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of the stranger who addressed him. Equally easy it would be to say that he had been warned by his parents and teachers. But the inner facts are different. I questioned him closely. He ran for “reasons” that were “irrational”; his flight was more eloquent than rumour or news, it spoke the language of the unconscious. He had received no caution – conventional caution – against strangers. He had read nothing in the New Forest Argosy.
    Fear had become a republic or plantation or colony against which he recoiled and beat his fists, not with his naked small hands that would have been broken in the rapist’s grasp but with his running feet that clawed and sprinted on the earth. Was it a battle then in which he was joined against fear when he ran from fear? Such is the language of the unconscious. It speaks on many levels of dream, half-puppet language, half-spiritual language, half-true language, half-false utterance, the labyrinth of innocence and guilt.
    The man who approached him was curiously appealing, oddly familiar, and yet sinister. He seemed to exist and yet not to be altogether real, a presentiment, a fate, something to be metaphysically penetrated, avoided, seen through. He was a menace, a danger; he would appear, again and again betwixt heaven and hell, Masters felt. Perhaps this was not the first time (and there had been previous visits) but whether first or not it would constitute the first critical encounter with Memory he would remember. An instinct for imagination perhaps saved the boy-king. It was a game of soul, a game a child plays with the shadow of Memory false and true, the shadow of Ambition, false and true. For Memory’s male persona aped the shaman of old. With a wave of his arm against the shadowy axe of the sea, far out in the sun, theintimate stranger called to the boy as to someone he knew, someone he saw with a backward glance from the future, or the past, into the present.
    Young Masters was fascinated. Such skill he had never witnessed before. The stranger waved his hand and appeared to disembowel space, yet to stitch it around the child in a wonderful garment with a button for an eye. The young boy recalled the eye of the fish on the fisherman’s gallows he had seen that afternoon in the game he played of wheeling light years.
    He was tempted now by a most dangerous extension of that game, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye of creation and his, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye mysteriously fired and sculpted, mysteriously dismembered into revisionary pupil and socket until it became a revolution of mind, a window of soul – and his.
    He ran, without knowing why, from such a temptation to accept his as the absolute original. It was a temptation he could not rationalize. It was as if the stranger were offering him the gifts, the talents, of a cosmic Pygmalion, a cosmic sculptor and seducer of space, offering him the precision of a godlike puppet to place his finger on the button of collective, explosive rape (to submit himself, in advance of that event, to a private version of collective, explosive rape) so close to, yet so remote from, the garment of love that is threaded into that transfigurative wound by the luminous hand of the sun and the moon and the stars.
    Had he stayed, had he been raped by that intimate stranger, the facts of this biography of spirit would have accumulated into a miscarriage of soul (whatever ambitions Everyman Masters may have realized, whatever powers he may have come to possess in imbibing the solicitation of the false shaman) for he would have appeared narcissistically whole in his own eyes and would have forfeited the mystery of partial guilt and therefore the mystery of ultimate surrender to otherness, ultimate innocence. As it was the danger remained – though few were aware of it as Masters climbed the ladderof success into traditional plantation overseer; the danger remained like a constant threat over a king’s or a