Grimus by Salman Rushdie Page B

gold chain.
    He removed his bowler from his head; and placed all these things, with his undergarments, neatly on Flapping Eagle’s prone form, where they wouldn’t get in the way.
    And ignoring his protesting corns, he danced.
    The Gorf, already locked in to the mind of Flapping Eagle (which was a good deal easier for him than for Mr Jones) was about to receive a surprise.
    Mr Jones circled the body of Flapping Eagle slowly, humming a low-pitched note. As he cud this, he turned round and round, stamping his feet at regular intervals. After a while, he stopped feeling giddy. After a longer while, he no longer had to think about what he was doing. His body took over and guided him on his looping path by remote control. After a much longer while he ceased to be conscious of anything—surroundings, body, anything— except the hum, which hung around him like a curtain. Then that died away (though his vocal chords continued to produce the noise) and for a brief second he was not conscious even of being. It was during that instant that the ripples of Flapping Eagle lapped over his own; and Virgil Jones became attuned to the ailing mind.
    If you’d been in the right Dimension, you would have seen a thin veil-like mist encasing the two bodies.
    Virgil Jones had gone to the rescue.

XXII
    T HE G ORF WAS pleased with the puzzle he had set Flapping Eagle. Having come to the conclusion that the Amerindian’s near-immunity to Dimension-fever sprang from a temporary paralysis of the imagination, the Master of Ordering had decided to fill the gap with his own. The puzzle he constructed was especially satisfying since all its elements, as well as the way out, had been built from Flapping Eagle’s memories; so that it was a perfectly passable counterfeit of a dimension that a more freely-thinking Flapping Eagle might have entered. The Gorf relaxed and prepared to enjoy Flapping Eagle’s attempts to solve it.
    These were the elements of the puzzle:
    A place called Abyssinia. Its characteristics sprang from the name the Gorf had taken from Flapping Eagle’s mind. It was a huge abyss, a narrow canyon with stone walls reaching up to the sky. And, just to add an intriguing time-factor, it was getting slowly narrower. The cliffs were encroaching on both sides; they even seemed to be coming together overhead, so that in time they would form a tomb of constricting rock.
    At the bottom of the canyon with Flapping Eagle were two Abyssinians. They looked like Deggle, creator of the memory. Both of them were long and saturnine. They wore black cloaks and emerald necklaces. But there the resemblance to Deggle ended. (Even so, it served its purpose; Flapping Eagle was utterly unnerved by the spectacle of twin Deggles standing before him, and forgot about Bird-Dog and his own powers long enough to enable the dimension to “set” firmly, like concrete.)
    The Two Abyssinians were called Khallit and Mallit. They were engaged in an eternal argument without beginning or end, its very lack of purpose or decision undermining Flapping Eagle’s ability to think clearly.
    One more thing: Flapping Eagle was tied hand and foot. He lay beside the two Abyssinians as they squatted around a campfire. They seemed oblivious of his presence, and did not answer when he spoke to them.
    A very pleasing puzzle indeed.
    Between them, Khallit and Mallit placed a gold coin. Every so often one of them would flip it; it was the only way they ever decided on any element of their eternal wrangle.
    At the present moment, they seemed indirectly to be discussing Flapping Eagle.
    —There are two sides to every question, Mallit, are there not?
    —Well … said Mallit doubtfully. He flipped the coin. —Yes, he said.
    Khallit breathed a sigh of relief.
    —Then if good is on one side of the coin, bad is on the other. If peace is on one side, war is on the other.
    —Arguable, said Mallit.
    —For the sake of argument, pleaded Khallit.
    —For the sake of argument, agreed Mallit,