They besieged the walls of the carpenter’s room, clamouring and hammering with the waterfall. He leaned down and removed the shaft once again from the side of the hunted ram — as he had moved it an eternity before — and restored the bent spear of the new moon where it belonged. The signs of tumult died in the animal light and cloud and the stars only thronged everywhere. So bright they framed his shape through the misty windowpanes. The carpenter looked blind to the stumbling human darkness that still trailed and followed across the world. He closed his window softly upon Donne and Jennings and daSilva.
Jennings cried slipping suddenly in the dark upon a step in the cliff. His wrist gave way too with the shaft of his engine snapping at last as a branch in the flight of the stream. They both answered him but their voices were drowned in the waterfall and they saw nothing save the ancient winding horn of the moon falling from the sky like the bone of his metal and wood.
They shook with the primitive ram again, scanning the endless cliff in fear and ecstasy, feeling for the bodily image of themselves.
Darkness still fell upon the cliff and the horn of the new moon vanished in the end behind the window of the wall as into a long-feared shelter in the earth rich with the frames of humility of God’s memory and reflection. The stars in the sky shivered as they crawled once more up the fantastic ladder and into the void of themselves. They wondered whose turn would be next to fall from the sky as the last ghost of the crew had died and they alone were left to frame Christ’s tree and home.
As they climbed upward Donne felt the light shine on him reflected from within. He had come upon another window in the wall. The curtains were drawn a little and after he had rubbed the windowpanes he began to make out the interior of the room. He looked for the carpenter but at first he saw no one. And then it grew on him a woman was standing within. A child also stood at her feet seeming hardly above her knee. The room was an enormous picture. It breathed all burning tranquillity and passion together — so alive — so warm and true — Donne cried and rapped with the world of his longing. He felt a glowing intimacy as he knocked but the distance between himself and the frame stood as the distance between himself and the stars.
The room was as simple as the carpenter’s room. Indeed as he looked he could not help reflecting it was simpler still. Bare, unfurnished, save for a crib in a stall that might have been an animal’s trough. Yet it all looked so remarkable — every thread and straw on the ground, the merest touch in the woman’s smile and dress — that the light of the room turned into the wealth of dreams.
The woman was dressed in a long sweeping garment belonging to a far and distant age. She wore it so absentmindedly and naturally, however, that one could not help being a little puzzled by it. The truth was it was threadbare. One felt that a false move from her would bring it tumbling to the ground. When she walked, however, it still remained on her back as if it was made of the lightest shrug of her shoulders — all threads of light and fabric from the thinnest strongest source of all beginning and undying end.
The whole room reflected this threadbare glistening garment. The insubstantial straw in the cradle, the skeleton line of boards made into an animal’s trough, the gleaming outline of the floor and the wall, and the shift the child wore standing against the woman’s knee — all were drawn with such slenderness and everlasting impulse one knew it was richer than all the images of seduction combined to the treasuries of the east. Nothing could match this spirit of warmth and existence. Staring into the room — willing to be blinded — he suddenly saw what he had missed before. The light in the room came from a solitary candle with a star upon it, steady and unflinching, and the candle stood tall and rooted in the floor as the woman was. She moved at last and her garment brushed against it like hair that neither sparked nor flew. He stared and saw her astonishing face. Not a grain of her dress but shone with her hair, clothing her threadbare limbs in the melting plaits of herself. Her ancient dress was her hair after all, falling to the ground and glistening and waving until it grew so frail and loose and endless, the straw in the cradle entered and joined it and the whole room was enveloped in it as a melting essence yields itself and spreads itself from the topmost pinnacle and star into the roots of self and space.
Donne knew he was truly blind now at last. He saw nothing. The burning pain he felt suddenly in his eye extended down his face and along the column of his neck until it branched into nerves and limbs. His teeth loosened in their sockets and he moved his tongue gingerly along them. He trembled as he saw himself inwardly melting into nothingness and into the body of his death. He kept sliding on the slippery moss of the cliff and along columns and grease and mud. A singular thought always secured him to the scaffolding. It was the unflinching clarity with which he looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself. He focused his blind eye with all penitent might on this pinpoint star and reflection as one looking into the void of oneself upon the far greater love and self-protection that have made the universe.
The stars shivered again as they climbed. The night was cold, ice-cold and yet on fire. His blindness began melting and soon had burned away from him, he thought, though he knew this was impossible. He had entered the endless void of himself and the stars were invisible. He was blind. He accepted every invisible light and conceived it as an intimate and searching reflection which he was helping to build with each step he made. His unique eye was a burning fantasy he knew. He was truly blind. He saw nothing, he saw the unselfness of night, the invisible otherness around, the darkness all the time, he saw the stars he knew to be invisible however much they appeared to shine above him. He saw an enormity of sky which was as alien to him as flesh to wood. He saw something but he had not grasped it. It was his blindness that made him see his own nothingness and imagination constructed beyond his reach.
This was the creation and reflection he shared with another and leaned upon as upon one frame that stood — free from material restraint and possession — as the light and life of dead or living stars whom no one beheld for certain in the body of their death or their life. They were a ghost of light and that was all. The void of themselves alone was real and structural. All else was dream borrowing its light from a dark invisible source akin to human blindness and imagination that looked through nothingness all the time to the spirit that had secured life. Step by step up the support grew and contained everything with a justness and exactness as true to life as a spark of fire lived, and with an unyielding motive that crumbled material age and idolatry alike.
They were exhausted after a long while, and they leaned in a doorway of the night hammering in blindness and frustration with the fist of the waterfall. They had been able to lay hold upon nothing after all. It was finished and they fell.
The door they hammered upon was the face of the earth itself where they lay. It swung wide at last with the brunt of the wind. The dawn had come, the dawn of the sixth day of creation. The sun rose in a cloud hinged to the sky. DaSilva stood within the door in the half-shadow. He looked old and finished and beaten to death after his great fall. Donne stared at him with nervous horror and fascination and in his mind he knew he was dead. He could see nothing and yet he dreamt he saw everything clearer than ever before. DaSilva was opening the door again to him: hands stiff and outstretched and foolishly inviting him to step into the empty hall. His mouth gaped in a smile and his teeth protruded half-broken and smashed. The high bones still stood in his face as when he had signalled their downfall. The early sun climbed a little higher and the world beneath the cliff became an aerial portrait framed in mist. The river shone clear as glass and a pinpoint started glittering in the bed of the stream. The mist rolled away from the cliff and the sun curled and tossed a lioness mane that floated slowly up into the sky over the dead. The resurrection head was uplifted and the great body rolled over in a blanket. DaSilva was shivering and shaking cold as death. Indeed he had never been so bitterly cold. He had woken to find himself inside the house and Donne hammering away outside almost in a heap together at the bottom of the wall. He had fumbled for the catch and release in the door, trembling and astonished at himself. The great cliff sprang open like the memory of the lion’s spring he had made tumbling him smashed and broken on the ground. Every bone seemed to break and he wrapped himself in the misery of death. But the wind that had sprung upon him flew out again shaking him from his blanket on the ground.