The Boat in the Evening (7 page)

In silence also we saw the gleam grow stronger up on the uneven hillside we were watching.

Perhaps the trees and tussocks of heather up there would soon catch fire? Surely they would not be able to withstand the flames?

But it was not like that either. At the same moment we saw that they did not begin to bum before the still hidden storm of light—we were expecting too much all at once in our excitement.

We were expecting fire, but something else too that would abruptly and decisively clarify the clouded future, tell us the truth from this day onwards, one early summer morning.

Everything we had wished for, somehow.

More than wished for.

Had wildly wished for.

We included the girl over there across the sound. She was standing as before, waiting as silently as us.

*

So it had been worthwhile wishing so wildly.

Was it not our innermost wish we now saw gleaming in the air?

We were seeing it on its way at last, at the moment when it would soon break over the threshold within us, when it could no longer be stopped by doubt.

The incredible is approaching from over there. It will not leap past us, we shall not be left in our dark vale to watch it go.

What form it had was not our concern. Whether the bush burned or not—not our concern. Our concern was a blazing field of light. Our wish was for explanation. Our concern was what we did not know. We had form on the other side of the sound. We saw it with our boys' eyes, proud that such should exist on our own home ground. We included
that
in the shared mood of exhilaration we were in. Our naked girl would enter the approaching field of light as an assured point of rest, as a kind of quivering anchorage in what we, in spite of everything, possessed.

We did not know her, as she stood there sparkling, but she was one of us. We almost felt that it was we who had come to meet her.

*

We stiffened: there it was up on the hill, shining among the trees and bushes.

First only as light.

Nothing caught fire there, but the sight of it was so strong that it blinded us.

We did not see whether it was the light of truth; there were horses, horses, a wave of shining horses, or a waterfall of them.

A waterfall of horses over the crest, pouring down our hillside like an unpent dam. But without noise, soundless as the shadows and the light. This light would fill us, we would become capable of doing something remarkable, we suddenly persuaded ourselves.

*

Hush, we thought as the searing notion presented itself—that we were in reality seeing nothing, but that instead we were about to die. Thus it could shift and become distorted in the space of a moment.

Why is nobody riding on the horses? Why is there no thundering of numberless hooves?

It is death. Nobody could ride a horse made of light, surely?

I am dying.

And in the same instant, like a stab: Already? No, no.

Hush, we said to the thought, but it would not obey, it went on nagging us, spoiling our great joy, trying to destroy our exhilaration and the happy impulses we were beginning to feel. Then I saw that Per was pointing like a rescuer across the sound, pointing at the girl who was standing on the rock as before, waiting as before. Everything was changed again, we were not about to die, we were alive and more than alive, we were open and ready to be filled with what was coming.

*

It poured on down the hillside. An unbridled dance of shining horses.

And on that hillside.

Ours, our hillside. There these inflaming visions were to be played out.

The hillside—where the dew had many a time collected on my shoulders through the night, in the grass beneath trees dense with leaf, where the darkness had been fearful and enticing. The arm of the brook beside which I had sat thinking illicit, strange thoughts. And the place where the cliffs hid in the tall grasses edging them, turning the drops into terrifying pitfalls. On this hillside, where I had sat thinking until it seemed as if I had never really been there at all, the rushing wave of light swept down as runaway horses. Our wild exhilaration was sweeping along, making straight for us.

To change us in some way?

Irregular gleams flickered between the trees.

Tall grasses and stiff angelica heads slapped against the horses' dancing flanks, their gleaming flanks, it was quite beyond reason and there was no thunder of hooves, they were noiseless. Since there was no sound, our tongues were paralysed. No one could shout in that silence. No one dared to look across the sound now; we were standing stiffly to receive them.

Thinking that now everything was different.

We were not to die, but to be created anew, on our familiar hillside.

*

Before long it looked as if the whole hillside were alight—as if our wish had come true. How could we tell? We stood there in a kind of elation. Tensely we saw that the terrifying cliffs did not exist: the stampede swept straight over them and nothing happened, none of them disappeared in the pitfalls, the web of light was unbroken.

And then:

5

The Drifter and the Mirrors

Leaning out over the water and the mirrors.

They twinkle and bewitch.

Be drawn towards the slime? Don't think. Don't think. Climb away from the slime? Don't think. The slime was imagination? Don't think. Nobody knows what flatters and bewitches.

*

Bewilderment increases in the presence of the mirrors. Leaning over as far as possible, to the point where one almost topples in. The deep water reaches right up to the rock here; tilt too far, and it would all be over. But there is still a foothold left in the heather and the scents and the hopelessness, and in all that hounds one on and that one wishes to be rid of.

Leaning over, thinking, or at any rate trying to think. No use. No thoughts there.

Leaning over, knowing one is about to slip. The thought of slipping becomes stronger the longer one looks down into the water. The picture down there is distinct; one can read it like a book. There is no current to pull the features awry; the mirror does not deform anything. There is a current deep down; one thinks of that.

Yet the face is deformed now, distorted and unlike itself, the result of misfortunes that have come like avalanches—there behind him, where he has left his halflived life. What has really happened? He meets his own shocked eyes down below.

Leaning a little bit more.

Meeting an eye that says: Come.

It's as bad as that. It does not matter what the eye is now that everything has gone so perversely and painfully aground.

Bewilderment has set in. Soon the picture will begin to glide. Begin to pull and bind and distort him. His own eyes are there no longer; he sees a fragmented eye and it numbs the links with his mind.

A stranger on one's own shore, become chillingly lonely. He did not consider the strength of his own resistance while there was still time. While there was still resistance.

At the place where he has come from yawn two great sorrows and a couple of shattering defeats. Never back there, he says in this twisted moment. No, your last card has been played, he reads in the sinister eye in the water.

There can be nothing more.

Something must be done. Done. Halted by the water, and the pull from deep down, that's what he thinks—because he has the inverted mirrors facing him.