Ignoring Dick, who was asleep- through one thickness of wall, but who was unimportant, since he had been defeated long ago, Moses vaulted over the verandah wall, alighting squarely on his feet in the squelch of rain which sluiced off his shoulders, soaking him in an instant. He moved off towards the Englishman's hut through the drenching blackness, water to his calves. At the door he peered in. It was impossible to see, but he could hear; holding his own breath, he listened intently, through the sound of the rain, for the Englishman's breathing. But he could hear nothing. He stooped through the doorway, and walked quietly to the bedside. His enemy, whom he had outwitted, was asleep. Contemptuously, the native turned away, and walked back to the house. It seemed he intended to pass it, but as he came level with the verandah he paused, resting his hand on the wall, looking over. It was black, too dark to see. He waited, for the watery glimmer of lightning to illuminate, for the last time, the small house, the verandah, the huddled shape of Mary on the brick, and the dogs who were moving restlessly about her, still whining gently, but uncertainly. It came: a prolonged drench of light, like a wet dawn. And this was his final moment of triumph, a moment so perfect and complete that it took the urgency from thoughts of escape, leaving him indifferent. When the dark returned he took his hand from the wall, and walked slowly off through the rain towards the bush. Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say. For, when he had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards through the soaking bush he stopped, turned aside, and leaned against a tree on an ant- heap. And there he would remain, until his pursuers, in their turn; came to find him.
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought -,kith her the manuscript off her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten European countries. Since then her international reputation not only as a novelist, but as a nonfiction and short-story writer has flourished.
For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honored with the Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982.
Among her other celebrated novels are the five-volume Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, and Memoirs of a Survivor.
Many of her short stories have been collected in two volumes entitled To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African stories appear in This Was the Old Chief’s Country and The Sun. Between Their Feet.
Shikasta, the first in the series of novels with the overall title of CANOPUS IN ARGOS: was published in 1979; the second; ‘The Marriages Between Zones’ Three, Four, and Five, in 1980; the third; ‘The Sirian Experiments’, in 1981, when it was short-listed for the Booker Connell Prize; the fourth; ‘The Making of the Representative for Planet S’, in 1982; and the fifth; ‘The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire’, in 1983.
