The stringed-thing throbbed like a toothache, and a tick-tocking, like ghosts of all the clocks they had never invented, sprang from the block.
Braxa was a statue, both hands raised to her face, elbows high and outspread.
The music became a metaphor for fire.
Crackle, purr, snap...
She did not move.
The hissing altered to splashes. The cadence slowed. It was water now, the most precious thing in the world, gurgling clear then green over mossy rocks.
Still she did not move.
Glissandos. A pause.
Then, so faint I could hardly be sure at first, the tremble of the winds began.
Softly, gently, sighing and halting, uncertain. A pause, a sob, then a repetition of the first statement, only louder.
Were my eyes completely bugged from my reading, or was Braxa actually trembling, all over, head to foot.
She was.
She began a microscopic swaying. A fraction of an inch right, then left. Her fingers opened like the petals of a flower, and I could see that her eyes were closed.
Her eyes opened. They were distant, glassy, looking through me and the walls.
Her swaying became more pronounced, merged with the beat.
The wind was sweeping in from the desert now, falling against Ti- rellian like waves on a dike. Her fingers moved, they were the gusts. Her arms, slow pendulums, descended, began a countermovement.
The gale was coming now. She began an axial movement and her hands caught up with the rest of her body, only now her shoulders commenced to writhe out a figure-eight.
The wind! The wind, I say. O wild, enigmatic! O muse of St. John Perse!
The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, passive as Buddha's, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of uninhabited turquoise.
Years ago, I had seen the Devadais in India, the street-dancers, spinning their colorful webs, drawing in the male insect. But Braxa was more than this: she was a Ramadjany, like those votaries of Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, who had given the dance to man: the sacred dancers.
The clicking was monotonously steady now; the whine of the strings made me think of the stinging rays of the sun, their heat stolen by the wind's halations; the blue was Sarasvati and Mary, and a girl named Laura. I heard a sitar from somewhere, watched this statue come to life, and inhaled a divine afflatus.
I was again Rimbaud with his hashish, Baudelaire with his laudanum, Poe, De Quincy, Wilde, Mallarme and Aleister Crowley. I was, for a fleeting second, my father in his dark pulpit and darker suit, the hymns and the organ's wheeze transmuted to bright wind.
She was a spun weather vane, a feathered crucifix hovering in the air, a clothes-line holding one bright garment lashed parallel to the ground. Her shoulder was bare now, and her right breast moved up and down like a moon in the sky, its red nipple appearing momently above a fold and vanishing again. The music was as formal as Job's argument with God. Her dance was God's reply.
The music slowed, settled; it had been met, matched, answered. Her garment, as if alive, crept back into the more sedate folds it originally held.
She dropped low, lower, to the floor. Her head fell upon her raised knees. She did not move.
There was silence.
I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now?
Applaud?
I sought M'Cwyie from the corner of my eye. She raised her right hand.
As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose.
So did M'Cwyie.
I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, 'K was beautiful,'
inane as that sounds.
I received three different High Forms of 'thank you.'
There was a flurry of color and I was alone again with M'Cwyie.
'That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thousand, two hundred-twenty-four dances of Locar.'
I looked down at her.
'Whether Locar was right or wrong, he worked out a fine reply to the inorganic.'
She smiled.
'Are the dances of your world like this?'
'Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa—but I've never seen anything exactly like hers.'
'She is good,' M'Cwyie said. 'She knows all the dances.'
A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me ...
It was gone in an instant.
'I must tend my duties now.' She moved to the table and closed the books.
'M'narra.'
'Good-bye.' I slipped into my boots.
'Good-bye, Gallinger.'
I walked out the door, mounted the jeepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.
II
I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eavesdropped:
Morton's fruity treble: 'Guess what? He said 'hello' to me awhile ago.'
'Hmmph!' Emory's elephant lungs exploded. 'Either he's slipping, or you were standing in his way and he wanted you to move.'
'Probably didn't recognize me. I don't think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I passed his door at 0300—I always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it.'
'The guy is working hard,' Emory admitted, grudgingly. 'In fact, I think he's taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of glassy-eyed these days.
Maybe that's natural for a poet, though.'
Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then:
'Regardless of what you think of him, it's going to take me at least a year to learn what he's picked up in three weeks. And I'm just a linguist, not a poet.'
Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It's the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did.
'I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,' he began.
'We read six authors—Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger—and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said,
'These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and hell shall not prevail against them.'
'Myself,' he continued, 'I thought his Pipes of Krishna and his Madrigals were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on.
'I think he's spoken two dozen words to me since I met him,' he finished.
The Defense: 'Did it ever occur to you,' Betty said, 'that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his appearance? He was also a precocious child, and probably never even had school friends. He's sensitive and very introverted.'
