It went and left awareness of the desert.
"False--fleeting--perjured...."
He saw himself as in mirrors.
The desert ached and became a place of thorns and briers and
bewilderment. Then rose, like Antaeus, the taskmaster. "_And what of
all that--if I like life so?_"
Sense of the villa and the roses and the nightingales in the
coverts--sense of wide, mobile sweeps and flowing currents inwashing,
indrawing, pleasure-crafts great and small--desire and desire for
desire--lust for sweetness, lust for salt--the rose to be plucked, the
grapes to be eaten--and all for self, all for Ian....
He started up from the rock above Como, and turned to descend to the
boat. That within him that set itself to make thin cloud of the
taskmaster pulled him back as by the hair of the head and cast him
down upon the rocky floor.
He lay still, half upon his face buried in the bend of his arm. He
felt misery.
"My soul is sick--a beggar--like to become an outcast!"
How long he lay here now he did not know. The nadir of night was
passed, but there was cold and voidness, an abyss. He felt as one
fallen from a great height long ago. "There is no help here! Let me
only go to an eternal sleep--"
A wind began. In the east the sky grew whiter than elsewhere. There
came a sword-blow from an unseen hand, ripping and tearing veils.
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