World Enough, and Time by James Kahn

Author:James Kahn [Kahn, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607466680
Google: eSexuQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1607466686
Goodreads: 159041
Publisher: Del Rey, Ballantine
Published: 1980-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11: In Which The Travelers Lose Some Time

THEY followed the creek downhill until it became a river, as the singing voices swelled, then faded again into the afternoon steam. There was a dropoff suddenly, the running water cascading over the twenty-foot falls. The hunters scrambled down the embankment.

Here the singing was intense. Whimpering, teasing. The companions looked at each other. Multiple emotions played across their faces in quick succession: fear, excitement, bewilderment; despair, obsession. The song seemed to be coming from the waterfall itself. With a single motion, the three friends stepped into the river; plunged under, and then through the pouring falls.

When they emerged on the other side of the falls, they found themselves standing in a still, green pool. It was fed, at its darker end, by a small quiet stream that wound back into the descending caves. They waded through the water, which was quite shallow, as it twisted even deeper into the caves. Up, down, spiraling away. At every turn the music became clearer, until, at last, a new cave mouth opened, emptying Jasmine, Josh, and Beauty into a sunny, grassy clearing. And there, by the side of the crystal river, lounged the three laughing Sirens.

They were exquisite: frail, blushed faces; lithe woman-bodies, lusciously covered in fine down and dove feathers of raging color, covered everywhere except over their sensitive faces, delicate necks, pale-skinned breasts. Bird-women, softer than sleep.

The Sirens rose, speaking a strange musical language in voices like harps. They came forward, took the three wanderers in hand, and led them up a gentle rise to a poppied knoll, from which they saw before them a city: a garden city, cut out-of—yet still laced through with—the jungle. Verdant, sultry; fantastic.

Buildings were the first element that caught the eye—ancient buildings, hundreds of years old, made of brick, cement, steel, glass; crumbling with age and weather. Every structure was partially or completely engulfed in a mantle of foliage: crawling ivy, matted iris. The windows were mostly broken, the iron rusted. But for all their decay, they stood, some taller than imaginable. Some even seemed to scrape the sky.

Connecting the buildings were discontinuous, pocked cement walkways. Interspersed among the buildings—roughly demarcated by the geometric shapes the walkways enclosed—were the gardens of the city. Fabulous gardens, like little transplanted sections of jungle. An overgrowth of purple orchids beside this building; a riot of exotic fruit trees over here: melons, pomegranates, figs, passions. An avalanche of ferns, a lake of poppies, a wall of shaggy moss. A thousand varieties of palm proliferated, some taller than the tallest buildings. And spattered everywhere were flowers. Cerulean, magenta, emerald-green, memory-violet, colors from a different spectrum.

Joshua felt exhilarated, disoriented. Standing uncertainly on the rise with the Sirens’ perfumed laughter in his ear, and this strange vision before him—Josh felt his mind begin to slowly, subtly distort. In what way he could not say; but he was aware of some alteration in his senses, some ongoing process, which came from within and without. Pleasurable, but intricate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.