, with typical family foresight, I had experimented with a variety of combustibles over the years. My disappointment at the discovery that gunpowder would not ignite in Amber, and that all of the primers I tested were equally inert there, was a thing mitigated only by the knowledge that none of my relatives could bring firearms into Amber either. It was much later, during a visit to Amber, after polishing a bracelet I had brought for Deirdre, that I discovered this wonderful property of jewelers rouge from Avalon when I disposed of the polishing cloth in a fireplace. Fortunately, the quantity involved was small, and I was alone at the time.