present it is nothing but a wooden hemispherical shell big enough to seat four, encrusted, round its edge, in jewels possessing properties that react to the elements in varying ways, decorated with the head and wings of the mythic bird
haá¹sa
, part swan, part goose, with three closed vessels containing gyroscopes, placed at specific points in the hull. Mythic, surely, but dead too. Nothing but wood, alloy, cloth, and jewel. What it needs to take flight is a force, a consciousness, which the king will before long implant in its breast. Not for nothing has he learnt the various characteristics and functions of mercury, which he carries with him wherever he goes.He knows how to bend it to his will, to his own subtle energies, and more than that, he knows that it can conduct the incredible power of the thunderbolt to create a force field. All he need do is to make the liquid run in a channel around the gyroscope and through a few conducting wires transfer the charge in the higher reaches of the atmosphere into the vessels. The rest he will manage simply by directing its course through concentration of thought. He will ride the bird, and like the earth so in the sky will he reign.
Life moving in circles. Better still, life moving in cycles. Learning, unlearning, learning afresh. To purge pride utterly inside oneself, only to find it streaming in from a chink so soon. From there what a short way it is to rage, to madness, to destruction. The weakening of the organism to let the parasite of evil action, from lives past or present, enter and defile the host yet again.
XIII
MUSIC, OPENING wide the portals of thought, slackening the bonds of flesh on the spirit, turning the water in jars sweeter by degrees.
Tall and heavy, his thinning hair falling in curls over his neck, a zither on his lap, the maestro sings into the cool tropical night to the accompaniment of a four-piece musical ensemble. Lamps burning in glass shades along the dais, and the walls of the courtyard filled with an ink-black air whose edges are swamped with stars. Gestures, modulations, faint unnoticed blinks to the prevailing deities of the night. The swish of an arm catching a note in the air, not just the chords in the throat, but the whole body performing and shuddering to the music, a great river of music flowing through and flooding the banks. A few lines of verse, ten or twelve words, not more, charged with ancient meaning or wisdom, sometimes merely expressing an aphorism or a yearning, sung a thousand times over in shifting patterns of notes with ever changing intervals, rhythms, improvisa- tions, here performing a swift short glide through words or suddenly breaking them into their constituent syllables which come whole again miraculously to make up an octave, there rising and falling and oscillating in notes, rolling in echoes, and at last breaking into a majestic howl, enacting the possibilities of speech to its very end, and then even beyond that end, catenated molecules of sound dissolving into soft strands of breath, and breath vanishing into silence or music of a kind the ear cannot yet detect whereby the auditorâs soul takes flight with the dying vocals to travel and spreadacross the empyrean, and there is every fear of it not returning.
The voice returns to earth and brings back with it the queenâs soul and her heart begins to beat again. This kind of dislocation of thought she has not felt in years. When last was the mind so emptied out? When was it the king held her in that unending embrace?
An entire month has elapsed since that first fateful encounter over the board. Fateful not because of the results of the match, which, if anything, had been all but forgotten by the same evening, but because what took place over the board had been so altered as to bewitch any interested mind with a single glance. That is, for a mind in the know of the old game, of how a spectacular effect was achieved by a simple rearrangement of its
haá¹sa
, part swan, part goose, with three closed vessels containing gyroscopes, placed at specific points in the hull. Mythic, surely, but dead too. Nothing but wood, alloy, cloth, and jewel. What it needs to take flight is a force, a consciousness, which the king will before long implant in its breast. Not for nothing has he learnt the various characteristics and functions of mercury, which he carries with him wherever he goes.He knows how to bend it to his will, to his own subtle energies, and more than that, he knows that it can conduct the incredible power of the thunderbolt to create a force field. All he need do is to make the liquid run in a channel around the gyroscope and through a few conducting wires transfer the charge in the higher reaches of the atmosphere into the vessels. The rest he will manage simply by directing its course through concentration of thought. He will ride the bird, and like the earth so in the sky will he reign.
Life moving in circles. Better still, life moving in cycles. Learning, unlearning, learning afresh. To purge pride utterly inside oneself, only to find it streaming in from a chink so soon. From there what a short way it is to rage, to madness, to destruction. The weakening of the organism to let the parasite of evil action, from lives past or present, enter and defile the host yet again.
XIII
MUSIC, OPENING wide the portals of thought, slackening the bonds of flesh on the spirit, turning the water in jars sweeter by degrees.
Tall and heavy, his thinning hair falling in curls over his neck, a zither on his lap, the maestro sings into the cool tropical night to the accompaniment of a four-piece musical ensemble. Lamps burning in glass shades along the dais, and the walls of the courtyard filled with an ink-black air whose edges are swamped with stars. Gestures, modulations, faint unnoticed blinks to the prevailing deities of the night. The swish of an arm catching a note in the air, not just the chords in the throat, but the whole body performing and shuddering to the music, a great river of music flowing through and flooding the banks. A few lines of verse, ten or twelve words, not more, charged with ancient meaning or wisdom, sometimes merely expressing an aphorism or a yearning, sung a thousand times over in shifting patterns of notes with ever changing intervals, rhythms, improvisa- tions, here performing a swift short glide through words or suddenly breaking them into their constituent syllables which come whole again miraculously to make up an octave, there rising and falling and oscillating in notes, rolling in echoes, and at last breaking into a majestic howl, enacting the possibilities of speech to its very end, and then even beyond that end, catenated molecules of sound dissolving into soft strands of breath, and breath vanishing into silence or music of a kind the ear cannot yet detect whereby the auditorâs soul takes flight with the dying vocals to travel and spreadacross the empyrean, and there is every fear of it not returning.
The voice returns to earth and brings back with it the queenâs soul and her heart begins to beat again. This kind of dislocation of thought she has not felt in years. When last was the mind so emptied out? When was it the king held her in that unending embrace?
An entire month has elapsed since that first fateful encounter over the board. Fateful not because of the results of the match, which, if anything, had been all but forgotten by the same evening, but because what took place over the board had been so altered as to bewitch any interested mind with a single glance. That is, for a mind in the know of the old game, of how a spectacular effect was achieved by a simple rearrangement of its
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