Now—after twenty years — was it still too late to recover an essential trace of their last — as if she had indeed overtaken him in the end — hypothesis and realm, river of gold? Fantasy of Eldorado?
He beckoned to her — frozen sea — wave and boulder. The strands of her life spun toward him — one form or another, conception or deformity of conception. Inventory of concrete and mystical instruments. Pursuer and pursued. Elusive pregnant model. Half-human, half-brute. Half-skin, half-wood. Half-song, half-silence. ENDLESS CREW OF FATE.
It was as if he had partly escaped her within ears that were deaf to her plea, and she was on the point of regaining him within eyes that were blind to her peril — sleep of the sun.
FOUR. Blast
The sun appeared in the sky overhead. Then writhed, flashed, vanished across the minute clearing he possessed in the astronomical, glittering and cruel wealth of the jungle.
It may never have stood above him after all and the very clearing around and beneath him turned unreal as though its very isolation made it enormous and the immensity of space and bush surrounding it shrank into a uniform indistinct province.
He was waiting for his Amerindian guides to return and she (Susan) was turning into one of these. Skin of metamorphosis. She often felt his eyes upon her back but she knew herself masked by an ornamental stillness and indifference, catlike, slumbrous, smooth as stone….
He looked up suddenly and there she was — naked (his eyes knew) beneath the cloth she wore, bereaved and entrenched, alone.
She had come to sleep with him — both abstractly and intimately. To make herself known. Casual and reflective, yet deadly shadow upon his heart and lips. He could hardly believe his ears and eyes which may well and truly have been blotted out at this moment; and he knew he needed, as a consequence, to be on his guard as never before against the unreality and conquest of space.
The camp he possessed in the tiny clearing stood very close to a nameless creek which he had followed once for miles until the hills closed in all around and the water descended into a hole in the ground, to emerge a mile or two away upon the face of a cliff. The great casual boulders at the mouth of the cavern and within the subterranean gallery of the creek may, for all he knew, have been flung into position by some ancient explosion of the sun — they seemed to him so utterly remote from the very earth on which they stood.
He, too, and she, at this moment, as they faced each other, might have been equally alien sculptures of affection. He was suddenly filled with an obscure motive but fearful determination which drew him closer still to her.
He recalled how secretively she used to move within her small body of Indian companions and how his impulses of recognition — as if she had belonged to him within another frame and place and circumstance — faded time after time into nothingness with each step he made. He excused himself now for every inroad of imagination he visualized upon her, with the reflection that it was all in the involuntary nature of fantasy. She was woman and he was man, situated in bewildering circumstances of unpredictable light or shade bordering upon the density of the remainder of the world. Fantasy indeed. How could he dream of such a thing. And in the presence of her husband, then still at her side. She had not yet suffered bereavement. Four guides in alclass="underline" herself, her husband, another man, his wife.
It had been his expressed intention at the outset to employ only two — both men — but the women arrived before long. He greeted them with anger and consternation but secretly was glad they had come. It was good for the morale of the men to have their women with them. And in fact he was quick to point out that they possessed no alternative now but to remain with the party and go on. Far into the interior droghing their rations on their back which they supplemented with fish and game.
ENTRY FOUND IN HIS DIARY. Encamped by nameless creek. Propose to stop for a while. Curious Amerindian woman — SUSAN?
FURTHER ENTRY illustrated by long jagged line (written in strange hand though this may have been due to violent emotional stress).
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The above entries with others pertaining to come from “his” diary were pasted into the log-book as if to confirm a shadow of participation and identity involving all the “characters” of the log-book — a shattered witness of events running like a species of remarkable fiction.
*
LIKE A FLASH THE BUSH MASTER ROSE AND STRUCK. Out of the blue. Stood high on its tail, writhed, spat. And it was Amerindian Susan’s husband upon whom sprang the mark of the venomous fangs, holes in his skin….
HORROR. Stupefaction. Intimate course of the poison in his veins. The tooth of the cayman alligator was placed on the wound. Nothing prevailed — neither civilization’s first aid chest nor mesmeric tooth of the wild, remnant of the skull…. THE MAN DIED.
It had happened at very close quarters — as close as she (Susan) now stood to him whom, she believed, in her primitive reckoning — since he happened to be their employer, living employer of consciousness — to be obscurely responsible for the fate of each member of his party (and therefore the death of her husband). Dream and capacity. WAITING ROOM.
All at once “he” could hardly believe his ears and eyes as if these had truly returned to him out of the cavern of death — to guard her equally in himself. As if he — and not his Amerindian servant and guide — had suffered the fangs of the snake. He recalled now the lightning stroke of the bushmaster which seemed to marry the sun as it earlier stood poised and still racing, fiery luminous ball, glowing feast of eyes upon the crumb of place. A great burning tooth was administered to the holes in “his” skin — puncture of memory — and converted and swallowed by a pinprick of blood. Poison as well as antidote.
He saw her now in a light he had never seen, since he had not been thus healed and safeguarded before. Her hair, black and glinting, piled high like a coil of dreams where the head of the snaking sun had been fierce and wild. Her eyes, black as a pit. He recalled the flight of the stream where it fell like a beam of light from the torch of sun. Self-division of elements he began to witness on his voyage in pursuit of the nameless river of the world where it descended into the ground at his feet to where he visualized its emergence — crack of illumination — upon cliff or stone. Two indistinct points these were (when seen from the middle obscure distance of the cavern). The glare of the torch in his hand blew out as if a cloud had sealed entrance and exit and shattered every skylight and clearing. But the faint stunned eyes within the subterranean cave of Susan grew brighter still, stars of consciousness blown by the very fist of night.
He had been walking upon a skeleton framework on the bank of the stream but now descended into the water and made his way forward within the very body of the current. The hidden river was suddenly colder than he imagined it could be at the heart of the tropics. The seal of the sun was upheld and splintered again and again — idiosyncratic purity and flaw of the landscape like an explosion of memory, jungle of nights, inset of days. The black eyelid of nature flickered with each stroke of enlightenment, stamp of flame, ice….