the carver's balcony, lonely in the extreme. Lonely, not for his home, but lonely in the knowledge of his inward isolation.
He took a step nearer the cave. The rain, surging over his head, had so glued-down his hair that his skull showed its shape like a boulder. His slightly heavy cheek-bones, his blunt nose, his wide mouth were by no means handsome in themselves, but. held in by the oval outline of the face, they formed a kind of simple harmony that was original and pleasant to the eye.
But his habit of drawing down his eyebrows and scowling to hide his feelings was making him look more than his seventeen years, and it appeared that a young man rather than a boy was approaching the cave. Directly he had decided to wait no longer, and had passed under the rough natural archway he was startled at the freedom of his head and body from the battering of the rain. He had become so used to it that standing there in the dry dust beneath the vaulting roof of the tunnel, he felt a sudden buoyancy as though a burden had been lifted.
And now another wave of fatigue heaved up in him, and he longed for nothing so much as sleep in a dry place. The air was warm in the cave, for the rain, heavy as it was, had done nothing to relieve the heat. He longed to lie down, in his new-found lightness of body, and with nothing pouring down upon him from above, to sleep for ever.
Now that he was inside the cave, the melancholy atmosphere of desertion had lost its potency. Perhaps he was too tired and his emotions too blunted to be conscious any more of such subtleties.
When he came to the main, inner chamber with its ample space, its natural shelves, its luxuriating ferns he could hardly keep his eyes open. He hardly noticed that a number of small woodland animals had taken shelter and were lying upon the stone shelves, or squatting on the ferny floor, watching him with bright eyes.
Automatically he tore off his clinging clothes and stumbling to a dark corner of a cave lay down beneath the arched arms of a great fern and fell, incontinently, fast asleep.
SIXTY-SEVEN
As Titus slept the small animals were joined by a drenched fox and a few birds which perched on outcrops of rock near the doming roof. The boy was all but invisible where he lay beneath the overhang of the ferns. So deep was his sleep that the lightning that had begun to play across the sky and illumine the mouth of the cave had no effect upon him. The thunder, when it came, for all that it was louder than before was equally powerless to wake him. But it was drawing closer all the while, and the last of the bull-throated peals caused him to turn over in his sleep. By now it was afternoon but the air had darkened so that there was now less light than there was when Titus sat upon the 'look-out' rock.
The roaring and hissing of the rain was mounting steadily in volume and the noise of it upon the stones and the earth outside the mouth of the cave made all but the most violent of the thunder-peals inaudible. A hare with its ears laid along its back sat motionless with its eyes fixed upon the fox. The cave was filled with the noise of the elements, and yet there was a kind of silence there, a silence 'within' the noise; the silence of stillness, for nothing moved.
When the next flash of lightning skinned the landscape, ripping its black hide off it so that there was no part of its anatomy that was not exposed to the floodlight, the reflections of that blinding illumination were fanned to and fro across the cavern walls so that the birds and beasts shone out like radiant carvings among the radiant ferns, and their shadows flew away across the walls and contracted again as though they were made of elastic: and Titus stirred beneath the archery of the giant hearts-tongue which shielded him from the momentary glare, so that he did not waken, and he could not see that at the mouth of the cave stood the 'Thing'.
SIXTY-EIGHT
It was hunger that finally woke him. For a while as he lay with his eyes still closed he imagined himself to be in his room at the castle. Even when he opened his eyes and found on his right-hand side the rough wall of a rock and on his left a curtain of thick ferns he could not remember where he was. And then he became aware of a roaring sound and all at once he remembered how he had escaped from the castle and had made his way through an eternity of rain until he had come to a cave... to Flay's cave... to this cave in which he was now lying.
It was then that he heard something move. It was not a loud sound and it was only audible above the thrumming of the storm because of its nearness.
His first thought was that it was one of the animals, perhaps a hare, and his hunger made him cautious as he rose upon his elbow and parted the long tongue of the ferns.
But what he saw was something that made him forget his hunger as though it had never been: that made him start backwards against the rock and sent the blood rushing to his head. For it was she! But not as he remembered her. It was she! But how different!
What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?
There she sat, the Thing, balanced upon her heels, unbelievably small, the light of a fresh fire flickering over her as she swivelled a plucked bird on a spit above the flames. All about her were scattered the feathers of a magpie. Was this the lyric swallow? The fleet limbed hurdler?
Was this small creature who was now squatting there like a frog in the dust, and scratching her thigh with a dirty hand the size of a beech leaf, was this what had floated through his imagination in arrogant rhythms that spanned the universe?
Yes, it was she. The vision had contracted to the small and tangible proportions of the uncompromising urchin - the rare-faction had become clay.
And then she turned her head and Titus saw a face that shocked and thrilled him. All that was Gormenghast within him shuddered: shuddered and bridled up in a kind of anger. All that was rebellious in him cried with joy: with the joy of witnessing the heart of defiance. The confusion in his breast was absolute. His memory of her, of a proud and gracile creature, was now destroyed. It was no longer true. It had become trite, shallow and saccharine. Proud, she was and vibrant in all conscience. And graceful, perhaps in flight - but not now. There was nothing graceful in the way her body, uninhibited as an animal's, crouched over the flames. This was something new and earthy.
Titus who had been in love with an arrogance and a swallow-like beauty of limb, so that he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it was now aware of how there were these new dimensions, this dark reality of slaughtered birds, of scattered feathers, of an animal's posture and above all of an ignorant originality that was redolent in her every gesture.
Her head had turned. He had seen her face. He was staring at an original. It was not that the face had any unique peculiarity of proportion or feature but that it was so blatant an index of all she was.
And yet it was not through any particular mobility of the features that it conveyed the independence of her life. The line of the mouth seldom altered, save when, in devouring the roasted bird, she bit with an undue
