through the country it was inevitable that people should come once again to the circular valley.
A man and a woman drove their automobile as far as a village down in a lower valley; hearing about the ruined monastery and the waterfall that dropped over the cliffs into the great amphitheatre, they determined to see these things. They came on burros as far as the village outside the gap, but there the Indians they had hired to accompany them refused to go any farther, and so they continued alone, upward through the canyon and into the precinct of the Atlajala.
It was noon when they rode into the valley; the black ribs of the cliffs glistened like glass in the sun’s blistering downward rays. They stopped the burros by a cluster of boulders at the edge of the sloping meadows. The man got down first, and reached up to help the woman off. She leaned forward, putting her hands on his face, and for a long moment they kissed. Then he lifted her to the ground and they climbed hand in hand up over the rocks. The Atlajala hovered near them, watching the woman closely: she was the first ever to have come into the valley. The two sat beneath a small tree on the grass, looking at one another, smiling. Out of habit, the Atlajala entered into the man. Immediately, instead of existing in the midst of the sunlit air, the bird calls and the plant odors, it was conscious only of the woman’s beauty and her terrible imminence. The waterfall, the earth, and the sky itself receded, rushed into nothingness, and there were only the woman’s smile and her arms and her odor. It was a world more suffocating and painful than the Atlajala had thought possible. Still, while the man spoke and the woman answered, it remained within.
“Leave him. He doesn’t love you.”
“He would kill me.”
“But I love you. I need you with me.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid of him.”
The man reached out to pull her to him; she drew back slightly, but her eyes grew large.
“We have today,” she murmured, turning her face toward the yellow walls of the monastery.
The man embraced her fiercely, crushing her against him as though the act would save his life. “No, no, no. It can’t go on like this,” he said. “No.”
The pain of his suffering was too intense; gently the Atlajala left the man and slipped into the woman. And now it would have believed itself to be housed in nothing, to be in its own spaceless self, so completely was it aware of the wandering wind, the small flutterings of the leaves, and the bright air that surrounded it. Yet there was a difference: each element was magnified in intensity, the whole sphere of being was immense, limitless. Now it understood what the man sought in the woman, and it knew that he suffered because he never would attain that sense of completion he sought. But the Atlajala, being one with the woman, had attained it, and being aware of possessing it, trembled with delight. The woman shuddered as her lips met those of the man. There on the grass in the shade of the tree their joy reached new heights; the Atajala, knowing them both, formed a single channel between the secret springs of their desires. Throughout, it remained within the woman, and began vaguely to devise ways of keeping her, if not inside the valley, at least nearby, so that she might return.
In the afternoon, with dreamlike motions, they walked to the burros and mounted them, driving them through the deep meadow grass to the monastery. Inside the great courtyard they halted, looking hesitantly at the ancient arches in the sunlight, and at the darkness inside the doorways.
“Shall we go in?” said the woman.
“We must get back.”
“I want to go in,” she said. (The Atajala exulted.) A thin gray snake slid along the ground into the bushes. They did not see it.
The man looked at her perplexedly. “It’s late,” he said.
But she jumped down from her burro by herself and walked beneath the arches into the long corridor within. (Never had the rooms seemed so real as now when the Atajala was seeing them through her eyes.)
They explored all the rooms. Then the woman wanted to climb up into the tower, but the man took a determined stand.
“We must go back now,” he said firmly, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“This is our only day together, and you think of nothing but getting back.”
“But the time . . .”
“There is a moon. We won’t lose the way.”
He would not change his mind. “No.”
“As you like,” she said. “I’m going up. You can go back alone if you like.”
The man laughed uneasily. “You’re mad.” He tried to kiss her. She turned away and did not answer for a moment. Then she said: “You want me to leave my husband for you. You ask everything from me, but what do you do for me in return? You refuse even to climb up into a little tower with me to see the view. Go back alone. Go!”
She sobbed and rushed toward the dark stairwell. Calling after her, he followed, but stumbled somewhere behind her. She was as sure of foot as if she had climbed the many stone steps a thousand times before, hurrying up through the darkness, around and around.
In the end she came out at the top and peered through the small apertures in the cracking walls. The beams which had supported the bell had rotted and fallen; the heavy bell lay on its side in the rubble, like a dead animal. The waterfall’s sound was louder up here; the valley was nearly full of shadow. Below, the man called her name repeatedly. She did not answer. As she stood watching the shadow of the cliffs slowly overtake the farthest recesses of the valley and begin to climb the naked rocks to the east, an idea formed in her mind. It was not the kind of idea which she would have expected of herself, but it was there, growing and inescapable. When she felt it complete there inside her, she turned and went lightly back down. The man was sitting in the dark near the bottom of the stairs, groaning a little.
“What is it?” she said.
“I hurt my leg. Now are you ready to go or not?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I’m sorry you fell.”
Without saying anything he rose and limped after her out into the courtyard where the burros stood. The cold mountain air was beginning to flow down from the tops of the cliffs. As they rode through the meadow she began to think of how she would broach the subject to him. (It must be done before they reached the gap. The Atlajala trembled.)
“Do you forgive me?” she asked him.
“Of course,” he laughed.
“Do you love me?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Is that true?”
He glanced at her in the failing light, sitting erect on the jogging animal.
“Yow know it is,” he said softly.
She hesitated.
“There is only one way, then,” she said finally.
“But what?”
“I’m afraid of him. I won’t go back to him. You go back. I’ll stay in the village here.” (Being that near, she would come each day to the monastery.) “When it is done, you will come and get me. Then we can go somewhere else. No one will find us.”
The man’s voice sounded strange. “I don’t understand.”
“You do understand. And that is the only way. Do it or not, as you like. It is the only way.”
They trotted along for a while in silence. The canyon loomed ahead, black against the evening sky.
Then the man said, very clearly: “Never.”
A moment later the trail led out into an open space high above the swift water below. The hollow sound of the river reached them faintly. The light in the sky was almost gone; in the dusk the landscape had taken on false contours. Everything was gray—the rocks, the bushes, the trail—and nothing had distance or scale. They slowed their pace.
His word still echoed in her ears.
“I won’t go back to him!” she cried with sudden vehemence. “You can go back and play cards with him as usual. Be his good friend the same as always. I won’t go. I can’t go on with both of you in the town.” (The plan was
