comes from a candle or a common star, because both the earlier light and the later light that would otherwise tend to drive it forward are only random white light, like the random waves a little girl might make by flinging a handful of pebbles into a lily pond. But if the light is from a coherent source, and forms the image reflected from an optically exact mirror, the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the accelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows again, it reenters ours naturally at another place.’
“ ‘Is it just a reflection?’ Domnina asked. She was looking at the Fish.
“ ‘Eventually it will be a real being, if we do not darken the lamp or shift the mirrors. For a reflected image to exist without an object to originate it violates the laws of our universe, and therefore an object will be brought into existence.’”
“Look,” Agia said, “we're coming to something.” The shade of the tropical trees was so intense that spots of sunshine on the path seemed to blaze like molten gold. I squinted to peer beyond their burning shafts of light.
“A house set on stilts of yellow wood. It's thatched with palm fronds. Can't you see it?”
Something moved, and the hut seemed to spring at my eyes as it emerged from the pattern of greens, yellows, and blacks. A shadowed splotch became a doorway; two sloping lines, the angle of the roof. A man in light-colored clothes stood on a tiny veranda looking down the path at us. I straightened my mantle.
“You don't have to do that,” Agia said. “It doesn't matter in here. If you're hot, take it off.”
I removed the mantle and folded it over my left arm. The man on the veranda turned with an expression of unmistakable terror and went into the hut.
The Hut in the Jungle
A ladder led to the veranda. It was made of the same knobby-jointed wood as the hut, lashed together with vegetable fiber. “You're not going up that?” Agia protested.
“If we're going to see what's to be seen here we must,” I said. “And recalling the state of your undergarments, I thought you might feel more comfortable if I preceded you.”
She surprised me by blushing. “It will only lead to such a house as was used in the hot parts of the world in ancient days. You'll soon be bored, believe me.”
“Then we can come down, and we will have lost very little time.” I swung myself up the ladder. It sagged and creaked alarmingly, but I knew that in a public pleasureground it was impossible that it should be really dangerous. When I was halfway up, I felt Agia behind me.
The interior was hardly larger than one of our cells, but there all resemblance ceased. In our oubliette, the overwhelming impression was of solidity and mass. The metal plates of the walls echoed even the slightest sounds; the floors rang beneath the tread of the journeymen and gave not a hairsbreadth under the walker's weight; the ceiling could never fall — but if it should, it would crush everything below it.
If it is true that each of us has an antipolaric brother somewhere, a bright twin if we are dark, a dark twin if we are bright, then that hut was surely such a changeling to one of our cells. There were windows on all sides save the one through which we entered by the open door, and they had neither bars nor panes nor any other sort of closing. Floor and walls and window frames were of the branches of the yellow tree; branches not planed to boards but left in the round so that I could, in places, see sunlight through the walls, and if I had dropped a worn orichalk, it would very likely have come to rest on the ground below. There was no ceiling, only a triangular space beneath the roof where pans and food bags hung.
A woman was reading aloud in a corner, with a naked man crouched at her feet. The man we had seen from the path stood at the window opposite the door, looking out. I felt that he knew we had come (and even if he had not seen us a few moments before, he must certainly have felt the hut shake when we climbed the ladder), but that he wished to pretend he did not. There is something in the line of the back when a man turns so as not to see, and it was evident in his. The woman read: “Then he went up from the plain to Mt. Nebo, the headland that faces the city, and the Compassionating showed him the whole country, all the land as far as the Western Sea. Then he said to him: ‘This is the land I swore to your fathers I should give their sons. You have seen it, but you shall not set your feet upon it.’ So there he died, and was buried in the ravine.” The naked man at her feet nodded. “It is even so with our own masters, Preceptress. With the smallest finger it is given. But the thumb is hooked into it, and a man has only to take the gift, and dig in the floor of his house, and cover all with a mat, than the thumb begins to pull and bit by bit the gift rises from the earth and ascends into the sky and is seen no more.” The woman seemed impatient with this, and began, “No, Isangoma —”
But the man at the window interrupted her without turning around. “Be quiet, Marie. I want to hear what he has to say. You can explain later.”
“A nephew of mine,” the naked man continued, “a member of my own fire circle, had no fish. And so he took up his gowdalie and went to a certain pool. So quietly did he lean over the water he might have been a tree.” The naked man leaped up as he said this, and posed his sinewy frame as though to spear the woman's feet with a shaft of air. “Long, long he stood... until the monkeys no longer feared him and returned to drop sticks in the water, and the hesperorn fluttered to her nest. A big fish came out of his den in the sunken trunks. My nephew watched him circle, slowly, slowly. He swam near the surface, and then when my nephew was about to drive home the three-toothed spear, there was no longer a fish to be seen, but a lovely woman. At first my nephew thought the fish was the fish-king, who had changed his form that he might not be speared. Then he saw the fish moving beneath the woman's face, and knew that he saw a reflection. He looked up at once, but there was nothing to be seen but the whisk of the vines. The woman was gone!” The naked man looked up, mimicking very well the amazement of the fisherman. “That night my nephew went to the Numen, the Proud One, and slit the throat of a young oreodont, saying —” Agia whispered to me, “In the name of the Theoanthropos, how long do you mean to stay here? This could go on all day.”
“Let me look about the hut,” I whispered back, “and we'll go.”
“Mighty is the Proud One, sacred all his names. Everything found beneath leaves is his, the storms are carried in his arms, the poison holds no death unless his curse is pronounced over it!”
The woman said, “I don't think we need all these praises of your fetish, Isangoma. My husband wishes to hear your story. Very well, but tell it and spare us your litanies.”
“The Proud One protects his supplicant! Would not he be shamed if one who adores him were to die?”
“Isangoma!”
