no certainty, even,
which things really occur, which things are dreams?
I’ve barely
hinted at the sights we saw, dull shocks to our sanity. I’ve told many times how we slipped through the
Clashing Rocks, and have been
believed; but who would believe me now, if I said to you we slipped in and out of Time, hurled crazily backward
and forward?
A man learns how much truth he can get away with.
Suppose
I leaned toward you, like this, abandoning dignity, and moaned, eyes wide: Oh friends, the worst of it all
was this:
Time swept over us in waves: one moment the hills
were green,
the next, crawling with cities, the next, black deserts
where things
like huge black insects belched out smoke and devoured
one another.
Suppose I reported that, sailing through fog, we heard
dreadful moans,
terrible deep-throated bellows we took to be
sea-monsters,
and all at once we’d see lights coming at us — no
common torches,
but lights blue-white as stars — and even as we gazed
at them,
shaking in terror, believe me, we saw they were eyes—
the eyes
of enormous drifting beasts. And sometimes the lights
would vanish
and the huge sea-beasts would sink, as if for a purpose,
like whales.
Suppose I told you I saw whole seas of dead men
floating—
women and children as well — a smell unbelievable— corpses from shore to shore, and ship prows parting
them.
You’d soon grow uneasy, I think. You’d call me a
tiresome liar,
and rightly. Then only this: we were riding in eerie
waters,
countries of powerful magic. And the strangest part was
this:
all that we saw, or thought we saw, was of no
importance.
At times the river was poison. At times the sky caught
fire.
At times the land we passed seemed virgin wilderness, and the river birds would land on our ship as if never
yet
attacked by the implements of man. The world was a
harmless drunk.
“A ship that reeked of incense drifted by us, filled with sleepy people, eerie music, children in rags or naked, as some of the adults were naked. They smiled
gently,
listlessly waved and jabbered in some outlandish tongue, human livestock packed in rail to rail on the sailless ship. They did not mind. Some coupled publicly, staring nowhere. They filled us, God knows why, with
anger.
Even Athena’s magic ship was changed, beside that rotting barque from the world’s last age. The
planking sang:
“ ‘For men, not earth, the time has run out. Though
oceans die,
meadows and fields, green hills, they hold no grudge
against their murderer.
They drift through time in their long
slumber,
secretly waiting, like beasts asleep in caves. Deep space bombards the poisoned seas with bits of life, and the
seas
grow whole again, renew themselves like a heart
awakening.
Algae forms along shores. Great, dark, ungainly beasts dream from the deeps toward land, and out of the
slime of blood
and bone — witless, charged with sorrow like a dying
horse—
mind comes groping, tentative, fearful, sly as a snake and as quick to love or strike. So spring moves in
again,
as usual, and flowers are invented, and wheels and
clocks,
and tragedies, and eventually, as the mind grows old, familiar with its quirky ways, even comedy is born
again—
fat clowns strutting, alone and ridiculous, shaking
their fists
at mirrors and fleeing in alarm, to teach that the joke
on them
is them. So autumn comes again, as usuaclass="underline" splendid triumph of color, when every tree turns
philosophical
and the seas, dying, past all repair,
provide mankind with jokes. (All consciousness is
optimistic,
even a frog’s. Otherwise who would evolve the handsome
prince?)
So plankton dies, and the whales turn belly up, become one world-wide stench of decaying symphonies; the grass withers. Starvation; plague. A silent planet again, for a time; drifting boulder pocked with old cities till space sends life. And once more goggle-eyed
creatures gaze
amazed at the brave new world with goggle-eyed
creatures in it,
as usual. And all that past minds dreamed or wrote, feared, predicted with terrible insight — all mind loved and mocked — is vanished like snow, cool archaeology. Cheer up, sailors! The wind of time was always dark with ghosts, pacing, angrily muttering to be born.’
“The death-ship
vanished, and a moment later, the music; finally the
smell.
We talked, held councils; but obviously we could make
no sense
of senselessness, and so, in the end, pushed on. And had adventures, each more lunatic than the last. Not even Orpheus knew how to twist the thing toward reason,
impose
some frame. In any case, I can tell you, it wasn’t
courage
that kept us going. It wasn’t sweet curiosity. For reasons we hadn’t understood at the time — nor did
we now—
we’d launched this expedition, and so we continued.
They did not
love me for it now. Muttered and grumbled.
“As I say,
we passed the Clashing Rocks. Never mind the details.
Two great black
boulders that rose from the sea like a pair of jaws,
and snapped
at any who passed between. The prank of some playful
god
in the First Age, before the gods grew ‘serious.’ A prank deadly for men, though one can see, in a way, the entertainment value. We’d been forewarned of
them
by Phineus — one of his endless, tedious meanderings. We followed instructions — hurled in a dove, by which
we learned
the pace of the thing … Never mind. We rowed for our
lives, and made it,
and saw the stone jaws lock, to move no more. Ironic. We could have sailed through at ease, like merchants,
chatting, if we’d known their
time was almost out. But in any case, we made it, and travelled senselessly on.
‘Then Tiphys spoke, overpleased
at how slyly his oar had steered us through — fatuous, unctuous with success … unless already the mortal
fever
was in him, befuddling his wits, and some subliminal
fear,
intuition of silence, now stirred his soul to noise. He
said,
pompous and hearty, too joviaclass="underline" ‘I think, Lord Jason, we can safely say all’s well! The Argo’s safe and sound, and so are we! For which we may thank pale-eyed
Athena,
who gave our ship supernatural strength when Argus
drove in
the bolts. The Argo shall never be harmed. That seems
to be Law.
And so, since heaven’s allowed us to pass through the
Clashing Rocks,
I beg you, put off all worries. There can be no obstacle this crew can’t easily surmount!’
“Our brilliant pilot, I thought,
is a dolt. I turned my head, looked back at the two
great rocks,
now motionless, then glanced at him, one eyebrow
raised.
But the next instant it struck me that Tiphys’ words
could be turned