then we were on the cliff’s edge again. The alighting of this great white bird frightened a number of monkeys that had been hiding where some bushes grew thickly. Theywent chattering off, and I sat myself in my usual place, and the bird sat with me a little in silence, and then sailed off again on its white wings into the dark of that night.
And so that night passed, with the screams and the sound of the fighting going on behind me, but now I felt less oppressed by it, for I kept my mind on the long cool flight I had had on the great bird’s sunwarmed back, and on my old love Conchita stammering her separate failure on her separate coast.
I did not go into the city’s centre again for three days, but sat on the cliff hoping to see the bird, but he did not come, and at last I ventured in, and the fighting still went on, and so many had been killed that they could not either eat or dispose of the corpses, which lay in heaps everywhere. All the animals were exhausted from the long fighting. Their fighting had become more frightful and desperate and mechanical. They were very crazy now, and their eyes were reddened, and their fur and hide roughened and dirty. The Rat-dogs no longer attempted to stand upright, they ran about on all fours, killing the monkeys by random snapping bites with their sharp fangs. Again they took very little notice of me as I went across the square to see how I could prepare it for the full moon not much more than a week away now. I saw nothing hopeful, and so went back to my cliff again. Now I abandoned my dream of preparing the landing-ground, and I dreamed instead of returning to the sea, of letting myself slide into the fresh salt like a bird into the air. I sat there as the days and nights came and went, my eyes fixed on the distant ocean, wishing I had slid off the bird’s back into the healthful sea, and there found someplank or spar or fish or floating thing I could have clung to like a barnacle until perhaps the Crystal took pity on me and swept me up at last. And as I sat there on the morning three days before Full Moon, wondering if I should slide back down the glassy wall, and run down, down to the sea, the white bird came back and sat by me, greeting me with its friendly yellow eyes. Again it squatted as I climbed up on to it, and again sped down over the forests to the sea and again circled there just above the breaking waves. But now I understood why the bird had come to fetch me, for the sea was no longer the fresh cold salty well of sanity it had been. There was a sluggishness in its moving, as if it had thickened. There was a taint of decay. Bobbing on the waves I saw hundreds of corpses from the war on the plateau, which had been flung into the great chasm and had been carried by the stream over falls and cataracts to the sea’s edge. And everywhere I saw fishes and sea creatures floating bellies up, and on the sea were patches of oil, dark and mineral-smelling. And over the sea, in patches, was a pale phosphorescence like an insidious decay made visible, and these were poisonous gases that had released themselves from the containers man had sunk them in to the sea’s bottom, and elsewhere were sheets of light like a subtle electric fire which was radioactivity from the factories and plants on shores oceans or continents away. The bird swept me back and forth across miles of ocean in the frying sun, making me look at the sea’s death, and even as we flew there, all the surface of the sea became choked with death, dead fishes and seaweeds and clams and porpoises and dolphins and whales, fish big and small, and all the plants of the sea, sea birds and sea snakesand seals—then my beautiful white bird lifted me up and up and up into the sky and sped back over the trees to the plateau, but now it circled down over the city with its roofless buildings and made me see how underneath me all the city, every building in it, was fouled by war, how everywhere lay the loads of corpses,
And so that night passed, with the screams and the sound of the fighting going on behind me, but now I felt less oppressed by it, for I kept my mind on the long cool flight I had had on the great bird’s sunwarmed back, and on my old love Conchita stammering her separate failure on her separate coast.
I did not go into the city’s centre again for three days, but sat on the cliff hoping to see the bird, but he did not come, and at last I ventured in, and the fighting still went on, and so many had been killed that they could not either eat or dispose of the corpses, which lay in heaps everywhere. All the animals were exhausted from the long fighting. Their fighting had become more frightful and desperate and mechanical. They were very crazy now, and their eyes were reddened, and their fur and hide roughened and dirty. The Rat-dogs no longer attempted to stand upright, they ran about on all fours, killing the monkeys by random snapping bites with their sharp fangs. Again they took very little notice of me as I went across the square to see how I could prepare it for the full moon not much more than a week away now. I saw nothing hopeful, and so went back to my cliff again. Now I abandoned my dream of preparing the landing-ground, and I dreamed instead of returning to the sea, of letting myself slide into the fresh salt like a bird into the air. I sat there as the days and nights came and went, my eyes fixed on the distant ocean, wishing I had slid off the bird’s back into the healthful sea, and there found someplank or spar or fish or floating thing I could have clung to like a barnacle until perhaps the Crystal took pity on me and swept me up at last. And as I sat there on the morning three days before Full Moon, wondering if I should slide back down the glassy wall, and run down, down to the sea, the white bird came back and sat by me, greeting me with its friendly yellow eyes. Again it squatted as I climbed up on to it, and again sped down over the forests to the sea and again circled there just above the breaking waves. But now I understood why the bird had come to fetch me, for the sea was no longer the fresh cold salty well of sanity it had been. There was a sluggishness in its moving, as if it had thickened. There was a taint of decay. Bobbing on the waves I saw hundreds of corpses from the war on the plateau, which had been flung into the great chasm and had been carried by the stream over falls and cataracts to the sea’s edge. And everywhere I saw fishes and sea creatures floating bellies up, and on the sea were patches of oil, dark and mineral-smelling. And over the sea, in patches, was a pale phosphorescence like an insidious decay made visible, and these were poisonous gases that had released themselves from the containers man had sunk them in to the sea’s bottom, and elsewhere were sheets of light like a subtle electric fire which was radioactivity from the factories and plants on shores oceans or continents away. The bird swept me back and forth across miles of ocean in the frying sun, making me look at the sea’s death, and even as we flew there, all the surface of the sea became choked with death, dead fishes and seaweeds and clams and porpoises and dolphins and whales, fish big and small, and all the plants of the sea, sea birds and sea snakesand seals—then my beautiful white bird lifted me up and up and up into the sky and sped back over the trees to the plateau, but now it circled down over the city with its roofless buildings and made me see how underneath me all the city, every building in it, was fouled by war, how everywhere lay the loads of corpses,
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