Pilgermann

14

Night passes, morning comes, surprised as always to find itself here. This morning is full of urgent motion, of horsemen trotting to and from Yaghi-Siyan’s palace, of shouted commands, of the slap and jingle of harness and the shuffling and snuffling and whinnying of horses as cavalrymen prepare for action. Action impends but does not come until the afternoon when a Turkish galloper clatters over the bridge, through the gate, and into the city with the news that the cavalry who rode out last night have ambushed the Franks returning from Suwaydiyya. The Turks have put the Franks to flight, have captured the wagons with the siege materials and are now on their way back with them.

Only a few minutes after the arrival of the Turkish galloper we on the wall see scattered horsemen coming from the direction of Suwaydiyya and making for the Frankish camp. These we guess to be Franks who have fled the ambush. Now the Frankish camp is in motion, they will be riding out to help their comrades. In Antioch the kettledrums are pounding; Yaghi-Siyan’s cavalry come pouring out through the bridge gate, thundering across the bridge to engage the Franks and keep them from reinforcing the others.

The Turks are able to hold the Franks for a time but suddenly here are Bohemond and Raymond with their forces regathered and their lances levelled. As always I see him at a distance, and I recognize Bohemond by the gathering of galloping warriors into a point; I know that only he can be that point, only he can be that ardent forwardness with his name cleaving the air before him. Surely by now his name is like the roar of the lion: it is more than a sound, it is that which makes the knees shake. The Turks cannot now move forward against the man and the name, they must wheel their horses round towards the bridge and the gate, must turn themselves in the saddle to loose their arrows at the baneful man, the baneful name that overwhelms them.

As it lives again in the eye of my mind it seems all in one moment that Yaghi-Siyan’s cavalry are galloping for their lives over the bridge while there rises stone by stone the tower of the Franks that will command the bridge and further tighten the blockade of Antioch. But before this can be done the Franks must recapture the building materials from the Turks, and for this must many Turks be killed.

On the far side of the river there is a Muslim cemetery, and this night the Turks come out of Antioch to bury their dead there. In the morning the Franks dig up the bodies, there is gold and silver to be taken from them. They use stones from the tombs in the building of their tower and this becomes a part of the picture in my mind, almost it seems to me that the tower is being built of dug-up Turkish corpses while yet the Turkish cavalry gallop for their lives across the bridge into Antioch. And in this same moment rises the other Tower, Tancred’s tower that will command the Ladhiqiyya Gate.

Still the back ways of Mount Silpius and the postern doors in the walls are there for those who want to leave Antioch and for the more determined of the foragers and profiteers but from now on there will be no more sorties from Antioch nor will there be more than a trickle of provisions coming in. In the five months of the siege the Franks have been able to do nothing much with their mangonels and other missile-throwing machines, and the river has kept them from moving siege towers up against the walls. The rumours of advanced Greek-fire techniques have proved unfounded; but now the striding stones of the broken cathedral have walled in the unbroken stones of the walls of Antioch.

Now ships from Genoa are bringing provisions to the Franks and the Suwaydiyya road is under their control; now do their fortunes improve while those of Antioch decline. Well do we know that in each of us lives a skeleton that waits for the flesh to die, there is an absence waiting for the presence to depart— but a great city! A city like Antioch! As Pilgermann the owl I fly over it now and it looks like nothing really, it has retreated from its medieval boundaries, it has shrunk and dwindled, it has huddled itself together, has drawn back from the vaunt of its greatness and the largeness of its history, it is like a swimmer who has struggled barely alive out of a raging torrent and does not enter the water again. No, I think as I look down on this place that is so small, so diminished, so unspecial, this is not Antioch: Antioch was days and nights of vivid action, Antioch was a paradigm of history in which at one time and another every kind of thinker and doer, every kind of greatness and smallness jostled together and shouldered and elbowed their way through all the lights and resonances and colours, all the smells and flavours and motion of endless variations of circumstance and event in a large and crowded arena. In a particular time people fought and lived and died for particular things; now it is small, now it is quiet. An old woman in black walks a path with a basket on her head; a man leads a donkey loaded with firewood; perhaps they say to themselves that God wills it. And of course God wills everything: the beating of hammers; the baking of bread; the rise and fall of nations; the quiet clopping of the hooves of one small donkey.

Raymond’s tower, the one commanding the bridge and the bridge gate, was built in March of 1098, and from that time Antioch moved forward faster and faster towards its fall. That tower was completed and Raymond’s banner was run up on the top of it on the Eve of Passover.

Before that, while the tower was being built, while Passover was approaching, there began to be in my mind the idea of Elijah and the anticipation of that moment in the Seder when the door is opened for him. I began to see that another idea was coming to me, it was the idea of Bohemond as Elijah, Elijah as enemy, enemy as messenger of God. Yes, the enemy as messenger of God, the enemy as teacher. Sophia was the beginning of my Holy Wisdom and Bohemond would be the end of it.

Behold, he cometh,

Saith the LORD of hosts.

But who may abide the day of his coming?

And who shall stand when he appeareth?

For he is like a refiner’s fire,

And like fullers’ soap;

Elijah sensed that everything was on him, the whole burden of a world of trouble. He said:

I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.

Is this perhaps God’s gift and mystery, that he puts the world in and on each one of us as if there is no one else? And perhaps Bohemond, with the whole world in him and on him in a way that I can have no idea of, is without even knowing it jealous for the LORD; perhaps he has been appointed by God to call our attention to something, to the fragility of the temples that we daily destroy perhaps.

I sensed that it was important for me to understand, of the many things in my mind, at least one thing well in order to die properly, to let go of life in the right way. I craved to know what at least one of the important persons in my life was to me: Sophia or the tax-collector or Bohemond, the one in my mind called Questing, the angel of death and messenger of God.

Different people look ahead to different things. There were Jews in Antioch who had no doubt whatever that the Messiah was coming. This brute faith seemed a kind of madness to me; their faces seemed coarse with it, their eyes like stones. ‘What?’ I said to them, ‘What will be when the Messiah comes?’

‘The Temple rebuilt!’ they cried, their stone eyes shining, ‘The glory of Israel restored!’

‘The Temple rebuilt!’ I said to them. Suddenly the absurdity of such a fast day as Tisha b’Av became overwhelming to me. To lament year after year, generation after generation, the toppling of stones! Stones that have no enemy, stones in whom God dances impartially for anyone or for no one, dances under whatever name is given, dances whether there is anyone to know of God’s existence or not! What is the toppling of stones to God? Is God overturned with the stones? My people! ‘If you want the Temple rebuilt then go and rebuild it!’ I said. ‘One doesn’t need a Messiah for that, one only needs carpenters and stonemasons and bricklayers.’

‘Don’t be such a fool,’ they said. ‘You know very well that it isn’t just the sticks and stones and bricks of it we’re talking about. Don’t you want the glory of Israel restored?’

‘The glory of Israel has never been lost,’ I said. ‘When you say, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”, then with those words and with that thought you speak the glory of Israel. To that perception of Oneness nothing can be added and from it nothing can be taken away.’

‘The ancient glory of the Kingdom of David!’ they said.

‘What kind of glory is that?’ I said. ‘Saul slew his hundreds, David slew his thousands, Bohemond the same. Wait, you’ll see glory when Bohemond comes over the wall.’

Their stone eyes glared into mine. Hearing the words that came out of my mouth I realized that I was not of their world, I was no longer even of my own world, I was well on my way to where I am now.

This Elijah who now presented himself to me as enemy and teacher and messenger of God, this Elijah had long lived in my mind as forerunner; I had always pictured him running ahead as he ran ahead of Ahab’s chariot, an athlete strong in his engoddedness, running like an animal and with his running prophesying the God in him; the beauty of his running makes a shout in the desert, a lightning in the sunlight. Elijah the forerunner of the Messiah, Elijah the warden of the covenant, Elijah for whom a chair is placed at circumcisions, Elijah for whom a place is set at the Seder, for whom a glass of wine is poured, for whom the door is left open, Ay! Elijah! Elijah feeling himself alone the covenant-keeper, Elijah with a silence all around him and a still small voice inside him. Elijah who bows himself to the earth and puts his face between his knees and waits for the rain, Elijah who runs away and throws himself aside until the angel of God calls him to action. Elijah fed by angels, fed by ravens, Elijah the magical, the one of us. His guises are many, one doesn’t always know who he is, one doesn’t always recognize him. One must make connexions, must find the combination that he is a part of. By learning to recognize Elijah one learns to recognize Messiah. Here in Antioch the evening of the fourteenth of Nisan in the Jewish year 4858 which is the nineteenth of March in the Christian year 1098 is the Eve of Passover. A place is set, a glas of wine is poured, the door is opened for Elijah. And I know that in this part of the space called time Bohemond is Elijah and for me the taking of Antioch will be the Messiah and Jerusalem both.

Passover has come and gone and the Franks have not come over the walls. The tower we call Evil Eye and Raymond’s tower and Tancred’s tower stare at us through days and nights as if by observation could be known the time when Antioch must fall to these soldiers of Christ who cannot breach the walls of Justinian.

The towers stare, the Franks await God’s will while Karbuqa masses his armies and the reports of his imminent advance come every day with fresh detail and greater numbers. In Antioch the feeling is that of a very long night almost over and daylight almost here. The walls have not been breached, the Franks for all their engines of war and their will of God have not been able to bring the outside into the inside. Some of the people who have crept away from the city now return to take up life and business where they left off. There are many difficulties, many hardships, there are not enough goods to do much business with, but the people of Antioch wait patiently for the city to outlast its besiegers.

April passes and May. Salzedo was wrong: Shavuoth has come and gone and Antioch has not fallen. Here is the beginning of June in the Christian calendar, the end of Sivan in the Jewish one. The new moon of Tammuz will soon be seen, and some of the more old-fashioned Jews of Antioch will address it in the old-fashioned way:

As I dance towards thee,

but cannot touch thee, So shall none of my evil-inclined enemies

be able to reach me.

It is the night of the last of Sivan. I am asleep and I know that I am asleep. I feel like an instrument, like a compass needle quivering to the pull of the north or like a weathercock — yes, that’s how I feel, like a weathercock high, high up on a steeple in a strong wind, my limbs rigidly extended north, south, east, and west but not fixed and still like the directionals of a weathercock; no, I am spinning, spinning through the space called time, over the miles, over the days, weeks, months to the fall of Jerusalem a year from now. My hands and feet burn as if they are on fire, spinning so high in a purple-blue sky, spinning down to the domes of Jerusalem the golden, down to Yerushalayim in the Christian summer of 1099, down to Yerushalayim with a pall of smoke hanging over it and a stench of fire and blood and death.

It is only a little while since the city has been taken, fires are still burning; the streets are slippery with blood and entrails; bodies of men, women, and children, severed limbs and heads are heaped everywhere. The colours of the clothes on the bodies cannot be distinguished, so steeped in blood are they. Some of the bodies still move a little, and groans can be heard.

Many of the Franks are busy with the dead and the near-dead; they cut them open and pull out the entrails, in this way some of them find gold coins. Screams are heard as well as groans, some of the Franks are active with women whom they have not yet killed while others take their pleasure with the dead.

Over the city circle the vultures while crows, bolder and more nimble, hop and flutter with red beaks and feet, picking and choosing. Dogs go cringing with their ears laid back, they seem stricken with guilt and terror at seeing so many masters slain at once; some are in an ecstasy of blood-frenzy, they snarl and growl and tear at the dead flesh, the corpses flop and jerk as they are pulled this way and that.

Here are the Western Wall and the Temple mound with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. I have never seen these places before but I know them from maps and pictures, from dreams and from the phantom Jerusalem I have seen on Hidden Lion. Blood runs down the stones of the Western Wall and in the heat of the day the air quivers and sways above the dead who are heaped between the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. These are mostly Muslims; I can see no Jews here but I can smell their death in the smoke that rises from the synagogue to which they fled and in which they have been burnt alive. I am not walking, I am moving on the air in this waking sleep-travel, this night journey to a day that is coming; if I had to walk I should find little space on the red and slippery stones, I should have to walk on corpses.

Now I see among the blood-soaked bodies one that is like a naked ivory goddess in this butchery-place of the soldiers of Christ. The back of her head is crushed; her flawless limbs are sprawled in dishonour — but I am wrong to say that: her beauty of self and person cannot be dishonoured; she has been violated and murdered but such as she cannot be dishonoured; those who have done this have dishonoured only themselves. Here she lies, my dead and naked pilgrim, her Arab gown torn from her; flinging it over her head was not enough, they had to see all of her. I cannot cover her nor can I more modestly dispose her limbs, I have no corporeal existence in this place to which I have spun with burning hands and feet.

Here is a strange thing: in Sophia’s left hand is a little shoe, a little scarlet slipper worked with gold. A child’s shoe. Now do I seek and search, powerless to move so much as a dead finger of the numberless dead who lie here bearing witness.

I seek, I search; crows flap their black wings and cry their carrion-lust, dogs growl at my strange presence as I look everywhere to see if there will be a live two-year-old child with one foot bare. Have I been brought here to see the end of Sophia and that alone?

The sun goes down; the crows depart; the dogs are bolder now, the smacking and slavering and crunching of their feasting is loud in the twilight. There! Something moves! Fouled with the blood of the corpses he has sheltered under, there crawls out of this midden-heap of history a boy of perhaps two years and a few months. On his left foot is the mate of the slipper in Sophia’s left hand. A fine boy, big for his age and strong-looking, with a face like Sophia’s. It is growing dark, there is no moon to be seen. The little boy is not crying, his eyes are open wide and all his senses are alert as he walks slowly and quietly among the silent dead and the snarling dogs.

I cannot follow. My burning hands and feet, my north and south, east and west are spinning me up into the night and away from Jerusalem. ‘My son!’ I cry, ‘My little son!’ Never shall I know his name. His face was not only like Sophia’s, there was something of me in it as well, also in the way he held his head.

I am in my bed. The last of the darkness is paling towards the dawn. My hands and feet still burn. I am naked. I look away from my mutilation and cover myself. At the foot of my bed stands my young death, naked but complete. For the first time his face is not obscure, and I see that it is like Sophia’s face and yet it is my face too, the face of my child’s soul grown into a better man than I ever was. Still I can’t be such a bad fellow to have a death like this. He points to my hands and feet and I see there, written on the palms of my hands and on the soles of my naked feet, the four characters of the unutterable name of God.

He has done this for me, my young death: by writing on my hands and feet the sacred name he has sent me through the space called time to the taking of Jerusalem and the death of Sophia to show me our son walking alive out of the slaughter. Perhaps he will live only one day more, perhaps only one hour more, but he will begin his journey and will have in his eyes for however little time the same world that burned in the vision of his mother and his father. My son! Never to know his name! As I look at my hands and feet the letters fade with the paling of the sky. My night journey is done.

Now the cool dim tones of light that every morning build afresh the world are building it again this morning; the houses and the domes and minarets, Justinian’s walls and towers all stand up in readiness for their dayward passage. Now appear before me, consubstantial with the light, the dead fellow-travellers of my pilgrimage in the order of their deaths: the tax-collector, headless and naked and writhing with maggots; Udo the relic-gatherer whom I killed in the little wood; the bear shot full of arrows by the man who called him God; Bodwild the sow and Konrad her master; the pilgrim children raped by Bruder Pförtner and his fellows — they must have perished at sea, they are bloated and eyeless, their hair is matted and tangled. My young death, respectful and attentive, stands a little to one side. His lips are moving, they shape the word, ‘Tonight’.

I nod. ‘Tonight!’ I say. I am ready, even eager. As comradely as I am with Bembel Rudzuk, as close as our friendship is, yet am I closer to these dead. As a pilgrim acquires merit by making the journey to Jerusalem, so have these acquired not only merit but magical power by completing the journey to the end of themselves, to the fullness of their action. In death they are intensified, they are more than themselves, they are more than philosophies; they are geographies, histories, they are sciences and guides for a soul sore troubled and perplexed. Where they are, where Sophia is, there would I be.

But Sophia is not standing before me with the other dead. Suddenly I recall that she is not dead. Jerusalem has not yet fallen to the Franks, this is not yet the year 1099, it is still 1098. Sophia is alive! Our little son is not alone among dogs and corpses. There is the delicate crescent of the new moon of Tammuz still in the morning sky. The evil decree is not yet upon us.

Tonight’ is the word shaped by the lips of my young death. This is the last day of my life! Only a moment ago I was eager to join the dead but now everything is different, I am not a dry tree, I have a son, I am needed by my child and the mother of my child, I must find them. Life is calling me now, not death.

I look at my young death, I shake my head and with my mouth I shape the words, ‘Not yet.’

‘Tonight!’ Again the word appears on his lips. I look away, I don’t want to see him now. The tax-collector and the others have gone, I am alone with my young death.

I am on my feet, I pick up my curved Turkish sword, Firouz’s sword that Yaghi-Siyan has given me. My young death looks at me sadly; in his face I see the face of my little son alone among the dogs, among the dead. I raise the sword to strike but it is as if an iron bar has dropped across my arm. This has happened to me once before when I tried to save the life of the bear, and now as then it is the bony arm of Bruder Pförtner that has stopped me.

‘You don’t mean to do that,’ he says, breathing upon me with his breath that is like the fresh salt wind by the sea. ‘It simply isn’t done.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘For myself I don’t care, I’m quite ready to die. It’s my son, you see — he’s only a very little fellow and he needs me badly, and his mother, if I can find her perhaps she needn’t die in Jerusalem.’

‘Yes,’ says Bruder Pförtner, ‘I do understand, you’ve no idea how often I hear this sort of thing. So many people are urgently needed elsewhere when the time comes. And what about me, eh? Have you perhaps a little thought for me? I am like a diligent housewife who cleans the house and cooks the meal and lays the table, all is in readiness but the expected guest suddenly can’t be bothered to come. Only in this case I’ve cleaned the house and cooked the meal and laid the table of history, and one can’t take liberties with history; it isn’t possible, the complexity of the energy exchanges is absolutely staggering.’

‘History!’ I say, ‘I’m talking about human lives!’

‘And I’m talking about human deaths,’ says Bruder Pförtner. ‘Tonight is the fall of Antioch and I need all the Jews and Muslims I can lay my hands on. You have no more time for rushing about, this must be the whole world for you in the time you have left.’ With that he disappears. When I turn back to my young death he also is gone.

I dress and go to Bembel Rudzuk’s room but he isn’t there. I go to the roof: not there. Should I run to Yaghi-Siyan and tell him that I have been told by Bruder Pförtner that Antioch will fall to the Franks tonight? I think that he will believe me but he may well have my head cut off as his first act of preparation for the attack. Should I tell Firouz? Ever since Yaghi-Siyan gave me his sword he looks at me as if he wishes me dead; he would probably accuse me and Bruder Pförtner of being spies. To whom can I give this news? To whom can I say that Death has told me that Antioch will fall tonight? Meanwhile Sophia and our son are either on their way to Jerusalem or are already there. I must find them, I must get out of Antioch.

Seeking Bembel Rudzuk I go to Hidden Lion. It is desolate in the summer dawn. Here are gathered Bruder Pförtner and his fellows. No more do they present themselves as loutish creatures of lust; now they are serious, respectable, they wear breastplates, helmets, cloaks. They are grouped like generals around a huge map that Pförtner has spread out on the tiles. With a baton he points here and there, the others nod. People and movement flow around Hidden Lion as water flows around an island, no one takes any notice. These bony generals stand out with startling clarity in the foreground of the picture in my eyes, they are sharply defined by the space between them and the houses, domes, and minarets and by the particles of colour on the morning air that in the eye combine to form Mount Silpius tawny and empurpled. The mu’addhin has long since sounded the call to prayer and the prayers have risen in the dawnlight, in the freshness of those cool dim tones with which the world is first sketched in each day. As the sun ascends the morning shadow of the eastern slopes of Silpius withdraws from the city like a transparent purple robe trailed across a floor.

There on the mountain climb Justinian’s walls of the four hundred towers, each correctly casting its morning shadow; there on the mountain is the citadel with its tawny stone catching the light of the sun, its green-and-gold banner rippling in the morning breeze; there in the cleft of Silpius is the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate where in the winter runs Onopniktes the donkey-drowner, roaring, bellowing, grinding its stones in its caverns under the city.

This, under the inescapable reality of Mount Silpius, is the first of Tammuz, the month named for the Babylonian god who is also the Sumerian Dumuzi. Down, down under the earth into the nether world goes he in the winter for he is the corn god. For him does the Goddess Inanna make her famous descent, anointing her eyes with the ointment ‘Let him come, let him come’:

From the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the

‘great below’,

The goddess, from the ‘great above’ she set her mind

toward the ‘great below’.

The new moon of the risen Tammuz hangs in the morning sky but I feel intimations of the great descent, the dark and chill of winter in the light and heat of summer. Inside the earth the waiting darkness trembles. Standing on the barren tiles of Hidden Lion and looking at that always surprising mountain, that simple mountain that so shockingly asserts the actuality of its strangeness, that mountain that now for me is truly and finally the dreadful mountain of the Law, I curse the infirmity of purpose that has kept me here in Antioch. Turning and turning in my mind my thoughts of what to do next I turn physically, making myself dizzy on this repetition of twisting serpents, shifting pyramids, and occulting lions. There burns in my mind that vision more real than Mount Silpius, more real than anything else in the world, of the violated ivory nakedness of dead Sophia and the animal watchfulness of our little son making his way alone through the dogs, through the dead. I have spent my time playing with patterns and it has come to this. There leaps up in me hatred for Bembel Rudzuk.

I looked up at the tower and saw him standing at the top of it, a solitary dark figure against the morning sky. I looked away. How could I hate Bembel Rudzuk? Overcome by love and shame I went to him.

‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

‘This is the last day of my life,’ I said.

‘All the more reason for looking your best,’ he said. ‘This is the last day of my life as well. How do I look?’

‘Dreadful,’ I said. We embraced each other sadly.

‘Before we talk of other matters,’ he said, ‘I must tell you how it is that I am called Bembel Rudzuk.’

‘I don’t think I can take the time to listen to that now,’ I said, ‘I must.go to Jerusalem.’

‘Don’t you believe Bruder Pförtner when he tells you there’s no longer anywhere for you to go?’ he said.

‘How do you know he told me that?’ I said.

‘He spoke to me as well,’ he said.

‘As Bruder Pförtner or in some other manifestation?’ I said.

‘As Bruder Pförtner,’ he said. ‘I suppose he didn’t bother to change because we’re friends. Are you offended?’

‘No,’ I said but of course I was. I was ashamed to have such stupid feelings at such a time but there they were.

‘Pförtner likes to affect a playful manner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but he means what he says. I don’t think he’ll let you leave Antioch, and if you try I think it will only make our last day more difficult.’

Our last day! I had come to Hidden Lion seeking Bembel Rudzuk’s counsel for my last day, mine alone. I didn’t want to have to think about anyone else’s last day, not even that of my dearest friend; and that his last day should now be the same day as mine seemed tactless of him, inconsiderate, even pushing. I no longer wanted to talk to Bembel Rudzuk but I wanted him to know how things stood with me. ‘Everything’s different now,’ I said: ‘I have travelled through space and time to the fall of Jerusalem. I have seen Sophia dead and violated, I have seen our son wandering alone among the dead and the dogs. All this has not yet happened and it must not happen, I must do something to prevent it.’

‘I too have seen them,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘You too have made a night journey to the fall of Jerusalem?’ I said. ‘You too have seen’ (I was going to say ‘my wife’) ‘Sophia and our son?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How can this be?’ I said.

‘How can what be?’ he said.

‘That you have seen them in the sack of Jerusalem,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If they were there to be raped and killed and orphaned then why not to be seen?’

I was so choked with rage that I could hardly find a voice to speak with. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Are you trying to teach me some kind of lesson?’

‘How could I?’ he said. ‘I am no wiser than you and I have nothing to teach. And being thus without wisdom I can’t help wondering why it is that all this time you have felt no need for action and now suddenly you want to change history.’

I thought I should go mad. Silpius continued to offer itself in its unaccountable simplicity to the eye; Bruder Pförtner and his generals continued to confer. Their pretensions disgusted me; I had seen them being themselves with those pilgrim children on the road. History! I felt myself impaled on history, my own and the world’s. The horror, the horror of cause and effect! The horror of the pitiless and implacable chain of one thing following another from the beginning of the world to the end of it with never a pause, never a year of Jubilee, never a clearing of the record! O God! to come so far and to end with so little. Now it was like that torture in which the victim, his belly opened up and one end of his entrails tied to a post, is made to walk round and round the post unwinding his guts. So walked my mind round its post while the images in it unwound, from the naked Sophia seen in the window to the naked Sophia dead and our son alone in the sack of Jerusalem. I wanted to smash every one of the tiles of Hidden Lion, every one of the bricks of the tower, I wanted Antioch and Onopniktes and Mount Silpius to disappear from my experience, to become unknown to me. I wanted to wind my time back into me, I wanted to be once more at the Eve of the Ninth of Av in the Christian year of 1096.1 would sin again but I would be fierce and strong in my sin, I would go armed and wary in my sin, I would kill for it, would claim Sophia against all odds, I would die fighting if necessary but I would die complete, not a eunuch. What a fool I had been, neither a sheep nor a goat, suffering the loss of goodness without the rewards of badness, Aiyee! But what if Sophia hadn’t wanted to be claimed by me? What if she wanted her Jew for one night only?

Bembel Rudzuk had been watching my face attentively. ‘Is this perhaps the moment,’ he said, ‘when I can tell you how I come to be called Bembel Rudzuk?’

‘If you must,’ I said.

‘This that I tell happened forty years ago,’ he said, ‘when I was trading for a big house in Tripoli — not as a partner, I was what we call a “boy”. We’d come from Tabriz to Aleppo with a three-hundred camel caravan but coming out of Aleppo there were only nine of us — five merchants and four camel-drivers — with twelve camels. We were a day out of Aleppo when there appeared on an empty stretch of road six robbers who put their horses straight at us, three of them passing on either side and shooting arrows as they galloped past; it happened so fast that one simply couldn’t believe it. And their accuracy, shooting at full gallop! A moment before there had been nine of us and now as they wheeled their horses for the second pass six of our party already lay dead.

‘By then the other three of us had put arrow to string and we got two of them on their next rush. Then it was four against three; they were wild with rage, they couldn’t believe that merchants would stand up to them. Of the first six they had killed four were mounted merchants and two were camel-drivers on foot. The two surviving camel-drivers leapt on to horses and tried to get away but they were quickly brought down by arrows. My horse was killed under me and I was nearly ridden down by the robber who did it. There was no time to think, I leapt at him and in the next moment he was rolling on the ground and I was bent over his horse’s neck and galloping for my life.

‘I was heading for some high ground and big rocks and I was already among the rocks when Tssss, thwock! Off I came with an arrow in my left shoulder, but as soon as I hit the ground I was in behind the rocks and climbing, they couldn’t get a shot at me and they had to get off their horses to follow me.

‘Up I went; I found a little opening between two big tall rocks and I squeezed through. It wasn’t a cave; the rocks were about twenty feet high and there was a space between them open to the sky. I didn’t know whether I was better or worse off than before. I had my sword and my dagger but I had dropped my bow when I leapt at the robber and in any case my quiver was empty. My wound was burning like fire; the arrow had gone right through my shoulder and the head was sticking out in front so that I was able to break it off and pull out the shaft.

‘I had no time to do more than that before there appeared a robber between me and the sky in the opening at the top of the rocks. He laughed and was just reaching for an arrow from his quiver when I threw a stone and caught him full in the face with it. That’s when I knew I was lucky because he lost his balance and fell, not backwards but forwards; he toppled from his perch, landed with a thump beside me and got my dagger in him for his pains.

‘So then I had a bow and arrows: three arrows there were in the quiver, and when the next robber showed himself in the opening above me he got one of the arrows in his throat. That left me with two arrows and two more robbers if the one I’d pulled off his horse had taken up the chase; I assumed that he had, so I looked alternately up at the opening above me and down at the one I had squeezed through and waited for what would come next. This was in the spring, I could hear a bird saying, “Plink, plink!” like drops of water falling into a basin. Above me the sky was blue, there was a fresh breeze blowing.

‘I could hear some movement on the rocks and a voice said, “You go in after him, I’ll be right behind you.” Of course I knew that was meant for my ears so I was waiting for them to come at me at the same time from above and below. I knew by then that whoever climbed to the opening above was unable to do it with an arrow on the string, he would have to pause for a moment at the top to reach for an arrow. And if he was going to time his attack with that of the other robber he would probably make a sound. So I aimed an arrow at the space I had squeezed through, I thought that was where I’d first see movement.

‘You know how it is at even the most desperate moments, even in matters of life and death — part of your mind is busy with its own affairs, perhaps making pictures, perhaps making words or singing a song while the rest of your mind takes care of the business at hand. Part of my mind was singing a little song, it hadn’t much tune, it was just something the mind had made up by itself, there were no proper words, it just went:

‘Tsitsa tsitsa bem, tsitsa tsitsa bem,

Tsitsa tsitsa bembel bembel bembel bembel bem.

‘Like that over and over again. When I saw movement in the space I’d squeezed through I loosed my arrow and I heard a grunt. There was a little sound from above as if in reply and when the last robber appeared against the sky my last arrow found him and that finished the business of the day.

‘So that was that. For a little while I just sat there leaning against a rock, looking up at the sky, listening to the bird, feeling the breeze on my face — just being alive and not dead. My mind was still busy with its song, now it was singing:

‘Rukh, rukh, rudz, rudzl, rudzl, rudzuk.

‘I was thinking what a lot of bems and rudzes there are in the universe, what an altogether bembelish and rudzukal thing it is, to say nothing of the tsitsas. I was glad for me that I was alive and sorry for the robbers that they were dead — it was such a good day to be alive in. I recognized that it could just as easily have been the robbers alive and I dead and that would have been fair enough, one mustn’t be greedy, one can’t always win the prize, the action goes on for ever but the actors come and go.

‘It was then that I noticed sitting beside me and leaning back against the same rock our bony friend, all got up for the occasion like a true son of the desert with quite a princely robe and kaffiya and jewelled daggers. “You’re a good boy,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I like you; you move well and you don’t hang back when things warm up a little. You’ll be lucky, you’ll have a good life and years enough of it. One thing though you must never forget: you must never forget whose child you are, and when I say it’s time for bed you must come promptly and cheerfully; you might as well do it with a good grace because in any case you’ll have to come — no one can say no to me.”

‘With that he whistled and there came not a black horse and not a white one but a dappled grey stallion. Such a horse, a horse of dreams, that one! Almost I wanted to go with Death at that very moment just to feel that horse under me. With a whoop he leapt to the stallion’s back and galloped away like a thunderbolt, what a man! It struck me suddenly, there’s no one more alive than Death; how could there be, he’ll outlive us all!

‘From that moment I called myself Bembel Rudzuk so that I should never forget the bembelish and rudzukal nature of the universe and whose child I was.

‘When I came down from the rocks I found the robbers’ horses tied to a thornbush and with them was the one I had ridden to the rocks. She was one of those clever little mares that can go all day and never miss her footing anywhere, I had her for years after that, she always reminded me of that ride. What a day that was!

‘I found the camels all grazing where the robbers had attacked us and grazing with them were the other horses, both the robbers’ and ours. Two of the horses had been killed but that still left me with four horses more than we had started the day with, and of course the six robber horses were all first-class, much better than ours; robbers can’t afford to ride rubbish.

‘Even better than the horses was what I found in the robbers’ saddlebags: two thousand and forty-two dinars! I couldn’t believe it — all that gold and still they went on trying for more! I suppose they were for ever unsatisfied and that’s why they had to be robbers.

‘I rode back to the rocks and collected the four dead robbers there then I loaded all six robbers and my dead colleagues and the camel-drivers on to the horses and continued on my way to Tripoli with the carpets we had bought in Tabriz. On my return all the dead were buried with the proper observances. We did well in the market and altogether my employers were well pleased with me. As I had been travelling for them when I acquired the robbers’ treasure I offered to share it equally with them but they refused to take so much as a single dinar. They wanted to make me a partner but I preferred to set up in business for myself under my new name and I came to Antioch to do it. I had always liked the look of the place, particularly the look of Mount Silpius in the dawn, and I had heard that long ago there was a statue of the Goddess of Luck here. I’ve never found the place where the statue used to be but I’ve always been as lucky as I needed to be.

‘I have had a good life, I have spent my time as I wanted to spend it, and although I have never grown wise I have through trial and error come closer and closer to Thing-in-Itself, so that when my time comes I expect I shan’t have too much of a jump to make from this state to the next one. I can understand your present bitterness and your regret that you have stayed so long in Antioch but for me what we have done with Hidden Lion was time as well spent as time ever is. To me it seems that the best we can hope for in life is honesty of error; more than that is not to be expected. Sometimes we can see what is wrong action but that doesn’t make everything other than that right action. I have said enough; I have lived enough. I do not forget whose child I am and I am ready to go when called.’

‘You say that Bruder Pförtner has spoken to you,’ I said. ‘Have you also seen your young death?’

‘I have seen only Pförtner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘on his dappled stallion: that for me is the sign. I have seen him and spoken with him many times since that first time forty years ago but never until this morning has he ridden that particular horse again; it has been understood between us that the horse would be the sign.’

‘I wonder how it is that you also have travelled to the fall of Jerusalem and seen Sophia and my son,’ I said.

‘You have a woman and a child to love,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I have only you and I have been eating the scraps from your table.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Whenever I think that I have seen the boundaries of my stupidity there suddenly open up new territories before me.’

We both looked across the tiles to where Bruder Pförtner and his generals were. He was now strutting back and forth and making some kind of oration. The sky had become dull and grey. Silpius was intensified in the greyness, became the mountain wholly strange and never to be known, the mountain showing the traveller from afar how far he had come to find that nothing whatever could be known about anything at all. The nakedness of dead Sophia was as if printed on my eyes; I looked through it at the mountain as one looks through a transparent figured curtain. The watchful face of our son was as big as the world.

‘We must do what we can,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. We looked at each other and the images printed on my eyes seemed to double in intensity.

‘Are they in your eyes also, Sophia and my son?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, I can’t help it.’

‘We’ll try together then to leave Antioch?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we must at least try.’

‘Ought we to warn anyone before we go?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Those who had in mind to leave have already gone and I don’t think that the others will be moved to act on what we have seen in our night journey. What is more likely is that we shall be taken for spies.’

We went back to the house and armed and provisioned ourselves. We were going to make the attempt on foot — in the present circumstances it was our best chance of going unseen and unheard and acting as the moment required. With a bag and a bow slung on my shoulder, with a quiver of arrows on one side and Firouz’s sword on the other I paused to look at the fountain in the courtyard and to listen to the plashing of the silvery water, thirsting for it with my eyes.

When we came out into the street the very air seemed strange, apocalyptic. I doubted my own reality, I was surprised to hear footfalls and voices around me, surprised to smell the hot and pungent smells of every day. I waited for the earth to shake but it did not, I expected everyone to stare open-mouthed at us but they did not, then I thought that perhaps we might be invisible to them and I wanted to shout but I did not.

The walls were manned as fully as possible now night and day and there were always sentries at all of the gates. We dared not wait for the darkness and the chance of going over the wall with a rope — not only were there our own sentries to avoid but we both had no doubt whatever that the Franks would also be waiting for the darkness of this night to come over those same walls into Antioch. We had no plan beyond getting out of Antioch; if we were able to do that we should consider what to do next.

We headed for the Iron Gate east of the Citadel where in the winter Onopniktes entered its channel. It was by way of that cleft in the mountain that many people now went to forage and we hoped not to be noticed there. This day, however, was not like other days: on this day Firouz was at the Iron Gate with the soldiers of the guard.

Only a few moments ago I had felt as if we might be invisible but now suddenly it was as if all the crowded space around us became blank and empty and in the whole world only we were to be seen. Firouz was pacing back and forth with his turning walk. The sky had gone grey and the shadow that turned and twisted with him was dull and blurred. He had seen us approaching, and for us to turn away now would invite more trouble than to continue towards the gate.

There swept over me a wave of irritation: I was annoyed with everything and everybody, even with Sophia and my little son that they had come thus at the eleventh hour to interfere with the smooth and orderly winding-up of my affairs. My being was grating on this day as the teeth grate on a stone in the bread. In my heart and soul I knew it to be my last day; I knew that the stones of my little history and the world’s great one were fitted together so precisely by cause and held in place so firmly by effect that the feeble knifeblade of my too-late good intention could not even find a crack between them let alone pry them apart. And it was in this state of mind that I stood before Firouz on the morning of the first of Tammuz in the Christian year of 1098.

Firouz looked at us with satisfaction. ‘Where are you going?’ he said.

I wanted to say, ‘To find Sophia and my son.’ I didn’t want to have to take Firouz into account sufficiently to have to lie to him.

‘We’re going to have a look around Suwaydiyya,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I think some of the merchants there may have provisions they’ve hidden away from the Franks.’

‘Very daring,’ said Firouz, ‘with so many Franks between here and Suwaydiyya. Very daring indeed.’ He was looking at the sword I was wearing that used to be his.

‘I know the back ways,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Firouz. He took the bag that was slung from my shoulder and looked into it. ‘You won’t starve while you’re out looking for provisions, will you,’ he said. ‘You’re got enough food here for a week. Will you be back in time to stand guard on the wall tonight?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We don’t go on until midnight.’

‘Good,’ said Firouz. ‘I think it’s probably best if I lock you up until then; that way you won’t wear yourselves out walking all those weary miles and you’ll be alert and well-rested for tonight.’

‘We haven’t done anything to be locked up for,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Not yet,’ said Firouz. ‘But you inspire doubt and mistrust in me, and as I’m in command of this part of the wall I’m taking it on myself to keep out of trouble.’

‘No!’ I cried out. ‘You mustn’t do that!’

‘Why not?’ said Firouz.

‘Because tonight may be the night the Franks take Antioch!’ I blurted out.

Firouz jumped back as if I had thrust a viper into his face. ‘Who told you that?’ he said.

‘It came to me in a dream, a vision, a night journey,’ I said.

‘Have you told this to anyone else?’ said Firouz.

‘No,’ I said.

Firouz motioned to two of the guards. ‘Lock these two up in the tower,’ he said.

I began to laugh, I couldn’t help it.

‘What are you laughing at?’ said Firouz.

‘Life and death,’ I said. ‘It’s so hard to make a good job of either.’

Firouz began to laugh too. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Truly it doesn’t give me pleasure to lock you up, it’s just that all of us have different things to do and this is what I have to do.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ I said. ‘It’s only life and death.’

‘It’s strange,’ said Firouz: ‘people buy and sell, they go here and there, they make plans for this year and the next year as if there will be no end to life, as if there will always be a next day and a next year; but sometime there must come an end to the days and the years; it must be like walking into a wall where one has always found a door.’ While he said this reflectively and in a companionable manner as if we were sitting in a coffee house Bembel Rudzuk and I stood before him with a guard on either side of us. When he had completed this observation the guards took away our bows and arrows, our swords and daggers and our bags. ‘Your weapons and your other possessions will be given back to you later,’ said Firouz as the guards took us away to the tower.

Later than what? I thought. With the two guards behind us we climbed the stone stairs to that part of Firouz’s tower that rose above the wall. There we were taken up more stairs to the top of the tower and put into a little room in which there was nothing but an overwhelming stench of urine and excrement and a bucket that had not been emptied for a very long time. A little dimness was provided by a high-up window that was too small to squeeze through.

I beat on the door to ask for the bucket to be emptied. There was no response of any kind. ‘This is to be our end then,’ I said, ‘in a little dim room with a bucket of old shit.’

‘Be glad we’re in the room and not in the bucket,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

We sat on the floor and looked up and down and all around the little room. It was so dreadfully finite. There was no possibility whatever of there being any more to it than we could see.

‘What Firouz said about buying and selling, do you think he meant anything by it, do you think he wanted to be bribed?’ I said.

‘I think he’s already been bought by the Franks,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

The bucket stood there stinking in a corner in a buzzing of flies in the dimness of the little locked stone room. I thought: Is this a metaphor? Then a nearby bird said, ‘Plink, plink, plink.’ Ah! I thought, explanations are unnecessary. So I felt a little better until the naked headless tax-collector appeared, writhing with maggots as always. Never mind, I thought, this is only illusion.

From wherever the tax-collector’s voice lived came a long sigh, ‘Ahhhhhhh!’ He assumed the necessary position over the bucket and emptied his bowels with a torrent like Onopniktes, I half expected dead donkeys to come out of him turning over and over in that disgusting flood. This is metaphorical illusion, I told myself, dismiss it from your mind; have other illusions, better ones; see Sophia. But Sophia would not come, even Bodwild would not come. My young death, I thought, surely he will come, I am like a father to him, I am his father — let us at least have a proper leavetaking before he goes out into the world to seek his fortune, let there be a fond embrace, a manly clasping of hands, a tear or two would be nothing to be ashamed of. But no, he would not come. Comfortless I sat on the floor with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.

‘Ahhhhhh!’ sighed the tax-collector again. He must have left the bucket because now he was returning to it to relieve himself once more with the same torrential rush and with a noise that was like the bursting of the Unseen into the seen, which of course in its own way it was. Surely, I thought, this is no proper epiphany; surely if God is gone I shall at least see Christ one more time, I deserve at least that much.

Pffffffttttt! went the tax-collector. The stench was no longer within the limits of what could be called a smell, it had become something in the nature of a metaphysical premise. The grotesquerie of the tax-collector’s appearing without a head while thus emptying himself of the waste of a lifetime, perhaps of more than one lifetime! Really, I thought, how much can be expected of my forbearance, my civility? After all, if this is illusion I must have something to say about it. ‘If you’re going to keep doing that at least you must accept responsibility for it!’ I shouted. ‘At least you can show your face!’

‘What did you say?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Say!’ I said. ‘Who can say anything with this constant noise, this unbearable stench!’

‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and I haven’t been noticing the smell for a while.’

‘Everything’s all right with you then, is it?’ I said. ‘With you there’s nothing to complain of?’

‘I’ve already told you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve had a good life and I’ve had enough of it and I’m ready to go. Why should I have any complaints?’

‘This smell,’ I said, ‘this smell isn’t illusion, it’s a real stink, it’s a stench of actuality.’

‘Where I am there’s not that much of a stench,’ he said.

‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Here we have an opportunity for preparation, we have a little quiet time in which there is nothing for us to do, nothing is required of us; it is like a silent desert in which we are not far from the track that will take us to that farthest lote-tree that is shrouded in unutterable mystery. All we need is a little patience, a little quietness of mind as we look for the track in the silent desert.’

‘You!’ I said. ‘You are attached to nothing, you care for no one.’

‘The one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other,’ he said. ‘I am attached to nothing but I care for you and I have cared for others in my time.’

‘Always you make me ashamed,’ I said.

‘Stop disquieting yourself and stop being ashamed,’ he said. ‘Use this time to find the track in the desert.’

‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ said the tax-collector returning to the bucket.

It seems now to be much later although I don’t know how much time has passed, I don’t know whether I’ve been asleep or not. The little stone room is full of darkness, but it seems to me that beyond the stench of the bucket I can smell the dawn that is coming. There enters my mind the thought that the bucket in the corner has been put there for Elijah. I don’t want Elijah to come here and relieve himself in that bucket, I want to see Elijah running ahead of Ahab’s chariot, running beautifully under a black sky in the rain and the wind, running in the thought of God to Jezreel.

Something is happening below us on the wall, there are footsteps and voices, there are armed men running, men shouting, ‘Deus le volt!’ The Franks are in Antioch and we are locked up in this little room of stone.

Bembel Rudzuk, whose silent stillness in the darkness suggests not sleep but contemplation, now says, ‘If you stand on my shoulders you can empty that bucket out of the window.’

This bucket-emptying is not a simple thing; there is no chair or table that I can use as a mounting platform, and one hand is of course required for the bucket. But Bembel Rudzuk at sixty-two is still a strong man. Facing the wall he kneels on one knee below the window. I step on to his broad shoulders and with one hand touching the wall I maintain my balance as he rises to his feet.

Bembel Rudzuk bracing himself with his hands against the wall is as steady as a rock. I am just high enough so that I can see the little crescent of the new moon of Tammuz and feel the freshness of the night on my eyes. From the sounds I hear I judge that our window overlooks the walkway on the top of the wall, and it is from this walkway that the shouts of the Franks are coming. There are cries and groans from the Turks; someone exclaims, clearly and distinctly as if required by history to bear audible witness, ‘We are betrayed!’

‘Bohemond!’ goes up the shout, ‘Bohemond! Bohemond! Bohemond!’

With my right hand under the bucket I slide it very slowly, very carefully up the wall to the window, keeping my balance with my face against the wall while I bring my left hand over to grasp the handle. There is in my mind an ardent prayer as I bring the bucket up over the window sill.

‘Deus le volt!’ I shout as I empty the bucket and hurl it after its contents. From below there comes a wild cry of rage as startling and primitive as the roar of a lion.

‘Allah The Finder,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.

At that moment the door opens and in the candlelight from a sconce on the stairs we see Firouz. He lays our bags and weapons on the floor. ‘Forgive me if you can,’ he says. In the doorway is my young death also, his face shining with love as he points to my sword that used to belong to Firouz. Bembel Rudzuk and I as one man stretch out our hands for our swords, we have no need of anything else now.

Pell-mell down the stairs we go to the walkway on the wall; there are dead Turks there, we step over them, we hurry down the next stairs to the ground.

‘Hidden Lion!’ says Bembel Rudzuk. Yes, yes, I know what is in his mind as we run. The little crescent hangs in the sky so delicate and slender, shouts and screams run through the darkness like fire through stubble; the mu’addhin will not sound the call to prayer in the new morning, there will be a great silence where there used to be the prayer of many. Stronger grows the smell of the dawn that is coming, that alchemy by which substance of darkness becomes substance of light in which are bodied forth all forms moving and still; the disquietude of the invaded houses, domes, and minarets, the continual surprise of Silpius that waits to manifest itself tawny and empurpled, unsurprised at the heaped bodies of the dead, surprised only that there should be world at all and itself in the world.

Dawn has not yet come but everything is Now and the actuality of it illuminates the night in my eyes so that I seem to see whatever is before me in the purple-blue crystalline vibrations in which I first saw the upside-down body of the tax-collector in the little wood of night.

Dim and yellow against the vibrations of the purple-blue shudders the faltering light of a lantern that stands on the tiles of Hidden Lion. And here is Questing the death-hound, here is Elijah for whom Firouz has opened the door, here is Messiah following on Elijah, here is the giant Bohemond foul and stinking with excrement that stains his scarlet cross as he stands on Hidden Lion lifting his sword vertically with both hands and plunging it down again and again like a man breaking ground for a post-hole. All around him are broken tiles and among them are heaped the gold and silver coins that were mortared into the tiles.

Now I see what I have seen before in the darkness and the brightness in my mind, I see leaping and still like a butterfly transfixed by lightning the elegance of Bembel Rudzuk as he attacks Bohemond; I see the great Frankish sword that has been going up and down like a post-hole digger suddenly leap like a live thing as Bohemond shifts his grip and now a track of brightness horizontally cleaves the darkness, cleaves the purple-blue, cleaves with its savage arc the body of Bembel Rudzuk; now in two pieces falls the body of Bembel Rudzuk to the broken tiles of Hidden Lion.

Here now before me is Bohemond. This is the great moment when I shall see the face of this man who has become my world and my Jerusalem. His fouled and stinking mail shirt glitters in the purple-blue luminosity of Now, his helmet flashes as if wreathed in lightnings; the iron nasal of his helmet makes other than human this face that I strain to see but I cannot, I shall never see it, I see instead the face of that veiled owl of my childhood.

I raise my arm, I strike with my sword, I see it shatter like shards of ice as the great sword of Bohemond makes a rainbow in the night, in the dawn that is coming. I stare into the brilliance, I see the Virgin and the Lion wheeling in the darkness, in the light. I see the sun-points dazzling on the sea, the alchemy of the triangular sail changing from the hot and dry to the cold and wet; I smell the salt breath of Bruder Pförtner.

But I cannot see Bohemond in this night and dawn of brilliance, of purple-blue luminosity. No, as the great sword makes another rainbow in the pale dawn where hangs the new moon of Tammuz, the last thing that I see with my mortal eyes, very, very high in the sky and circling in the overlapping patterns of the Law, is that drifting meditation of storks that I have known from my childhood, each year returning in their season to their wonted place.