"RANIA" by Dane Rudhyar

RANIA

Dane Rudhyar

passionate spring

spiritual flowering

sacrifice of the seed

passionate spring

CHAPTER I

The snow beats against them.

Huge white sheets torn from the skies lash galloping creatures sent through the storm by the haste-call f death. On the other side of the pass, the ghost-fury had not yet reached its full when they heard that fever had clawed him, savage fire amidst the icy wastes. Mother, daughter, they had left. Strong stock, Russian, Magyar, Gypsy... mixed strains and fervor of races that plough life to tear from it a harvest of triumphant pain and ecstasy.

The white gale slashes them.

The snow made hunger, black snow moving with instinct, ferocious clang of winter's an-hatred. They horses know; they rebel against the master-hands. They drill madly into raging sails which flap against the white sea of the earth. Wolves, wolves... they howl. One jumps, cut back by the lash.

The wolves' hunger overtones the storm.

Big trees have been reached, with easy branches.

The sledge tumbles over roots scarring the snow. The mother, strong and fierce, slashes back the beasts that growl, pushes up the girl climbing the branches. "Hold fast! Peasants will save you after dawn. The farm is near." Bravely she beats, beats the horde that craves her flesh. "Hold fast!" she cries. "Have no fear. Courage, my love I am strong yet."

Big trees stand like crosses over a grave.

She had been named Rania.

She stood with courage. She was of a strong stock. Her body seemed frozen, her mind deafened by the howlings of the beasts hardly fed by sacrificial flesh. But with power she clung to the ice. She clung to her soul trapped in this fierce planet. She called aloud: “I am not afraid. I am strong yet. I am strong!” And dawn saved her, with kind hands and warm bed from the farm.

She had been named Rania.

Her father recovered.

He was a strange passionate man, with Gypsy blood drawn from old India-lands. Something in him remembers the mounts where saints live who bless mankind with power compassionate and wisdom all-embracing. Something could not forget the lust of torrid plains sickened by fever, reeling with dances of sex, swirling around the brains. And these two clashed and struggled within his violent frame; great knowledge, great fervor, and the strong will of body craving its own against the god.

Her father took her far and away.

Over lands and seas they journeyed.

They reached the New World, where men who are young torture with machines their unborn souls, with greed for power, with rush everlasting. They scoured cities, factories, slums and palaces gilded with blood dripping money. His many-tongued blood rejoiced in the Babels where all races lust, craving to be reborn as the little children of an earth prolific and strong, where destiny can be met and loved into great deeds and fortunes.

Over states and mountains they tore.

He was a restless soul.

He loved his daughter with a strange passion: that she was beautiful, that she was strong, that she could laugh and dance, yet plundered books for knowledge and goods for divinity. He loved her with a perverse love. He made her face his own debauches. He wanted to feel with her eyes and nerves his own passion. She was stirred, frantic. But she scorned, laughed; and her soul closed her stubborn jaws tight with defiance.

He was a tragic, powerless soul.

One day she saw him beat a young girl.

The girl was beautiful and frail. She had been stranded in some monstrous city and sold herself for bread and the few smiles of things that girls must own. Rania was her own room; he called her, forced her to witness his shame. He was helpless that day for men had bruised his deepest longings. He must have revenge on life, brutalize bodies to pay for his shattered soul. The girl begged, cried. She tore her hands; she fled to Rania. “Oh! Help me!” Daughter faced father in ghastly silence. Dumb confrontation of fates that stood apart, yet rooted in the same earth.

That day she closed the door and left him.

Rania wandered for many days.

She had reached her sixteenth bird. Men stared at her as she passed by for the fervent yet icy splendor of her eyes, the strong, defying pace of her walk that knew direction. She had taken with her but few dollars to start the search. She waited in tearooms; she knew the looks of men stammering over breakfast orders while unable to tear their eyes off her breast. She was assaulted with harrying smiles flushing with covetousness. She danced through music hells amid haggard bodies, and laughed off moist hands already clenching their prey.

Rania wandered, silent, unscathed.

Days and nights she worked, facing life.

Yet her body collapsed under the strain, as she was dancing in a small town. The hospital took her with its white-sheeted peace. For days she was burnt by the violence of the pent up fire within her flesh which had not given up, witch had not opened to the craving of men. Then she recovered and was sent to the druggist of the town who needed help, while an official search was made for her father.

And Rania began her new work.

It was at first kind and pleasant work.

She had to wait upon customers hurrying through indigestible lunches, often piercing her clothes with greedy eyes, yet distant and fearful, for the town was small and tongues easy to start. The druggist had a wife, cautious through considerate. She had a strange look, as if ever watching for some ghost to appear from behind things being moved. Her world seemed a shaky world, unsafe; and some troubled longing twisted her upper lip into pain, while her eyes belied suffering with a strange smile.

It was for weeks kind and pleasant work.

A peace-wrapped languor pervaded Rania.

Hospital days had been a long gaze into emptiness, a long waiting, soul-pregnancy in love with the unborn. They had been winter days muffled by snow, gorgeous ermine cloak sheathing the naked blade of sorrow. She had relaxed into expectancy, husband-weary mother loving inward life-to-be. Spring had liquefied the silence into dancing waters. The ermine cloak had shed its fur. Vernal breezes tore through the bethinned fabric and the earth-body stirred into buds like the fields.

The discontent of spring rose in Rania's soul.

Surge of greens, surge of dreams.

He was still a boy. He helped the druggist with his preparations working at night toward college. He was frail and strange-eyed like a deer surprised amid mountain meadows. He looked at life with the same delicacy with which he divided powders into small equal heaps. There was a mystery Rania had not fathomed; but she loved him for his insecureness, for his mother-need.

Surge of greens, surge of dreams.

One night she stumbled over the mystery.

Tenderly the little stalk had spun its life sunward.

Now it was crushed once more, with the bitterness of disgust. She understood the writhing lines of pain in the wife; but in herself, it was her heart that bent in awesome loneliness. She wanted to go, but was watched rather strictly. She drew within herself with vehement unearthiness. She hated the earth. She clung to her dreams, wild dreams she has to throw off to bear the contempt and irony of things.

Cypresslike, tense-nerved, she judged life.

Because she was strong she asked for judgment.

It would have been easy to accept and twist the mouth in restrained suffering. But Rania was a stock of rebels and defiers. She wanted to face life. She did not deny. Her father beating girls, the druggist and his clerk, men, men, men with frenzied hands choking with the longing to pierce and to crush, as if beyond there were God... And if there were God beyond? Was she the weakling? Were they the victorious? Tensely, desperately, the flung questions at the silence of life.

Because she was strong she asked for judgement.

Something answered from within.

It was very faint at first, like transclucid steam in a cold room. It shaped itself into moving forms, square, oblong, round... somewhere beyond her closed eyes; or was it within the hollow globe? She saw dreams, dreams which she knew were real. She could not grasp the meanings nor the source. But she knew another world had opened and it was a glorious, blazing, yet icy world. She was not frightened, only she could not see the whence nor the whither. Forms and colors were going on; beyond and through. All things, all faces became streaked with strange gyrations

Was it the answer from within?

She had no one to tell whom she could trust.

She thought at times she was going mad. She thought she was not of the same race of men as others. But she had not the vain pride of men who fool their souls into belief of lone godhood. She passed through days of deary scorn, as if all her body were spitting upon ell men encountered. And it made here so beautiful and wild that men dared not look at her. In the town many worlds converged toward her. Her father had not yet been found. She was watched. Around her she felt wonder, awe, suspicion.

And no one to tell she could trust.

Yet she loved him.

However much she despised, her youth loved and longed. Two strong streams bounced upon the rocks of pain of her everyday; the mysterious flow of forms and dreams witch were like messages unread, letters unopened lying upon the door step, a flow ever more steady and rich threatening to absorb the whole of her in some supernal ecstasy: then the anguish of body, of the want to be loved and to mother, the want to take hands and head into one's one, to forget dreams in the throb of glorious oblivion.

Like a mother, she loved him.

Then she heard her father was coming.

He had been found in a northern city where he had married wealth. First he had refused to bother about her, but decided to send her until of age to a convent in a west. The news struck her, as the druggist's wife confided it. The first thought was: escape. The second, a terrific anger that shattered her bearings and left her powerless and dulled. Then she thought of him, the poor beloved, and his thwarted life against the grain love.

Soon, soon her father was coming.

If she must go, then victorious.

Life was beating her. She would force life, bow it to her will. Rania, the strong, could not leave, defeated. Face to face she would make destiny if destiny refused to make life for her. The next day she would be gone. She asked the boy to take her for a last stroll near the river she loved, and upturned sky frowning star-ripples under the strain of the winds.

If she must go, then victorious.

It was late summer.

The trees wept golden seeds into ceaseless flow of the waters oblivious of their love. The boy was silent, nearly trembling from some fearful ghost, inescapable. In the darkness she took him by both arms; she gazed at him with passion of wilful love. She cried to him: “Look at me! Look at me! Am I not beautiful? Take me. I shall release you from your curse. I shall drop upon you my strong purity. Grow into me, my boy! Laugh off into me your fear and your ghosts. Ah! Take me...”

It was late summer.

There were no clouds, nothing hidden.

It was a great fierce gesture of will and strength. She tore him from his shell; she dug into his heart for life to spout and free him who had been slave and bound. She stirred in him the muscular strength that makes the first birth of man toward the second birth of supernal power. As they arose, he was glowing like wild fire with the passion of her in his breast, with the taste of her in his skin. As they arose, he would sing, he would cry, he would dance. She looked at him. She was proud in her fierce motherhood of him as a man.

There were stars, clear, strong, nothing hidden.

The following day she left.

Her father was cold and distant. He had climbed up in the great game of respectability. He was not eager to have his past mar his never-too-safe present. She greeted him with amused scorn. Now she did not care. She wore red blood over her pale cheeks. Life within pulsed hight and rich. She bid the boy good-bye with a triumphant glance. Even the druggist she laughed at, with merry wishes. For her blood knew that in her had come the mystery.

Victorious and fulfilled, she left.

First days in the convent.

Rania entered the gates with laughing defiance. She knew herself powerful and would take it as atest of strength between the life in her and the fallacious benevolence of the grey shells parading silently through endless corridors. She felt the whole atmosphere so ludicrous that it stirred her sense of humour. She faced the frowning nuns with challenging eyes that said: “Here I am. You fools, what will you do with me?” Condescendingly the performed routine work with perfection. The nuns glanced at her, wonderingsly, as leisurely travelers at powerful dark bodies hoistiong cotton bales in Asiatic harbors.

First days in the convent.

She took refuge in her mystery.

While her body and brains were retailing muscle and nerve tension in ordinary gestures, her soul was sweeping through aeons in great flights of wonderment. In her first sense of motherhood she seemed to have pierced through many crusts, scraping off the dirt off the dirt of self from the skin of eternity. The great steam of forms and colors which she had beheld in her dreams had taken some inchoate yet deep-thundering meaning in her very fecundation. They were more real, yet less important. They shone now with reflected light like huge moons of some inner skies haloing her heart; but Light itself, the Power, she could sense at the center-streaming, bold, thrilling Light yearning to become form and gesture.

She took refuge in her mystery.

She flung it at her schoolmates.

She faced them, a perpetual mockery aimed at their childish purity, darting poisonous spears at their innocence. She rode though bewildered minds, a fierce Amazon amidst a female herd, slashing prudery and prejudice with sarcasm. A few grew hateful; most worshiped. The irony of her position delighted her, upstrained her. Her acts being reproachless, none could blame her. But her looks and gestures shrieked out the insolent joy.

She flung it at her schoolmates.

And a letter came that shattered all.

The druggist's wife who loved her was writing how the boy-clerk had poisoned himself two days before. No one knew exactly why, save that since Rania had left he had become dreadfully nervous, had made dangerous mistakes in filling prescriptions, had had several angry word-battles with the druggist who was ready to throw him out. His body was resting now at peace under golden oak leaves near the river on which stars were still dancing under the winds.

Then Rania flew into a great passion.

She tore the sheets of her bed.

She beat her womb savagely with terrific laughter.

She jumped from her first story window.

Half-numbed by the fall she ran across sloping fields.

Above, rigid mountains heaved frozen sighs.

As of some old unbearable pain.

Trees flung themselves many-handed to the sky,

dried up sarcasms of earth-pangs.

She ran to the stables, unleashed horse

and beat him like mad until the beast,

with foaming mouth, raged with elemental passion.

They tore through ravines and stony fields.

The winter sun stared with hellish fire.

Rania's face reddened with its menace.

Jaws strained, eyes devouring the light,

she was singing, singing, singing.

A wild steppe song of old remembrance

had flared through her brains and body.

She cried it to the darkening skies.

She shouted it to winds gashing through canyons.

Until she and the beast,

spent flames of anger,

collapsed.

All night she lay in the ravine. Her body was bruised and panting, wounded by aborted life. Her body was bleeding like a broken jar; her mind reeling, lashed by words darting through feverish cells: “I have killed him! I have killed him!” Until the sun rose again from the dead, golden and young with triumphant light which caressed her face, which warmed her broken body, which was kind and strong. Rania awoke from the raving stupor and looked at herself, and looked at that other tragic death of the unborn. She smiled, “Poor little one! No chance, this time!”

With great power of will she rose, whistled for the horse which was grazing nearby, unconcerned. She dragged herself upon the beast. She lay panting on his back and rode until men in a car saw her, stopped her and kindly brought her back to the convent.

She lay for weeks with fever.

The nuns were kind and strange, like beings of some other world not yet born, not yet breathing life. They moved gently, noiselessly with feet which had never stamped the pulsating earth. They were still wrapped in grey placenta, floating in the waters of childish belief and obedience. For her who looked with eyes that had known the bleeding of many deaths, they were like phantom, unreal images of a dreamy limbo. The real, she heard and saw from within her closed burning body. Forms and faces, lights, words rose up, passed through, with meanings of power she left like electric breaths, yet grasped not.

She lay for weeks with fever.

Strange, dark faces came to her.

With strong clear eyes they becknod and pointed to great mountains with everlasting snow. They uttered familiar words, words that clanged with fierce majesty. A hidden self that she had nevever known arose in recognition; a self young and clear, with calm certitude even though its slps seemed so insecure. It moved in the world of forms that glowed from within-curious, geometrical shapes, bars of all colors, spheres, pyramids-swaying with tidal rhythm, yet propolled from within as if they were lives with great hearts beating at their centers.

Strange, dark faces spoke to her.

Slowly the fever left.

She found herself curiously calm and poised. Her eyes, turned inward, smiled with kindness, with amused gentleness at the outward. She was tender to all the grey unborn that paced silently though the halls. She was kind because they knew not, because one must be kind to the future-kind to sleepwalkers also, for fear one might awake them too suddenly and souls might forget the path to the body.

Slowly the fever left.

Something had been born in her.

She knew it from within. She knew it too from the mirror, telling her strange secrets of deepened lines and steadied eyes, of a mouth clear and firm that had been childish and stubborn, but now lived. Mysterious life of human mouths! They open to food. They open to breath, and to love. Each time, some of the things that touch the quivering flesh write their names, not to be forgotten. One name after another, one dream, one passion after an another. Long years of adolescence ridden through at mad pace, gallopings of proud soul, of heart of ancient stock untamed by the shams of this age. She had killed the still unborn, father and son; and yet...

Something had been born that was true.

The mother Superior spoke to her.

She felt that after all that happened it was better for Rania to leave the convent and go to her father. She had written him and he was coming the next day. Rania answered politely with thanks for the care they had given her. Then, she hesitated as she opened the door. Should she tell words of life to the gentle, indrawn and dulled eyes of a woman who sent her away because she had dared to live and face tragedy? But she smiled, shook her head and then left the sleepwalker to the phantasms of her unformed world.

The Mother Superior stared at her, helplessly.

She met her father at the station.

He seemed older and weighted with unexpressed soul and distrust of life. She faced him in silence. He was almost afraid to look at her strong self which had found power in dying. He asked her at last what she wanted to do. Her stepmother was unkind and spoiled. He did not know whether he could stand it much longer. Money is a poor game to trifle with. He longed for the earth of wild humans raging thought steppes and hills. He was yearning for the old earth of this forefathers where men are stolid and bronzed by secrets impenetrable.

She glanced at her father with pity.

But she could not follow.

She too had dreamt of Eastern faces. She knew they would call for her when time had to master this, ere that could be reached-this soil of unborn, the mad rush through the pale joke of civilization. She has killed two heroic birth of anew humanity. She had died within the white lips of beds that led to greedy mouth of the beyond. But she had come back from below, and she had to prove herself master and mother.

She could not follow him.

He must let her go alone.

And alone she took the burden of the roads.

He had given her enough to assure her life for a few months to come. He had pressed her into his arms bowing before the will of the strong stock and the strong soul. He too would go. He was too old to search for true love. He had damned too many with his own lusts and his own cowardice. He had not dared be true to his god. But now he would go, go back whence light came and his own dawn also. He would go back and retrace the rungs of life's hell, and search for peace where glaciers bestow silence and bronzed faces tell no secrets, for they know.

And both took upon them the burden of the roads.

CHAPTER II

She went down the coast virescent with spring.

The rust of numberless poppies be-topazed the hills swarming with squirrels. The dry strenght of oaks spiraling from the earth in contorted rhythms told of deep roots, stubborn and firm. Like locks of hair they emanated the powerful magnetism of the body-earth that bore them in defiance of the drought. There must be some rich blood flowing deep down to bear the rigidity of trees-sycamores, redwoods, massive oaks. Rich blood, rich humus, golden wheat, golden poppies, strong where the kiss of the sea does not moisten with fog the parched skin of the land.

She went down the coast virescent with spring.

Because she liked freedom she bought a small car.

Breathing deep the rain, one with the soil, imbibing with fervor the gift of water, she zigzagged through valleys and hills drinking freedom and sun like one reborn. She rolled herself upon the grass: her body gave in love to the vast breasts of the earth, to the deep womb of canyons rounded in expectation of seeds. The air was soft with flowers, pungent with orange-whiteness. It flowed through the crisp leaves of the oaks like woman-hair through millions of combs. It flowed through her, kissed her legs bared to the caress, kissed her browning flesh offered to the sun through dawns of sun ecstasy. It glowed in her eyes, staring at the light. She was drunken with mimosa, drunken with radiant orchards, drunken with fertility and rain, her body ploughed with passionate languors.

In freedom she roamed for weeks along the great ocean.

Then she reached the city of glamorous screen-fame.

Because she was young, agile, and beautiful, she was told she would have no difficulty in piercing through the host of potential stars starving through weary ordeals, and would be singled out. She took rooms in a studio club filled with youthful cravings and hectic pursuits. She found soon that women with beautiful bodies and easy characters were many, a common fare for men who retained the absolute power of casting or pushing. She waited for hours and hours in crowded offices with mobs staring at some small window whence would come signs of possible favor. She had to disrobe to the weary eyes-yet never too weary-of casting officials in search of tempting curves for oriental screen-orgies. She saw in their looks the appraising of connoisseurs feeling skin and muscle, evaluating also the boon of easy-gained nights.

She had reached “screenland,” modern slave market.

At first she laughed it off, bewildered yet amused. She was too proud really to mind the banal desire of all-powerful bosses. Small pride only fears being insulted by small men. She looked back with ironic scorn and politely joked with them, as with misbehaving children. The whole show seemed such a farce that she could extract but humor out of the amazing scenes that came before her every day. She was eager to know all life, to depths, even though filth might cling to it and weigh it down for long miseries. It was all mankind, the living pulse of passion; not to dismiss, but to understand. How could one understand unless one would live through, if not with the muscles, at least with knowing looks?

And so she went through it all, bewildered yet amused.

But soon a strange disgust began to creep in her.

It was a slack time when she reached movieland. Thousands of “extras” were crowding outside gates, running credit accounts if lucky, or nearly starving; contented, if they were brave, with sunbaths and meals snatched here and there. She found it hard to get an entry to the sanctuary of the huge hangars, factories of dreams, temples of deception. Weeks of long waiting passed; endless procession to studio gates, or afternoons mobbed in narrow halls facing one door through which the chosen ones would disappear, often sacrifices to the strange Moloch of the soulless industry; soulless because of its world fame, because men and women were rushing in with dreams from all over the earth, hundreds competing for every little bit, all fitted just as well for the easy work. How could choice be made save on grounds of personal preferment, which meant lust or drink, or the gambling away of this or that?

And slowly, insidiously, disgust seeped into her.

But money was scarce and she had to keep on.

She could laugh at insults and ward off banal greed; but the drawn out, depressing routine of days reaching nowhere made her life rebel in helpless anger. Helpless, for there was no one to be angry at; no one but a machine, but the grinding of unorganized wills flaring excitement into emptiness or polite refusals worse than insults: “Nothing today! Nothing today!” The dull refrain, ending long errands from mountain to sea over miles of roads, far and wide roads to many aGethsemane. “Nothing today! Nothing today!” The dull refrain, ending long errands from mountain to sea over miles of roads, far and wide roads to many a Gethsemane. “Nothing today! Nothing today!”

But money was scarce and she had to keep on.

She made many friends, women and men.

A strange comradeship there was between these many-raced faces gathered at the foot of the hills, browning there with the rainless summer. She was kind but distant; and most were kind but distant. Mornings, as she would rush in her car to some studio beyond the hills, she would pick up on the roads straggling pieces of humanity waiting, moneyless, counting on good luck for a ride. They stood on corners with tortured eyes, anxious for the passing of minutes which might mean being last and failure. The word would come that beards were needed; and files of hirsute faces, as from a world long past, would flock on the trail to five dollar checks, ten dollars perhaps for the lucky... living in many cases on a week's, even a couple of days' work a month.

She made many friends, kind yet distant.

One had to be kind.

One could never know when some strange trick of luck might not transform long-drawn features, peering through casting windows from the outer world, into the powerful boss glancing through some windows from the inner world dispensing salvation. But one had to be distant; for who knew what thief and polluted one might not glare behind sad countenance, heartrending misery, arousing pity, or the composure of evening-dressed gentlemen wearing moustaches like coats of arms heavy with ancestors. It was all a huge, heartless gamble, bitter contest and ferocious struggle most of the time-all weapons free to slander favored ones, or to drag some director from the body of a long-beloved.

One had to be distant.

At last she got her first break.

After nearly naked ordeals in front of hight-ups - “Turn around! Head up! Bend your back! Dance!... Hum! Not so bad! Good skin... Will register well. Breasts a little thin. Oh! Well, it will do...” - she was selected for a “bit” in a big Arabian picture to be made on location. She was to be the favorite slave attending the queen. Her clothes she could hold between two fingers; small trunk and some pearl string. She was signed up. One hundred a week and free board in the camp, somewhere in the dunes.

That was her first break.

Weeks of “location” work.

Broiling sun beating on a camp with hundreds of tents, small and large. Work starting at daybreak in cold chilly air moist with sea-fog. Gulping hot coffee and banal fare, after cold nights and colder awakenings before dawn. Then hours of painting practically naked on the sand which but slowly warmed up to the touch of the sun; then orders, counter-orders, confusion. Beasts and men herded into masses, swayed by contradictory whistles, thrown into panic, to and fro. With the zenith sun, dancing would start. Hours of dancing, swirling, dropping, perspiration on the sizzling sand. "Once more! Once more!" slashed weary muscles again and again. Exhausted, scorched; yet going on once more... once more.

Weeks of "location" work.

Weeks of steady, cruel work.

She had to dance under the lash of some huge black figure, some tragic mimic of despair. The man was kind but awkward. He was afraid to hit. The director got mad. "Darn you! Can't you use a lash!" The man lost his head. "Picture!" The camera ground. He used the lash. She nearly fell, her breasts cut; but she was reckless; she went on. The assistant yelled, "Hey! Go easy! You fool!" The man did not hear. He lashed. She danced; she danced; her teeth clenched; she danced-until she fell fainting, bleeding. It was a good shot. They had made the man drunk to make it more real.

Weeks of cruel, relentless work.

The director thought she was game.

He went to her and helped her up. She opened her eyes enough to see his face agleam with sadistic grinning. He stared at her. He could not do much now before the mob; but she understood. They gave her a day of rest and treated her well. One senses soon when favor falls upon one from on high. One must be very kind then, very kind. For the favorite may either crush or grace from her bed of pleasure. Other girls laughed and sneered: they were jealous. He was hard to please. His pleasure meant fame. They must watch her and begin to slander her, carefully though-most carefully.

The director thought she was game.

He told her so plainly when location ended.

He asked her to come to his office. He was very kind. He inquired about past and family. He played at fatherly tones, essayed a few silly gestures. She laughed. She knew she could not do it. He was domineering and cruel. She felt his craving like some foul animal twisting round her limbs. She could barely breathe. He had almost hypnotic power. He tried to seize her. She flung herself back and with cutting words threw him away to his desk. He sneered like a beast. "Proud, hey! Well, you know, better not play with me... dangerous game here." She asked to leave. He frowned, rushed to her, almost crushed her both hands. "Now girl! Don't be such a damned fool! What do you want? A house, car, jewels? All right... but, by God!" She looked at him slowly, up and down, shrugged her shoulders and simply said, "I am not for sale, that's all." He burst out in cramped laughter and let her go. "All right! Go your own damned way, little idiot. But you hear, no monkey-talk and not one step of yours black in this studio; or else..." and the gesture that ended was harsh and cutting like a curse.

In this manner "location" work ended.

As she went through the waiting room a man followed her.

Face flushed and a somber anger in her eyes, she did not see him. He was an hold man, had played the hight priest in the lashing scene. When she was outside the gates, something broke within her. She bit her lips, clenched her fists, not to let go. But when she came to her car, she dropped on the wheel and sobbed. She was startled as she felt a kind hand pressing her arm and a voice saying: "That's all right, girl! Don't take it so bad. He didn't kill you after all. You aren't the first one. That's the game. Don't mind it." She looked at a smiling face shaking with fatherly pity; she remembered him. He knew. He had seen her come in and out of the boss's sanctuary. He knew. Her face told. She tried to smile too, grinned only and cried bitterly in his arms.

The old man who followed her was kind.

He took the wheel and drove her to the beach.

The lay on the cooling sands watching the withdrawal of light and the slow rise of the fog, the cold, heavy breath of the compassionate sea moving earthward to mother the leaves and wipe the dust off their scorched eyes. There was a long silence. She was quiet now, look-eyes. There was a long silence. She was quiet now, looking far and away, following the motion of some things of the sea swaying on the big waves curling and breaking with the back power of great infinitudes. He looked at her distantly, as if she had a name, but where some transparent symbol of sorrow to be cared for, lest it might vanish and leave the earth empty, meaningless. He was dreaming through her at life; and it felt good to the wounded one, for that was quiet, silence, selflessness.

He lay near her for hours upon the beach.

Then she looked at him, whimsically.

The thing was absorbed now. It had struck and hurt. Now the time had come to shake off the ugly dream and live again more knowingly in the strength of one's soul, intangible. She fixed with a long clear look his restful countenance, a face long past middle age which must have suffered and forborne, and perhaps forgotten. His eyes did not shrink. They were deep grey lakes with soul-mist rising from old memories of sorrow. They were kind, full of acceptance, shadowed by some intangible dream almost beyond life.

She looked at him and laughed.

And gaily he also began to laugh.

Like two big children, they laughed at life, at them-selves, at all the foolish water, tear-wasted throughout the ages. "What do you think he did to me?" she asked. "Don't know," he shrugged off. "I guess he might do anything. But the way you looked, I rather think he hadn't it easy!" and he smiled. "Easy!" she retorted. "Not on your life! I don't care, old man. I am not a silly girl to waste tears on my body, taken or not. You know what hurt?..." No , he did not know. "His eyes. They were awful. They pierced and tore me. It was ghastly. My body, what's the difference? He might just as well have had it, as long as he would get thrills out of it. It might have done him good. Men are such strange animals. But I couldn't bear his eyes. Anything, but not that."

His face was grave now. He understood.

She was a strange girl.

He had not yet seen anyone like her. Obviously she had known much of life otherwise she could not have this freedom and peace of a turned-loose self, whose moorings suffering must have burned, ere it could rise from the old fears and the old restraints-yet remain a self, unmovable and real beyond the tricks of flesh. He wouldn't question her. She might tell of her own accord. He had respect for all depths, this kind man whose eyes were heavy with soul-mist from memories of sorrow. He began to feel a deep tenderness for the lean creature whose heart was beating with a rhythm unfrequent among the herd of bodies called woman women, lowing for food or for love. Old memories he had thought vanished lifted their heads to watch the new life-throb moving on from within toward the stranger.

She was a rare, mysterious girl.

She suddenly felt hungry.

They hurried back to Hollywood, growing proudly her first skyline, as a youth his moustache. Adolescent, easy, tense, inert, excited and unreal... indeed an adolescent youth in love with love and movement, amazingly self-conscious, innocently depraved and foolishly aping vices which cause no trill but soothe the rush of blood from head to sex. The Boulevard was gay, rouging its facades with neon lights. Musso-Frank was recovering from rush hour and late players coming in, grumbling at directors who dragged on the scenes and kept one hungry and weary, in sheer obstinacy over some business which meant nothing. Rania and her new friend sat in a booth and open, lovely faces looking in, amused and gay. The evening, softened with fog, yet warm with the glowing of the earth that sun had so well loved.

Hunger appeased, they went on riding.

Over the high ridge above the lake they sat.

Under the moving fog glowing from below, thousands of lights were dancing. In long lines they shone, brightly marking the main boulevard, fainter ones for the cross-streets. All the south was scintillating; and north, along the San Fernando Valley, new cities were rising, coruscating the dark combs of mountains! Desert winds blew from afar, warm and soft, vast tender arms to relax into and taste of love, soft pungent fragrance like chrysanthemums. Men were children, mad, selfish children. They made love; they could never belove and silence and repose in the beloved-vast, endless repose from the weariness of self. Rich nights, never forgotten, the real live hours of California, when the sun had waned and the earth breathes perfume, and men might be beautiful and smile in love and repose...

The hills were moaning under the winds, like flutes.

He asked her to let him be her friend.

He could help her along a great deal in the studios. He had worked many years for types; he had written successful plays years ago, cheap things he cleverly put together. Then he grew disgusted with the game. He had enemies who blocked his way. For a while he acted on the stage; then his health broken love. Just a banal story. But somehow he had seen through it and won. He had lived in the desert; he had still a cabin on the Mojave Desert where he retired when studios got on his nerves. He had been five years in Hollywood; had seen the little churches go and the eucalyptuses, ant tall buildings grow that broke the sloping of the hills. He had seen men of all nations flock by trainful to sunshine and moving shadows. He could have made much money perhaps, but cared little. He has just enough to be free, if needed, and live in the desert whose bareness and silence are king to one who had suffered. He worked when good bits came. He did not know much perhaps, but had forgotten much. Is it not what one has forgotten that makes one wise?

He knew at least one thing-how to be a friend.

And so their friendship grew, strong and loving.

Some people smiled; others openly said the usual ugly things. But they were happy. He brought her to casting directors whom he knew well. With the few hundreds she had earned in location she bought lovely gowns, made others. She was ready for the game. Her strong features and big eyes registered well. She fitted exotic scenes. French and Russian sequences saw her running, from queen to beggar. Much of the dreary waiting in casting offices was over. She found enough work to keep her going without harassing assistants and directors for personal help; and the strange captivation of this unreal life began to posses her...

With her old friend, Johan, she found happiness.

It was a quiet, beautiful happiness.

For the first time in her life she left a rich, unobstructive affection surrounding her. She yielded to its warmth as to the soft air of sweet-scented nights. He was gentle and full of humorous anecdotes. He had seen and traveled much. He had a keen sense of people, intuition of their inmost self, much respect and much patience. He was with her almost every evening when they worked in the day, often went for long rides, perhaps camped under trees, on the desert. He was patient and simple. He knew he was old and none too strong. He did not care to force his love upon her. He was waiting, dreaming often of her loveliness, of the supple body he watched dancing and running on sloping hills. He never asked her anything. She was happy, he knew. What did it matter? She might feel some day the need for his arms yet strong enough to press her as a lover and stir her young body... But he was willing to wait, not to spoil the rich comradeship, the quiet, beautiful happiness.

He lived in a small canyon toward the north.

A young, reckless friend of his, Richard Newell, had built the bungalow. It had several rooms, live fireplaces with updancing flames, a library filled with books, and solitude under huge trees-eucalyptus spears smelling fresh, rose-wigged pepper trees comforting in their stol-idness. The grounds were left wild, still hairy with sage and darting yuccas. The soil was black, pungent with shed leaves. It rose rapidly as the slope of the hills joined in rounded embrace, two firm thighs vibrant with earth-love. A few goats were roaming under dark bushes, relics of old days. An old Italian kept them nearby. Rania loved them, drank their tasty milk. It awakened memories of her mountain-youth in Karpathian wilds.

It was a small, hidden canyon toward the north.

Richard Newell had left a year before.

His father was a wealthy man; his passion: oil. He roamed over the earth hunting oil, digging for oil, smelling oil. He was tall and lean, an old derrick sullied by the hell-born flow. He loved the game of adventure in strange lands. An Englishman, he worked with the diplomatic lands. An Englishman, he worked with the diplomatic service of his country, and bribes and stole and killed to uncover the viscous thing that clung to his bones. Richard inherited from him a strange wanderlust and a violent nature, hardly tempered by softer mother-strains. He loved big deeds and crushing passions. Intensely selfish, he adorned himself with proud gestures Arabia. His tales were glorious, were true. He could do anything... and undo anything His soul was of a condottiere; his body strong, nervous and irresistible. He knew it. He used it. Suddenly weary with Hollywood, he disappeared toward Asia. He had not been heard of since.

Richard Newell had left a year before.

The library was filled with books.

There were books of travel, books of adventure, books of science, books of philosophy. His dead mother, abandoned by his father, was a great reader, trying to forget and understand. She had traveled in the Orient and brought back in her soul the quest for silence and infinitude of ancient races. Chinese, Hindu, Persian poets and lovers, mystics and sage, she read; hoping to reweave the rug of scattered memories with the many threads of wisdom. She left her books to Richard, who cared little, but kept them, partly to show off depth to impressionable conquests. Johan loved to read; he read aloud to Rania listening in wonder, asking to read; he read aloud to Rania listening in wonder, asking big question-unanswered yet, but stirring on, arousing, shattering also.

The library was filled with books.

She became feverish with knowledge-thirst.

She brought books with her on every set where she was working. She stole away from the yawping group of extras, away from improvised bridge parties behind scenery between director's whistles. She was tired with the constant aimless chattering of long days of illusion, in agilded costumes, tawdry gowns or rags. Adventures, love affairs, little scandals, tips for this or that... she knew them all. She became careless of comradeship, she hid in corners far from the lens, striving not to come into close-ups, letting ambitious ones fight for "getting in" near the star, indolent; but devouring books, books, more books. They laughed at her. Assistant directors chided her, rebuked and menaced. Distantly she obeyed, performed hackneyed gestures - 'being French" with foolishly stereo typed demeanor to please Mr. X, who had been in Paris and "knew it all"; "being Russian" with languid, exotic pallor and blackened pupils; "being full of pep" with squirming contortions and shallow grinning. It was business. It had to be done. So little registered; who cared anyway? She was far and beyond.

She was feverish with knowledge-thirst.

She read all the books about Eastern lands.

She read travel stories. She dug into philosophy with passionate intensity. She began to grasp inner meanings she had never fathomed. She saw that the old visions and dreams she had nearly forgotten had been real experiences, vestiges or forebodings. She pondered over, dissected, compared, played with ideas, as with her enthusiasm, they glowed, as huge diamonds dazzling upon soul-fingers. She read evenings, nights. She could not tear herself from the library. Johan, smiling at her new passion, suggested she might as well stay for good in his house, as long as she hardly ever slept in her own club-room. She look at him, straightforward, with clear soul. She knew he loved her. She was grateful. She bowed her head, smiled a little, whimsically, a little weary perhaps. Then she faced him with open love and joyousness. "All right, Johan! Friends always? As before?" "Of course," he answered.

Her soul had been caught in the dream of the East.

But it was too much for her body.

Hardly sleeping in spite of her friend's admonitions, tense over printed pages, strained in weary self-questioning, tired out by the routine work, long standing and waiting of the studios, her strength gave out toward the spring, and she fell ill with flu. Johan nursed her devotedly through days of fever and long convalescence. He was not well himself, and every cold he got roused again the old lung trouble never quite cured. But he was happy. She was sweet and tender like a young child resting in mother-love. She felt secure. She was drawing in fresh things that were life from the very threshold of a possible death. It was strange how illness would open up great fields of light, as if her strong body had been shutting them out by the glamor of health. She would not awaken. She would sleep long hours peopled with dreams and beautiful faces of power like those she had seen years ago, and at times a curious shadow, the features of a man, indistinct, yet somehow spreading darkness and sorrow.

It had been too much for her body.

But summer and sunbaths gave her rebirth.

Climbing slowly up the canyons in the places of darkness of the hills, she bared her body and gave it to the light. And light took her and made her a thing of its realms, brown and glowing like warm fruits, ripe pineapples, growing from the soil amidst darting yuccas, bodyguard of speared watchers.

The sun was rich and stirring.

The sun beat forcefully on the place of darkness of the hills, on the place of darkness of the flesh. It was too much to bear alone, this potent sun, craving extension, inrush and possession.

The sun was strong and fierce. The sun would take one and melt one, and soft, lucent nights would follow with hot winds that creep beneath white sheets, that open windows, door, and love gates. And amidst the fervor of the dry earth crackling with sun power, she drew, supple and warm into Johan's arms, that knew strength once more and rhythm and glory. Life flew in her, sun-born, sage-scented, where the hills meet like firm thighs in the place of darkness beloved on the sun; and it made her well.

CHAPTER III

Many months passed by with indolence, with sameness. Rania was growing into womanhood, rounding with maturity angular corners of body and soul. She was flowing into the quiet rhythm of a life in which the rippling wavelets of excitement born of studio mock-storms was alternating with the quasi-seclusion of the canyon house, rich with loving-kindness and soul-stirring books. She had quieted down the pace of her reading, allowing life to pour and personalities to reach through her distant pride into her heart. She began to draw herself out toward human beings, no longer fearful of impacts, but eager to give. For she had found wealth that was indestructible and she saw men wearily dragging with spiritual poverty, hollowing out their looks-youthful, lovely looks of children, of beautiful soulless bodies.

City of soulless bodies, of pure instinct and receptive sensibilities. It seemed like a fresh moist clay craving for the sculptor's hands. And the hands joyously would mold and shape, unheeding the sticky matter clinging to nails and fingers. The night passed. At dawn the clay had dried up and there was nothing left but heap of sand, ever-virgin sand, ever-soiled, ever-throbbing, ever-lusting... yet ever-virgin. For virginity ceases only when mind awakens from within-even be it but instinctual mind; and Rania was staring at beautiful bodies, unlighted windows of some dark rooms, limbo of unborn selves.

"Oh my poor unborn!" she would sigh to Johan. "I feel them begging me to mother them into being real men. They cling to me, they beat me in my womb of soul. I am willing, Johan... should I not be? But what is the use? What is the use?

He was willing, too. He had brought no chain to bind her to their happiness. Their happiness was free, with but few shadows of race feelings that were old and outworn to stir nervous tensions soon absorbed. She was free to go as she felt the urge. If destiny called for her service, she should answer.

Johan lived with the poise of one who had known destiny. He had seen the heights of what men call success; he had loved and won and withdrawn, for he felt it was not worthwhile. As he had called upon the higher, outer failure answered - as it so often must. Failure and pain he accepted as part of the game. Perhaps he had nothing to offer; his life, to make noble and strong and peaceful. And he went through, his grey eyes veiled to concentrate better on birth within. She had come in him, as some one always comes when destiny is ripe. He accept whatever would be next, as he would accept happiness.

The year was still a slack one; much distress prevailed among the extras flocking in hordes ever increasing to the magic gates of the slave market. Drastic steps had to be used to stem the tide and the pressure of hungry looks and of willing bodies upon already satiated offices. Wages went down. Production being cut, the fewer the openings. Yet now and then sensational rises stimulated the hopes or cravings of always new recruits.

Rania was know and could easily get usual jobs. Johan found it harder, but somehow kept going. Often they improvised picnics in the hills, excuses to feed empty stomachs and legs weary of endless stations following long walls from corner to corner of the ever-widening studio districts. Boys and girl came, some with nothing but beauty, others with some vague craving for adventure, for reaching beyond. Hollywood - center of a world of unreality! Its glamor sucked youths from all races into its ever-shifting core, its poignant emptiness. It was no longer the little village kind and hospitable, filled with communal care, getting together and the like; and not yet a unit - a city - ensouled with a purpose. Here and there some dreamer would start a little "salon." For a few weeks few kindred souls would come and talk, escape from the rut of cranking cameras. Then friends would bring friends. Drinks would move on; radio twitter and squeak. And the "salon" ended in a fair, or a bored and sinless brothel.

Yet there was a strange uncouth fascination in this empty and soul-shattering existence with no tomorrow, with no chance of planning anything, always on the go or waiting, waiting to go, hanging on the phone day after day, hours of faithful presence near the dismal receiver, hoping for a studio to call toward six o'clock, then calling to make sure is not forgotten. “Nothing today. Sorry. Call again – in a week.” Politeness, strained affability of casting offices worn to utmost irritability by endlessly ringing phones, by question, by inquiries for jobs, by interruptions, schedules changed, directors' whims, lack of organization, waste, utter waste of time, money, lives. One wondered how they could keep on the grinning smile. Often they did not, of course. And curses flew and beastly treatment. Men, women herded like cattle; no consideration, no attention, no sense of human worth. Merely moving bodies to fit costumes on. “How many uniforms left?”

“Ten.”

“Damn you! Speed up and get ten men in the streets.” There were hundreds of men waiting for the ten costumes. Five bucks a day – but many, many empty foodless days between the luck of fitting into costumes, and being herded around in the wet, blood-freezing draught of winter stages, in the suffocating heat of dozens of are lights focused between walls upon which the fierce sun beat all day.

It was all so unnatural, so unreal. Not like the theater, a few hours every night of plays reaching climax in front of responsive audience; but every day the putting on of illusion, the whole day the putting on f responsive audience; but every day the putting on of illusion, the whole day the dragging on into tinsel costumes through backless sceneries, in strange company, doing awkward gestures supposedly real. It ate into your blood. It sapped your moral strength. You went down to the level rhythm, vaguely stimulated by an atmosphere of excited boredom and meaningless sex craving. God! One had to do something to stand it all, month after month. If faking be, then faking all along the line; in and out of the sets. Freedom and restraint alternated. Mixture of reticence-one must keep a reputation - and of complete breaking down for favors from the "masters," or for the mere filling of one's own emptiness.

Yet a lovely illusion of spontaneity, of charm; life of bodies, of young, strong, muscular flesh, always in motion, always going-anywhere, nowhere-but going, ridding, playing, shouting; couples everywhere, alive, sunburnt; sense of mating, of rhythm-broken, hectic rhythm, but dance all the same-and the endless hope that, out of this chaos, the one, the expected, might surge and meet you with this same freedom and this same dance, where there is no class, no tradition, no prejudice, where one starves today, tomorrow makes merry, climbs and falls-huge gamble, life gambling, strip poker, body poker, soul poker, chaos, madness; but going, going, on, madly on, on.

There were big sets in the air and extras were pulling wires to get the many "bits" promised, expected, dreamt. Superpicture of the Thousand One Nights. Extravagance. Gold costumes. Elephants. Camels. Mobs. Lots of excitement. Studio buzzing madly. Hammers. Curses. Hair-tearing. Rush of worn-out faces from office to office. Pandemonium. The greatest picture ever made!

Rania interviewed, waited, interviewed some more. "Come again. No time. We have not the continuity yet. For God's sake! Let us breathe. Sure, promised; next week. Call us."

For once it came through. She got a part, a real one. And she had not slept with the director, or kissed the assistant, or given booze to the wardrobe! Marvelous. Johan too had a part as a monk, dervish or whatnot. She was a slave turning into a bad princess who seduced the son of the hero and caused everything to go wrong.

Rania felt suddenly like a kid, being drawn into the mad vortex of days of costuming, tests, wig-making and the like. She forgot everything and was going to have a good time. Dance rehearsals. The first sequence was a grand orgy a la motion picture. Naked girls whirling vehemently and swooning into the arms of sedulous princes breathing heavily in big robes, gold-heavied and stiff. It was glorious.

After a week of steady dancing, muscles aching and feet bleeding under the rain, the dancer's group was ready. Rania was the second best. There was a star dancer; but the prince obviously would not have her, was to rush to Rania instead, drag her before the throne, and order her to dance; and then his heart would be lost and the next thing she would know, she would be a princess.

All inspired, though freezing-winter dampness made unheated dressing rooms breeding places for colds-the dancers, ankles tinkling, hair excited into feverish curls, skin darkened, nails reddened, with the utmost brevity of clothes thought advisable, came onto the huge set. Massive columns, gold draperies, bejeweled throne, black varnished floor from which assistants cursed away too-curious extras, completed the paraphernalia of Hollywood-bred Oriental splendor. Around the floor were colossal cushions on which some hundred gentlemen with grand mien, false beards and rubescent clothes were trying to stabilize with dignity their preposterous and warlike appendages. A couple of braziers were burning in a corner of the big hight-roofed stage. The girls flocked to them shivering in coats they dared not keep close to their skin, the browning of which was not yet lights, heavy smell of floor varnish, of ether-pasting wigs and moustaches on rebellious faces, fumes of slow burning coal in the braziers. Heavy eyes half asleep still; too much love, perhaps! Hands stiff with quick rides in open cars from suburbs. And over it all the queer tension of something about to happen, of something being made; not really with the world public in mind, but as a thing in itself, self-sufficient in its unreality.

"On the set! Everybody on the set!" Latecomers push through, while assistants run, scold, drag here, drag there, scream, curse counter-orders, listen for the loud-speaker echoing through the din, scanning the directors's whims and ever-changing commands. The orchestra tunes in. The show is on; while the small one-eyed cameras record with blank faces the momentous events of the scene which will set millions of hearts and sexes athrill through five continents, which will set some to kill perhaps, others to quarrel with a banal wife, youngsters to mate hiding in corners; all because of the dream, the insistent dream, repeated endlessly, theater after theater, hour after hour to onflowing herds of wasteful minds craving release from meaningless jobs.

"Camera!" The dance is on-whirling flesh, dazzling scarves, fake jewels, shimmering lights. Men's faces glow on. A few twitter. Warmth increases, of perspiring nude bodies, of movement, of riveted eyes following arms, legs, supple torsos bending, twisting, offering them-selves, near, very near, coming, gliding. Arms undulate hans call, smiles glitter from lovely faces, dark, blue eyes, rouged lips. Paroxysm of the dance. The glorious bodies are to be seized, to be throw, panting from the dance, into one's arms, over one's knees. One must kiss almost the moist flesh, kiss the lips... not too much, not too much; it is not in the game of extras, only for close-ups. Yet kiss the lips, be very real, very convincing.

The director shouts: "Warm it up, boys! Be yourself. Now let go. Throw them away." And bodies are thrown away; but bodies remember, are hot. Acting? Oh yes, of course, it's all a fake. But flesh plus flesh is never entirely fake. And when the climax comes, when the girls rushing, whirling down some huge stairs are to be grabbed, fought for, carried away, with torn clothing and hot, convincing gestures, there are many who do not entirely fake, who fight a little too hard for the throbbing prey, who crave a little less fake, a little more real, whose blood must be restrained now of course, but is kept feverish and that night mustrage forth with pent up power.

Somehow Rania at first fell into the arms of a dark-eyed man who looked suspiciously Hindu. Somehow she liked him and arranged to fall again at the same spot, as many, many times the passionate scene was re-enacted. During shots there were moments to rest in these arms which had grabbed her, to relax on these cushions, huge and soft, where the male body had dragged her. Words were better that silence. Conversation ensued. The man had a strange, powerful face. It was not fake; real brown skin, real long hair. She wondered, questioned. He laughed with big white teeth. He did not answer; but looked at her long. She became uneasy, near with-drawing.

"You, beautiful, strong girl," he said slowly, with a marked accent. "This is no place for you. You belong to the old, old countries, my country. They don't understand you."

She looked at him, puzzled, inquiring.

"Yes, of course, they will love will love you and you will think it must be so, because you are young, your body is young. But the real you is old, so old. It is lovely, very lovely. I can feel it lovely. All old being are lovely; for young ones cannot understand why they are so quiet, and know so much."

Whistle. "Camera!" She had hurried away, troubled. The rest of the day she had to play her action with the prince who snatched her away and forced her to dance. She danced, eyes by the crowd; gazed at by friends and enemies, desired, envied, an image to be kept for long solitary nights for some not favored with love, a thing of beauty, selflessly moving, warmed by the primal urge of her own dark-skinned race that wandered over lands and struck no roots; race of free beings, of vehement loves.

At lunch hour she watched for the Asiatic with the strange knowledge of her. But could not find him in the rush that followed the words of release. Before going home, she looked again. He saw her, smiled and waved his hand from afar. She came home, uneasy and sullen.

The next day and the day that followed she saw him, the Asiatic. His dark eyes clung to her, piercing her beyond the flesh, rousing strange unbodily fires, longings for deeds of power.

He talked to her; deep, metallic, harsh voice. "You do not belong here. You are not of this puny race. You are strong. They are children, silly little children; just tearing through their easy dreams with no aim, gesticulating like madmen.

“In my land there are still some who know. There are secrets which give power. I shall teach you. Why waste your life doing foolish gestures, when you can be a god, command the gods and have nature your servant?

“I knew you as soon as I saw your body move. You have rhythm and will. I shall teach you how to breathe for power, how to still you wandering thoughts, how to rouse the Great Mother in you, the fire that makes one master.

“We shall work both as one. There will be more power. Life is like a battery. We need two poles for the spark. With the spark in us, we shall see through the wall. There are forces everywhere. All is alive. All these lives we can master, if we have knowledge and power.

“I have knowledge. I have studied ancient books. My father was one of a brotherhood in Nepal. He taught me. There are huge monasteries deep in the rock. They light fires that burn you, but make you god. Don't be afraid. There is no danger if you are strong. Only the fools fail, soft-headed, soft-hearted fools. They cannot keep their desires. But we shall not waste power, just to be like animals. Power which one keeps; out of that, one rises and masters.

“I don't want your love. What is love Mock bubbles of dreams, dead before they begin. I want you immortal, a power. I need you as you need me. Together, we can have power you as you need me. Together, we can have power, if we forget this race of fools, this suckling West, and go back to our old knowledge, our old secrets, our old strong nerves that do not collapse under shadows of pain.

"You love strength. I know. Of course not silly muscle strength soon turned over to worms. But strength that keeps, that grows stronger through centuries, free from the body. Body is but an instrument, a dynamo. Just a form to focus and release energy. When it is worn out, we get another one. But we, we need not go down and forget.

“Come out of these silly passions and silly loving, strong one! I shall show you the way. We shall leave these bodies and work, unseen. I know great men who will welcome you, too. Our old mountains will welcome you. They will uplift you. Cease bewailing the weakness of the mob-selves squirming around in this mock world. You want heroes, noble men to live a life glorious and free. You won't find them here.

“But in Asia, there are many. They are too great to let themselves be known and become prey to idle curiosity. What do they care about being known, when the world within, when all the powers of nature are theirs? But they work, be sure! They command; the fools obey, not knowing even that they are led from within their own brains. Will you stay a fool or be a master?”

To become a master of life. To gain power. To live the hidden life of one for whom the outer show a man is worthy but of scorn, for whom the world of energy, form-controlling, is real, is known, is dominated. Oh! She was so weary of puny selves, of aimless chattering, foolish sentimentality and neurotic yearnings without strength. She was weary of this constant disrupting strain, of this ceaseless agitation without purpose, without concentration, without heroism and nobility. She was craving life real and dangerous, life that exalts, that dares, life of deep confrontations, face to face with the powers she knew were lurking beyond, powers she could only dimly sense, yet felt one with intensity and stoic grandeur.

She was tired of happiness; she loved her old Johan dearly. But his calm and peace was too quiet a pool for her windblown self raised in the vast abysses of life. Her Gypsy, Mongol blood was crying out for Asia, for immensities to sweep clean at the frantic pace of horses that had fire. She dreamt of huge mountains, endless steppes. She saw herself galloping through, breaking through this world into other, claiming new tumultuous oceans to sail across, unchartered voyaging to unknown mastery.

The dark strength of these big, unmoved eyes fascinated her. She did not desire the man, though she felt his body rigid and stell-like, a tense yet strangely relaxed source of power. She did not love him; but she must follow him. This was the call for a greater life that could not be dismissed, that could not be delayed, that surged from within as a torrid electric tide when she was near him and he touched her back. It surged from her loins and rose along the spine, shiver of desireless yearning, reaching up, up, almost bursting toward the head. Powerful stillness, expectation of mystery, regulated breathing that produced a sense of not-being, yet intense energy, controlled strain-like steam speeding on joltlessly the huge monsters that tear along glittering steel.

They met as often as work permitted in his small cottage up in Laurel Canyon. A couple of tough, creepy oaks, Hydralike; rose spiraling up the earth. The wooden house was gripped into their iron tentacles, resisting, glaring with silk-curtained windows; a fire-place, a couple of divans, a few red and green draperies, printed scarves, cushions. He cooked strong curry. She love it. It burn through. It made the breath dry and hot. He made black heavy coffee out of long-handled ibziks, boiled in the open fire. He had pungent, spicy ones which he mixed and burned, till the air was like a hot fog, dizzying and intoxicating.

He sat near her, gazed fixedly at her. She must still her thoughts, fix some dark spot, train her nerves, be rigid yet relaxed. He would touch certain spots of her body. And fire would seem to burn through her. Sometimes she would stay all night. They would not sleep. The world had gone out of consciousness almost. At daybreak he would take her, half-faint under the nervous stress and strain, to the top of the canyon. He would massage her limbs and make her breathe slowly, rhythmically; a subtle, uncanny life-stream would pour through her. She would feel relaxed and vigorous. She would hurry through the day's work as if she had slept long hours.

Johan was distressed by her new life. Not only she refused herself to him, to save her life power she said-he would have accepted that-but she seemed to fade away from him into a realm of mystery which, he sensed, would certainly mean eventual disaster. He had read books dealing with many types of Yoga; his friend, Richard Newell, had told him about curious encounters he had had in India, about fakirs, adepts and priests using many-sided powers to charm, heal ... or kill. He was also acquainted with European writings on so-called occultism and had had experiences in Paris with a group dabbling in ceremonial magic; a group fro which he escaped in time to avert the fate of most of its members, who met tragic deaths which he could not help considering as fateful sequences to the practices indulged in.

Rania truly looked more beautiful than ever with her eyes deepened by a kind of inner glow, her cheeks somewhat and a provocative air of intense jubilation as if intoxicated with powerful visions. But this very glow frightened him. He had seen it in consumptives when, at the threshold of death, life seems to brim over the cup of a translucent body. He had seen it once in an ecstatic nun who went insane with holy visions of saints and angels. Old-blooded Hindus might stand it and reach beyond; but could Rania, in spite of her strength, resist the hollowing from within, the burning of an energy, no longer normally spent, but volatilized and, under forced draught, hissing and flaring to the brain?

He advised her gently, calmly; begged her to be wary and probe the motive back of it all. Why did she want power? Why this frantic desire to transcend the normal boundaries of her race-body? Was it real spirituality? He opened books she loved, read to her from theBhagavad Gita, from the calm, quiescent wisdom of the Tao. But she confronted him with many arguments he could not well answer. She quoted many texts proving that power need be acquired, that concentration practices were necessary for spiritual development. How could one hope to reach supermanhood before the powers of the body were transmuted, the animal mastered, and the Fire raised, opener of the great world where regenerated men live and work.

Her destiny had come. Characteristic indeed, that it would have been in the midst of the mob illusion of a wild set. But did not heaven and hell react the one upon the other; and would not the highest bound up from the deepest, as if powered by some mystic springboard? He did not need not be altered, because she was being reborn into a grater world. She would love him from some deeper and vaster recess of her heart as he would grow into her richer self. He was old and wise enough not to cling to dream bubbles and bodily lure, to transcend the personal into the impersonal, and love her into universal life.

But he shook his head and could not answer.

Long strained weeks went by.

The Oriental film was slow in the making. Rania's part was lasting all through, with periods of rest, alternating with feverish all-day-and-night sessions in hot then cold stages-outdoors under the blatant sun blindly focused on one's body by means of huge reflectors, indoors under the pitiless convergence of burning lights-then freezing hours of rest wrapped in fur coats around stoves, lashed by draughts making the perspiring, dance-weary body shiver.

Johan, too, was working almost constantly, a fantastic part requiring the utmost of exertion, long night vigils, almost acrobatic feats, acting with lions and panthers strange to stand by, with queer steady eyes laughing at you, devouring you, scorning from the noble depth of untamable power.

Long strained weeks of mad illusion.

The spring rains had come, bursting open flowers over the hills.

The spring rains had come, swelling wide-bedded arroyos, whirling steams of power cataracting through unaccustomed sands and willow-haired banks. They had come with torrential strength, that year. Streets were flooded, Johan's canyon was torn by tumultuous waters. The house was nearly surrounded by moving mud, thick, brownish clay clinging to the feet. The road to his canyon was practically blocked by washouts. The studios were islands emerging from swirling pools. Extras could not reach their work. Stagehands, assistants, directors cursed and roared, in dripping clothes. Every roof leaked. Life itself leaked from every frame. Blood seemed to have turned into water, seeping mournfully through the skin ashen with grey skies.

The rains poured for weeks into swollen canyons.

It had been a tense, hectic day. She had worked constantly. Nerves were hight-pitched. Everything went wrong. She had to stage a frantic scene of tears over the body of her dead lover. She couldn't do it at first. She was bored, sullen. She acted like a machine. The director scolded, insulted her. Everyone's will was pressing against her. 3Cry, girl! Cry! You are mad! Your lover is dead. Break down girl! Break down!” She couldn't do it. The director shook her. By God! She would cry! He pinched her so hard blood came on her arm. She screamed. Someone gave her whiskey. She was shaking. “Camera!” The dead body. She bites her lips. Tears stream as her face twitches convulsively. She cries. She cries. “Again! Once more! More movement. Tear your clothes, your hair!” Her arms beat the air. Broken, she falls, prostrated, lifeless. “Good shot!”

Good shot... good shot.

She is carried away. Her body quivers, nerves and fever. Johan is called. He rushed her in his car, unconscious, to the house, across dark stream and molten earth. A physician. Just nervous exhaustion. Nothing but rest, complete rest.

From the roofs, drops fall unceasingly into a big tub; leaks, leaks, everywhere. Drop after drop, like mad gonging; drops upon the skull, beating, fever-mad, torturing. “Please stop it! Stop it!” He piles up rags under the leaks to mufflle the sound. She is hot and he has to go to studio work. Days, he stands up in the rain; nights, he watches the curled body aching with strange pains.

With strange pains... Nerves seem to twirl in repressed spasms all along the limbs. If she could only stretch, stretch! He massages the warm body. She clings with her hands to the bed posts. He pulls her feet. Stretch! Stretch! Something is locked, twisted that cannot unwind. The body groans. There is fire that cannot flame, fire smoldering, turned into acid corroding the vitals.

Shooting pains, sharp and rhythmic, lacerate the back of the loins. They seem to pulse and rise from where the spine ends, flashes of blinding fire, bone-rending. They shoot at the heart, contracting, writhing under the mad inrush of power. Rigid face! Cataleptic. Stretched eyes, dry and glaring, like desert stones torrid with sun; The lips twirl and twist, pitiful. “Oh! Rest... rest... to forget, forever to forget.”

The body groans. It howls pain. It howls pain. It bends, it bends, it curl, it breaks, exhausted, powerless to shake off the mad demon that ravages, that consumes.

Johan stands up, worn out by work and vigil, staring at her torture, staring. Awesome silence creeps into the room as she relaxes, as she forgets. Huge black faces seem to sneer in the dark, seem to scorn and call for the prey; huge black hands to claw the panting flesh. Confrontation. Who shall win? He or they? His will is tense, tense, like steel cables harboring through the storm an airship to its mast. Someone must win. He or they? Oh! For the power, power to cast out the torturing hell- to carry her on, blessed, into the sun, into the silent sun, far into the desert, where stones are kind, peaceful, wondrously nonhuman, strainless and warm!

Someone must win. Someone must suffer. Someone must die, perhaps. It is the law, the great, mysterious law, that calls. Will he accept? Can he accept? He is an old man. What does it matter to love, to compassionate love? His life had been sort of failure-outer life. But who knows victory? Is failure victory?

His life opens up, a lightning flash through the black silence. Confrontation. Rania's body groans. Torrid pains tear up again. “Johan! Johan!” Poor, helpless voice! She knows. She has played the mad game. It is hurled back. Aroused power is pitiless. It devours. It sneers at fool's pride. Promethean pygmies craving fire! Now the curse falls, the thunderbolt. It rages forth. Shall it be stayed? Can it be stayed?

Johan rises. He accepts. Lets the fire burn! And in the black silence hammered by the rain, his naked flesh took her writing body and quenched the fire that struck at his own heart.

She recovered. Something had been released. The body lay unnerved. Strange weariness, poignant, void. Automatic motions of heart and lungs. Food entering, chemically scattered into molecules, indrawn, dispersed where needed most. Waste leaving the body. And the circuit again, aimless, strange to behold for a soul that wandered beyond the pale of earth-stars and was called back.

It is home again now-confusion, wonderment. It is all quite dark yet-an intricate web of life-streams, red, yellow, black, gold, which flow into one another, yet separate; each necessary, integral, with its own rhythm and its own meaning. But one cannot grasp well. The soul is still blind from the awesome dark, the torrid darkness of beyond the earth-stars. Familiar things stare at you as witnesses to some great expiation. Familiar things are mysterious judges. They confront the soul from a depth of knowledge which men do not posses. On them, destiny writes. The soul cannot help reading, though it may shrink, though it may sob bitterly, as if it had all been in vain, in vain.

Is there ever anything in vain?

Days of recover, of silence.

Johan went on with his work until the picture's end. He began to cough. He was so weary he could hardly move. His emaciated feverish flesh seemed to stick around him like wet clothes. A sad, faraway look dreamed from the depth of orbits caving under some heavy load. As soon as they were free from work they left for his cabin in the Mojave desert. The physician had listened to Johan's lungs. The wounded tissues within the lungs were tormented again by destructive powers. They had never entirely recovered from past assaults. Now suddenly the evil had struck deep; there was little hope left of recovery.

They rode to the desert, where stones are kind, where strange cacti-like semaphore arms-signal frigidly to the stars the passionate woes of men.

CHAPTER IV

Late spring in the high desert.

The sands paint themselves up to seduce the sun. Soon, under the torrid love, the face of the desert will lose its roses and purples and grow thin and dusty, in long summer weariness. But now the few sprinklings of rain have wrought florescent wonders. The winds that blow from north and west have still the cool taste of snow on their breath-fresh, strong, clear air that makes the skin lucent and stirs effervescence in the lightened blood. Rubescent skies dome evenings of peace after days of work or riding. It is good to breathe. Stars scintillate, bejeweling the pallid horizon scissored by mountains. One thinks of infinitude. Deeper breaths lift one up. The sky shrinks into one's eyes. Dizziness of beyond. Rolling over the still tepid earth, the sand dribbles into one's clothes. Away with them! Rapt in darkness, the passionate body breathes, loved by myriad-tongued winds.

Late spring in the hight desert.

Rania and Johan, alone.

A small wooden cabin and long dreams. Much to be pondered over; much which the heart dares not utter in loud words, yet broods over. Long wonderings through the sullen stillness of nights. The older body was very ill, would never be well again; the younger, strong, fervent, radiant with recovery. But the souls-mysterious, unknown; of what strange dreaming, watching, pondering was made their silence?

She nursed him, carefully, tenderly, guiltily; surrounded him with loving-kindness. She looked at him from within some hidden recognition as if the all-important thing could not be told, yet was hovering, hawklike, over the field of live moments to be snatched away into some dark recess of the night of soul.

Rania and Johan alone.

She was restless, filled with the unexpressed.

They rented a horse. She went for long wild rides, saddleless, her strong thighs mastering the raw will of the beast. They flew centaurlike, toward the dry ridges, sharp teeth of defiance baring the fury of the fabulous being with four-footed speed and two-armed power. The alone against the rocks, black and grey with bleeding veins of metallic ore, the sang. Deep, resonant voice with strained intonations and tones powerful with soul-craving fervor.

She was restless, bursting with songs unsung.

She sang to the desert.

Songs never-written, songs clamored from the life urge, melodies strange with unWestern steps, with glissandos nurtured by Asiatic ecstasy. She was calling for the new races of men, summoning from the deep of unearthly motherhood the god-born heroes of a richer earth. Sands and rocks seemed to swirl to the rhythm of the songs-dust tone-molded into shapes of power. She was straining her soul into the future. Would the fierce dawn break? Power was still burning into her blood-soul. Fate-battered, she was still the rebel, once more stirred by the magnificence of stones.

That was her desert song.

Johan listened to it in wonder.

He could not fully understand this Amazon power. His life was flowing with quieter rhythm, ebbing away now in the burnt offering. Soon he would die. It was well. He had done his work. In away somewhat dark which he could hardly fathom, he had saved a soul he loved. He had put himself between her and the powers aroused to destruction. They struck at him and he collapsed. And now the freed one was singing, singing, songs vibrant with infinitude, songs hard and raw with elemental strength, magic with powers he could not face. What did it all mean? Songs of triumph born of his own dying? Songs of liberation? Some nights they would soften and caress; his heart would sob away with chidlike despair. At dawns they would burst forth with the sun rays. They met the noons like bells clanging, deep-throated, for masses of light as for a ritual never-ending. Rania's songs surrounded him who was dying, and life poured in from very far, unearthly: from what planet, her home?

Johan listened, listened in wonder.

To escape summer heat they drove north

Through fir-lined ridges, chasms of torn granite, deserts to the right, fruit-laden orchards to the left, they reached Yosemite. High up where one faces the vast display of slate-colored masses towering into glaciers, with precipices gaping, thirsting mouths of stones streaked with foaming rivilets and cataract-thunder, hight and clear into the love of skies, they dwelt, souls dilated with infinitude. The awesome silence of mile-deep canyons, stilled Rania's songs. She felt a yearning to draw on paper the monumental masses, to extract from the rocks and capture with blacks and whites the thousand faces that stared at her from some heroic past.

Great heroic past of this rugged North!

From sequoias to granite!

She drew them all.

In harsh, cutting strokes she sketched the monstrous shapes, enlivening dead forms into myriads of faces, re-enacting the mystery of creation. The pulse of slow-heaving stones stirred dark masses into consummation of ecstasies that were hardly of the earth. She had captured the elements' dances. Then she would pin the sheets on the log walls, cry triumphantly to Johan to come and see the new birth. More often than not on the next day she would teat them into bits and throw them into the abyss, laughing, a priestess feeding the eternal Moloch with limbs of tortured children. And fire invisible would spout from the monster and seize her and force her to draw again new prodigious scenes of cosmic mysteries.

For weeks and weeks, she drew.

Johan's life nearly sank away.

It was too strong, too vehement perhaps this life, this presence of fire burning near him with lionlike tenderness. But he did not care. He was to see it through. As this was the end, he would rather take it gallantly and speed it up into freedom for her. Their money, accumulated during highly paid weeks of studio work would not last forever. They had bought a new car. He would use it to surround his death with speed and new horizons, across mountains and deserts, wanderers feeding on the glorious body of this land of power. So they went back to the desert, and after a few weeks of rest during which he seemed to recover wonderfully, they left for inland canyons, painted deserts and the throbbing rhythms of Indian toms-toms.

Johan's life was ebbing away.

She knew it, but as one who has come back from death.

Death had no terror for her, nor did it arouse any sentimental gushing. It had to be faced, as everything had to be faced. The important thing was to make the most of life, for we meet death with the same strength wherewith we, everyday, are meeting life. Being filled with life she was indifferent to keeping it safe, away from the thieving of death. Her indifference of strength met his indifference of repose. They both knew. Everything was clear and firm between them. Her love was too deep to surround him with a shut-in and invalid death. She rode him to his death with the adventurous joy of lovers escaping toward a new life. How could one fear who had met death and won?

The willing victim too wins immortality.

Tom-toms beat still in the rock-hearts of stalwart Redmen

through ridges and mesas pungent with brown earth

and green foliage of pinyon trees.

Tom-toms and feet pound silence and soil

fecundating the dumb into the living,

magic forces magnificence of corn-growing rain.

Tom-toms beat still in the dark of nights

cold with altitude clear and electric.

If war no longer summons the loud bangs

that once have roused the brave for the battle;

if the Redman has lost his eagle diadems

and parades helplessly for the white shadows;

if trains cut and darken the rigid canyons

chiseled by strokes of divine hammers

where men that knew commanded the thunder

and roused cornbread out of stones;

if children and adults desecrate their past

with the piteous worship of Christian idols;

yet the land of strong men is still power

that beats upon the soil that is daring and strong,

and the earth is still red, blood-bearing and rugged,

and canyons resonate under sun and storms

with the massive fierceness of crystallized thunder.

Huge world-spine bearing strong-pined men,

we may yet discover the mighty currents

that stream up your loins

from pole to pole and from man to god!

Men may know some day the mysterious forces

that make from within the Redmen hard, stoic

though the long communion with the soul of the land,

with the silent awe of men that face power.

Huge world-spine, living fire that may blaze forth

under the magic call of a race of heroes-

great canyons between vertebrae where the force escapes,

torrents that tear vehemently through vitals

of the giant body of the continent-

immense spaces where man knows his measure,

is born god against the vast indifference of the earth....

Tom-toms beat still, rugged and raw,

calling, calling yet from within, the race of heroes

who shall tame the mounts and bear them seeds,

transcendent seeds of regenerate manhood.

Rania lived in the exhilaration of that male power which confronts at every step the traveler across the great plateaux. She drank it on with awe, yet jubilation. It was so strong, she was often stunned by the immensity of the experience. The earth opened to her and she experienced the earth. She realized there as never before that great elemental body on which men crawl in soul-intoxicated madness to be more than men. She knew the earth; she knew the stone; she knew it in her body, in strange mystic possessions. The tom-toms beat birth into her, and the rain that fell at the call of the iron feet trampling the sod for endless hours tore through her body in great cataracts of life. She ceased thinking. She lived deeper than thoughts, where the unconscious meets the earth and is made again in its likeness: a rich, hard matrix teeming with unborn. The chants of the brown throats echoed in her own heart. She heard the strident, wild tones of the magic Navajos, the deeper sun-born melodies of the Zunis, the magic chants of white-robed Taos men who guard jealously the mystery of the sacred mountain where rites take place, hoary with earth-magic.

One day as storm advanced fiercely them as they rode through a mesa. The road went uphill and down a number of small arroyos, dry save when the rain would thunder through, rolling huge stones like children's marbles. It came with incredible suddenness. They were riding slowly watching amazing clouds piling up purples over darkened rims. Midway across the arroyo they heard a big crashing noise. Unwary, they stopped. In a second, torrents of water had rolled by the car a foot deep, heaved with mud and stones. The car refused to start. The water streamed up into the engine. They crawled against the corrosion of death, fell exhausted, shivering in dripping clothes, fever mounting high while awful coughings shattered his beaten frame. There was little to be done. The car stood in the stream, half under water. No blanket. No dry clothing. Rania decided to walk along the unknown road hoping for a nearby house, fearful as she was to leave Johan alone. After an hour she reached a small Indian pueblo and managed to get some men a cart to follow her down the road to rescue Johan.

He was breathing heavily, with greats pains, coughing blood. They carried him to the pueblo, laid him on rugs near a fire. Strange, dark, impassible faces looked on, surrounding the two whites. Heavy silence broken by spasms of the dying body. Someone went for a doctor. He lived far. Nothing to de but to try and ease the fading away of life. An old woman made some sort of a plaster which seemed to relieve the pain. Breathing became heavy but more peaceful. The night passed. At dawn the doctor came. It was hopeless. He could but soothe the burning flesh.

Dark, quiet faces looked on as Johan opened his eyes and tried to smile at Rania holding his hands firmly-black, strong eyes, weary, of stone-immensities, ravined features ploughed by sun, wind and rain. He, now lying in death-fever, fire mounting up his body to sear the grey substance where the cell multitudes are mastered into the single will of body: she, bent over his bogy as if to shield it from some power of destruction. Vaguely it recalled to the dying memory that other scene un the little canyon, with the rain also beating against windows, gurgling along the walls; the girl burnt by the strange fire her recklessness has summoned, with dark faces he could sense watching for they prey. . . . He had willed it. It was well. Life streamed before him as he knew it, as he had found strength to live it, with youthful folly and mature acceptance, and the old smile of compassion and indifference. Destiny was rolling back. It had known itself as a human soul. It was free now to move in its realm of wholeness, synthesizing past into future, bringing its small wisdom-gift to the temple of Man, which aeons are building with such gifts at cement.

The body lay still near the fire. Near the fire all bodies have ever grown and died. But some dare enter the fire and be burned. He flame from below means death, for some: from above, rebirth. Rania looked into the grey eyes in witch the mist had risen to the fullness of their orb of vision. There was nothing more to be seen. But how because they were dark they shone like mirrors; and Rania saw herself in them.

She saw herself as she was in him; She saw the many threads of destiny that were he-and-she together. She sensed them as they stretches into far distant eras; she sensed them as they must weave themselves again into the future patterns of lives to come. She realized her debt to life which had been entered into his book of merits. She saw that there was no distinction; that all books were one, perpetually balanced. She sensed the completeness and changelessness of all, while separate selves make patterns, white and black.

She, too, was a maker of patterns. She knew how to make meanings out of whites and blacks. Would she have the power to make meaning also out of her life-whites and blacks? Time opened. She saw a great figure print a few positive out of old negative numbered in her book of past. She saw tragic black cloud the sensitive paper; streaks of passion, frenzy, huge shadows. The printer threw the paper away on the desk life. Tomorrow it would appear, confront her. She shuddered awhile. The dead body was quiet, restful. Above her an old squaw was looking on expressionlessly; a little papooses, awed and silent, bundled up in a corner.

It was all real; all life.

It was well. An artist knows how to deal with shadows, how to lighten them with great glaring lights. She knew that in life's book account always balance. She breathed deeply; closed the eyes of one who needed them no longer to stare at the false without, peopled by strange shadows and deceiving lights. She closed her own eyes. Life beat in her, calm and vast. There was no fear, no passion, nodesire. It was all open, all ready for confrontation, whatever it might be, to whatever path it would lead. For one moment, she forgot all, in the completeness of remembering all. She felt then that Johan's soul had finished the ultimate review from the grandstand of death. The mob of lives dispersed. The day was over. It was time her to go.. It was more chapter closed. It was well.

Johan”s body was buried deep down the mesa as he had wished. Rania left the batterd car and robe in the fast train to Hollywood. He had willed her all he had. She returned to the house in the canyon. She was facing new life, alone.

She kept jealously alone.

She had decided to give a year to intense work, drawing, studying anatomy, technique, the history of art, fitting herself for creation. There was too much life in her not to create. It had to out-flow, else the body would burn in self-destruction. Power must be used, to build bodies, or selves, or magic forms, masses or tones. She felt overwhelmed by her own power. It coursed through her. It cried aloud, insistently, to be reckoned with, to be fed with more power. Often her body ached throughout, vitality pounding from within, dilating blood vessels, organs unused, swelling tide of imprisoned lives. Something had to be done. She was too proud for an easy release. She would dam in the flow and create from within, fashioner of shades and lights, arouser of visions that would carry outward the power to men.

She kept jealously alone.

The past was forgotten.

She had an incredible sense of forgetting the past. Her mind remembered, extracted meanings, drew comparisons, analyzed cycles and the rhythm of destiny. This past was all in the present; but the present was free of it, always virgin, like beaches made anew every dawn by tides, with her own living. Yet it was not selfishness, for she was thoroughly generous, considerate of others, sinking herself in souls encountered to feel their needs and give accordingly. She felt alive to all pains and all wants. Her motherhood longed to nurse poor aimless souls into warmth and love. She had no closed gates to keep away beggars. Her pride was of a more regal kind. It was the pride of one who ispower and cannot help dispensing it; of one who isgreat horizon and cannot help encompassing all men in her light-gift. Not selfishness, but intense, overwhelming selfhood, concentrated energy flashing through a little channel-the soul-into a machine-the body-generating fire and power inexhaustible.

The past was forgotten.

But the present was not yet the eternal.

Her dynamic intensity shut her soul out from the repose of being destiny. After Johan's death, as something in her communed with the ultimate peace of death, she had sensed for a few moments the pure impersonal peace of the beyond of self, the poise of ever-balancing forces. But she could not recapture the calm, the childlike wonderment of the moment. Blood was singing too loudly in her ears songs of gestation and glorification. She would have to lose much blood, be broken up perhaps, battered by greater powers, ere she could forget present as well as past, and be eternity. Too much light in the life-drawing; more shadows were needed to rest the vision of the beholding soul and release deeper meanings, deeper rhythms, all absorbed now by the glaring whiteness of the molten life.

The present had to die into the eternal.

CHAPTER V

Months passed of intense work.

Life was help captive by strong grip of her will. It had to pull inward, to grow knowledge and mastery. But strong will is not strong against a deeper destiny. In will there is self; and only beyond self does the sea of destiny open, which is power and law rolling cyclically to restore endlessly ever-disturbed equilibrium. It was self in her that called for creation, for the trowing off of its plethoric wealth; self, the power that impels life into matter, that forces outward through the magic glamor of desire.

Months passed of studious work.

Richard Newell came back.

As Rania was drawing in strained fervor, the door opened and he entered? Seeing her, he stopped, apologized, and inquired after Johan. She told him the story of her comradeship with him, of his death. She asked when he would want her to move and to give him back the house, thanking him for all it had meant to her and to Johan. He looked at her, wondering, admiring. Oh! There was no hurry. He might not stay long in California. He could as well stay at the hotel. Was she living alone now? Was she an artist? Could he see more of her work? His voice was warm, metallic. His entire being vibrated as one who has dared much, lived much, forgotten much, who had seen many lands, frequented alien races. She remembered afterward he had struck her once as being, by blood and birth, a hunter, “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” His body moved like an animal's, with inherent rhythm. It was strong body, youthful, intensely male. A hunter.

Richard Newell came back.

He remained.

Against such meetings no human force can claim the narrow will of its own selfhood. For the self is lost in the surge of blood which tears from the heart, washes out all dams, washes out all peace. The soul stands back aghast and wondering, unable to grasp any pattern as yet, any meaning in the downrush of the flood. The bird in the soul, freed, takes vast draughts of air, bends its wings upon the storm and rises above valleys and plains where houses are lit with quiescent fires. The dog in the soul howls, frantic to rouse the sleeping god. The tiger roves through the jungles of heat-tense body, clawing the wet humus with its electric thirst. The sage in the soul watches, feels the winds of destiny and smiles, studying the queer combustions of molecular humans.

They met with elemental richness. It was strong, intense, raw. In him there was no refinement, no subtlety. He was a hunter with terrific blood passions. He struck. There was nothing to be done, anymore than earth could hide from the sun. She drank the sun. Her body vibrated to unknown feasts of life. It was beating into her with the insistent, precise, inescapable power of a huge sledgehammer. She had lost her body-self: it was all pelted into the furnace of the race-self demanding perpetuation. There was nothing left in her to resist. She had become the act. She had become sex; a partaker of cosmic infinities, of the unselved world of creative energy. With him she reflected life in its wholeness, in its parturient immensity. It was dissolution, then ecstasy, then life reborn-an assumption of power, perfectly harmonized blood, the race recreated, continued, triumphant.

There was triumph; yet, from afar, a vague, poignant sense of disaster. It was as if one had become identified with some volcanic element, had plunged into earth-caverns reaching to the very core of life; yet all the vast roar of flame and thunder suddenly blended into awful silence through which sighed the low whistling of sun-scented breezes moaning away-far, far above-for the departed Eurydice. In the magnificence of the many-limbed dance there came a moment when all life dissolved into a narrow little hollow, somewhere, everywhere. There, God must be found. But suddenly a great distress came, as if she no longer could desire God. The emptiness became excruciating, the hollow began to eat up all of her, weary, ever so weary. It spread all over her, till the heart ceased beating and she thought it was death. Then a great wind would blow from the rim, filling the cavity with liquid fire. The body would blaze forth, cling to strained muscles. And consciousness would stick to tiny little things, valueless, but magnified into importance, as to drowning men, floating wreckage is transformed into salvation.

When she was left alone she would try to think and evaluate. She would start back with some past experience, try comparison, opposition, the placing of the now into the pattern of the past completing its growth. But somehow the chain of events would rush off at some point in an inexplicable way. There was no causation, no sequence left. Something had happened which absorbed all past, because it had a glow of timelessness.

She was fulfilled, radiant-but silent. Richard at first had respected this silent aloofness, perhaps because he himself floated upon the same quiescent depth of repose, because intense rhythm had worn him out into negative response to her ecstasy. But he was of the hunter's race, never satiated with blood-fulfillment, a mad rover through forests of bodies straining fervent trunks and limbs to the sun. The trees answer possession of light with seeds. But what are seeds to the hunter? Only rey yet to be born.

He began pounding her with endless questions: “Are you happy? Why don't you speak? Am I boring you?”

She glowed into love, smiled, kissed him, fondled him like a mother. The male resents the mothering in his depth. It shields the home. The conquered woman turns back as a mother to draw him in, more and more in-to herself, to her warm quiescent hearth, to the unborn. The hunter rebels. It is then that brutality begins. He essays violence, cruelty, because he senses himself weak before the indrawing suction of the bewifed woman. Fighting with shivering heart, he loses his head and his temper. Jealousy, men call this. But it is the rancor of the male losing ground, of his blood-self fearful of being stretched into the family self, of being expanded beyond the obvious cycle of desire, tension and release.

The release never fully comes. Tension gnaws from within. While the woman dreams from the race depth, or listens to the waxing moans of her supernal self sighing under the stars, the male sours into distrust, ferments in the locked barrel of a haunted mind; orgasms turn into meaningless poundings, kniving black the soul staring helplessly.

Rania was soon aware of the strain. She thought of the usual remedy for this fear of indrawal in man; travel. She had become pregnant. To protect the future, she had asked marriage. She was Mrs. Newell now. It sounded strange, somewhat ghostlike. But she smiled it off, thinking of the one who was to come. They would have to travel, to have passports, to behave socially. She could not bear lying. She had met that destiny. Whatever it would mean, she was game and would fulfill it, until freed for greater tasks.

Thus they went, eastward. Once more, after many years, she visited the huge, blackened cities of the plains. She had groped through them, shadowed by her father's cravings or the common greed of music hall mobs. She was driving through a seeded earth with overbearing clouds that soon would turn into hurricanes. Some great life cycle was nearing completion. She had reached her twenty-seventh year.

Pairs.

Old world teeming with dead beautiful forms, with mental alertness and vivacity of speech and composure. Elegance born of long adaptation to social living, to the slowing pulse of racial blood turning into nerves. Nerve-subtleties, nerve-debauch, nerve-heroism, nerve-love. Old world feeding for centuries on polluted roots, built upon lies and crimes and the refusal to confront life save through the fallacious patterns of brain-born dogmatism. A feudal world in disguise, with motion picture castles dismantled, all facades; but with intellectual partitions and sophisticated ruthlessness. A world of autumnal splendor, with pungent leaves, now nearly shed, humus-making, softly sinking into alcoholic fermentations, into dream fabrics-under the lashing of winds and the drowning of endless rains washing clean the black trunks, patterns of beauty against velvet skies.

Paris.

A life growing within.

She wanted to surround this birth with all the wealth of past magnificences, so that, having absorbed this past while still in her, the child could start life as a striving toward a future which would grow normally out of such a prenatal assimilation. She wanted to make her blood rich with cultural atoms ingathered, filtered through the sieve of her discriminating mind. Profoundly, intently, she was synthesizing in her body a cycle of centuries into a unique moment of consciousness and rebirth. If there was life worth remembering in this past it should be gathered, molded into the form of a beginning. She stood as a living link between body and soul as a meeting ground for the past's ascent and the future's descent. She was conscious of great tensions, of accumulating power at each pole. Would the spark create the great noble human she had willed with all her passions?

A life growing within.

Against the life, hatred.

Richard hated that thing waxing in her. He hated it for her withdrawal and her consecration to the seed. A deep resentment flared up in him as he touched the curving muscles doming the birth-to-be. He was no hierophant of hallowed mysteries, but one who sees, feels, touches and breaks into submission. A hunter. He craved her, because she refused herself. His looks gnawed into her body, tearing her aloofness, that he might make her clean of all but him, of all but his love embittered into nerve-rending passion.

He fed with alcohol his hatred.

Tense struggle between two wills.

He could hardly touch her without making her shiver as if burnt by strong acid. Dark desires beat upon her. She would resist, sneer at him, shame him with biting sarcasms. He would leave, helpless, pass away the night, drinking, drugged perhaps. The fever of the decadent city was eating into his nerves. He looked haggard. He wanted her; he wanted her. He would cry as a baby begging her. It would not hurt the thing. She loved him; she could see it was wrong; it would end wrong. He could not stand it. She stared at him, with contempt.

Tense struggle through long weeks.

Seventh month.

The child stirring. Another rhythm asserting, strange, helpless, irregular rhythm of a caged life which had known the vast expanses of solar fields. The little hollow contracting, moving with the dance of fists and feet, swaying, absorbing, quieting. Joy mixed with queer fright, with tense expectancy. Long brooding, dream-making, holding thoughts that might not mar the growth, tying to be calm, loving, compassionate; the alembic and the old alchemist watching the fluidic mass turn into strange shapes merging into humanhood.

Seventh month.

The storm struck.

He could not stand it. To know that the thing moved, that another rhythm was beating at this womb, he could not stand that. He went wild, menacing, his mind frantic with the sense of her, remote, absorbed in the unborn. Familiar things sneered at him. He would kill himself, make an end of this miserable farce. Then she could be alone with her child; alone, alone! A fool, forced to beg love, to beg men, to beg, to beg. . . . Enough of that! He was going. He slammed the door, tramped downstairs. Her blood froze. She felt him demented, blood-crazy. She rushed after him. In the rain she called a taxi, following his. The hunt, the hunt. . . . He stopped in front of a house. She caught him as he stepped in. “Richard! What are you doing? You are mad. You are mad! I will be good to you. Come back.” He sneered. Ah!, now she was talking sense. But he was through, through. A woman had come. He asked for a room, whiskey, everything. Rania clung to him. He dragged her to the brothel room. He seized her wrists, he crushed them till she screamed, broken, sobbing. A great disgust, a great pity streamed over her. Useless, useless. Such ugliness, such poor, helpless misery! She looked at him with big, opened eyes, sad, very sad-pitying. He shuddered. A distorted look writhed though his face. He reeled away as if struck. Her body dropped, bent against a cough, flabby, unnerved. Something broke in him. Something sharp knived him through the heart. He groaned like a beaten beast, fell toward the door which burst open, and ran, ran . . . far away, far away.

The storm had struck.

A sharp pain roused her. The woman of the house was near the bed, anxiously watching. “What happened, dearie? Did he hurt you?” She was afraid of scandal. Rania understood. The pain in her womb increased. The shock had been too much. The thing had broken loose.

“Quick! To the hospital. . .” She clenched her fingers in supreme defiance. Perhaps it could be saved. She must be strong. She reached the hospital; she swooned upon the bed while the thing was born, faintly crying to useless life.

It was a girl; but she did not live long. A few weeks afterward, as normal birth should have occurred, it was all over. One dream more that crumbled, one more death, one more failure.

Richard, after a day of mad raving, had found from the woman of the house where Rania had gone. He had attempted seeing her, but stubbornly she had gone. He had attempted seeing her, but stubbornly she had refused. After a couple of weeks she had been well again but stayed near the little helpless contorted body, tense with the giving of life. After it had died and had become but a small imperceptible heap of ashes, she went back to the hotel where she lived with Richard, at a time when she felt quite certain of not finding him. She gathered quickly her clothes, books, jewels, money available and left on the table addressed to him an envelope containing the hospital bill with a few words: “This is for the birth and burial of your daughter, whom you killed. Good-bye.” She had reserved by phone a few days before a cabin on a streamer. She caught a fast train to Cherbourg, boarded westward, arrived in New York and left after two days for Hollywood.

After discovering the letter and his wife's flight, Richard had gathered from information snatched from the hotel boys and from a diligent search in steamship offices Rania's boat. He cabled: Am coming. Please wait for me at Plaza Hotel. Forgive me. Love.” He cabled also to a private detective firm un New York to watch for her at the pier and follow her moves. As he reached the city a few days later, the detective informed him of her departure and destination. He hastened to the airfield him of her departure and destination. He hastened to the airfield and flew at full speed across the continent. He reached Hollywood a few hours before her, drove to their home, had it cleaned in a hurry, filled it with flowers, bought a Buick roadster and waited for her.

She did not come the first night. She rested at the Roosevelt Hotel as he soon learnt from the man shadowing her. But the next day she walked to the canyon. She hesitated a moment when she saw a car in the garage, but knocked at the door. Richard opened it. The room was warm with a huge burning fire, fragrant with roses and carnations. She stood amazed. She could not understand.

“You were waiting for me? How did you come here?”

He laughed jokingly. “Air mail of course. Does it not feel good to be home again?”

He wanted her to forget. He had his best manners; whimsical, childlike, cajoling. She did not speak; she did not smile. She had not expected he would dare to come back, not so soon. Her steel-colored eyes were filled with fog, huge icebergs melting from behind the pupil.

She might forgive, but how to forget? Crimes may be brushed aside; but a certain kind of moral ugliness cannot. As she stared at him, facing like a stone his forced eagerness to please and to be loved, his clear-cut features seemed to alter and swell into a lurid sneering face. A horrible twitch distorted the mouth that was outwardly speaking with baby tones as a naughty child begging the mother forgiveness. The eyes were shallow and half-closed, sick with covetousness.

She shuddered. She hid her face in her hands, convulsive. He stopped talking, frightened. He knelt near her, taking her arms in his hands that were moist, hot. She pushed him back. He wouldn't understand. He came closer, nearly touching her face. Oh!, again, the wolf's hunger! The beast snarling, writhing with brute hunger. Would she never be free, free from male bestiality, free and pure and clean, clean like snow, that snow which fell upon her own strained body clinging desperately to the salvation of the tree, above the pack of beasts gorging themselves with flesh?

So vividly the past rose, that she seemed to hear the dying voice cry out of her, “Hold fast!! Have no fear . . . I am strong yet! Be brave, my love.” And she saw the woman back against the tree, lashing furiously the wolves crowding in upon her, falling, legs half torn, yet lashing, lashing until a black monster jumped at her throat and stilled the mad courage of that soul.

And Rania violently sprang upon her feet, throwing off the body that clenched her limbs with repressed greed. She ran to the fire in front of which wood was piled. She snatched a long twig, another, another. Richard ran to her: “What are you doing?”

She laughed, insanely. “Show you that you are-a beast, a beast!”

She beat him over the shoulders, over the breast. A blood-fury took her.

His eyes dilated, aghast, enraged. “You are mad.”

She cried with laughter. “Murderer! . . .”

He took her arms; she snatched herself away. She slashed him in the face. She beat him, until he stumbled, haggard, half-unconscious.

She stood, petrified, for a moment. Flames burned into her eyes like molten steel. She stood. She heard him groan, moan, like a hurt beast crawling to its lair. Sneering, she caught her coat and bag lying on a chair, opened the door jerkily, jumped into the car in the garage, and drove away.

Hearing the motor start roused Richard from his stupor. With bleeding face he rushed out. The detective who had watched Rania met him a car.

“Shall I follow her, sir? She went up the pass in the Buick.”

Richard glanced at the car, a Buick too. He laughed bitterly.

“Get out of here,” he yelled, “I shall follow myself. Watch the house. And he sped madly toward Cahuenga Pass.

Race in the night along the hot valley cooling with stars, along the sharp turns of the canyon up and down the ridge. Race through the thickening fog spreading its wet fume across the Ventura Valley . . . Santa Barbara. He thought he had seen the car, but was not sure. The streets were gaily lighted. He had to stop. He would try the coast route. A vague fateful instinct seemed to guide him, this road, that road. He stopped at several stations; they might have noticed her. He knew she would have to fill the tank soon after Santa Barbara. She might forget and be stalled. Or did she turn around and come back? He would try a little longer. He had been speeding, he should overtake her.

He asked once more at the station near San Luis Obispo. Yes, she had stopped; a girl with dark hair in a steel-colored Buick. She was all out of gas, had the tank filled and darted away at awful speed.

Race in the night. . . Blood had coagulated in his hair, stuck to the cap he had put on to hide it. He tried to pull it. A sharp pain tore through the skin. He swore; had to stop a moment. He was lame. The fool must be rushing over sixty an hour. He had lost time, asking people on the way. By God! He must catch her. No child now to go soft over. He had been taken aback when she struck him. Damned female! If he could only grab her, grab her pliant, resistant body! She would know this time. . .

Morning. He asks again. Yes, a car has been racing a while before; couldn't see who was in it. She must be aiming at San Francisco. On, on with the race. In front of him, dust swells. It must be she. The car refuses to go faster. King City. The long windy stretch. He is held back by some stupid truck blocking the road. Five minutes lost. He tramples the road, raging. The way is cleared. He charges on. This time it is the car. It has slowed down. Perhaps she is worn out.

She hears him or senses him. She looks back; and furious speed shatters again the steel monsters. He wants to stop her, passes her, yelling to her. She takes a sudden turn to the left and dashes on unheeding Lost time. He follows her, on to Salinas, way past. Again he overtakes her. Will she not stop? He is afraid to bar the road. He must wait for some obstruction, for her to slow down. Thick rolling fog dampens the awesome ride. She must have steel nerves to go on at such a pace without rest. Big dunes, fields of artichokes; the Monterey Bay. He passes her, signals to stop. The road is wet, slippery; as he twists himself at the wheel he does not see a sharp turn; on wheel hits the sand, the others skid; the car bounces over, upturned lightning. The panting mass hits crosswise Rania's car which roars over, writhes up, collapses, a huge dead monster, into the sand.

When farmers who had heard the explosion of steel came, they found Rania lying with torn metal half-crushing her legs. The other car was on fire; later only a charred body was discovered under it.

Rania was taken to Monterey. He surgeon did his best to cope with an almost hopeless condition. The bones of hips and legs were broken into bits, even the lower vertebrae were hurt. There must have been inner contusions; a broken mass.

Yet she did not lose consciousness. She told her name, asked for Richard. They lied to her and said he was very severely wounded. She gave the address of her bank, of her lawyer. Another surgeon was summoned from San Francisco. They tried operation after operation. She was stretched on the bed, bound up tight. She could not move. She was but a big feverish knot of pain. They gave her morphine. But the pain merely went a little distance away. She could not sleep. She was very calm thoughts. She did not think, but dreamed endless, vivid, ecstatic dreams, as one dead. She dreamt of dancing, of wild movement against the winds, of swaying rhythms as of wings. It flowed through her, this rich, powerful dreaming, a cataract of waters shattered over broken boulders. She felt everything tearing apart in her body, a huge crumbled cliff. Pains, sharp and explosive, would burn through. They would come from afar, like thunder clouds, heavy, stirring; they madly burst forth into lightnings, excruciating. Perspiration would run down her forehead. She had to close her eyes. She could not move. The nurse would try and soothe her. A little morphine.

The nurse was a lovely woman, the daughter of Mrs. Falkner living in Carmel-a quiet, peace-loving woman devoted to the study of philosophy and ancient religions. After many unfortunate experiences mother and daughter had found shelter in a rustic cottage, reading, dreaming, though actively interested in all the new things coming into small but intensely alive community. Hilda was nursing, on and off, to help her mother. She usually did not do it much at a stretch; but she had been impressed by the heroism of the poor broken girl whose soul she felt so strong and real, bearing the ordeal with stoic quietness, never complaining, smiling, even when tears of pain would roll over her rigid head cramped into immobility. She stood at Rania's side for weeks, for months.

Five operations were performed. But the fractures could hardly mend normally. They tried grafting bone. But in spite of all, it seemed impossible that she should ever walk again freely. Internal lesions had also caused much trouble and recovery might never be complete.

Months passed in absolute immobility. They ceased giving her morphine. Then the most terrible weeks began. The body-tense, struggling for action, for freedom-aching with the drug's desire. Not even the absorbing acuity of pain. No longer the steady flow of dreams. The soul bound again into the body, encased by bandages, by weights pulling the neck, the feet, pulling day after day, week after week, of caged life.

Mrs. Falkner came often to visit her, brought friends. Someone loaned a victrola with many records. The brave soul roused a rich, beautiful sympathy. Hilda would read to her for hours. Time ebbed away.

At last the doctors let her go, deciding nothing more could be done. Little by little, she learned to move again. The stone became vegetable. The vegetable grew aching legs that needed heavy crutches to begin again the weary conquest of space; huge crutches, ugly weight while the flesh sags and crawls, jerkily rises. It was pitiful. She would never be without them. She would never move much, nor bear any strain. The hurt had struck deep. It had knifed the vitals. The strong plethoric life had been broken, wasted. Now the will of soul would have to pull up and stretch the loose strings.

Rania's mind was clear. She saw the task. She was game. At first she laughed at it. But the laughter became strained and bitter. As she left the hospital and agreed to spend the first few months of recovery at Mrs. Falkner's home, as she began to face herself alive and free amid alive and free people, far from the subtle distortions of reality that cling to sickroom walls, a terrific reaction set in and blackness covered her, pall of bitter despair, of tortured rebellion.

spiritual flowering

CHAPTER I

Strong men face strong crashes with bitterness or ecstasy. Bitterness claws the soul, vulture of unanswered “whys,” black hunter hovering over moments frenzied by self-torment, shivering preys to the bird of doubt darting from the clouded mind. The sea has breathed thick rolling fog over rocks and cliffs. The foghorn ululates dull ravaging tones of death. They drop upon the brains they torture, rousing fever, implacable fever corroding the strength to bear the questioning of late.

Why ? Oh, why ?

Is it necessary that the body be racked, every bone be crushed before the caged embodied self may rise into freedom ? Is it necessary that love decay into lust and the raving passion of males yoked to torment as unavoidably as death to body? Is it necessary that concentrated life burst asunder the frame containing its pressures and leave it a wreck on the sea of moments, helplessly swaying with the tides of fate?

Why ? Oh, why ?

The rough grandeur of Carmel pounded upon the invalid-sledge-hammer of sea and silence upon her mind at white heat. The cleft tongues of Lobos snaked the sea, the wind hissing through its scale-like cypresses, dark and contorted. The earth grew medusas from every cliff point to petrify the stars which might venture to look through the cloak of fog, woven by the motherly love of the waters. But even these would surge and harrow, clench the brown throat of the many canyons, until every living thing would resound and groan, with shrieking sea gulls overtoning the wails.