Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris Lessing

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not understood. Each army sent out representatives and the corpses were dragged away. These were not buried, but pulled through the city and then its suburbs, and thrown into the great hole where the river plunged down into the earth. I cried out to them, ‘No, No, No,’ not to foul the clean river and then the sea, but remembered how men had poisoned all the oceans and rivers so that beasts and fish were dying there, and so, feeling sick and hopeless, I went away, thinking that what corpses succeeded in making their way from out the dark riverine channels through the earth, and out to the waterfalls and cataracts, and from there to the wide level river, and at last to the sea—these corpses would at least be cleaner offal than the lethal filth men feed to the sea currents.

      Towards night, and the light’s draining away in sadness in a red-stained sky, the fighting broke out again, and they fought all night, and I sat on my cliff’s edge and tried not to hear it or to follow the carnage too closely in my imagination. There were thirteen days to go to the moon’s full, and I knew I had no hope of cleaning the city, no hope of the Crystal’s coming, unless by some fortune I had no reason to expect, the animals went away from the city again, as apparently casually as they had come.

      Next morning the dead lay in heaps, and the whole city smelled of blood. And now these animals, whose food was fruit and water, were gathered around piles of corpses and were tearing off lumps of hairy flesh and eating it. As I came in close to look, I felt afraid for the first time of these beasts, apes and Rat-dogs. I was now, as they were to each other, potential meat. They ignored me, though I was standing not twenty yards away, until I saw three of them become conscious of my being there, and they turned their pointed muzzles to me, with their sharp teeth white and smeared red, and I saw the blood dripping down as I had off the faces of my women. I went back to the edge of the sea and fell into a despair. I gave up hope then. I knew that the fighting would go on. It would get worse. They would now kill for food. I knew that I was in danger and I did not care. In such moods there are many arguments you can find to support the wisdom of despair. The advocates humanity has found to argue on the side of despair have always been more powerful than those other small voices. I laid myself down on the escarpment’s edge and looked down into the deep forests which had taken so many centuries to grow, where my beautiful yellow beasts must be and where birds as brightly coloured as sunset or dawn skies followed the curve of lives as brief as mine. And then I slept. I wanted to sleep away time so that the end would come more quickly.

      When I woke it was late afternoon and, while the sunlight still lay sparkling over the distant ocean, beneath me, over the forest, it was almost night. The fighting still went on. I could hear animals chasing each other not more than a few yards away in the buildings that reached almost to the escarpment. I did not want to turn my head to look, for out of the corner of my eye I could see a dying rat-beast rolling and squeaking and kicking up puffs of dust in its death struggle. I looked forward and out again over the forest where Jaguar, Parrot and Lizard blazed and burned, older than man, and then I saw lying on the air in front of me a great white bird which, instead of sailing right past my eyes on its current of air, at the last moment turned and landed beside me on the cliff’s edge, its great wings balancing it to a safe perch. It was not a species of bird I knew. It was about four feet tall as it sat, white plumaged, and it had a straight streak of a yellow beak that gave it a severe appearance. I thought enviously of how in a moment it would let itself slide off on a warm wave of evening air, as a swimmer slides off a warm rock into a swirling sea. As I thought this it turned and looked steadily at me with very round golden eyes. I went to it and it squatted low, like a hen settling in a smother of outstretched sheltering wings over its eggs, and I slid on to its back, and no sooner was I safely there than it glided off into the air, and we were dropping down lightly over the rocky sliding hill, and the waterfalls and then over the deep forest, now silent with the approach of night. The bird’s back, its wingspan, was ten or twelve feet. I sat up, with a fistful of feathers to keep me steady, but a wind that came sweeping up from the sea nearly sent me toppling off and down over and over to the tree-tops, so I lay face down, with my arms on either side of the bird just above where the wings joined. The slopes of white feathers were sun-warmed still, and slippery, and smelled clean and wholesome like a hen’s egg when it is fresh. The light shone off the white feathers immediately below my eyes like sun off a snowfield, and I turned away my face and laid it to one side, and looked down past the bird’s neck and shoulders and we swooped out over the sea and sped along the waves’ crests that still, even though all the land between the shore and the plateau’s edge was plunged in dark, sparked off light from the setting sun. It was a red sun in a ruddy sky, to match the carnage that went on in the city beneath it—which I could just see, white walls and columns in miniature, miles away, high through darkening air. And on we went over the waves and I breathed in great gulps of cold salty air that swept my lungs free of dirt and blood. And on we went until the shore and continent beyond had dwindled to a narrow edge of dark against a sky that was piled high and thick with glowing clouds, and then as my bird dipped one wing to swerve around and back I cried, ‘No, not yet, go on,’ and the bird sped on, while the air whistled past my cold-burning ears and I could taste the salt spray on my lips and beard. And on and on we went, and then I turned over carefully on my back, with my arms bent back and clutching at the finer feathers in the warm caverns under the bird’s beating or balancing wings, and I looked up into a star-sprinkled sky where the moon was with her back to the Earth, and showing a slice of her edge one finger wider than yesterday’s to remind me of my sorrow and my failure. And now in front of us was the coast of Portugal and there was Conchita on her headland looking out to sea. Behind her the red blotch of new suburbs spread out like measles, and below the sea pranced and tossed. She was singing or half chanting, or even speaking—for it was halting, worrying, blocked song, which showed poor Conchita was as little fitted for her nunhood as she had been happy in my arms,

      

      ‘Come on, shout!’ the brass sun said,

      The peacock sea screamed blue, the turkey houses red, Sun and sea, they challenged ‘Come!’ The earth sang out, but I was dumb.

      Slow, slow, my feet down thick sand dunes,

      Curled shells recalling old sea tunes Cut my slow feet until they bled. ‘Who cannot dance must bleed,’ they said.

      Not ape, nor God, to swing from tree to tree,

      Or bid the sea be still from fear of me, Divided, dwarfed, a botched thing in between, I watched the sky burn on, the grass glow deeper green.

      To sing! To sing! To squeeze the flaring afternoon

      Like warm fruit in my hand! Then fling it out in tune! To take the waves, the freedom of their beat, And dance that out on sea-taught feet.

      But blood and nerves are crucified too long

      That I should find a sweet release in song. Not I to sing as free as birds Whose throat forms only human words.

      Renounce the sea, the crooning sands,

      My ease, bought not by loosed feet, hands, Or love which breaks the mind in pain To make the flesh shine whole again.

      These are mine still, but only in the long

      Cold reaches where the mind coils strong To create in patience what the slow Limbs, bound, knew simply as a song, but long ago.

      I called to her, ‘Conchita, Conchita,’ but she did not hear me, she was looking out over the sea, and now my bird had swept around and was heading back and soon we were over the sea’s edge where I had landed, and then over the forests, and then we were on the cliff’s edge again. The alighting of this great white bird frightened a number of monkeys that had been hiding where some bushes grew thickly. They went chattering off, and I sat myself in my usual place, and the bird sat with me a little in silence, and then sailed off again on its white wings into the dark of that night.

      And so that night passed, with the screams and the sound of the fighting going on behind me, but now I felt less oppressed by it, for I kept my mind on the long cool flight I had had on the great bird’s sun-warmed back, and on my old love Conchita stammering her separate failure on her separate coast.

      I did not go into the city’s centre again for three days, but sat on the cliff hoping to see the bird, but he did not come, and at last I ventured

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