plants were grown in full sun all day, with a plentiful supply of water, the resulting fruit was bright orange, and it tasted divinely sweet. With full sunlight but a limited supply of water, the fruit became brilliant red, with still another nuance of sugar-sweet flavoring. And in full sunlight without even one drop of water, the fruit turned a deep, rich yellow and developed a thick husky hull, with a sweet-sour mash inside that was delightfully refreshing. Grown in only partial sunlight, with a little water, the fruit was pale and pink. It was this delicately flavored melon that Far-Awn first fed us, and so it was always my favorite.
"Other plants were grown in the shade, with only speckled light coming intermittently, and these developed into various shades of green and blue, the color and flavor depending on the degree of shade, the degree of water, the degree of occasional light. But the plants that grew in total darkness gave us our biggest surprise--and to many, our greatest delight! In the darkness, the fruit developed only a thin brittle purple shell, as fragile as an egg. Inside, the pulp was almost liquid. It could be eaten with a spoon, or strained and made pure liquid to pour in a cup. It had a very pleasant zingy taste.
"Someone--I forget just who--was able to resist the temptation of drinking this liquid straight down. That someone kept the purple liquid until it aged into a magenta color and when swallowed, it burned our throats, and warmed our insides. It was unpleasant, rather sour, yet somehow it was very pleasing. It reacted on us strangely. We smiled for the first time in our lives. We quickly hushed, of course, lest the Gods see they had given us too much. Then and there, there were those who decided to specialize in the cultivation of the grown-in-darkness purple pufars. Many variations of the liquid purple were developed but many have covered that subject far better than I possibly could.
"Let me write this, as a man who remembers the past well, that until the coming of the pufars, all that any of us on El Sod-a-Por could think of was food and how to obtain it, of shelter and how to retain it, of all of life and how to sustain it! We were obsessed with the weather, with the perpetual struggle against so many odds. We never thought we could win--we just wanted to hang on! After the pufars came into our dreary, monotonous, hopeless lives, doors swung open that we hadn't even realized were there.
"We had food now that grew bountifully, with such little care; we had the time and the energy for discovering the joys of other things. But we were so accustomed to our old obsessions, to our old habits of labor and nothing but endless hard work, that we couldn't readily give them up without making substitutions. The pufar itself became our obsession--and what zealots we were!
"I recall my wife, pregnant with our first child, looking at me wistfully. 'Sal-Lar,' she said, 'you work as hard now as you did in the underground caverns. Can't you stay home at least one day, and forget your work?'
"I gave her an incredulous look. 'Stay home and do nothing all day?' I asked. 'What would we do, all day long?' 'We could think of something,' she said rather vaguely, 'something we could do that was just fun, and not hard work.'
"At that time I could think of only one thing that was fun, and she was already pregnant. So I threw off her ridiculous suggestion that I stay with her and do something that was fun for a full day! I set out at a trot, eager for the factory work that was a challenge to our ingenuity, and found my brother-in-law, Far-Awn, already busy at work. He had not yet married, although every unmarried girl in the upper borderlands was crazy for his attention. There had been a time when I thought he felt some attraction to my sister, Santan, but Santan had married one of Far-Awn's brothers and had two children. I am most proud to write here that I was Far-Awn's very closest friend, so that he could confide
"Other plants were grown in the shade, with only speckled light coming intermittently, and these developed into various shades of green and blue, the color and flavor depending on the degree of shade, the degree of water, the degree of occasional light. But the plants that grew in total darkness gave us our biggest surprise--and to many, our greatest delight! In the darkness, the fruit developed only a thin brittle purple shell, as fragile as an egg. Inside, the pulp was almost liquid. It could be eaten with a spoon, or strained and made pure liquid to pour in a cup. It had a very pleasant zingy taste.
"Someone--I forget just who--was able to resist the temptation of drinking this liquid straight down. That someone kept the purple liquid until it aged into a magenta color and when swallowed, it burned our throats, and warmed our insides. It was unpleasant, rather sour, yet somehow it was very pleasing. It reacted on us strangely. We smiled for the first time in our lives. We quickly hushed, of course, lest the Gods see they had given us too much. Then and there, there were those who decided to specialize in the cultivation of the grown-in-darkness purple pufars. Many variations of the liquid purple were developed but many have covered that subject far better than I possibly could.
"Let me write this, as a man who remembers the past well, that until the coming of the pufars, all that any of us on El Sod-a-Por could think of was food and how to obtain it, of shelter and how to retain it, of all of life and how to sustain it! We were obsessed with the weather, with the perpetual struggle against so many odds. We never thought we could win--we just wanted to hang on! After the pufars came into our dreary, monotonous, hopeless lives, doors swung open that we hadn't even realized were there.
"We had food now that grew bountifully, with such little care; we had the time and the energy for discovering the joys of other things. But we were so accustomed to our old obsessions, to our old habits of labor and nothing but endless hard work, that we couldn't readily give them up without making substitutions. The pufar itself became our obsession--and what zealots we were!
"I recall my wife, pregnant with our first child, looking at me wistfully. 'Sal-Lar,' she said, 'you work as hard now as you did in the underground caverns. Can't you stay home at least one day, and forget your work?'
"I gave her an incredulous look. 'Stay home and do nothing all day?' I asked. 'What would we do, all day long?' 'We could think of something,' she said rather vaguely, 'something we could do that was just fun, and not hard work.'
"At that time I could think of only one thing that was fun, and she was already pregnant. So I threw off her ridiculous suggestion that I stay with her and do something that was fun for a full day! I set out at a trot, eager for the factory work that was a challenge to our ingenuity, and found my brother-in-law, Far-Awn, already busy at work. He had not yet married, although every unmarried girl in the upper borderlands was crazy for his attention. There had been a time when I thought he felt some attraction to my sister, Santan, but Santan had married one of Far-Awn's brothers and had two children. I am most proud to write here that I was Far-Awn's very closest friend, so that he could confide
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