Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris

Author:Wilson Harris [Harris, Wilson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571308781
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-07-03T20:00:00+00:00

IX

The Arawak woman rolled like a ball on the cliff, clinging to tree and stone and Vigilance was able to follow. The river crept far beneath them, and above them – beyond the wall they were climbing – lay safety and freedom. Vigilance knew that every step he made was a miracle of survival. It was incredible he had escaped after the wreck of the boat and succeeded in climbing so far and high. Millions of years had passed he knew until now he felt bruised and wounded beyond words and his limbs had crawled and still flew. He had slept in a cradle of branches and in a cave overlooking the chasm of time. However strange it was the fact remained he was living after all. The memory of the conventional crew was a dead eccentric belief that still continued to haunt him every now and then whenever he thought he had fallen and died in the primitive moments of a universal emptiness and fear.

The fantasy of the fourth day dawned – the fourth day of creation – since they had all set out from Mariella. From his godlike perch he discerned the image of the musing boat in which they had come. They had found a cave the previous nightfall and they had stretched their limbs until morning.

It was a close fit lying there – too close for ease and normal sleep – and everyone stirred when Vigilance moved. They could not help turning their dull eye upon the vessel they had managed to anchor at their ghostly side in the stream and it was as if they sought a long lost friend and soul. Everyone stirred and woke, all except Cameron. He was dead with a stab wound in his back. In their enormous fatigue the night and day before they had kept him at their side as they would an idol and companion.

They hurriedly abandoned him in the cliff, turning the room in which they had slept into his grave alone, and were soon travelling fast in the river when Jennings deliberately shut off the engine and the boat swung in the stream, lodging its bow in a fresh hollow of stone.

“Ah got an idea,” he announced. He spoke with hopeless obstinacy. His face was no longer the same as before: it had changed into a dream, the dream of an unnatural unshaven dead man’s beard and growth. The cheeks were hollow as the caves in the wall and the blackness of his skin had grown lighter and greyer into an older drier mask and presence lying within. The lust and soul of rebellion had been killed abruptly in a manner that left him suddenly empty. He felt now only the loss of an opposition and true adversary within himself. His eyes had lost all rude fire and in their blindness and loneliness they spun deeper than nature’s darkness and light. It was the strangest abstract face Vigilance had ever seen – the abstraction of a

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