Read Lookout Cartridge for Free Online Page B

light.
    Who’s that in the grove, said Dagger, I think your guru’s taking a breather.
    There is no one in the grove, said the little woman, though she need not have answered, and as if continuing an instruction that had not been interrupted she explained that just as the group included different conditions of rebirth, so it included also different styles of practice, Tantric release, ascetic release.
    Dagger moved away saying, What I want to know is who went into that there grove.
    He was having trouble revolving his turret to find the 50 lens.
    I said to the little bright-cheeked woman, Are there Americans here?
    She said, Why do you ask? and pointed to the American Indian, who was saying to Dagger, I’ve been here four months, I mean in Britain, and I’m not looking back. I’m from Kansas City originally.
    The woman pointed to the small circle chanting Rama and said, Also the boy-his father’s American, his mother’s English, they’re in London.
    Dagger was on the far side of the fire. The big woman in the blanket stopped him and embraced him so he had to drop his camera hand. She said, Anyone who enters as you entered is so lost he risks rebirth as a tortoise. She giggled.
    The little woman called to Dagger across the fire, But I know you, I know you from London. The big woman said with more laughter, Elspeth knows you. The big woman held Dagger and his camera at arm’s length: As the calf knows the mother, she said, you have not known the relation between your samsara and your karma.
    Dagger very friendly said, Out of the karma, and the woman said, Into the camera.
    I joined him near the grove. He was shooting. Sure enough I detected ahead a pale motion, though why he had to get (as he said) the complete picture puzzled me.
    A skinny man in a hooded jacket stood with his arm around the young initiate: Come with us, brothers, he called, and Dagger called back, Just a minute, and the other fellow said, Throwaway your machine, brother, you are filming as if you were pursuing your enemies.
    Dagger called back, Don’t know till I catch up with them.
    But now, instead of the elusive character in the grove, out of it came at us in a brief, accidental charge a cow that cantered off into the fog-sifted night.
    She is going to the river, said a man’s voice behind us, and someone chuckled, and I said, Just some of the local fat stock (for that was no dairy cow), and Dagger said, Near the intersection of the River Usk and the Monmouth-Breconshire border.
    The man in the grove-unnecessarily it seemed to me and almost as if to show us-stood clear of a tree and I saw him quite well in the light of the fire at my back. I saw him, and Dagger got a shot of him veering out of the grove and running after the cow.
    The big woman captured Dagger from behind. As when a lute is played, she said with her cheek against his shoulder, one cannot grasp the eternal sounds but by grasping the lute or the player of the lute the sound is grasped.
    I was talking to the fellow from Kansas City who was explaining how the Indians would not let Sir Walter Raleigh in on the secret of pot that they smoked in the peace pipe but gave him tobacco instead to take back to the white man in Europe.
    The little woman at this distance not so ruddy was close to me talking across me low and rather fiercely to Dagger: This is our place, we rent it, we are here only a small part of the year. We prepare now for the cosmic dance of the Dancing Siva tomorrow evening and no one outside the group is allowed here, I don’t know what you are doing to us.
    And that, I said to Claire, looking up from a page of onion skin, is the dance that celebrates the end of the world, and when I said this to the woman, Dagger said, Well I don’t want to be here when it happens-he asked her name-a baby started crying-I said Elspeth , and he said, Do you go to the National Film Theater? Maybe you saw me there.
    She only said, I do know you, and Dagger said, Dagger DiGorro, and this