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thousand years of darkness.”
    “I heard them,” Simon said, very low, from the shadow. “I
heard their voices.”
    “Oh, Christ! Stop it!” Max cried out, and got up and went
blundering out into the unlit hall, without his coat. We heard him running down
the stairs.
    “Phil,” said Simon, lying there, “could we raise up the
white towers, with our lever and our fulcrum?”
    After a long silence Phil Drum answered, “We have the power
to do it.”
    “What else do we need?” Simon said. “What else do we need,
besides power?”
    Nobody answered him.
    ~
    The blue changed. It became brighter, lighter, and at the
same time thicker: impure. The ethereal luminosity of blue-violet turned to
turquoise, intense and opaque. Still we could not have said that everything was
now turquoise-colored, for there were still no things. There was nothing,
except the color of turquoise.
    The change continued. The opacity became veined and
thinned. The dense, solid color began to appear translucent, transparent. Then
it seemed as if we were in the heart of a sacred jade, or the brilliant crystal
of a sapphire or an emerald.
    As at the inner structure of a crystal, there was no
motion. But there was something, now, to see. It was as if we saw the
motionless, elegant inward structure of the molecules of a precious stone.
Planes and angles appeared about us, shadowless and clear in that even,
glowing, blue-green light.
    These were the walls and towers of the city, the streets,
the windows, the gates.
    We knew them, but we did not recognize them. We did not
dare to recognize them. It had been so long. And it was so strange. We had used
to dream, when we lived in this city. We had lain down, nights, in the rooms
behind the windows, and slept, and dreamed. We had all dreamed of the ocean, of
the deep sea. Were we not dreaming now?
    Sometimes the thunder and tremor deep below us rolled
again, but it was faint now, far away; as far away as our memory of the thunder
and the tremor and the fire and the towers falling, long ago. Neither the sound
nor the memory frightened us. We knew them.
    The sapphire light brightened overhead to green, almost
green-gold. We looked up. The tops of the highest towers were hard to see,
glowing in the radiance of light. The streets and doorways were darker, more clearly
defined.
    In one of those long, jewel-dark streets something was
moving — something not composed of planes and angles, but of curves and arcs.
We all turned to look at it, slowly, wondering as we did so at the slow ease of
our own motion, our freedom. Sinuous, with a beautiful flowing, gathering,
rolling movement, now rapid and now tentative, the thing drifted across the
street from a blank garden wall to the recess of a door. There, in the dark
blue shadow, it was hard to see for a while. We watched. A pale blue curve
appeared at the top of the doorway. A second followed, and a third. The moving
thing clung or hovered there, above the door, like a swaying knot of silvery
cords or a boneless hand, one arched finger pointing carelessly to something
above the lintel of the door, something like itself, but motionless — a
carving. A carving in jade light. A carving in stone.
    Delicately and easily the long curving tentacle followed
the curves of the carved figure, the eight petal-limbs, the round eyes. Did it
recognize its image?
    The living one swung suddenly, gathered its curves in a
loose knot, and darted away down the street, swift and sinuous. Behind it a
faint cloud of darker blue hung for a minute and dispersed, revealing again the
carved figure above the door: the sea-flower, the cuttlefish, quick,
great-eyed, graceful, evasive, the cherished sign, carved on a thousand walls,
worked into the design of cornices, pavements, handles, lids of jewel boxes,
canopies, tapestries, tabletops, gateways.
    Down another street, about the level of the first-floor
windows, came a flickering drift of hundreds of motes of silver. With a single
motion all