The water moved past with reflective backward strokes as the vessel went forward. The old Arawak woman stirred a little, a sudden wind fluttering her sleeves. She had been sleeping all the while but now that the danger was past she had awakened. The river was familiar ground to her, it was plain. High precipitous cliffs and walls had appeared on either hand and bank. She blinked a little, pointing her aged and active fingers. Vigilance saw trees growing out of the cliffs overhead parallel to the river and he wondered whether any man could climb and clamber there. He rubbed his eyes since he felt he saw what no human mind should see, a spidery skeleton crawling to the sky. It danced and gambolled a little, clutching the vertical floor that seemed to change in a shaft of cloudy sun into a protean stream of coincidence where every mechanical revolution and image was the inscrutable irony of a spiritual fate.
Vigilance could not make up his bemused mind whether it was Wishrop climbing there or another version of Jennings’ engine in the stream. He shrank from the image of his hallucination that was more radical and disruptive of all material conviction than anything he had ever dreamt to see. The precipitous cliffs were of volcanic myth and substance he dreamed far older than the river’s bed and stream. He seemed to sense and experience its congealment and its ancient flow as if he waded with webbed and impossible half-spidery feet in the ceaseless boiling current of creation. His immateriality and mysterious substantiality made him dance and tremble with fear a little as Wishrop danced. It was incredible that one had survived. He saw into the depths of the deathless stream where the Arawak woman pointed. A flock of ducks flew, their wings pointed like stars. They were skeletons fixed from ancient geological time unmoving as a plateau. The sudden whirr of their wings awoke him as they flew living and wild across the river. The Arawak woman laughed. Vigilance drew himself up like a spider in a tree. He stood over an archway and gate in the rock through which swarmed and streamed a herd of tapirs, creatures half-donkey and half-cow. They were seething with fear as they ploughed into the river.
“Look — chased by the folk,” Donne said. He spoke from the bow of a skeleton craft Vigilance discerned in the stream of the rock. “Look one has been wounded and is dying. We are close as hell to the huntsman of the folk.” His deathless image and look made the Arawak woman smile. Vigilance winced a little and rubbed his eyes where he climbed and clung to the cliff wondering at the childish repetitive boat and prison of life. What an enormous spiritual distance and inner bleeding substance lay between himself and that crust and shell he had once thought he inhabited. He could hardly believe it. He tried to convey across the span and gulf of dead and dying ages and myth the endless pursuit on which Donne was engaged.
“Rubbish,” Donne said. “That herd is a good sign. The folk are not so far away. We can catch up and repair our fortunes. They’ll lead us home safely and we’ll cultivate our fields and our wives.” He spoke out of a desire to hearten himself and the crew. The truth was he no longer felt himself in the land of the living though the traumatic spider of the sun crawled up and down his arms and his neck and punctured his sides of rock.
Vigilance was sensible to the fantasy of his wound and alive, the sole responsible survivor save for the Arawak woman who clung with him to the wall of rock. He dreamed she had kept her promise, her stepmotherly promise, and had saved him from drowning. Donne’s boat had righted itself, he dreamed, in the volcanic stream and rock and the crew were all there save Wishrop’s spider and transubstantiation: wheel and web, sunlight, starlight, all wishful substance violating and altering and annihilating shape and matter and invoking eternity only and space and musical filament and design. It was this spider and wheel of baptism — infinite and expanding — on which he found himself pinned and bent to the revolutions of life — that made his perception of a prodigal vessel and distance still possible. Darkness fell and the banks were too steep for the crew to land. The river had grown smooth and this was a great good fortune. The stream sang darkly and the stars and harmony of space turned into images of light.
*
The sun rose on the third day of their setting out from Mariella. The cliffs appeared to rise higher still on both hands and the river seemed to stretch endlessly and for ever onward. The water was as smooth as a child’s mirror and newborn countenance.
Nevertheless the crew were downcast and dejected. They had forgotten the miraculous escape they had had and recalled only fear and anxiety and horror and peril. This was hard-hearted nature they contemplated without thinking they may have already suffered it and endured it and re-lived it. Rather it seemed to them only too clear that the past would always catch up with them — when they least expected it — like a legion of devils. There was no simple bargain and treaty possible save unconditional surrender to what they knew not. Call it spirit, call it life, call it the end of all they had once treasured and embraced in blindness and ignorance and obstinacy they knew. They were the pursuers and now they had become the pursued. Indeed it looked the utmost inextricable confusion to determine where they were and what they were, whether they had made any step whatever towards a better relationship — amongst themselves and within themselves — or whether it was all a fantastic chimera.
They stared hopelessly into the air up the high walls and precipice that hung over their head — an ancient familiar house and structure — and as hopelessly into the bright future and sun that streamed. It was all one impossible burden and deterrent they could neither return to nor escape.
They felt themselves broken and finished in the endless nightmare and they slouched and nodded in the stream. Vigilance alone preserved the vessel straight ahead, steering with spider arm and engine. The water grew still and quiet and clear as heaven. The Arawak woman pointed. A dense flock of parrots wheeled and flew and a feather settled on Vigilance’s cheek with a breath of life. They wheeled closer and nearer until he saw the white fire of feathers — around their baiting eye, giving them a wise inquisitive expression and look — and the green fire on their bubbling wing as they rose from the stream and the cliff and the sun.
Vigilance had been wounded by a nameless shaft from the enormous unpredictable battlements he dreamed he stormed — cliff and sun and rock and river all set with their ceaseless pursuing trap as if he were the most precious remarkable game in all the world. Nevertheless he was the one most alive and truly aware of everything. He saw differently and felt differently to the way the herd slept in the innocent stream of death. All blind lust and obfuscation had been banished from his mind. Indeed the living life that ran within him was a unique and grotesque privilege and coincidence because of the extraordinary depth and range he now possessed. Vision and idea mingled into a sensitive carnival that turned the crew into the fearful herd where he clung with his eye of compassion to his precarious and dizzy vertical hold and perched on the stream of the cliff. The light of space changed, impinging upon his eyeball and lid numerous grains of sound and motion that were the suns and moons of all space and time. The fowls of the air danced and wheeled on invisible lines that stretched taut between the ages of light and snapped every now and then into lightning executions of dreaming men when each instant ghost repaired the wires again in the form of an inquisitive hanging eye and bird.
The feather on his face pricked him like a little stab of fear as though he had not yet become reconciled to his understanding. He felt himself drawn again into the endless flight that had laid siege to the ambivalent wall of heaven and every spidery mis-step he made turned into an intricate horror of space and a falling coincidence and wing. The parrots wheeled and flew around his head on the cliff and the Arawak woman pointed again to a close silver ring that girdled one flying foot. Vigilance rubbed his eye in vain. It was strange but there it was.