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streamers of choking dust up to meet the gently radio-active April rain.
    Ware sat on the heaped remains of his alter within the tumbled walls, under the uncertain sky. His feelings were so complex
     that he could not have begun to explain them, even to himself; after many years’ schooling in the rigorous non-emotions of
     Ceremonial Magic, it was a novelty to him to have any feelings at all but those of thirst for knowledge; now he would have
     to relearn those sensations, for his lovely book of acquisitions, upon which he had spent his soul and so much else, was buried
     under tons of tsunamic mud.
    In a way, he thought tentatively, he felt free. After the shock of the seaquake had passed, and all but an occasional tile
     had stopped falling, he had struggled out of the rubble to the door, and thence to the head of the stairway which led down
     to his bedroom, only to see nothing but mud three stone steps down, mud wrinkling and settling as the sea water gradually
     seeped out from under it. Somewhere down under there, his book of new knowledge was beginning the aeon-long route to becoming
     an unreadable fossil. Well then; so much for his life. Almost it seemed to him then that he might begin again, that he was
     nameless, a
tabula rasa,
all false starts wiped out, all dead knowledge ready to be rejected or revivified. It was given to few men to live through
     something so cleansing as a total disaster.
    But then he realized that this, too, was only an illusion. His past was there, ineluctably, in his commitments. He was still
     waiting for the return of the Sabbath Goat. He closed the door to the stairwell and the fossilized ripples of the mud, andblowing reflectively into his white moustache, went back into the refectory.
    Father Domenico had earlier tired – it could not exactly be said that he had lost patience – of both the waiting and the fruitless
     debates over when or whether they would become for, and had decided to attempt travelling south to see what and who remained
     of Monte Albano, the college of white magicians which had been his home grounds. Baines was still there, trying to raise some
     news on the little transistor radio to which only yesterday he had listened so gluttonously to the accounts of the Black Easter
     which Ware had raised up at his commission, and whose consequences now eddied away from them around the whole tortured globe.
     Now, however, it was producing nothing but bands of static, and an occasional very distant voice in an unknown tongue.
    With him now was Jack Ginsberg, dressed to the nines as usual, and in consequence looking by far the most bedraggled of the
     three. At Ware’s entrance, Baines tossed the radio to his secretary and crossed towards the magician, slipping and cursing
     the rubble.
    ‘Find out anything?’
    ‘Nothing at all. As you can see for yourself, the sea is subsiding. It is obvious that Positano has been spared any further
     destruction – for the moment. As for why, we know no more than we did before,’
    ‘You can still work magic, can’t you?’
    ‘I don’t appear to have been deprived of my memory,’ Ware said. ‘I’ve no doubt I can still
do
magic, if I can get at my equipment under this mess, but whether I can work it is another matter. The conditions of reference
     have changed drastically, and I have no idea how far or in what areas.’
    ‘Well, you could at least call up a demon and see if he could give us any information. There doesn’t appear to be anyone else
     to ask.’
    ‘I see that I’ll have to put the matter more bluntly. I am totally opposed to performing any more magic at this time, Doctor
     Baines. I see that you have again failed to think the situation through. The terms under which I was able to call upon demons
     no longer apply – I am no longer able to doanything for them, they must now own a substantial part of the world. If I were to call at this juncture, probably no one
     would answer, and it might be better if