Ross was humane. His vocation was that of a teacher, his temperament that of a sceptic, an agnostic, despite his religious calling. I saw from his expression — the expression of a complex suitor — that he was on the verge of surrendering himself to … To what? To whom? Not to conquest. To the miracle of hope in a child-queen who might still breach an epic formula.
It was a question of personal relationships, personal involvements. Ross surrendered himself to the child-queen who had danced in his class on the eve of descending into the sky of the Waterfall with its pooled stars under the guardian rocks and clouds.
Our captors (were they perhaps our guardians now?) began to beat the drums of Home, the drums of the turning world. Not frenziedly but with a haunting rhythmic pulse, like rain that seemed to encompass us all and as the music widened and flew we were caught up in its embrace.
This rain of Night seemed to glimmer in the stars. Captors and captives began to loom in the new darkness of the Dream, the new guardian rocks, the new guardianship of sky and cloud at the heart of the Waterfall of space, a theatre of interchangeable masks and fates and elements upon savages and civilizations. The rain that fell upon us was so fine-spun and delicate that it seemed an impossibility when within it we discerned the burden and mystery of the rising sun.