The second of the two illustrations mentioned had been printed on the page the innermost margin of which was described in a previous paragraph. The illustration had been of a naked young woman sitting on a narrow expanse of sand in front of an expanse of rock that the boy had always supposed to be the base of a tall cliff beside a small bay or cove. The young image-woman had been sitting in such a way that her groin was hidden from the camera although her breasts were visible.
The boy mentioned had first seen the image of the naked young woman more than a year before he had found the strip of paper mentioned. When the boy had first seen the image, he had supposed that the pages of fiction surrounding the illustration included a report of the presence in a seemingly deserted bay or cove of a naked young woman. Later, the boy had learned that the pages of fiction reported seeming-events that might have taken place during the nineteenth century in one or another western state of the United States of America. The boy had then concluded that the image of the naked young woman had been printed in the magazine for no other reason than to enable a certain sort of boy or young man in whose mind was often an image of some or another isolated bay or cove beneath tall cliffs — to enable him to see more readily in such a place an image of a naked young woman.
More than fifty years after the boy mentioned had found the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember no phrase or sentence from any page that he had read in any of the books that were kept in the shelves mentioned earlier. He sometimes remembered, however, a few words from one of the last pages in one of the books and what might be called the import of one of the sentences on that page.
A certain book on the shelves mentioned had been read and praised by many thousands of persons since its publication in the third decade of the twentieth century, so the boy had learned from the dust jacket of the book during one of the years before he had found the strip of paper in the magazine mentioned earlier. The boy might have set out to read the book if he had not learned also from the dust jacket that many passages in the book reported seeming-events that might have taken place in England or in France or in Belgium during the First World War. The boy chose never to read about soldiers and battles or about weapons and machinery or about bombed houses and ruined landscapes; he preferred to read about unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived a mostly uneventful image-life, going sometimes to an image-race-meeting, looking out always for a young image-woman who might fall in love with him, reading often from one or another book that brought to his mind unremarkable image-scenery and mostly uneventful image-lives, perhaps even writing a work of image-fiction set in unremarkable image-scenery where an image-person not greatly different from himself might have lived…
Although he had chosen not to read the book mentioned, the boy had looked once into the last few pages of the book. (He would look thus often during the next fifty and more years. Often in some or another bookshop or beside the bookshelves in the house of some or another friend, he would look into the last few pages of some or another book that had been praised by critics and reviewers or had been recommended to him by some or another friend. He did this partly in order to decide whether or not the whole book deserved to be read but partly in the hope of feeling again what he had felt often as a boy: that a book of fiction could not, by definition, come to an end; that what had been created could not be later annihilated; that the image-persons and the image-scenery brought into being whenever a certain sort of reader read what a certain sort of writer had written — that such image-realities must continue their image-existence even though another sort of writer might report long afterwards that they were no longer remembered.)
The boy mentioned remembered for long afterwards his having learned that the noise of guns sounded to a certain fictional young man during the last minutes before he died a fictional death like the noise of the waves in the bay or cove beneath steep cliffs where he had spent his summer holidays as a boy in the fictional south-west of a fictional England.
An image of a man and an image of a young woman appeared at the base of a tall image-cliff. These images appeared in the mind of a certain young man while he was sitting beside a campfire at the base of a tall cliff and trying to explain to a certain young woman what he remembered having read in certain passages of a certain book that he considered, so he told the young woman, a neglected masterpiece of English literature. Since the young man spoke as though the image-persons were actual persons, they will be thus described in the following paragraphs.
The image-cliff was not a bare rocky cliff such as might have overlooked a bay or a seacoast but a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and forming one side of something that was reported in the so-called neglected masterpiece as being a dingle, which word the young man had never looked for in any dictionary, preferring not to have to call into question the images that had first appeared in his mind while he was reading a work of fiction. At the base of the cliff was mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Near one such clump a small tent was pitched. Perhaps ten paces away, near another clump, a second tent was pitched. About halfway between the two tents, a kettle of water hung above a campfire. One of the tents belonged to the man mentioned and the other tent to the young woman mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Both the man and the young woman were noticeably tall, and the young woman had red hair.
The man and the young woman had lived in their respective tents since their first meeting, which had taken place several weeks before. At that meeting, the young woman had struck the man but had later made peace with him. During the weeks when the young woman and the man had lived in their tents, they had often taken their meals together or had drunk tea together at the campfire between the tents. At such times, they had debated many matters, and the young woman had sometimes threatened to strike the man. Sometimes, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to learn certain words and phrases in the Armenian language, which the man had learned from books for no other reason than that he felt driven to learn foreign languages. At one time, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to conjugate in several of its tenses and moods the Armenian verb siriel, I love. In the course of this lesson, the man and the young woman were obliged to speak, in the Armenian language, such sentences as ‘I have loved’, ‘Love me!’ and ‘Thou wilt love’. At a later time, beside the campfire, the man proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry at some time in the future and should then go to live in America. At a later time still, the young woman left the dingle without the man’s knowing and did not return. A few days later again, the man received from the young woman a long letter telling him, among other things, that she was setting out alone for America and that she had declined his proposal of marriage because she believed he was at the root mad.
The young man who was trying to report what he remembered from the book that he considered a masterpiece — that young man was able to remember not only the summary of events reported in the previous paragraph but words and phrases from the supposed masterpiece. Forty and more years later, the older man who had been the young man could recall only an image of a male person and a female person beside a campfire, the male uttering words in some or another foreign language and the female trying to repeat the words.
The older man was able to remember rather more details of a scene in which a young man and a young woman sat beside a campfire within sight of a tall cliff. At the base of the cliff was the entrance to a cave. The entrance was large enough for several persons to have walked through, but the farther parts of the cave were in darkness. The young woman, who had lived as a child in the district surrounding the cave, had told the young man that the Aborigines who had formerly lived in the district believed that a supernatural being lived in the cave.