It will have been noted that none of the individuals categorised here was among those identified with a particular injustice, such as suffering under an arbitrary or tyrannous power, or being deprived of a country, or persecuted for being one of a despised or subjugated race, or kept in poverty by the thoughtless, the careless, or the cruel.
I could not contact the next individual through the Giants, or anything like them. I had been looking for someone suitable, and during my trips in and out of Shikasta, I had seen an old friend, Ranee, waiting on the margins of Zone Six at that place where the lines form for their chance of re-entry. I had told her that I needed very soon to spend time with her, and why. Now, searching up and down the lines I could not see her, and saw, too, that they were shorter and more sparse. I heard that there were rumours of an emergency, of frightful danger, in Zone Six, and all those able to understand had left to help people escape. The souls remaining in the lines were too fixed on their hope of an early re-entry, crowding forward each time the gates opened, jostling each other, their eyes only for the gates, and I could not get anything more out of them.
I walked on past them into the scrub and thin grasses of the high plateau, quite alone, as evening came on. I felt uneasy, and thought first this was because I had been told there was danger, but soon the sense of threat was so strong that I left the scrublands and climbed a small ridge, scrambling from rock to rock upwards, in the dark. I set my back to a small cliff, and my face to where I could expect the dawn. It was silent. But not completely silent. I could hear a soft whispering, like a sea... a sea where no sea was, or could be. The stars were crowding bright and thick, and their dim light showed low bushes and outcrops of stone. Nothing to account for this sound, which I could not remember ever hearing before. Yet it whispered danger, danger, and I stayed where I was, turning myself about and sensing and peering, like an animal alerted to some menace it cannot understand. When the light came into the sky and the stars went, the sound was there, and stronger. I descended from the ridge, and walked on, soon coming to the desert's edge, where I could hear the steady sibilant hissing. Yet there was no wind to blow the sand. Everything was quite still, and there was a small sweetness of dew rising from around my feet as I set them down on a crunchy surface. I walked on, every step slower, for all my senses shouted warnings at me. I kept close to my right the low ridge I had used for shelter the night before. It ran on in front of me until it joined black jagged peaks far ahead that were sombre and even sinister in the cool grey dawn. The rustling voice of the sands grew louder... not far from me I saw wisps of sand in the air, which vanished: yet there was no wind! The lower clouds hung dark and motionless, and the higher clouds, all tinted with the dawn, were in packed unmoving masses. A windless landscape and a still sky: and yet the whispering came from everywhere. A small smudge in the air far in front of me enlarged, and close to me the sands seemed to shiver. I left them and again climbed on the ridge, where I turned to look back at where I had been standing. At first, nothing; and then, almost exactly where I had been, I saw the sands shake. They lay still again. But I had not imagined it. At various places now over the plain of sands that lay on the left of the ridge I saw smudges of sand hanging. To the right of the ridge I had not yet looked, not daring to take my eyes away from the place I had been in, for it seemed essential to watch, as if something might pounce out like an animal, if I once removed my gaze. There was no reason in it, but I had to stand fixed there, staring... the place where the sands had moved, quaked again. They moved, definitely, and stopped. As if an enormous invisible stick had given half a stir... the soft whistling filled my ears and I could hear nothing else. I waited. An area I could span with my arms stretched wide was stirred again by the invisible stick: there was the slow, halting movement of a whirlpool, which stopped. Half a mile ahead I believed I could see a spinning underneath one of the air smudges. But I kept my eyes on the birth - for now I knew that this was what I was watching - of the sand whirlpool near to me. Slowly, creakingly, with halts, and new beginnings, the vortex formed, and then at various distances around it, the sand shivered, and lay still, and began again... Then the central place was in a slow regular spin, and grains of sand flung up and off to one side glittered as they fell. So the sun was up, was it? I looked, and saw all the sky in front a wild enraged red, shedding a ruddy glow down on to the gleam of the sands.
The whirlpool was now established, and steadily encompassing more and more of the sands around it, and the places near it where I had noted small movements, each were beginning to circle and subside, then start again as the new subsidiary pools formed. I saw that all the plain was covered with these spots of movement, and the air above them each showed a small cloud that hung there, enlarging but not drifting, because of the lack of wind. And now, with difficulty, I made myself look away from this dreadfully treacherous plain, and I gazed out to my right. Desert again, stretching interminably, and I could see no movement here. The wastes lay quiet and still, inflamed by the wild scarlet of the skies, but then a desert fox came towards me, its soft yellow all aglow, and it trotted into the ridge of rocks and disappeared. Another came. Suddenly I saw that there were many animals in flight from some danger behind them. Far behind them: for I could see no movement in the sands on this side of the ridge, though on the other side all the plain was shaking and quivering between the whirlpools of sand. Far over this solid and ordinary plain, I could see that the sky, now fully light in a clear morning where the reds and pinks rapidly faded, was hung with a low haze, which I now understood.
I had taken in what was happening, was going to happen, and I ran clumsily forward along the rocky ridge, which I believed, or hoped, would not succumb to the movement of the sands, was solidly rooted.
I was looking for refugees from these terrible whirlpools who might have climbed to the safety of the rocks, but believed they were more likely to be on the mountains that still seemed to be such a distance from me. And then I did see a party of five approach, a woman, a man, and two half-grown children, and these were dazed and silly with the dangers they had survived, and could not see me. They were accompanied by someone whose face I knew from the lines at the frontier, and I stopped her and asked what was happening. "Be quick," she said, "there are still people on the sands. But you must be quick" - and she went on along the ridge, calling to her charges to hurry. They were standing with their mouths hanging open, eyes fixed on the shivering and swirling sands of the plain to my left, their right, and seemed unable to hear her. She had to hustle them on, pushing them into movement. Again I ran onwards, clumsily, scrambling and falling over the rocks, and several times passed little groups, each shepherded by a person from the lines. The rescued ones shook and trembled, and stared at the liquid-seeming desert, and had to be continually reminded to move on, and to keep their eyes in front of them.
When at last I reached the beginnings of the mountain peaks, which rose straight up out of the sands, it was not too soon, for I had seen that if the great sands on my right were to dissolve into movement as they had on the other side, the ridge could not stand for long, but must be engulfed. I turned to look back from the mountain and saw that on the one side of the ridge there were no unmoving places left: all that desert was shivering, swirling, dissolving. On the other side, still, things seemed safe, yet, looking over those reaches of sands as far as I could, it was possible to see crowds of hopping, running, flying animals and birds. None looked back, none was panicky or stricken or had lost their senses, but purposefully and carefully picked their way through the dunes and hollows of the sands to the ridge, where they must all be working their way back through the rocks to the plateau I had come from. But from a certain point on that plain of sand, there was no movement of animals at alclass="underline" I was seeing the last exodus of the refugees, and behind them the sands lay quiet. On the horizons, the dust clouds had risen higher into the cobalt blue of the morning sky. was not certain what I should do next. I had not met groups of refugees for some time now. Perhaps everyone had been rescued, there were none left? I went forward up the stony, cracked sides of the mountain, towards the right, and when I reached a small outcrop of young, harsh cracked rocks and dry bushes, I was able to see straight down into the plain where, ahead, suddenly, there were the beginnings of movement, the birth of sand whirlpools. And, at the same time, I saw down there a little bunching of black rocks, and on them two people. They had their backs to me, and they stood staring away across the plain. I seemed to know them. I ran down again towards them, with many thoughts in my mind. One, that a symptom of the shock suffered by these victims was that they were stricken into a condition where they could do nothing but stare, hypnotised, unable to move. Another, that I could get to them in time, but whether I could lead them out again was another matter... and I was thinking, too, that these were my old friend Ben and my old friend Rilla, together, and at least safe, if marooned.