To the Islands (24 page)
He came forward to the edge of the cliffs, where they dropped, vast red walls, to the faraway sea below. And the sea, where the light was not on it, was the blue-green of opals and endlessly rearing, smashed into white at the foot of the rock.
There was a break in the cliffs, and he climbed unsteadily down a few yards to a red ledge with a shallow cave behind it. The skulls were there again, and the eyes of the mouthless god, turned forever towards the islands. But the islands—the islands. He stared out to sea and saw nothing but the sun on the water; his dreams and his fears all true, and there were no islands.
He turned, blinded, away, and saw on the ledge beside him a block of stone fallen from the cliff. And he stooped, straining, and lifted it in his arms. He knew suddenly the momentousness of his strength, his power to alter the world at will, to give to the sea what the sea through an eternity of destruction was working to engulf, this broken rock. Truly, he would work a change on the world before it blinded him.
Poised on the ledge, he threw the stone, and it floated slowly, slowly down the huge cliff face, and crashed against it; and slower and slower entered the sea, in a tiny circle of spray.
And watching it, he staggered, and stepped back towards the cave, shaking in the legs, and in his head following the enormous fall into the waves.
High overhead the eagle patrolled the cliff. But suddenly, passing under it, a gull flew out from the rock and planed towards the sun until it was hidden in light. And when the sun sank lower, there, in the heart of the blaze, might appear the islands.
The old man kneeled among the bones and stared into the light. His carved lips were firm in the white beard, his hands were steady, his ancient blue eyes, neither hoping nor fearing, searched sun and sea for the least dark hint of a landfall.
‘My soul,’ he whispered, over the sea-surge, ‘my soul is a strange country.’
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