ThisLife

* I have a great affection and admiration for Kurt Vonnegut. Without a doubt, I've read more books by him than any other author, and in the process, collected a great many 'gems' of what I consider to be his creative genius. I'm continually wanting to throw in quotes from him, but since they're often rather short and snappy little aphorisms I felt that they wouldn't quite work in a 'story' thread. So, to solve the dilemma I thought I'd gather together a collection of what I felt was his 'Very Best', and then put them all down here in one giant "Splat !". (Thus hopefully venting, if only temporarily, this constantly bubbling admiration from my system.) As well, it might also provide a few moments' change of entertainment for anyone else in this forum who loves reading, and who appreciates the genius of story tellers like Vonnegut. NOTE : In case there's anyone who isn't familiar with him, Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer who was born in 1922 and who died just a few years ago in 2007. His best known book was "Slaughterhouse Five", based loosely on his actual wartime experiences as a POW in WW II. He had been imprisoned in Dresden during the three nights that it was annihilated in a firestorm created by Allied saturation bombing. This so strongly affected the rest of his life that he became one of the leading American anti-war authors during the 60s and 70s. He was a Humanist, and also very dedicated to the preservation of nature and our environment. He continued to write until his final years, and in his latter books he became so disenchanted with American foreign policy, (and George Bush in particular), that he wrote books with titles like "A Man Without A Country". The first of the extracts below he wrote during the rock bottom years of George W's reign. The rest are just a collection of my favourites that I took from wherever they happened to pop up in the wide range of his books: * * Kurt Vonnegut wrote: * Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a million bucks ! Starting when I was only twelve years old. I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon. * * Dr Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolph Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union, and so on. "I paid my dues along with everybody else," he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889 - 1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German : "Entschuldigen Sie." Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Beg Your Pardon," or "Excuse Me." * * I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be. And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things." "Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God, "I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand." She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed. She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing. * * “Like everyone else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit. Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne”. * * OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about ? They want to talk about everything. What do men want ? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today ? It's because most of them don't have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to. A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys. But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man. When a couple has an argument, they may think it's about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though, without realising it, is this : "You are not enough people !" * * My uncle Alex Vonnegut taught me something very important. He said that when things were going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories; maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing someone all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies : “If this isn’t nice,…what is ?” * * In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. ‘Mud-as-man’ alone could speak. God leaned close as mud-as-man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Must everything have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away. * * Tiger got to hunt, Bird, he got to fly; Man he got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, Bird, he got to land; Man he got to tell himself He understand. * * “Why me? --That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes. --Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." * * People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. * * We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. * * One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us. * * There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: “Only nut cases want to be president.” * * Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. * * 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them. * * Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. * * Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. * * "Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."* * " We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should." * * "Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead." * * "And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes." * * "Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization." * * "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did." * * "Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." * * "If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too." * * "Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns." * * "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." * * "Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?" * * "She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies." * * "I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we both overestimated our apathies; but not that much." * * Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sundae. * * Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her." * * "Ever since writing Slaughterhouse Five I have been a sore headed occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction', and I would like out. Particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake this drawer for a urinal." * * If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC * * True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. * * The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, "Forgive them, Father, They know not what they do." The irony would be that we do know what we are doing. When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done. People did not like it here.” * * "Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well ?" * * Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were big things." *

An aardvark ?

* Just for a change of pace from the setting of the last extract, I thought I would add a trio of my favourite short literary romps by Bill Bryson. As most people here probably know, he's an expatriot American who has been living in Britain since the early 1970s. He fell in love with this country, (and is now in fact, the chairman of a very influential national organisation whose name says it all,… the 'Society for The Preservation of Rural England'). The first story is an account taken from what sounds like it must have been one of the most fun-filled childhoods that ever lit up the monotone predictability of Des Moines, Iowa. It's taken from my personal favourite book of his, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. The second he wrote as a kind of appreciative eulogy for England after the many years of his life that he has spent here. As an expat myself, it never ceases to amaze me the incredibly low value most English people have for virtually everything within their own country. Perhaps the fresh eye and ready wit of an outsider like Bill Bryson might help to loosen what I once read somewhere described as “the tyranny of viewpoint.” In the final extract Bryson moves away from the narrow world of petty nationalistic concerns and happily deposits us smack-dab in the middle of the far more invigorating domain of his own wildly, utterly ridiculous,… imagination : * * Bill Bryson wrote: {1} MATCH FIGHTING WITH THE WILLOUGHBYS The Willoughby boys really were able to make fun out of nothing at all. On my first visit, they introduced me to the exciting sport of match fighting. In this game, the competitors arm themselves with boxes of kitchen matches, retire to the basement, turn off all the lights and spend the rest of the evening throwing lighted matches at each other in the dark. In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements – more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seem positively determined not to fail. The idea, in any case, was to get matches to land on your opponent and create small alarming bush fires on some part of their person; the hair was an especially favoured target. The drawback was that each time you launched a lighted match you betrayed your own position to anyone skulking in the dark nearby, so that after an attack on others you were more or less certain to discover that your own shoulder was robustly ablaze or that the centre of your head was a beacon of flame fuelled from a swiftly diminishing stock of hair. We played for several hours one evening, then turned on the lights and discovered that we had all acquired several amusing bald patches. Then we walked in high spirits down to the Dairy Queen on Ingersoll Avenue for refreshment and a breath of air, and came back to discover two fire engines out front and Mr. Willoughby in an extremely animated state. Apparently we had left a match burning in a laundry basket and it had erupted in flames, climbed up the back wall and scorched a few rafters, filling much of the house with smoke. To all of this a team of firemen had enthusiastically added a great deal of water, much of which was now running out the back door. “What were you doing down there ?” Mr. Willoughby asked in amazement and despair. There must have been eight hundred spent matches on the floor. The fire marshal is threatening to arrest me for arson. In my own house ! What were you doing ?” Willoughby was grounded for six weeks after that, and so we had to suspend our friendship temporarily. * * {2} "Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardeners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you." * * {3} In Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², (as you will recall from schooldays), E in the equation stands for energy, m for mass and c² for the speed of light squared. In simplest terms, what the equation says is that mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c² , (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormous number, what the equation is saying is that there is a huge amount – a really huge amount – of energy bound up in every material thing. You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 x 1018 joules of potential energy – enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs,… assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. *

* This is the final extract that I copied out of William Dalrymple's "Nine Lives". Something in me fell in love with the dream of India many years ago, and this attraction still carries on in these cameo pictures of India's ancient, vibrant, and unbroken spiritual life as it exists today. India has many of what must be the oldest unbroken religious/spiritual/philosophic traditions in the world. They still continue to this day,... though like everything else in this 21st century, some things have changed and some have stayed the same : * * William Dalrymple wrote: THE SONG OF THE BLIND MINSTREL On the feast of Makar Sakranti, the new moon night on which the sun passes through the winter solstice, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, a great gathering takes places on the Banks of the Ajoy River in West Bengal. Around the middle of January, several thousand saffron-clad wandering minstrels or Bauls - the word means simply 'mad' or ‘possessed' in Bengali - begin to gather at Kenduli, in the flat floodplains of Tagore's old home of Shantiniketan. As they have done on this site for at least 5oo years, the Bauls wander the huge campsite, greeting old friends, smoking ganja and exchanging gossip. Then, as the night draws in, they gather around their fires, and begin the singing and dancing that will carry on until dawn. You approach the festival through green wetlands, past bullocks ploughing the rich mud of the rice paddy. Reed-thatched or tin-topped Bengali cottages are surrounded by clumps of young green bamboo and groves of giant banyans, through which evening clouds of parakeets whir and screech. As you near the Baul monastery of Tamalatala, which acts as the focus of the festival, the stream of pilgrims slowly thickens along the roadsides. Bengali villagers herding their goats and ducks along the high embankments give way to lines of lean, dark, wiry men with matted hair and straggling beards. Some travel in groups of two or three, others travel alone, carrying hand drums or the Bauls' simple single-stringed instrument, the ektara. Throughout their 500-year history, the Bauls of Bengal have refused to conform to the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society. Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques sex, asceticism, philosophy and mystical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision. For the Bauls believe that God is found not in a stone or bronze idol, or in the heavens, or even in the afterlife, but in the present moment, in the body of the man or woman who seeks the truth; all that is required is that you give up your possessions, take up the life of the road, find a guru find a guru and adhere to the path of love. Each man is alone, they believe, and must find his own way. Drawing elements from Sufism, Tantra, Shakta, Sahajiya, Vaishnavism and Buddhism, they revere deities such as Krishna or Kali, and visit temples, mosques and wayside shrines.- but only as helpful symbols and signposts along a road to Enlightenment, never as an end in themselves. Their goal is to discover the divine inner knowledge: the 'Unknown Bird', 'The Golden Man' or the 'Man of the Heart, - Moner Manush - an ideal that they believe lives within the body of every man, but may take a lifetime to discover. As such they reject the authority of the Brahmins and the usefulness of religious rituals, while some - though not all - Bauls come close to a form of atheism, denying the existence of any transcendental deity, and seeking instead ultimate truth in this present physical world, in every human body and every human heart. Man is the final measure for the Bauls. In pursuit of this path, the Bauls defy distinctions of caste and religion. Bauls can be from any background, and they straddle the frontiers of Hinduism and Islam. The music of ‘God’s Troubadours’ reflects their impulsive restlessness and their love of the open road. Travelling from village to village, owning nothing but a multicoloured patchwork robe known as an alkhalla, they sit in tea shops and under roadside banyan trees, in the compartments of trains and at village bus stops, busking their ballads of love and mysticism, divine madness and universal brotherhood, and the goal of Mahasukha, the great bliss of the void, to gatherings of ordinary Bengali farmers and villagers. They break the rhythm of rural life, inviting intimacies and wooing and consoling their audience with poetry and song, rather than hectoring them with sermons or speeches. They sing of desire and devotion, ecstasy and madness; of life as a river and the body as a boat. They sing of Radha's mad love for the elusive Krishna, of the individual as the crazed Lover, and the Divine as the unattainable Beloved. They remind their listeners of the transitory nature of this life, and encourage them to renounce the divisions and hatreds of the world, so provoking them into facing themselves. Inner knowledge, they teach, is acquired not through power over others, but over the Self. Once a year, however, the Bauls leave their wanderings and converge on Kenduli for their biggest annual festival. It's the largest gathering of singers and Tantrics in South Asia. To get there I flew to Calcutta and took a train north to Shantiniketan, determined to see this gathering for myself. But first I had to find Manisha Ma's friend, Kanai Das Baul. Manisha had told me something of Kanai's story when I was with her in the Tarapith cremation ground. When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind. His parents - day labourers - despaired as to how their son would make a living. Then one day, when Kanai was ten, a passing Baul guru heard the boy singing as he took a bath amid the water hyacinths of the village pond, or pukur. In Bengal, the pukur is to village life what the green was to medieval England: the centre of rural life, as well as acting as swimming pool, duck pond and communal laundromat. Kanai's voice was high, sad and elegiac, and the Baul guru asked Kenai's parents if they would consider letting him take Kanai as a pupil: 'Once your parents have gone,' he said, 'you will able to support yourself if you let us teach you to sing.' In due course, many years later, after a terrible family tragedy, Kanai remembered the guru's words and set off to find him. He joined him on the road, learning the songs and becoming in time one of the Bauls' most celebrated singers. Then, after the death of his guru, Kanai took up residence in the cremation ground of Tarapith, where Manisha, Tapan Sadhu and some of their friends helped arrange a marriage for him, to a young widow who looked after the shoes of visitors. Kanai, Manisha told me, had arrived at the Kenduli Mela a few days ahead of me, and had already joined up with an itinerant group of other Bauls. They were all staying in a small house off the main bazaar: to get there you had to leave the bathers washing on the banks of the Ajoy and pick your way through the usual melee of Indian religious festivals: street children selling balloons and marigold garlands; a contortionist and a holy man begging for alms; a group of argumentative naked Naga sadhus; a hissing snake goddess and her attendants; lines of bullock carts loaded up with clay images of the goddess Durga; beggars and mendicants; a man selling pink candyfloss to a blare of Bollywood strings emerging from a huge pink loudspeaker attached to the flossing machine. All along the main drag of the encampment, rival akharas, or monasteries, of the different Baul gurus had been erected, interspersed with tented temples full of brightly lit idols, constellations of clay lamps and camphor flames winking amid the wafts of sandalwood incense filling the warm, dusty Bengali darkness. By the time I found the house - a simple unfurnished Bengali hut - it was dark and Kanai's Bauls were in full song. They had scattered straw on the ground and were sitting in a circle around the fire, cross-legged on the floor, breaking their singing only to pass a chillum of ganja from one to the other. There were six of them: Kanai himself, a thin, delicate and self-possessed man in his fifties with a straggling grey beard and a pair of small cymbals in his hand. Beside him sat a fabulously handsome old Baul, Kanai's great friend and travelling companion, Debdas, singing with a dugi drum in one hand and an ektara in the other. His hair hung loose, as did his great fan of grey beard, while a string of copper bells was attached to the big toe of his right foot which he jingled as he sang. The three men - Kanai, Debdas and Paban - were old friends, and as the music gathered momentum they passed verses and songs back and forth, so that when one would ask a philosophical question, the other would answer it: a symposium in song. The voices of all three men were perfectly complementary, Paban's resonant and smoky, alternately urgent and sensuous; Debdas's a fine tenor; Kanai's softer, more vulnerable, tender and high-pitched - at times almost a falsetto - with a fine, reed-like clarity. As Paban sang, he twanged a khomok hand drum or thundered away at the dubki, a sort of small, rustic tambourine. Kanai, in contrast, invariably sang with his sightless blue eyes fixed ecstatically upwards, gazing at the heavens. Paban would occasionally tickle his chin, and tease him: 'Don't give me that wicked smile, Kanai. . .' The songs all drew on the world and images of the Bengali village, and contained parables that anyone could understand: the body, sang Paban, is like a pot of clay; the human soul the water of love. Inner knowledge found with the help of the guru fires the pot and bakes the clay, for an unfired pot cannot contain water. Other songs were sprinkled with readily comprehensible images of boats and nets, rice fields, fish ponds and the village shop: Cut the rice stalks, O rice-growing brother. Cut them in a bunch Before they begin to smell Rotten like your body Without a living heart. Sell your goods, my store-keeping brother, While the market is brisk, When the sun fades And your customers depart, Your store is a lonely place . . . Later, after dinner, Paban and the other Bauls went out to hear a rival Baul singer perform in the Kenduli market place, leaving Kanai on his own, sitting cross-legged on the rug, singing softly. I sat beside him and asked what he was doing. 'This is how I remember the songs,' he said. 'I am blind, so I cannot read and write the verses. Instead, when I am left alone, I hum a few bars and repeat the songs to myself to help me commit them to memory. It is by repeating them that I remember.' Kanai smiled. 'There are some advantages to being blind,' he said. 'I can learn songs much quicker than other people, and pick up tunes very fast. Debdas says that I see with my ears. When he forgets, I have to remind him, even if it is a song that he originally taught me, or sometimes, even one he composed.' At Kanai's request, I lit a cigarette for him, and we chatted about his childhood, as he filled out the brief picture of his life that Manisha had painted for me. “ I was born in the village of Tetulia,” he said, not far from here, near Birbhum. I was born with eyes that could see, but lost my sight when I caught smallpox before my first birthday. I was ten when my brother was killed in an accident involving a heavily laden bullock cart, and eleven when my father passed away too, from an asthma attack. This left me with the responsibility to feed my two sisters. They were growing girls and needed food. At first it wasn’t too hard. Once I got used to begging from my own friends, from door to door, I found it wasn’t difficult to get enough to fill all our stomachs. We were loved and looked after: I only had to say, “I am hungry” and I would be fed. The door of the poor man is always open – it is only the doors of the rich that close as you approach. If the people in the village came to hear that another family was going through a hard time they would always give them rice or a cow dung cake for fuel. I joined the Bauls partly because it seemed the only way I could make a livelihood. But my guru soon taught me that there are much more important things than getting by, or making money, or material pleasures. I am still very poor, but thanks to the lessons of my guru, my soul is rich. He taught me to seek inner knowledge and to inspire our people to seek this too. He told me to concentrate on singing and did not encourage me to take the path of a Tantric yogi, though I have picked up a lot of knowledge of this sort from other sadhus and Bauls over the years.” “Is it a good life ?” I asked. “It is the best life,” said Kanai without hesitation. ”The world is my home. We Bauls can walk anywhere and are welcome anywhere. When you walk you are freed from the worries of ordinary life, from the imprisonment of being rooted in the same place. I cannot complain. Far from it – I am often in a state of bliss.” “But don’t you miss your home ? Don’t you tire of the road ?” “When you first become a Baul, you have to leave your family, and for twelve years you must wander in strange countries where you have no relatives. There is a saying, “No Baul should live under the same tree for more than three days.” At first you feel alone, disoriented. But people are always pleased to see the Bauls: when the villagers see our coloured robes they shout : “Look, the madmen are coming ! Now we can take the day off and have some fun !” “Wherever we go, the people stop what they are doing and come to listen to us. They bring fish from the fish ponds, and cook some rice and dhal for us, and while they do that we sing and teach them. We try to give back some of the love we receive, to reconcile people, and offer them peace and solace. We try to help them with their difficulties, and to show them the path to discover the Man of the Heart.” I asked, “How do you do that ?” “With our songs,” said Kanai. “For us Bauls, our songs are source of both love and knowledge. We tease the rich and the arrogant, and make digs at the hypocrisy of the Brahmins. We sing against caste, and against injustice. We tell the people that God is not in the temple, or in the Himalayas, nor in the skies or the earth or in the air. We teach that Krishna was just a man. What is special about him in essence is in me now. Whatever is in the cosmos is in our bodies; what is not in the body is not in the cosmos. It is all inside – truth lies within. If this is so, then why bother going to the mosque or the temple ? So to the Bauls a temple or a shrine has little value : it is just a way for the priests to make money and to mislead people. The body is the true temple, the true mosque, the true church.” “But in what way ?” “We believe that the way to God lies not in rituals but in living a simple life, walking the country on foot and doing what your guru says. The joy of walking on foot along unknown roads brings you closer to God. You learn to recognise that the divine is everywhere – even in the rocks. You learn also that music and dance is a way of discovering the Unknown Bird. You come to understand that God is the purest form of joy – complete joy.” Kanai shook his long grey locks. “There is no jealousy in this life,” he said. “No Brahmin or Dalit, no Hindu or Muslim. Wherever I am, that is my home.” For many years now I have wandered the roads of Bengal, spending the rains with my guru, and after he died, in the cremation ground at Tarapith. Sometimes when I have tired of walking, I would work the trains between Calcutta and Shantiniketan. That was how I first met Debdas.” “In a train ?” “He was only sixteen,” said Kanai, “and had just run away from home. He was from the family of a Pundit, and had a childhood in which he needed to ask for nothing. But then he was thrown out for mixing with Muslims and Bauls, and he was innocent of the ways of the world. He had an ‘ektara’ but at that stage he hardly knew any songs. Though I was blind and he could see, it was I who taught him how to survive, and the words of the songs of the Bauls. Although we are from very different worlds, the road brought us together, and we have become inseparable friends.” Kanai smiled, “But I shouldn’t be telling you his story,” he said. “You must ask him yourself.” *

* NOTE {Apologies for my poor computer savvy. I can't figure out how to paste this cartoon from the Word doc where I have it,... unless someone can offer me some practical advice} * * If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I’m not really sure of the ‘word count’ for the two mutually supportive halves of the cartoon above. But when its amusing ‘window of insight’ opened for me, it very soon turned my thoughts to that ‘two part drama’ that I’m sure many others here besides myself, find playing itself out in a significantly large portion of our life,…… the duality of : (1) the seeker, and (2) his or her goal. Because since birth we’ve all been trapped inside our own body/mind mechanism, the nature of our ‘mind’s construction’ is to interpret this play of consciousness that runs continuously inside our heads,… as ourself being the subject and centre of awareness,... and our spiritual goal as the object. This is simply the way our minds were engineered to function. But it is possible to come across teachers who claim to be living in the state of mind that they say ‘IS’ the goal we all seek. Often they are willing to pass on to us candid insights of what ‘we seekers' and 'our seeking’ look like from the perspective of the island in the cartoon, (or the boat,… whichever way our mind is drawn). Below I’ve added four extracts ‘from the outside looking in’, taken from talks by two of my favourite teachers. The first three are by Wayne Liquorman, the last consists of a combination of three theme-related viewpoints by Richard Sylvester. * * {1} When the understanding comes, it is always intuitive and instantaneous. In fact, this whole process of seeking is just designed to keep us busy while we’re waiting for something to happen. * * {2} {Q} : Does it matter if one yearns to evolve, to be – I don’t want to say “better” – but somehow more ? {Wayne} : If you yearn to evolve, it matters for you. For the people who don’t yearn to evolve, it doesn’t matter. You can say to them, “It’s very important for you to yearn to evolve,” and they’re going to look at you like you’re crazy and ask, “What do I have to evolve for ?” {Q} : So either path is okay ? {Wayne} : Both happen. “Okay” or “not okay” is something that is subsequently put on top of what happens. {Q} : We’re free to be what we are ? {Wayne} : We are what we are. It is what it is. What’s happening is what’s happening. You can call it ‘freedom to be what we are’, or you can say ‘we’re enslaved to what we are’. * * {3} {Q} : Aren’t all human beings striving to end their sense of separation ? To experience this ‘Oneness’ that you’re referring to ? {Wayne} : Many people go throughout their entire lives absolutely convinced that they’re separate beings. There’s no yearning that arises at all. There’s no sense of, “Oh, I have to find my True Nature.” That happens only with seekers. Now if you hang around with seekers all the time, then everybody you know has that yearning. That’s your culture. That’s your environment. That seems like the way everybody is. But, I promise you (laughs) that is not the way everybody is. The seeking only happens through a relatively few body-mind mechanisms. But there are some people who, for whatever reason, become seekers; who care about healing this split experience between themselves and the world at large. Then there are others who experience the split who don't even recognize that they’re experiencing the split. For them there is just an incredible emptiness, and they become either drug addicts or alcoholics or food addicts or meditation addicts or anything that will temporarily heal this wound. So, it’s absolutely true that these movements exist within this phenomenal world. Clearly they do. But not everyone is interested in consciously seeking their own true nature. Most people are interested in seeking more money or a better mate, so that in their sex-relations and their money-relations they can get more influence or power. So that they're not feeling so afflicted by the world, and they can exert their 'will' more successfully. They want power in their job, a promotion, so that instead of being on the bottom of the pile they can be on the top of the pile. Those are the things that most people are interested in. Believe it or not, when people hear that there’s someone in Hermosa Beach talking about the nature of Being, and that it destroys all of your concepts -- relatively few people say : "Wow ! Let's go !” (laughter) {Q} : Are you saying my being here wasn’t up to me? {Wayne} : Yes, you have to be here. Right now you have to be here, you could not be anywhere else. People who have to be at the ball game are at the ball game, people who have to be at the opera are at the opera. {Q} : So why are we here doing all this ? {Wayne} : I know why all of us are here today. None of us got a better offer. It’s pretty sad, isn’t it ? This is the best we could do. (laughter) {Q} : But I’m really glad I didn’t get a better offer ! {Wayne} : It’s nice when you feel like you’ve landed in the right place, rather than, “Oh, I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right. I want to be somewhere else.” Because that’s suffering. The sense that things should be other than they are, is suffering. But for you, as it is happening in this moment, your organism is programmed in such a way that this interaction produces joy,... happiness. However, the programming is dynamic; it’s changing all the time. You could come tomorrow – you’ve had a shitty day; you were in heavy traffic; you’ve got a stomach ache and a headache; you’re really not feeling well – and all this ends up sounding like so much mindless bullshit. So you say, “What the hell was I thinking of ? He was really good yesterday. What the hell happened to him?” The thought could readily come in the very next instant, “This sucks...this guy is an idiot.” (laughter) "I'm outta here.” And then the next thought might be, "Somebody said that new movie was really good, I'll just slip quietly out the back here and see if the film has started yet.” This in no way denigrates the happiness and the joy that you’re experiencing right now. That’s part of this moment. When it’s there, it’s there. It feels great. It’s part of what is in this moment. We'll just have to see what the next moment brings. * * {4} Richard Sylvester on ‘Seeking’ ******* One of the problems which arises from our tendency to personalise our fantasy of liberation, is that we can create an idealised image of the guru or teacher. One of the ways in which we keep ourselves seeking is to project onto a teacher an ideal of an ‘enlightened’ person who is so far above us that we can feel we could not reach their state in fewer than twenty lifetimes. We may create an idealised enlightened figure that is above any thought of pain and any possibility of suffering, who lives in utter bliss, who can perform wonderful siddhis and who can release us from our karma if we only show him enough devotion. There can be a powerful tendency to project this idealised figure out there. The more idealised this teacher is, the more our search can be kept going. The search, particularly if it’s for spiritual enlightenment, is sustained by our sense of personal inadequacy. Most spiritual paths are sustained by this. “I am not yet good enough but if I follow the guru, repeat the mantra, do enough chanting, clear my chakras and receive darshan enough, then I will become good enough and one day I will be utterly purified.” All spiritual seeking stems from this core sense that “I am not yet adequate.” Sadly, imagining that there is an idealised teacher out there who is totally adequate does nothing but sustain our own sense of inadequacy in comparison. ******** Of course spending time in the Funfair of Spiritual Seeking can be very entertaining. It can provide us with hope and purpose, a circle of like-minded friends, the company of charismatic teachers, and a way of spending our surplus income. It can also give us a colourful way of passing the time between birth and death, perhaps travelling to exotic places with our arms full of vaccinations and our rucksacks full of anti-diarrhoea pills. But seeking also guarantees that we do not find, because it takes us away from presence. As long as we are looking for the ‘Secret of Enlightenment’ over there in some far away place and some future time, we cannot notice that this is already it right here, right now. This is already what we are searching for, the Promised Land, the hoped-for paradise. However, this can only be seen when our sense of separation falls away. When the self is there, muddying the view with its neuroses and its incessant shouting for attention, then it cannot be seen that this is already it. ****** It’s very common for people to feel that they can help others to awaken by teaching them techniques. This is a confusion that arises when someone feels that liberation is personal to them and they can make it personal for you. A lot of spiritual communication is of this nature. At its heart lies the idea that “I have got to the end of the path, or at least further along the path than you have, and I can teach you how to get there as well.” There’s nothing wrong with saying this but it happens to be totally misleading. And remember that for the seeker, it can be very seductive to be told that there is something you can teach me which will bring liberation closer to me. *

* It’s that curious ‘no-man’s-land’ time of year between Christmas and New Year. All the relatives have gone back to their homes, the lovely presents are gradually getting incorporated into what feels like a fresh new phase of my life, the over-rich meals have thankfully subsided,… and, while that warm feeling of Christmas and friends still lingers I thought I would add some appropriate stories that could hopefully resonate with those sentiments. The first wee poem below came from one of those collections of ‘spiritual insights’ books that someone gave us as a small present. This extract was on the opening page. For me, the poem had such a strong personal impact that I felt maybe others here might also appreciate it. The second extract I came across the very next day, and at the time it felt that, (by wonderful synchronicity), here was a life story that perfectly fleshed out the condensed insight of the poem. Unlike any of the other stories on this thread, this one came off a Facebook link that a friend had posted. Normally I have mixed, and very dubious feelings about stories that fly around on Facebook. But this one felt something quite special. So, here they are,… hopefully a small bit of post-Christmas pleasure for anyone on the forum who enjoys stories : * * {1} * Kindness Is more important Than wisdom, And the recognition Of this Is the beginning Of wisdom. * * {2} A ‘Non–Intellectual’ Teaching Story A NYC Taxi driver wrote: I arrived at the address and honked the horn. After waiting a few minutes I honked again. Since this was going to be my last ride of my shift I thought about just driving away, but instead I put the car in park and walked up to the door and knocked.. 'Just a minute', answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across ...the floor. After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 90's stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940's movie. By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets. There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware. 'Would you carry my bag out to the car?' she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman. She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb. She kept thanking me for my kindness. 'It's nothing', I told her, 'I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother to be treated.' 'Oh, you're such a good boy, she said. When we got in the cab, she gave me an address and then asked, 'Could you drive through downtown?' 'It's not the shortest way,' I answered quickly. 'Oh, I don't mind,' she said. 'I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a hospice. I looked in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were glistening. 'I don't have any family left,' she continued in a soft voice. ‘The doctor says I don't have very long.' I quietly reached over and shut off the meter. 'What route would you like me to take?' I asked. For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she'd ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing. As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, 'I'm tired. Let's go now'. We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico. Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expecting her. I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair. 'How much do I owe you?' She asked, reaching into her purse. 'Nothing,' I said 'You have to make a living,' she answered. 'There are other passengers,' I responded. Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly. 'You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,' she said. 'Thank you.' I squeezed her hand, and then walked into the dim morning light. Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life. I didn't pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk. What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift? What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away? On a quick review, I don't think that I have done anything more important in my life. We're conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware-beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one. *

* Kindness Is more important Than wisdom, And the recognition Of this Is the beginning Of wisdom. * *

If you too think that this may be a problem, there's a host of soap operas running almost continuously on daytime television, that were created for PRECISELY this purpose. Innocuous ballast for the mind.

Hiya Stosh, Thanks very much for your thought-provoking reply. You seem to have filled in a missing brick in my long-running 'love affair' with Vonnegut's writing when you wrote : "Yeah , Vonneguts writing is interesting and I did like it ,( I read most of his stuff , when I was a a teenager), I dont think it helped me though , it encouraged my wry attitude and propensity for sarcasm.. but if a person was feeling the pinch of a drab mental rut, well then maybe the material would be of greater impact." Yes, perhaps he has also, 'less-than-beneficially', encouraged my own tendencies to a "wry attitude and propensity for sarcasm." Anyway, I think that anything which, (even if only temporarily), derails the complacency of our comfortably habitual train of thought,... offers us the space to actually think about something differently before our mind quickly performs its inbuilt 'damage control' function, fills in that 'troublesome gap', and gets us chugging along again in unruffled complacency again. I now owe you five minutes of freed mind space. Thanks

* What an interesting, diverse, and helpful collection of suggestions from so many people on this forum in response to a sincerely expressed thought that I'm sure we've all experienced at different times in our search for spiritual answers. I've personally never had the slightest realisation or deep insight myself, and am sadly reliant on second-hand experiences, (usually via books). But, we all have to try and find our own way by using whatever strengths or weaknesses we've been dealt with. In that light, can I offer you a possible 'helping hand of words', (one of these second-hand insights), written by an author that I'm very fond of, Richard Sylvester ? * * Expectations can be so subtle. There are always expectations if you are a seeker. I was listening to an interview with Mathieu Ricard on the radio last week. He is a French Buddhist monk who has written a book about happiness. American scientists have tested his brain wave patterns and found him to be the happiest person that they have ever come across. He sounded like an absolutely delightful man. I would love to spend an afternoon with him. But can you imagine the expectation of going to a Buddhist retreat where happiness is being taught! You'd probably be trying to gauge your happiness and comparing yourself to the other students in the room! In a way it is another form of oppression, the expectation that I must not be miserable or that I am failing my Buddhist teachers by not being happy enough. It's something else to fail at. The expectation of being happy is very seductive and lies at the heart of much of our activity. It may lie at the heart of a person seeking happiness on a Buddhist retreat or of a terrorist setting off a bomb. A person has the idea that if I do this or that I may become happier. We all want to be happy. I was recently contacted by a Christian who said that he had recently had a sudden revelation that he actually didn't need anything else from God. Until that unexpected and startling insight he had spent so much time praying to God for so many things. He said that afterwards, there was just such incredible relief. He suddenly realised that he could let go of all that need to please God. *

I can readily understand why you feel the way you do about Kurt Vonnegut. He, too, was fully aware of his own, 'bummer attitude'. In his first novel, "Cat's Cradle", he wrote " My second wife left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with." For me, the experience he is referring to is one shared by all of us,.... because aren't we all 'mentally trapped' within our own personality in an analogous way to how we are each 'physically trapped' within our own body.? It's tied up with that interesting question of whether we really do have any freedom to 'be' other than we are, or to 'do' other than we are doing,... at every moment. For me, Vonnegut's pessimism is kind of adds a 'flavour' to literature that wakens up my tastebuds. I don't think I've ever come across another author with quite such a bizarre, witty, yet incisive viewpoint. Nevertheless, like any spice, his way of looking at the world simply 'part of' a much wider meal, created by many other writers, friends, teachers, family,... in the end, every experience that my life has brought me up to this moment in time. I can only imagine that this experience must be true for you as well. Though you have expressed your personal affection for Melville, I doubt he is the sole author you read, or the only contribution to your current world view. He too, is most probably simply one flavour among many that you enjoy. Even if he may well be your 'main man.' To give you a better example, (by using his own words), of what I think of as Vonnegut's unique genius, I'll add the rest of the quote from which I extracted my earlier comment about his pessimism. {Only, can I say in advance that I am NOT on a 'Vonnegut conversion trip' ? I just enjoy the spice of his viewpoint. Quotes like this are simply done the way most of us pass around internet jokes. It's just an attempt to spread a bit of light-hearted fun} : * * During my trip to Ilium and to points beyond - a two-week expedition bridging Christmas - I let a poor poet named Sherman Krebbs have my New York City apartment free. My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with. Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blonde Jesus with spaniel eyes. He was no close friend of mine. I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painters for Immediate Nuclear War. He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happened that I had some. When I returned to my apartment… I found it wrecked by a nihilistic debauch. Krebbs was gone; but before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet. He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen: I have a kitchen But it is not a complete kitchen I will not be truly gay Until I have a Dispose-all. There was another message, written in lipstick in a feminine hand on the wallpaper over my bed. It said: "No, no, no, said Chicken-licken." There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck. It said “Meow.” … I might have been vaguely inclined to dismiss the stone angel as meaningless, and to go from there to the meaninglessness of all. But after I saw what Krebbs had done, in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism was not for me. Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebbs’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy. Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done. *

* Scientists, like everyone else, will have their view on what this universal experience of 'death', is. In a very real way, it is the ultimate mystery for man,.... because it is the gate through which everyone passes, but no one has ever returned to tell us about. (And of course I am aware of the myriad testimonies of Near Death Experiences. But thinking about them a bit more deeply, the very first word says all that is necessary on that count, doesn't it.) So, we all choose the explanation that appeals most to our sensibilities. Some scientists may choose an idea like you've outlined above. Me,... I happen to like most this one below by Richard Sylvester. I guess it just suits my nature : * * Last night I dreamt that I was having dinner in a restaurant with an old friend. We asked for the bill but before it came I woke up. Did my friend have to pay my share of the bill ? It is easy to see that the question about my dream is absurd. It is the same with the question "What happens to me after death ?" The question dissolves when it is seen that I am a dreamed character. Then it is seen that there is no `me' who dies, no `after' because time is created only in the dreamed mind and no `death' because death is simply the awakening from the dream. The mind cannot imagine its own annihilation. Faced with the appearance of death in the dream, the mind creates stories about its own continued existence after death. All of these stories are like answers to the question "Who pays the restaurant bill of the dreamer who wakes up before the bill arrives ?" We are all familiar with so many of these stories. Most offer some variation of reward for a life well-lived, (however that is conceived), and punishment for evil doing. They are both seductive and intimidating, alternately promising us spiritual riches and threatening us with dire consequences. But in liberation it is seen that there is no separate individual before death, so the individual's continuation after death is hardly a problem – it becomes irrelevant. In practice what this means is that generally, when liberation is seen, concerns about death cease to bother us and stories about an after-life cease to interest us. This leaves more attention free to enjoy whatever is happening right now. I like the words of Ramesh Balsekar on death. “What does death ultimately mean? It means the end of the struggle of daily living. It means the end of duality.”

* Booga - Booga !

* THE BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE PART TWO : * In spite of any misgivings and after the years of delay, Stevenson was anxious to start work on the rock no later than May 1807. His first challenge was how to manage his workforce so far out at sea. No one had ever tried to build a lighthouse on a rock only exposed for two hours in every twelve. As the tide was later by about an hour every day, there would be times when the rock was only uncovered during the night. When building the Eddystone Lighthouse of the Cornish coast, Smeaton had ferried his men to work on a daily basis, but Stevenson did not see that as a practical proposition for the Bell Rock. He decided to take the bold step of keeping his men out at sea, at first on a vessel moored at a safe distance from the rock and, later, in temporary quarters on the rock itself. Stevenson hoped to raise a sturdy wooden building, the beacon, on the Bell Rock that would stand on timber beams well above the reach of high tide. These temporary barracks would house the men and at night provide a warning light for passing ships. He was only too aware that such a building might be considered precarious, just a few feet above the swirling waters of the North Sea with no land in sight. After all, Captain Brodie's beacons had not braved the relentless onslaught of the waves for long and Winstanley's more substantial lighthouse had been blown away in the night like gossamer in the wind, but there was really no alternative. Should a sudden gale blow up, it might be impossible to row back in heavy seas to their vessel, and once the tide turned the exposed rock was all too quickly drowned again by the rush of incoming water. Some kind of temporary dwelling was essential. Before the beacon could be built, he needed a ship that would fulfil a duel role providing a dormitory for men working on the rock and also a floating light warning ships at sea. The board was obliged to provide a warning light at night while work was in progress, which would enable them to charge dues from passing shipping and start repaying the loan. For this purpose he acquired an 82-ton vessel, the Pharos - named after the first celebrated beacon tower of ancient Egypt, the Pharos of Alexandria. The Pharos was then fitted out to provide 30 bunks for the workmen, quarters for the crew and a cabin for Stevenson that would give him some privacy. The Pharos would have to be moored one mile from the rock since it was inadvisable to be too near the escarpment should she break anchor in bad weather. Here the water was particularly deep and, as high winds could easily set the ship adrift, a special heavy mushroom-shaped anchor was cast that would dig into the seabed and act as a drag. The men would have to row each day in small boats the mile from the Pharos to their work on the Bell Rock. The starting date in May passed by and with it went the good weather. Stevenson was becoming impatient, as preparations took longer than anticipated. Another ship had to be built, a 40-ton ship called the ‘Smeaton’ that would be used to bring out supplies to the rock. Stone from the quarries was ordered and masons were hired to cut each stone into its own individual design so that it interlocked with its neighbour and gave the tower stability. There were tools to be ordered, coal for the smith, food, alcohol, water and then the men to be hired who would labour possibly for years on the rock. Stevenson preferred to hire those who had worked for him before or were recommended. He was a good judge of character and men usually stayed with him on wages of 20 shillings a week, 'summer or winter, wet or dry', with rations of ½ pound of beef, 1 pound of bread, 2 ounces of butter and 3 quarts of beer a day. There was, too, the added bonus of papers, which protected them from the press gangs, which were quite ruthless in claiming men for service in the navy. Stevenson made it quite clear to his men that nights would be spent on board ship and that no man could return home to his family for a month. After a month, he reasoned, the men would have adjusted to seasickness and, hopefully, fear too. He worried that if they were allowed home earlier they probably would not return. He also required the men to work on Sunday. This proved a problem to many, so before they began the epic journey to their new home in the middle of the sea, perhaps as some sort of insurance against the unknown dangers, the men crowded into the little church at the port of Arbroath to hear prayers. Late in the evening on 17 August 1807, the Smeaton finally set sail. Ships in the harbour were flying their colours and friends and family had gathered on the quay to see the men leave. As the ship moved slowly out of the harbour towards the darkening sky, the sound of cheers rang out across the water and echoed around the town and then was lost to the sound of the waves. They reached the rock, hissing and frothy with surf' at dawn the next morning' There was an air of excitement at being in such a strange place. It was too early to start work with the tide still pushing water over their feet, so Stevenson raised three cheers and poured a ration of rum to the men' By 6 a.m., the water had retreated and some of the workmen began drilling holes for the beams that would support the beacon. The smith, James Dove, who would soon be busy sharpening tools, found a sheltered corner near a rock pool while other men cleared seaweed away from the pitted and uneven surface of the slippery rock. A seaweed called dulse was collected with enthusiasm; many of the men were suffering from seasickness and this was thought to be an antidote. When the tide returned, the men were thankful to row back to the relative security of their temporary accommodation on the Smeaton. As they pulled away, the rock that only minutes before had been a firm foothold was swallowed up before their eyes, with not even a ripple to mark its position. Calm weather with whispering seas and wide, pearly-gold skies of late summer surrounded the enterprise in the first few weeks. Stevenson's first task was to set up the forge. Everybody helped James Dove erect the iron framework which would form the hearth. This was supported by four legs set up to twelve inches into the rock and secured with iron wedges. A huge block of timber which would carry the anvil was treated in the same way and water was fast encroaching again as the weighty anvil was placed. James Dove was invariably up to his knees in water and sometimes up to his waist but this was considered a minor problem compared to keeping the forge fire from the ever-playful waves. The next task was to start work on the temporary hut or beacon. This was uppermost in everyone's minds since if there were an accident to the rowing boats when attempting to land, then this beacon on the Bell Rock would at least provide something to cling to until rescue arrived. Willing hands took on the difficult task of gouging out the hard sandstone that would take the stanchions supporting the uprights. Fifty-four holes in all, each two inches in diameter and eighteen inches deep, were needed to hold the iron stanchions. The upper part of the stanchions above ground would be riveted into the six massive 5O-foot upright beams that formed the core framework of the beacon and other supporting beams. One morning as the men rowed towards the rock, Stevenson was astonished to see what looked like a human figure lying on a ledge of rock. His mind was in turmoil, assuming that there must have been a shipwreck in the night and the place would be littered with dead bodies. He was afraid his men would want to leave. They would see the Bell Rock living up to its reputation as a place of dread. As soon as he landed, and without a word, he made his way quickly to where the 'body' lay, only to discover, with immense relief, that it was, in fact, the smith's anvil and block. Six days after leaving Arbroath, the men, who had been very cramped on the Smeaton, were transferred to the lightship Pharos, now anchored a mile away. Everyone was pleased to be going to the larger ship, which had a well-equipped galley and bunks for the men. Her only drawback was that she did roll rather badly even in light winds. This made it extremely difficult for the men even to get into the rowing boats for the mile-long row to the rock. Indeed, her rolling was so great 'that the gunwale, though about five feet above the surface of the water, dipped nearly into it upon one side,' recorded Stevenson, 'while her keel could not be far from the surface on the other'. Everyone hoped the good weather would continue, not daring to imagine what she would be like if the weather turned. Seasickness, which had largely been conquered, now became a very big problem. Even Stevenson was affected. On Saturday night, al1 hands were given a glass of rum and water and every man made a contribution to the occasion, singing, playing a tune or telling a story, so that the evening passed pleasurably, ending with the favourite toast of 'wives and sweethearts'. By Sunday morning, however, the atmosphere was much changed. There was the seriousness of breaking the Commandments to be considered' Several were opposed to working on the Sabbath, but Stevenson pointed out that their labour was an act of mercy and must continue without fail, although he emphasised no one would be penalised for following his conscience. Prayers were said, and then Stevenson, without looking back, stepped into the boat. To his relief, he was followed by all but four of the masons. Several days passed with work progressing well. The site for the lighthouse was marked out' a huge circle 42 feet in diameter in the middle of the reef, and the foundation holes for the beacon house were underway. On 2 September, however, their luck changed. A strong wind blew up and a crew from the Smeaton, who had rowed to the rock that morning, bringing eight workmen, was concerned that the Smeaton might break loose from her riding ropes and took its rowing boat back to check. No sooner had it reached the Smeaton than she broke from her moorings and began drifting at speed. The men who had remained on the rock were so intent on their work that they did not notice the rowing boat leave, or see that the Smeaton herself was floating quickly away. Stevenson, alone, realised their terrible dilemma. He could see that with the wind and tide against her, the Smeaton could never get back to the Bell Rock before the tide overflowed it. There were 32 men working on the rock and only two boats, which in good weather might hold twelve men each. But now the wind was blowing in heavy seas. In such conditions, it would be fatal to put more than eight men in each boat to row the mile back to the floating light. It meant that there was transport for only half the men. He watched the ship too far away to help and the men still involved in their work. As he stood there, trying to make sense of this insoluble problem, the waves came in with a sudden fury, overwhelming the smith’s fire, which was suddenly put out with a protesting sizzle and hiss. Stevenson himself was now 'in a state of suspense, with almost certain destruction at hand'. With the obscuring smoke gone and the sea rolling quickly over the rock, the workmen gathered their tools and moved to their respective boats to find, not the expected three boats, but only two. Stevenson watched helplessly as the men silently summed up the situation, only too aware of the rock fast disappearing under the sea. They waited. ‘Not a word was uttered by anyone. All appeared to be silently calculating their numbers, and looking to each other with evident marks of perplexity.' A decision had to be made. Soon the rock would be under more than twelve feet of water; they would have to take their chances. Sixteen men could go in the boats and the rest would have to hang on somehow to the gunwales while they were rowed carefully back through the boisterous seas to the Smeaton, now three miles away. There was no point trying to row to the Pharos, although it was nearer, as she lay to windward. Those clinging on to the rowing boats would stand little chance. So which men could have a place in the boats ? Stevenson was about to issue orders, but found his mouth was so dry he could not speak. He bent to a rock pool to moisten his lips with the salty water and, as he did, heard someone shout, “A boat! A boat!” Looking up he saw a ship approaching fast. By sheer good luck, James Spink in the Bell Rock pilot boat had come out from Arbroath with post and supplies. As he approached, Spink had seen the terrible dilemma of those on the rock and come to the rescue. This episode left a deep impression on Stevenson. The picture of the men silently standing by the boats awaiting their fate made him acutely aware of his responsibility for their safety and that, on this occasion, only a stroke of luck had averted a terrible catastrophe. On 5 September 1807, the tide receded late in the day and as the sea was running a heavy swell, making the rowing boats hard to handle, Stevenson decided to cancel the trip to the rock. This proved to be a most fortunate choice as the stiff breeze turned rapidly into a hard gale and would have made rowing back from the rock in the darkness a terrifying, if not fatal, experience. The storm raged all night and the next day; the little lightship was hit by successive waves of such force that for a few seconds, as she met each wave, her rolling and pitching motion stopped, and it felt as though she had broken adrift or was sinking. The skylight in Stevenson's cabin near the helm was broken and water poured in from the waves, which were crashing on deck. Later in the morning, Stevenson tried to dress but was so violently thrown around in his cabin he gave up. At two o'clock in the afternoon, an enormous wave struck the ship with such terrifying force that tons of water poured into the berths below, drenching bedding and sloshing as one body from side to side as the ship moved. 'There was not an individual on board who did not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered,' wrote Stevenson, 'and was in the act of sinking.' The fire had been extinguished in the galley and the workmen, in darkness, were deep in Prayer, swearing that should they survive, they would never go to sea again' But by the evening the storm had blown itself out and the workmen were grateful to find the crew returning the ship to normal with a fire in the galley and bedding dried. By mid-September, the bad storms that had prevented work on the rock were replaced by quiet seas and kind weather in which Stevenson hoped to raise the six main beams of the beacon house. It was essential to get the 50-foot beams up and secure quickly as a day or two of bad weather could destroy any work left unfinished and autumn was approaching. More men were recruited from Arbroath. There were now as many as 40 carpenters, smiths and masons on Bell Rock. Their first task was to get a 30-foot mast erected to use as a derrick and a winch machine bolted down. The six principal beams – with iron bars and bolts already in place - were rowed on two rafts from Arbroath. In order to get the first four timbers securely in place in the space of one tide, the men worked in teams. They began before the tide was out, labouring deep in water, hoisting the beams into their allotted places. Others bolted them to the iron stanchions already fixed in the rock to a depth of almost twenty inches and yet more men were ready to secure the uprights with wedges made of oak then finally iron. Every man worked with great intensity before the inevitable returning water claimed the rock. As the waves engulfed them first up to their knees and then their waists, the four main beams were put in place and securely tied to form a cone shape; the timbers were temporarily lashed together with rope at the apex and mortised into a large piece of beech wood. As the last men were leaving, up to their armpits in water, a rousing 'three cheers' rang out from the men already in the rowing boats. The beacon was standing bravely above the waves. The next day the remaining two beams were put in place. Diagonal support beams and bracing chains were added and the beacon was soon strong enough to hold a temporary platform where James Dove made himself a forge. At night, his glowing fire and shooting sparks presented an extraordinary sight as he perched above the waves. To everyone's great delight, the cumbersome bellows no longer had to travel back and forth to the rock with the rowers. The temporary platform was large enough to accommodate carpenters and masons who could work at making the beacon more secure even when the tide covered the rock. Early October brought signs of the coming winter with shorter days and heavy seas. Stevenson was pleased with the first season's work; the beacon looked capable of defying the winter and a start had been made on the excavation of the lighthouse base. John Rennie paid his first visit, impressed with the progress, but expressing grave doubts about the durability of the beacon. Rennie's one night on the yacht, with the sound of the sea lapping so near his pillow, was enough and he took his leave. By 6 October 1807, everyone departed, leaving the Bell Rock and its new beacon to face winter alone. As they made for land after almost two months at sea, the men watched the improbable beacon, sporting a cheerful flag, grow smaller on the horizon until, at last, it was swallowed up by the ocean. *** Winter at home in Edinburgh could not be more of a contrast for Robert Stevenson. Here, he swapped the strictly male world of the rock, where a hard life - and possibly heroism, too - was traded for a daily wage, for a quiet family life with his wife and five children. In 1799, he had married Jeannie' Thomas Smith's eldest daughter by his first wife, and they lived with their parents in a large home Thomas Smith had built in Baxter's Place, Edinburgh. Stevenson was becoming a man of some standing in the town as word of his involvement with the Bell Rock spread. His work did not entirely stop that winter; he undertook a small tour around the lighthouses for the Northern Lighthouse Board and his advice was often sought when problems arose in Thomas Smith's lamp-making business. The firm had won the contract for new street lighting in Edinburgh and lights were also being custom-made in the workshop for lighthouses, which used many faceted mirrors as reflectors. There was also a never-ending correspondence with John Rennie throughout that winter. As the chief engineer, Rennie was in charge of overseeing the progress on the Bell Rock but he was extremely busy managing large projects of his own. His work took him all over England and left him little time to visit Scotland. Despite this, he determined the shape of the tower, with a curvature rising gently from the rock at about 40 degrees in order to reduce the wave force effect. He also insisted on the dovetailing of all courses of stone up to about 45 feet to provide greater strength. After this, he was content to send letters of advice, and Stevenson, sure that his understanding of the Bell Rock was superior, quietly ignored them. Stevenson answered Rennie's letters with voluminous replies, full of complex questions on the lighthouse, designed to create a smokescreen of ambiguity. There was never an actual schism, never an open disagreement between the two men. Stevenson always acknowledged the older man's mastery of current technology, but slowly, as work progressed, the balance of power shifted. Before long, Stevenson .was openly working from his own plan for completing the lighthouse, sanctioned finally by the Northern Lighthouse Board. Christmas passed with warmth and fun centred on the children, but the cold winds of the New Year arrived bringing with them a desolation for which the family was unprepared. The children succumbed first to measles and then whooping cough, nursed patiently by Jeannie. But the double illness proved too great for the 5-year-old twins, James and Mary, who died early in January. Their older sister, 6-year-old Janet, weakened by illness, died just two weeks later. The Stevensons were devastated. They had seen their family decimated; Jeannie was inconsolable in the now silent house. 'Never was there such a massacre of the innocents,' Robert Louis Stevenson wrote years later. 'Teething and chin cough and scarlet fever and small pox ran the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle.' The devastation of the winter left Robert Stevenson ready for a change of scene, to be active again in the company of men, taking on tangible difficulties that could be understood. The dominant thought in his mind was the lighthouse and, above all, the beacon. Rennie had strongly advised against it, fully expecting it to disappear over the winter. Stevenson was more optimistic, but he needed to know for sure. Finding a spell of calm weather at the end of March l808, Stevenson set out in the lighthouse yacht with some of the workmen on the evening tide. As they approached the Bell Rock in the early morning light, he was straining for any sight on the horizon. There was the beacon, riding the waves, just as they had left it last October. ‘There was not the least appearance of working or shifting at any of the joints or places of connection,' Stevenson wrote triumphantly; ‘except for the loosening of the bracing chains, everything was found in the same entire state in which it had been left.’ He was now sure enough of the strength of the beacon to build up further and use it as a refuge should the need arise. If all went well, he hoped at last to make quarters for the men above the tide. The season's work began in earnest when Stevenson, with his foreman, peter Logan, and a dozen masons, set out in a new, custom-built schooner, the Sir Joseph Banks, on the afternoon tide of 25 May I808. His priority over the coming months was to dig out the foundation pit for the lighthouse in the middle of the Bell Rock and create a small cast-iron railway some 300 feet in length that would run from the various landing stages to the site of the lighthouse. Strange though it seemed to build a railway our at sea, Stevenson realised it was the best way to transport the one-ton blocks for the lighthouse across the rock with its corrugated and spiky surface. Any damage done to the individually cut blocks, each one exactly shaped to interlock with its neighbour like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, could render them completely useless. With good weather continuing throughout June, James Dove and his assistant at his forge on a platform on the beacon were endlessly engaged making the fittings for the railway and sharpening tools. Meanwhile, masons laboured at the rock surface, shaping the 42-foot-wide circle for the lighthouse foundations. Stevenson had decided against using explosives to excavate the two-foot-deep foundation into the solid rock in case irreparable damage was done. Therefore, every piece of rock had to be laboriously dug out by pickaxe. The deeper they excavated, the harder the rock became. One man was continually employed replacing pickaxe handles while others were called to help bail out the foundations after each tide. Meanwhile, the landing master and his crew of sailors helped the millwrights to lay the cast-iron railway. They built up the surface where necessary, sometimes as much as five feet, to accommodate the jagged unevenness of the rock. Viewed from the sea, the Bell Rock presented a strange sight. There were sometimes as many as 60 men crowded on its surface, 'the two forges flaming, one above the other’, wrote Stevenson, 'while the anvils thundered’. The entire work party was surrounded by clouds of hissing steam, oblivious of the crashing waves below. The sight was even more strange by night. If it was low tide, the men continued working by the light of the forges; strange dark shapes with their torches casting unnatural shadows over the pitted rock surface. The calm seas and warm summer weather enabled the men to gouge out the reluctant rock in good time and by mid-July the two-foot-deep foundation for the lighthouse was ready. Irregularities in the floor of the rock had to be levelled with eighteen especially cut stones. The largest of these, the massive foundation stone of some twenty cubic feet, was engraved with the year 1808 and fitted with due ceremony. Flags were fluttering from the boats and the whole workforce was in celebratory mood. They stood in the sunshine and cheered as Stevenson and his chief assistants, Peter Logan and Francis Watt applied the token pressure from level and mallet. 'May the great architect of the universe complete and bless this building,' said Stevenson, in a moment of prayer. The motley workforce, standing almost on water it seemed, were absolutely confident that under Stevenson's leadership they could between them build this sheer and slender column that would defy the power of sea, wind, and the slowly creeping rust of time. The whole surface was smooth and ready and the construction of the lighthouse could now begin. As the work gathered momentum, many workers chose to sleep on the beacon, rather than row all the way back to the bunks in the Sir Joseph Banks. Since the railway was not yet finished, every block had to be manhandled across the difficult terrain, yet by mid-August the first course of 12 interlocking blocks was in place - no small feat since the total weight of these blocks was 104 tons. A fortnight later, the second course was laid and trenailed into position. Oak was used for the trenails, which were slotted into previously drilled holes in the stone. These were then lined up with holes in the stone below to join one course to another. The men were much inspired now to see the bold curving lines of the lighthouse taking shape and were as keen as Stevenson to see the third course completed before work finished for the season. Back at the yard in Arbroath, the engineer's clerk, Lachlan Kennedy, was conscious of the race against time, too. Kennedy arranged for the yard workers to load the Smeaton by torch light during the night of 20 September with the last seventeen stones of the third course, so that the ship might catch the 2 a.m. tide and be at the Bell Rock by breakfast. Stevenson and the men were delighted to see the Smeaton unexpectedly sail into view in spite of heavy seas and strong tides that morning, since it now looked possible to finish the third layer of blocks. Any satisfaction soon evaporated, however, as they became helpless witnesses to what followed. Two men from the Smeaton, the mate, Thomas Macurich, and one of the crew, James Scom, a lad of eighteen, went in a small boat to attach the Smeaton's hawser to the floating buoy. This had become caught on a rock on the seabed, shortening the chain and depressing the buoy; the attaching ring of the buoy was barely above water. While the two men struggled with heavy rope to secure the Smeaton, the chain suddenly became disentangled and the large buoy vaulted up with such force that it upset their little boat. The two men were thrown into the sea. While the mate managed to cling on to the gunwale of the boat, James Scott had been knocked unconscious and was quite unable to grasp anything that would save him. Before anyone could attempt a rescue, he was carried away by the strength of the current and disappeared. A distress signal was immediately hoisted, but he was never found. It was an unsettling tragedy for the men on the Bell Rock to witness, particularly as James Scott with his pleasant and willing disposition was everyone's favourite. It was agonising news to have to break to Scott's family, too. His mother was overcome with grief. To add to her difficulties, her seaman husband was being held in a French prison and James was the only one who brought home a wage to her and her four other children. It occurred to the men that to alleviate her hardship, James's younger brother might take his place on the Smeaton, but no one could find the courage to suggest this to her. Eventually, the landing master, Captain Wilson, seeing her desperate circumstances, put the idea forward. 'Such was the resignation, and at the same time, the spirit of the poor woman,' wrote Stevenson, 'that she readily accepted the proposal and in a few days, the younger Scott was actually afloat in the place of his brother.' The third layer of stones was duly laid making the lighthouse four feet high, although the achievement was robbed of its glory by the death of James Scott. Late in the season, with winds growing stronger, everything on the rock was made safe and left to the mercy of the winter seas. The busy days of summer were soon just a memory as the emerging lighthouse, the railway and the marks of humanity made by the men were claimed by the ghostly underwater world of winter at the rock. *** Stevenson made his way back to the comforts of home, but not for long. He took the Smeaton on a short lighthouse tour in terrible weather, where it was pounded within an inch of destruction. Rennie made his annual visit, braving the continued storms, and was shown the season's work on the rock although suffering his usual agony of seasickness. That he approved of Stevenson's work was now clear to the solid, conservatively minded members of the Northern Lighthouse Board, who found they had in their employ, by some whim of fortune, Robert Stevenson, the coming man. Stevenson's greatest concern during the second winter was to find and prepare the best granite for the body of the lighthouse. This was not easy as most quarries could not produce enough rock of the size required. His search took him on long journeys all over Scotland. He favoured granite from the Rubislaw quarry at Aberdeen and transported it back in huge, uncut six-ton blocks. Several more craft were needed for the complex operation of transporting all the stone to the yard at Arbroath, where it was cut and prepared before being taken out to the rock. Two more ships were added to the fleet, the Patriot and the Alexander, as well as wide, flat-bottomed boats called praams, which would take the finished stone from the ships to the Bell Rock itself. One final crucial link in this chain of transport was a horse named Bassey who, unaided, carried the whole of the lighthouse, 2,835 stones, block by block from the yard to the quay. Despite Stevenson's determination to make good progress at the rock, the harsh winter weather lingered into spring and it was snowing when the third season's work started in May 1809. The men began by repairing winter damage to the railway and continuing its progress around the lighthouse. Joists to create another floor level and battens for walls were added to the makeshift beacon, too. In spite of its frighteningly precarious appearance, there was increasing competition among the men to spend the nights there in preference to a berth on the Sir Joseph Banks. It had now survived two bleak winters and confidence in it was growing. This confidence was rudely shaken within a few days, though, as shrill winds from the cold wastes of the north brought in a storm to remember with mountainous seas. Stevenson on board the Sir Joseph Banks was hardened to danger after years of sailing around the Scottish coasts. But even for him, the 'rolling and pitching motion of the ship was excessive . . . nothing was heard but the hissing of winds and the creaking of bulkheads'. His greatest fears were for the eleven men who had chosen to stay in the unfinished beacon. For 30 hours, in a building with no proper root no food, bedding or comfort of any kind, these men were exposed to the terrifying storm. As soon as was possible the crew of the Sir Joseph Banks set out for the rock with supplies and a kettle full of mulled wine, wondering just what they would find. They were greeted with a scene of devastation. Huge seas had washed everything in the house away, even some of the lower floor. The beacon had suffered 'an ill-fared twist when the sea broke upon it,' Peter Logan said with some understatement, but miraculously all the men had survived. It soon emerged that during the storm their spirits had been kept high by a joiner called James Glen, who had regaled them with stories from his early adventures as a sailor 'after the manner of the Arabian Nights' . Glen had recounted such horrific tales of hardship at sea that the men were inclined to think that their own fate, in what amounted to a makeshift box perched just above the ravenous waves, was preferable. Indeed, so inured were they to the petty trials of life that Francis 'Watt and James Glen continued to sleep at the beacon house, declaring that they 'were not to be moved by trifles'. Although conditions on the rock were unpleasant with strong winds and heavy seas, the beacon house was soon repaired and the space separated off into individual rooms. On the lowest floor the smith was at work, sharing the space with the workers mixing mortar. The second floor provided sleeping quarters with bunks for those who preferred to sleep at the beacon. A galley and a small cabin for Stevenson and Logan were added. Balking against unpleasant conditions, Stevenson would not allow anything to slow progress on the lighthouse. He need not have worried. By June, the tower was high enough for a rope bridge to be connected from the beacon house to the lighthouse and work continued as quickly as it could, irrespective of the tide. In fact, Stevenson almost had to restrain the enthusiasm of the men who would often row to the rock at daybreak at four o'clock in the morning to start their day's work. By the end of June, the tower had risen to a height of twelve feet. The biggest problem was that the mortar was continually washed away by heavy seas, although an especially hard, quick drying pozzolana mortar had been used. There was no easy solution to this problem, except to hire more mortar mixers who were always prepared with fresh supplies. At this level the tower was too high to use the derrick cranes and an ingenious new balance crane was adapted particularly for the conditions of the tower by Francis Watt. From a central column a horizontal jib could be raised or lowered, the weight of the article lifted counterbalanced by a similar weight at the other end of the jib. By 30 June, it was necessary to move the crane higher. It was now 35 feet above the rock and quite difficult to manoeuvre. During the operation, someone neglected to tie a purchase rope securely, which resulted in the crane and a ton weight on the jib falling with a terrible crash on the rock. Men ran in all directions except for the principal builder, Michael Wishart, who had tripped directly under the crane. His feet were caught and badly mangled. It looked as though amputation was the only answer. White with shock and excessive bleeding, he was stretchered into a boat and hurried back to Arbroath. When Stevenson visited him a few days later, it was clear he had escaped amputation and was making a good recovery. He could no longer help to build the lighthouse, but he expressed the hope to Stevenson that he might ‘at least, be ultimately capable of keeping the light at the Bell Rock’. By mid-July, high tide no longer covered the lighthouse. The beacon house was also now complete, with a roof of tarred cloth and moss lining the space between the walls for insulation. The walls themselves were covered with green baize, which created a much more homely effect. Most of the men wanted to spend their nights there, including the new cook, Peter Fortune. Fortune was a man of many talents; apart from working as cook and surgeon - for which he was paid three guineas annually - he also served as the barber, steward and provisions accountant. On 22 July 1809, an express boat arrived from Arbroath with the news that an embargo was placed on all shipping while the army was en route to The Netherlands. The lighthouse ships were forbidden to leave Arbroath and the Smeaton could not supply the blocks that were needed to complete the half-finished thirteenth course. Stevenson, fretting at the delay, hurried to Edinburgh, where he argued that the lighthouse was a special case. The customs, however, were not to be persuaded and referred his appeal to the Lords of the Treasury in London. The situation looked bleak until Stevenson managed to coax the customs men into letting him take the necessary blocks and provisions out to the rock in the company of a customs officer. By early August, the tower was 23 feet high and the lower crane at ground level was now raised on a platform of blocks six feet high. This extra height enabled the lower crane to deliver blocks to the crane on top of the building. Work was proceeding well although the hot still days of summer had been few and far between. The men at the rock were constantly harassed by angry seas, soaking their clothes, flinging their tools about and washing the mortar from newly laid stones. By 1 August, 50-foot waves were crashing down with great violence upon the beacon. Yet in spite of these repeated attacks and with successive seas finding new weaknesses, there was a nucleus of men with courage beyond the everyday who would not give in to the elements. On 20 August, a complete course of 53 stones was laid in one day and, less than a week later, the solid part of the lighthouse, consisting of 26 courses, was finished. It stood more than 31 feet above the rock, seventeen feet above high tide and marked the end of work for the season. This last stone of this significant level was laid with full ceremony and then the men set off to Arbroath with flags flying. Stevenson was frustrated at ending the work in August. There was still another 70 feet to build before the light could shine out. The whole season of 1809 had been plagued by bad weather, then the embargo. None the less, he judged it best to leave the solid stump of lighthouse to the mercy of the winter seas, rather than try to take the walls higher that year. Besides, he needed another crane since the one in use had guy ropes that were too long to be manageable in the face of the autumn gales. Over the winter he hoped to appoint the lighthouse keepers. Stevenson decided that the Bell Rock must have at least four; three on duty and one on leave in Arbroath. He did not want a repeat of what had happened at the Eddystone where there had only been two keepers on duty. When one man had died, the remaining keeper, fearful of being accused of murder, had not informed anyone and when the light had been visited a month later the body had been found in an advanced state of putrefaction with the surviving keeper decidedly unbalanced. It did not take Stevenson long to decide on his first keeper. John Reid, captain of the Pharos, was, he thought, a person 'possessed of the strictest notions of duty', and as his assistant he chose Peter Fortune, the cook, who had ‘one of the most happy and contended dispositions imaginable’. Stevenson wanted the light on the Bell Rock to be very bright and easily identified so it would not be confused with any other lighthouse. Therefore, he set out on a tour to inspect other lights. This led to a number of technical improvements; the silvered surface of the reflectors, which directed the beams of light, had to be accessible for polishing to prevent the light from being dulled, and he devised a system to collect any oil that spilled below the burners. His key concern, however, was how to give the Bell Rock a unique signal. Stevenson was particularly impressed with the new Flamborough Head Lighthouse in England, which used coloured light - two white beams followed by a red beam. The effect was created by mounting the reflectors on a rotating axle, which revolved around the light. The reflectors were arranged in three rows, with one of the rows covered in coloured glass. Stevenson also realised the mechanical device for moving the reflectors could control the striking of a bell - giving extra warning in heavy fog. Back in Scotland, he set to work experimenting with different designs and colours. Red invariably gave the strongest light. The Bell Rock Lighthouse, he decided, would flash a bright white light and then, at closer range, a red flash would alternate with the white. It was a design that would set the standard in Scotland for years to come. *** At least the winter break gave Stevenson a chance to be with Jeannie again. She was heavily pregnant over Christmas that year and gave birth to a baby boy called James in February 1810. Stevenson enjoyed barely two months at home with his new son before salty sea spray at the cold and unwelcoming Bell Rock came into view for the fourth season. It was mid-April and there were still sixty-six courses to build. Through these stages the lighthouse would be narrower and no longer solid, so the stones would require very careful cutting if they were to fit into the exacting requirements of the spiral staircase, the separate rooms, the ceilings and the windows. The first essential job of the spring was to build a substantial wooden bridge connecting the lighthouse to the beacon. This would speed up work as the heavy seas made it impossible to even set foot on the rock for almost a month. They soon found that seaweed had festooned the lighthouse and made walking on top difficult. It was clear, too, that during their absence the sea had broken into the beacon house, discovering the secrets of the rooms, visiting and revisiting, and left its watery mark on the green baize. A new balance crane was quickly erected, its various parts landed by the praam-boat in a strong easterly wind and hauled into position. Yet it was still out of the question to start work in the blustery weather, which imprisoned the men in the beacon. The delay worried Stevenson; he dreaded the idea of the lighthouse still being unfinished by late summer, overtaken by bad weather as the higher courses were being laid. It would be impossible to send men up as high as 80, 90, 100 feet to lay masonry in the autumn gales where wind gusts of 90 m.p.h. were not unusual. Work started in earnest by 18 May and the men entered into a race against time regardless of the weather. By 25 May the building had reached the door lintel. Less than three weeks later, they were covering the ceiling of the first room. By the end of June, the lighthouse assumed a fine inward curve and stood 64 feet high. Now the situation was getting dangerous. There was less room to work and a long way to fall; inattention or carelessness could be fatal. The job of pointing the walls was the most precarious; the men 'stood upon a scaffold suspended over the walls in a rather frightful manner,' wrote Stevenson. As the tower increased in height it was a constant fight to keep balance in the wind gusts and many workers lost clothing, jackets and hats to the sea below them. 'Work was again hindered in early July when storm-force winds battered the rock. Heavy seas pushed up from below the beacon house, carrying everything away, including provisions and equipment from the lower floor. It took two days to repair the damaged upper course of masonry where the sea had gouged out the mortar. Whatever the elements did now, however, the end was in sight. By 2l July, the last principle stone of the building was hauled to the quay in Arbroath by the indomitable horse Bassey, who was embellished with bows and streamers for the occasion. At the end of July, the last stone was laid to the ninetieth course by Stevenson. He was surrounded by azure skies and placid seas and every boat proclaimed the victory, hoisting colours and flying flags, the men cheering. The lighthouse now soared 102 feet 6 inches. 'May the great architect of the universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner,' Stevenson said with his customary ceremony as he laid the stone. All that remained was to fit out the light room. But on 15 August, with the final preparations being made, a storm - the like of which no one had yet encountered - hit the rock with awesome fury. The Smeaton broke anchor and drifted hurriedly for the Firth of Forth. The men 'cooped up in the beacon were in a forlorn situation, with the sea not only raging under them, but also falling from a great height upon the roof'. The bridge to the lighthouse was completely impassable from the quantity of sea that constantly gushed over it. With 80-foot waves, the lighthouse itself, still without a roof, had the sea pouring over the top of the walls and out of the windows and door. The storm lasted three days and the men on the floating light could only watch in horror as first the lower floor and then most of the one above were torn from the beacon by the waves. When the storm had washed itself away, the seventeen men in the beacon, pale and exhausted, but alive, started once again on repairs and clearing up. By 16 October, the glazing in the light room was almost finished. That evening, James Dove gave orders for work to cease and the team of workers made their way down through the lighthouse and across the bridge to the beacon house for dinner. Two friends, Henry Dickson and Charles Henderson, were larking around now that the day's work was over, and made a competition of getting there first. They tried to outrun each other as they descended the lighthouse, Henderson in the lead. When Dickson reached the cookhouse he was surprised not to see his friend, who had been ahead. No one had seen him; and no one had seen him fall into the darkness of the water as he had lost his footing hurrying over the rope bridge. A search was made of the black and silent water but he was never found. It was the second tragedy inside two years, but the men, determined, worked on. The light room was at last finished by the end of October. The reflectors were in place, the lamps made by Thomas Smith were fitted, the revolving clockwork machinery set up, and two five-hundredweight 'fog bells' were placed on the balcony. All was ready but the defining sheets of red glass, 25 inches square, were still missing. Red glass of this size was not made in England, and the one man in the country, James Oaky, who had been prepared to try, had not yet been inspired to create this important article. A foreman was sent to London with instructions to stand over Oaky until the red glass was produced and he duly did - the brilliant red glass was soon complete. On 1 February 1811, the blackness enveloping the terrible power of the Bell Rock was banished for ever. A shooting ray of white light, followed by red, cut the night. Everything that Stevenson had strived for, everything his team of men had struggled for at such great risk to life, was condensed into a dazzling beam of light, which sent out John Gedy's original warning from the fourteenth century. The lighthouse that everyone had said was impossible now stood on top of the impregnable and ancient rock, totally conquering its ability to destroy. Huge seas could hammer at the slender column. Sea spray 100 feet high could hiss and curl around the light diffusing its brilliance, but it would stand a glittering star in the wildest storms. It was an enormous achievement, bringing Stevenson wide recognition and acclaim. He had been young and relatively untried when he built the Bell Rock Lighthouse, but on the strength of this success he set up in business for himself as a civil engineer building lighthouses, bridges, harbours and roads. The Northern Lighthouse Board continued to employ him and he built eighteen lighthouses in all, often astride an impossible precipice whipped by the sea on some bleak wind-blown rock. And his sons and grandsons followed after him, festooning the rocky shores all around Scotland with sparkling beacons in the night. He and Jeannie lived in their big house, so loved by the children and grandchildren, with mysterious cellars and secret lofts full of apples ripening and a lifetime's treasures. They were married for 46 years, their lives entwined more than they knew, and when Jeannie died in 1846, he found her absence unbearable. His own life had overflowed with riches exactly to his liking - full of comradeship and adventurous trips. His grandson, Robert Louis Stevenson, later wrote about the 'intrepid old man', who when told he was dying, fretted not at approaching death, which he had faced many a time, but at the knowledge that 'he had looked his last on Sumburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the Sound of Mull . . . that he was never again to hear the surf break on Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse open in the hour of dusk their flowers of fire, or the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of the Bell Rock'. He died in July 1850 at the age of 78. There were, of course, many tributes praising a life so full of achievement, including one from the Northern Lighthouse Board whose commissioners set a marble statue in the Bell Rock Lighthouse with the words: 'in testimony of the sense entertained by the Commissioners of his distinguished talent and indefatigable zeal in the erection of the Bell Rock lighthouse'. To this day it shines out over the North Sea and remains the oldest offshore lighthouse still standing anywhere in the world. *

* I'm a little apprehensive about contributing this next story to a religious/philosophic forum since it doesn't have the appearance of a 'spiritual story', nor even offer a salutary moral lesson that might possibly act as guidance in our daily lives. But from the first time I read it there was something so irresistibly compelling,... so exalting of the resolute, ‘fearless-yet-compassionate’ side of humanity, that this story was the jewel in the crown, above all others, that I simply had to add here. The story itself arrived by such curious means that it still mystifies me. One day while I was sitting at my desk near the front door, the postman arrived, the letter slot popped open, and a small package dropped onto the floor. After removing the parcel's wrapping, I found myself holding what appeared to be a single chapter torn from the body of a book of stories. There was neither a return address nor a covering letter. I've never since been able to discover who sent it, nor had I previously heard so much as a word concerning the subject matter of the story. Since then I've read and re-read this extract with undiminished pleasure quite a number of times over the years since it first arrived. However, few weeks ago a strong thought came out of the blue,… that I suddenly wanted to find out more about this story. The first step was obvious, (and I clearly should have explored it earlier). But the title of a book is usually written on the top of each left-hand page and, luckily, the torn segments I had followed that literary convention. So I put the title into Amazon's search engine and found that it had been taken from a book called "Seven Wonders of the Industrial World", by Deborah Cadbury. Once I had this information, I straight away ordered a copy of the complete book. And though I must say that the story posted below still remains my personal favourite from the collection,.... Ms Cadbury certainly is an extremely capable writer. If you enjoy her down-to-earth style in this story, I'm sure you would equally appreciate the rest of her most fascinating book. To cut my long-winded intro short, though on the simplest level this could be described as merely a tale of courage and altruistic motivation by a select handful of working British folk of the 1800s,.... I personally feel that its relevance is far more universal. Primarily, I find it an uplifting story about ‘all’‘ mankind. Human faults are so widely publicised in newspaper, TV programme, and in endless accounts of the environmental havoc we've unleashed on all other species by our existence on this planet. Thankfully, after I first read this historical testament, an inner part of me quietly rejoiced. A simple story,… of the 'good' in man. P.S. I've just discovered that it will have to be posted in two parts because there are too many characters. Fortunately there were logical break-points within the story exactly as Ms Cadbury wrote it. P.P.S. All my relatives arrive tomorrow so I imagine I’ll be away from this forum for a week or so, till Christmas is over and normalcy returns. I suddenly thought, a two-part serial of a 19th century tale,… it seemed a perfect Dickensian way to launch the Christmas season ! I hope the coming celebration brings all readers on this forum, every happiness of family, friends and shared enjoyment. * * THE BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE PART ONE : * The safe anchorage of the Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland has always been a refuge for shipping hoping to escape the wild storms of the North Sea. The safety of this natural inlet, however, is considerably compromised by the presence of a massive underwater reef, the Bell Rock, lying treacherously right in the middle of the approach to the Firth of Forth. It is far enough away from the coast for landmarks to be unable to define its position, being eleven miles south of Arbroath and a similar distance west from the mouth of the Tay. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a storm was brewing in the Forth and Tay area, those at sea faced a forbidding choice: ride out the storm in the open sea or try to find safety in the Firth of Forth and risk an encounter with the Bell Rock. Hidden by a few feet of water under the sea, the craggy shape of the Bell Rock lay in wait for sailing ships, as it had for centuries, claiming many lives and ships and scattering them wantonly, like trophies, over its silent and mysterious escarpments. It bares itself briefly twice a day at low tide for an hour or two, and then disappears under the sea at high tide, sometimes its position given away by waves breaking on the submerged rocks and foaming surf over its rugged features. An outcrop of sandstone about a quarter of a mile long, it slopes away gently on the southern side, but to the north it rises steeply from the seabed, an unyielding barrier. For early navigators the greatest danger was to come suddenly upon the northern cliff face. Any ship taking soundings north of the rock would find deep water and assume all was safe, only to learn the fatal error should the ship stray a few yards further south. All on board would listen for the last sounds they might hear of timber being torn and split as wood was crushed against rock. So many lives were lost, along the whole Scottish coast the notorious Bell Rock 'breathed abroad an atmosphere of terror'. For centuries the sea lanes were deserted, their wild highways left unchallenged, but from about the mid-eighteenth century the growth of trade in flax, hemp and goods for the weaving industry saw an increase in shipping and, as a consequence, a growing number of fatal collisions with the massive submerged cliff of the Bell Rock. The heavy toll brought pleas for some kind of warning light, although no one was sure how this could be done so far out to sea on a rock which for most of the time was under water. The local people of the east coast had once succeeded in putting a warning on the rock. In the fourteenth century, it was said, a man called John Gedy, the abbot of Aberbrothock, was so concerned at the numbers who perished there that he set out to the rock with his monks and an enormous bell. With incredible ingenuity, they attached the bell to the rock and it rang out loud and clear above the waves warning all seafarers, an invisible church in the sea. The good abbot, however, had not reckoned on human avarice. Soon after, a Dutch pirate called 'Ralph the Rover' stole the bell, in spite of its miraculous Power to save life by its insistent warning ring. Ironically, he died within a year and must have regretted his act when his ship met bad weather and the great reef and some said a deserving fate, as he and his ship disappeared beneath the waves. From that time, the rock acquired its name and became known as the 'Bell Rock'. The coast of Scotland is long and rugged and has many jagged peninsulas and rocky islets. Even by the late eighteenth century for hundreds of miles, according to local accounts, these desolate shores ‘were nightly plunged into darkness'. To help further the safety of these coastal waters, the Northern Lighthouse Board was established in 1786 to erect and maintain lighthouses. At that time, the warning lights to shipping were often no more than bonfires set on dangerous headlands, maintained by private landowners. When the warning fires were most needed in bad weather, they were usually put out by drenching rain. By 1795, the board had improved on these primitive lights with seven major lighthouses, but progress was slow' They were chronically under funded, though never short of requests to do more by worried ship-owners, and especially to put a light on the Bell Rock. The Northern Lighthouse Board was well aware of the desirability of a light on the rock. Its reputation as a killer lying in wait at the entrance to the enticing safety of the Firth of Forth had travelled well beyond England. However, with little in the way of funds and the difficulties of building so far out to sea on a rock that was submerged by up to sixteen feet of water for much of the day, such a request was improbable madness not even to be considered. There was one man, however, who had been dreaming of the impossible, of building a lighthouse on the hidden reef and allowing the whole bay of the Firth of Forth to be useful as safe anchorage. Robert Stevenson was a man of strong character who by some strange fate had been given the very opportunities he needed to fulfil his ambition. In early rife his chances of success had looked poor. His mother, Jean Stevenson, had been widowed and left penniless when he was only two. Years of hardship followed, but Jean Stevenson, a deeply religious woman, struggled on to ensure an education for her son. In later life, Stevenson always remembered, that dark period when my mother’s ingenious and gentle spirit amidst all her difficulties never failed her'. Jean was eventually remarried in November 1792 to an Edinburgh widower called Thomas Smith who designed and manufactured lamps. At the time, Smith was interested in increasing the brightness of his lamps. A scientific philosopher from Geneva called Ami Argand had recently developed a way of improving brightness by fitting a glass tube or chimney around the wick. Smith was experimenting with taking this work further by placing a polished tin reflector behind and partly surrounding the wick, shaped in a parabolic curve to focus the light. This gave a much brighter beam than conventional oil lamps and the lamps from his workshops were now much in demand. He was soon approached by the Northern Lighthouse Board, who employed him as their lighting engineer. At a time when lighthouses were as basic as a fire or torch on top of an open tower or simple oil lamps encased in glass lanterns, Smith began to design oil lamps with parabolic reflectors consisting of small facets of mirror glass to create a powerful beam. When the young Robert Stevenson visited his stepfather's workshop, he found it a magical place where uninteresting bits of metal and glass were transformed into beautiful precision-made objects. Jean could see where her son's interests lay and, much to his delight, Stevenson was soon apprenticed to Thomas Smith. One of Thomas Smith's duties at the Northern Lighthouse Board was to visit the board's growing number of lighthouses. During the summer months he and Stevenson would set out by boat and appraise the situation, repairing damage and deciding on the position of new lighthouses. By about the turn of the century this responsibility fell entirely to Stevenson. 'The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted,' his grandson, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote years later. * “The coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback through unfrequented wildernesses he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of out door life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences.” * From May to October, Stevenson went on his round visiting the board's scattered lighthouses, taking much needed supplies and solving problems. These could vary from the repair of storm-damaged buildings to the question of finding new pasture for the keepers’ cow. Stevenson was also employed to map out the position of new lighthouses and soon found that some of the inhabitants of the remote islands – who supplemented their income from wrecking - were openly hostile to him. On one journey in dense fog his ship came dangerously near sharp rocks of the Isle of Swona. The captain hoped to get help towing the ship away from the danger from a village he could see on shore. The village looked dead; everyone was asleep. To attract attention, he fired a distress signal. Stevenson watched in disbelief as .door after door was opened, and in the grey light of morning, fisher after fisher was seen to come forth nightcap on head. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised, but all callously waited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and waited also.’ Luckily a breeze sprang up and the ship was able to make for the open sea. During these summer trips Stevenson learned a great deal. He could be impatient, not inclined to suffer fools gladly, but he never lacked confidence in his ability to tackle the most difficult problems. Over these years, as the Scottish coastline and its lighthouses became ingrained on his mind, he was nurturing his secret ambition to tame for ever the awful power of the Bell Rock. The fulfilment of his dream seemed remote. Stevenson was not a qualified civil engineer. As Smith’s young assistant he had little influence with the board. And he was only too aware that the commissioners believed that a light on the Bell Rock was out of the question. Those living on the northeast coast of England and Scotland in December 1799 saw the old century dragged out with a thunderous storm of screaming winds and mountainous seas, which raged from Yorkshire to the Shetlands. All along the east coast, ships at anchorage were torn from their moorings and swept away. Those seafarers who could hear anything above the wind and crash of waves listened for the dreaded sound of wood cracking and splitting as it was thrown against rock - the sound of death. In Scotland, the haven of the Firth of Forth, guarded by the Bell Rock, was ignored. Ships preferred to make for the open sea and take their chances in the storm rather than try to steer their way past the dreaded reef. The storm lasted three days and was to sink 70 ships. The call for a light on the Bell Rock grew louder. If there had been a lighthouse, ship-owners argued, many more ships would have made for the safety of the Firth of Forth. The Northern Lighthouse Board began, at last, to give serious consideration to what they still saw as an insoluble problem and Stevenson was quick to present his own plan for a beacon-style lighthouse on cast-iron pillars. Although there was not a more dangerous situation 'upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom,' he argued, his design would be safe, relatively inexpensive and even pay for itself as the board collected fees from ships taking advantage of its warning light. The cautiously minded board was impressed with the idea of economy, but less sure of Stevenson's design. Despite his experience around the coast of Scotland, Stevenson had not yet managed to set foot on Bell Rock itself and was impatient to do so. In April 1800, he hired a boat, intending to survey the site, but the weather was too stormy to land. In May, as he sailed nearby on a journey north, it lay invisible, even at low tide. He had to wait until the neap tides of October before he could make the attempt again. At the last minute, however, the boat he had been promised was unavailable and no one was prepared to take him out to the rock, not even in calm seas. Time was running out for a landing on the rock before winter and, if he could not find a boat he would miss the favourable tides. Finally, a fisherman was found who was prepared to take the risk; it transpired the man often braved the Bell Rock to hunt for valuable wreckage to supplement his income. Once on the rock, Stevenson and his friend, the architect James Haldane, had just two hours in which to assess the possibilities that the rock might offer before the tide returned and the rock disappeared. It was covered in seaweed and very slippery. The surface was pitted and sea water gurgled and sucked in the fissures and gullies that criss-crossed the rock, but Stevenson was encouraged by what he saw. The exposed area at low tide was about 250 by 130 feet, revealing enough room for a lighthouse. Better still the surface of the rock was of very hard sandstone, perfect for building. There was one problem though. He had thought that a lighthouse on pillars would offer less resistance to the sea, but when he saw the heavy swell around the rock, overwhelming the channels and inlets, pushing its bullying foamy waters into deep fissures even on a calm day, he knew his plan could not work. Visiting boats bringing supplies or a change of keeper would be shattered against the pillars in heavy seas, and the capability of the pillars to withstand the timeless bearing of the waves was questionable, too. “I am sure no one was fonder of his own work than I was, until I saw the Bell Rock,” he wrote. “I had no sooner landed than I saw my pillars tumble like the baseless fabric of a dream.” The two hours passed all too quickly. The fisherman, who had gathered spoils from wreckage on the reef, was anxious to leave as the returning tide swirled around their feet. For Stevenson, finding the Bell Rock and standing at the centre of its watery kingdom, with nothing but the ever-encroaching sea in sight, had been a revelation. It was clear that only an immensely strong tower would have a chance of surviving in such an exposed position - a building higher than the highest waves, made of solid sandstone and granite. With these thoughts in mind, he undertook an extensive tour of English lighthouses and harbour lights in search of a model on which to base his own plans. It was a journey of some two and a half thousand miles by coach or on horseback, which took many months of 1801. He soon found there was only one such stone sea-tower already in existence. It was built on a buttress of rock about nine miles from the port of Plymouth, off the south coast in Cornwall. The Eddystone Lighthouse, so called because of the dangerous eddies and currents that swirled around it, had withstood the fearsome gales blown in from the Atlantic since 1759. It had been built by John Smeaton, a man revered by Stevenson and considered to be the father of the civil engineering profession. Standing 70 feet high, it was made from interlocking solid Portland stone and granite blocks, which presented a tall, smooth curved shape to the elements. It had been inspired, Smeaton said, by the trunk of an oak tree. ‘An oak tree is broad at its base,' he explained, 'curves inward at its waist and becomes narrower towards the top. We seldom hear of a mature oak tree being uprooted.' There had been several attempts at lighthouses on the Eddystone rocks before Smeaton's triumphant endeavour, the most notable being the Winstanley Lighthouse, built in 1698. Henry Winstanley, the clerk of works at Audley End in Essex, was also an enthusiastic inventor and he took it upon himself to build a remarkable six-sided structure on the Eddystone rocks standing over 100 feet high. With charming balconies, gilded staterooms, decorative wrought-iron work and casement windows for fishing, the whole curious structure was topped with an octagonal cupola complete with flags, more wrought iron and a weather vane. It might have been more appropriately placed as a folly on a grand estate, but Winstanley was confident it could withstand the most furious of storms. He was so confident that he longed to be there in bad weather to observe the might of the sea and by chance he was there on 26 November 1703. That night a bad storm blew in with horizontal rain, screaming winds and waves 100 feet high. Winstanley certainly had his wish. At some time in the night, the fury of the sea took Winstanley and his pretty gilded lighthouse and tossed them to a watery oblivion. In the morning, nothing remained but a few pieces of twisted wire. On his return from his trip in September, Stevenson immediately set about redesigning his lighthouse along the lines of Smeaton's Eddystone. He, too, would build a solid tower that curved inwards, the walls narrowing with height and accommodating the keeper's rooms. It would have to be at least twenty feet taller than the Eddystone, which was built on a rock above sea level, unlike the Bell Rock, which at high tide was covered by eleven to sixteen feet of 'water. And if it was to be taller, it would also have to be wider at the base, over 40 feet, with solid, interlocking granite stone that would ensure it was invulnerable, even in roaring seas. More than 2,500 tons of stone would be needed and Stevenson calculated that the cost of such a lighthouse would be around £42,000. He could foresee that this cost would be a major obstacle as the annual income collected by the Northern Lighthouse Board from dues was a modest £4,386. He was right; the board thought the cost prohibitive and also questioned Stevenson's ability to undertake such an immense and difficult project. They felt he was too young and untried for this great responsibility and pointed out that he had in fact only ever built one lighthouse before, a small lighthouse at that, and on the mainland. The board made it clear that they intended consulting established men in the civil engineering profession, men with a body of work and high reputation, such as John Rennie, who was building the London Docks. But Stevenson was a man who stood four-square to an unfavourable wind. The sweet wine of optimism flowed in his veins in generous measure and he took the negative epistle from the board as a simple invitation to his buccaneering spirit to try again. Meanwhile the commissioners of the Northern Lighthouse Board realised they would never generate alone the huge sum needed for a lighthouse on the Bell Rock. It would need an Act of Parliament to allow them to borrow the required amount, which they would then repay from the shipping dues they collected. The first Bill was rejected in 1803, but the subject was far from forgotten. The board was still hopeful for some sort of light and made it known that they would give consideration to any sensible plan that was submitted. A Captain Brodie stepped forward with his plan for a lighthouse on four pillars made of cast iron and a generous offer to provide, at his own expense, a temporary light until a Permanent structure was in place. The board quietly shelved the lighthouse on cast-iron pillars but encouraged the temporary lights, which duly appeared, built of wood. And as each one was toppled by careless seas, it was replaced by Captain Brodie with growing impatience. Several budding engineers had proposed plans for a lighthouse on pillars, including one advocating hollow pillars, to be filled every tide by the sea, but the conservative- minded members of the Northern Lighthouse Board remained unconvinced. The years were sliding by and Stevenson embarked on courses in mathematics and chemistry at Edinburgh University and worked on designs for other lighthouses. All the while, he was untiring in his efforts to interest the board in his now perfected design for a strong stone tower on the Smeaton plan. He envisaged a lighthouse standing over 100 feet tall, 42 feet wide at the base, with 2 feet embedded in the Bell Rock, and the whole exterior of the building encased in granite. The board were polite but cautious. If only “it suited my finances to erect 10 feet or 15 feet of such a building before making any call upon the Board for money,” Stevenson declared with growing impatience, “I should be able to convince them that there is not the difficulty which is at first sight imagined.” While the officials procrastinated through 1804, a severe storm blew up and sank the gunship HMS York off the Bell Rock. Sixty-four guns and 491 lives were lost. With the loss of a gunship at a time of Napoleon’s unstoppable progress, the Admiralty at last woke up to the dangers of the Bell Rock. The board, however, still took no action and somewhat dejected, in December 1805, Stevenson could see no alternative but to send his plans to John Rennie seeking his advice. Rennie was a man at the peak of his career, widely recognised as one of the best civil engineers in the country, with twenty years achievement in building bridges, canals and harbours. None the less, Stevenson felt reluctant to share his ideas after all this time, pointing out that the design had 'cost me much, very much, trouble and consideration'. Rennie, however, was greatly impressed by his work and replied by return of post. He confirmed that only a stone building would survive the conditions of the Bell Rock and approved Stevenson's basic plan. He even came to a similar conclusion on the cost of the enterprise. Rennie's approval was enough to unlock the door. Overnight, the Northern Lighthouse Board was transformed and unanimous: the commissioners wanted a lighthouse on the Bell Rock such as Rennie advocated. But first there would have to be a Bill passed by Parliament allowing the board to borrow £25,000. In April 1806, John Rennie and Robert Stevenson went in person to Westminster to explain their case to the Lords of the Treasury and the Lords of the Admiralty. Progress was slow, but eventually the Bill was passed and a date set for work to start on the infamous Bell Rock. The Northern Lighthouse Board, mesmerised by Rennie's reputation and charmed by his charisma, placed him in overall charge, with Stevenson merely acting as his assistant. Rennie himself, who had never built a lighthouse, argued that the light on Bell Rock should be a fairly faithful copy of Smeaton’s Eddystone Lighthouse, which was, after all, a proven success. He based the design of the lighthouse tower on this concept, but with a much greater curvature at the base to deflect the force of the waves upwards. Although a lot younger, Stevenson considered himself far more knowledgeable about lighthouses than Rennie, having now built several, and he was also familiar with the unique conditions of the Bell Rock. So without ever questioning the older man's authority, he became quietly determined to work entirely from his own plan. But no one had ever built a lighthouse where so much of it was underwater. Stevenson could not know for sure whether a stone lighthouse was feasible. There was an awful possibility that the critics were right. Perhaps he was attempting the impossible, endangering life and squandering money. The Bell Rock could so easily have the last word as his imagined sea citadel came tumbling down. *

* Mercifully, there’s no preamble today as I’ve already introduced Brian Harris and his wonderful book, “Tibetan Voices ; A Traditional Memoir”. The extracts below are the second installment of three stories. * * Tibetan Tales : {1} : THE GIFT OF GOOD WORK My interest in building and repairing monasteries goes back as far as I can remember. As a child, it was my job to help with the goat herding, and whenever I took the goats up into the hills, I would let them feed in the pasture while I sat on a rock and constructed miniature monasteries and other buildings with small stones and pebbles. Some people from my village came to visit me recently, and I was astonished to hear that these structures are still standing! Even at this young age, I already had a great liking for carpentry and woodwork. When I took the goats to pasture I often used to cut a branch with my goatherd's knife and carve it into the shape of a butter bowl or a musical instrument. I still have the scars on my hands from the cuts I gave myself in my clumsy efforts all those years ago! At fifteen I was helping my family transport grain on our yaks, travelling quite long distances to trade grain for salt and then the salt for rice, which we later traded at home for other goods. But my only desire was to do woodworking; so when I was twenty-two I began to study with my uncle, a famous carpenter. I lived at his house for a year and learned to make all kinds of things. I started with the specially designed boxes that we use to carry goods on horseback. Then I learned to make a musical instrument called a damyang, which is something like a guitar. I also made butter churns, small tables, water barrels, and drums. I learned very quickly, as I was bright and the skills came naturally to me. I was happy to be doing what I most wanted to do, and my uncle was happy to teach me, even though he had sons of his own. My parents, however, were not pleased - they would have preferred me to put my whole heart into farming. I was the eldest of a family of eleven, and my parents insisted that as the eldest son I must help look after our family affairs. As a semi-nomadic family we had quite a bit of land but we still had to pay the government tax, so there was lots of work to do: looking after the yaks and other animals, working in the fields, and raising the goods we needed to sell in order to pay the tax. I was also expected to study, although I had little time for it. Another reason for my parents' displeasure was that, in Tibetan society, carpentry and woodworking were not viewed as suitable occupations for people from families of high status. These trades were usually done by people from a lower level of society who had no other means of making a living, although a skilled woodcarver could often earn more than enough to meet his daily needs. In fact, as an independent craftsman having mastered the skills of woodcarving and monastery construction, I received very generous compensation and was treated very well. After studying with my uncle for a year, I began to receive requests from different monasteries to do repairs and before long I was called to Sakya to assist in the construction of the main temple of the Lama Sakyapa. It was there that I learned how to construct and carve a monastery in its entirety. These skills were passed on to me by a famous master carver named Dechen, who had been brought to Sakya from Lhasa to oversee the construction of the temple. I studied with Dechen for three years, learning masonry, traditional engineering, geometrical drawing, and design, all under his expert guidance. I shall always feel indebted to my master for helping me learn my craft. He had nearly five hundred people working under him-masons, woodcarvers, carpenters, and labourers - but he gave me special attention because I was bright and took immense care with everything he asked me to do, so he could see that I was sincere in my desire to learn. It was customary for students and workers to offer gifts to their teachers, usually in the form of money or alcohol. But Dechen drank only tea and I knew the best offering I could give him was to do the finest work possible on whatever I was assigned to do; this was what pleased him most. From the foundations to the roof of the monastery, my teacher guided my instruction and I was able to learn all the skills I needed. Wherever there was something important to be done, I was given the opportunity to assist in the work. I was always anxious to know what new thing I was going to learn the next day: how deep the foundations should be, what kind of stones should be used for them, where the pillars should stand, how to carve the different types of designs at the top of each structure. These were the things that concerned me, not how much I was getting paid or whether the job would come in on time. My master decided that, since I was doing such good work and taking on a lot of responsibility, I should be given the title of ‘uchung’, which means something like "junior master "or "teacher." He went to see the man responsible for the construction of the monastery, a wealthy businessman from the Lhasa aristocracy whose name was Pondesang, and asked him if he would agree. I had other ideas, however. I told Pondesang that if my master felt like giving me an uchung’s salary, I had no objections; I pledged to work to the standard of an uchung, but I did not want the social status that went with the position. I knew that, given the special relationship I had with Dechen, the many other uchungs from Lhasa who were working at the monastery would not be pleased if I took this title. Pondesang's response was that since I was a sincere and gifted worker, I had earned this privilege, and so I was given the salary of an uchung but not the title or status, just as I had requested. By doing this I not only avoided problems for myself and my master but at the same time was able to improve the overall quality of the work done in the monastery, which I knew I could only do as an ordinary worker. If I had taken the title of uchung while continuing to produce the high-quality work that I was known for, and then demanded work of a similar standard from the other craftsmen, they would simply have said, "You're an uchung, and it's your duty to do superior work!" However as a normal worker, when l received commendations for the quality of my work I could say to the other uchungs, "My status is inferior to yours, but I am producing better work. So why can't you improve your skills and show the others how to do better, too?" In this way I was able to influence the general standard of work there. Although with private commissions it was customary for offerings to be made to the master and his workers, the construction at Sakyawasa government project, so the uchungs received no benefits other than their salary. During this three-year project l did not leave the construction site, since my main concern was to acquire all the skills from my master. In any case, I never had money to spend. There were official leave times, however, and during these periods my master, Dechen, would go and work on the Phunsok Potang - the private palace of the Lama Sakyapa. I was among fifteen skilled craftsmen working there under the master, and as well as our daily needs we were given many gifts of butter, meat, clothes, and money. Dechen was presented with gifts of great value' such as rich brocades, precious stones, dzi, and gold. The construction of this palace also took three years. After the monastery and the palace were completed, Dechen returned to Lhasa. Before he left, he announced that he was very pleased with me, and that thanks to me his great burden of responsibility had been considerably lessened. I was told that my apprenticeship was complete and I was now ready to totally supervise the construction of a monastery. I returned to Tsang, where I constructed three new subsidiary monasteries to the great Namring Monastery, which took about four years. After that I went to Shigatse to work on the Panchen Lama's palace. I expected to be there for three years, but after two I was recalled to Namring to build a palace for the Panchen Lama and a congregation hall for the geshes (monks with high scholastic degrees). I completed both in two years. I continued on in my profession, building small monasteries and temples as well as large private houses for wealthy families. There were few skilled craftsmen available, which meant I was very much in demand. Often a monastery and several families wanting new houses would call me at the same time, so unfortunately it was impossible for me to respond to every request. Because of the need, people appreciated me and treated me well. I would arrive on horseback at the main gates of whichever monastery had invited me, and even before I entered the monastery grounds a big picnic would be given to welcome me, often lasting the whole day. I would be given a whole new set of clothes and the monks would say special prayers for the successful completion of the monastery. At different stages of my work, I was offered large gifts, such as horses or yaks. Of course, these offerings were made only for private building projects. For government jobs, they would never stoop so low as to receive a master craftsman in this way! My happiest times were during the period I worked on the palace of the Panchen Lama in Shigatse, which was a very auspicious undertaking. By then I could work on my own. I had acquired almost all the skills of my craft and was able to handle almost every aspect of the work, thanks to the kindness of my own master, Dechen, who taught me everything I needed to know. * * {2} : TO THE NOMAD CAMPS In 1953 my husband, Sakya Rinpoche, was invited to eastern Tibet, and I joined him on the journey, eager to revisit the area where I grew up. We took a northern route, and, since there were few monasteries on the way, we often camped. The tent we used for our family had been made in Bhutan and was constructed of heavy, striped canvas and had a window. My husband’s tent, which he used for religious ceremonies, was particularly beautiful and was made of gold canvas and decorated with Buddhist symbols and red and blue dragons. This special tent was set up wherever there were enough visitors to warrant it, and it was visible from a long way off. There were many nomads scattered over this vast area and, though they lived in dispersed communities, news travelled fast - people quickly learned if a lama was coming, especially a Sakya lama. Each evening when we stopped to camp, hundreds of nomads from miles around would gather to see, and be blessed by, Sakya Rinpoche. Many came by horseback, while others rode yaks or walked. As more and more people arrived there would be many joyful reunions, with old friends hugging and kissing each other. The people were very affectionate and had a closeness I had not seen before. My husband gave Buddhist teachings to the nomads and distributed blessing cords or relics. The nomads were extremely devout; they never asked for elaborate things such as initiations and so on, but would be content simply to be touched on the head by the lama, receiving the blessing of the Buddha, the bodhisattvas, and the Sakya lamas. They had so much faith and trust; they believed that a real Buddha was present. They expressed profound respect for all lamas and monks, not just for those from our school of Buddhism. They would crowd around Sakya Rinpoche, and, though the monks would scold them and tell them to get back, I would always ask the monks to leave them be since it was their only chance to see Rinpoche. When the nomads entered my husband's tent they would immediately prostrate themselves on the ground and ask my husband such questions as "How many years will we live?" My husband would say, "Oh, don't ask me. I don't know. I don't even know how long I’m going to live!" "Oh, yes, you do know!" they would reply, "Just tell us!" Sometimes Sakya Rinpoche would tell them to perform a puja or to recite certain daily prayers and then they would live for a certain number of years. At other times he would say that perhaps in a couple of years that person might face difficulties, but that later he or she would be fine. Years later, when we met the nomads again, they told us that it had happened exactly as Rinpoche had predicted. That was a demonstration for me of why faith is so very important. The nomads were the most devout people I have ever met. There was nothing modern about the nomadic way of life. Daily life was slow-paced and no one ever hurried. People just sat, or lay down, and talked. People would speak openly and simply about whatever was in their hearts. The nomads would always bring butter; cheese, and yogurt for Rinpoche to eat. They thought that if he ate a little bit then their family would prosper or their animals would be blessed, so they would always insist that he take a little bite. Often people would ask Rinpoche for blessings on behalf of elderly relatives or sick animals, requesting blessings for them. The best gift you could give the nomad women was a kind of makeup, though not the Western type. It was the red paper that was used as a wrapping for tea leaves. These beautiful women would lick the wrapper and dab the red colour onto their cheeks, doing all this quite openly. It was wonderful to watch. They would wear or use anything that we gave them, whether it was tea leaf wrappers, beads, or glasses. My abiding memory of that time is that even when the nomads had work or chores to do they would resolutely stay all night near the lama. Although the women would claim that they were going back to their tents to sleep, I would still hear them outside our tent. They all wore lots of jewellery hanging around their necks or braided in their hair, so almost all night long, as they walked around our tent on kora, together with the sounds of whirring prayer wheels and mumbled prayers, I could hear the soft tinkling of their jewellery. * * {3} : GORED BY A YAK I was gored quite badly by a yak when I was a child. You see, my family had a large number of yaks, and in the summertime we travelled with the herds for almost three months, living in tents. During this time, the whole family had to help make butter and cheese for the rest of the year. We were constantly around the yaks as well as the dri - the female yaks – and their young, so I got to know them very well. I knew them all individually, and even if there were a couple of hundred yaks together I could tell them apart. But show me three donkeys, and they all look the same to me ! We children had to take care of the baby yaks while their mothers - the dri-were grazing. After a few hours, the dri would be brought home and we would have to do the milking. But first we would have to bring each dri her baby and show it to her, otherwise she wouldn’t give any milk. I knew the animals so well that I could easily tell which baby belonged to which dri. Two of our older yaks were used for ploughing the fields in the springtime. They had rings in their noses and, since they weren’t used for riding, they still had their horns. They were very gentle animals and I used to play with them all the time, pulling their beautiful hair, their tails, their horns - they never seemed to mind. One day they brought the yaks to town to do the ploughing. I was six or seven at the time. My aunt and I were responsible for bringing food to the ploughmen and the yaks, so we came at lunchtime and fed the yaks while the workers ate the tsampa and yogurt that my aunt had prepared. While everyone was resting, I played with one of the yaks. As usual, I pulled his hair and tail and then, taking handfuls of grass, I started pushing the grass in his mouth and pulling it out again - just like I had so many times before. This time, the yak didn't seem too happy about it, but since he had always been so gentle I thought it was OK. So I yanked his horns hard, and that was when it happened. The yak gored me in the face and threw me several feet in the air. My aunt ran over, crying out that I was dead. I was really scared. The yak's horn had gored me right through my cheek, and blood was everywhere. People gathered round, many of them weeping - such a commotion! They carried me at once to the nearby monastery and fetched my uncle, who was a doctor there. On the way my wounds were breeding so badly that everyone kept saying, "She's finished," and I thought I was going to die ! But my uncle looked after me. He was very wise, you know – the townspeople kept saying to him that the yak was bad and must be slaughtered, but he refused and said that they had to cut its horns and let it run wild. So the yak got its freedom - we "gave it to the Buddha," as we say. In fact, we used to give many yaks to the Buddha after they had done a certain amount of work. Once a year, everyone gathered at the monastery, and we would hang lots of prayer flags and put colourful banners on the yaks and let them go. After they are released their hair grows really long and they look beautiful. So after all those years of hard work the yak that gored me gained its freedom. *

"Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?" Kurt Vonnegut

How could you NOT care about apathy ? Don't you see, this is the way apathy makes its first entry into your body/mind mechanism ? Once inside it starts to grow, un-noticed. Then one day, seemingly from nowhere, thoughts like this will unexpectedly slip into your mind : "Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die." Trust me,... This is the place where not caring about apathy takes you. But if you can catch yourself in time, start 'CARING !' about apathy right now,... then happy, positive thoughts like this, may well come to permeate your every waking moment : "I used to be clueless about Maths, but I turned that around 360 degrees."

* I'm not really for apathy, but I'm not against it either...

* Last night my wife and I watched one of the most wonderful documentaries I've ever seen. It struck me this way because it was about someone whom I regard as one of the most heroic champions of every form of living being on our planet that our modern age has ever produced. Who else, but .... David Attenborough. It was the first show in a retrospective of his life's work to bring visual and mental awareness of the phenomenal beauty, (far beyond almost any one person's ability to conceive), of our living planet. Attenborough's growing and constantly evolving dream was to be able to share his discoveries and insights about nature with any person who had access to the medium of television. For me, the film footage of his 60 years of nature programs was touching, heart-warming, and profoundly inspiring. Amongst those scenes was one that unexpectedly re-activated a long-buried memory of the most gripping short story of my early high school days. In English one year we were obliged to read "Leiningen Versus the Ants". In last night's program, one of Attenborough's short clips showed the terrifying reality behind this insect army on the march and led me to search for this old, half-remembered story on Google. Luckily, against any logical expectation, someone had placed a copy of it there. I re-read it, ( found myself once more immediately gripped by the same powerful adrenaline rush of mind-paralysing fear and desperate efforts to survive),.... and decided to paste a copy here for anyone who might not have had the good fortune to be forced by their own teachers to expand their reading experience into this previously unimagined domain. It's a bit long, but what the hell. Cyberspace is limitless, and the thrill is 'intense !' : * * Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson (1893-1954) * "Unless they alter their course, (and there's no reason why they should), they'll reach your plantation in two days at the latest." Leiningen sucked placidly at a cigar about the size of a corncob and for a few seconds gazed without answering at the agitated District Commissioner. Then he took the cigar from his lips, and leaned slightly forward. With his bristling grey hair, bulky nose, and lucid eyes, he had the look of an aging and shabby eagle. "Decent of you," he murmured, "paddling all this way just to give me the tip. But you're pulling my leg of course when you say I must do a bunk. Why, even a herd of saurians couldn't drive me from this plantation of mine." The Brazilian official threw up lean and lanky arms and clawed the air with wildly distended fingers. "Leiningen!" he shouted. "You're insane! They're not creatures you can fight--they're an elemental--an 'act of God!' Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants! And every single one of them a fiend from hell; before you can spit three times they'll eat a full-grown buffalo to the bones. I tell you if you don't clear out at once there'll he nothing left of you but a skeleton picked as clean as your own plantation." Leiningen grinned. "Act of God, my eye! Anyway, I'm not an old woman; I'm not going to run for it just because an elemental's on the way. And don't think I'm the kind of fathead who tries to fend off lightning with his fists either. I use my intelligence, old man. With me, the brain isn't a second blind gut; I know what it's there for. When I began this model farm and plantation three years ago, I took into account all that could conceivably happen to it. And now I'm ready for anything and everything--including your ants." The Brazilian rose heavily to his feet. "I've done my best," he gasped. "Your obstinacy endangers not only yourself, but the lives of your four hundred workers. You don't know these ants!" Leiningen accompanied him down to the river, where the Government launch was moored. The vessel cast off. As it moved downstream, the exclamation mark neared the rail and began waving its arms frantically. Long after the launch had disappeared round the bend, Leiningen thought he could still hear that dimming imploring voice, "You don't know them, I tell you! You don't know them!" But the reported enemy was by no means unfamiliar to the planter. Before he started work on his settlement, he had lived long enough in the country to see for himself the fearful devastations sometimes wrought by these ravenous insects in their campaigns for food. But since then he had planned measures of defence accordingly, and these, he was convinced were in every way adequate to withstand the approaching peril. Moreover, during his three years as a planter, Leiningen had met and defeated drought, Hood, plague and all other "acts of God" which had come against him-unlike his fellow-settlers in the district, who had made little or no resistance. This unbroken success he attributed solely to the observance of his lifelong motto: The human brain needs only to become fully aware of its powers to conquer even the elements. Dullards reeled senselessly and aimlessly into the abyss; cranks, however brilliant, lost their heads when circumstances suddenly altered or accelerated and ran into stone walls, sluggards drifted with the current until they were caught in whirlpools and dragged under. But such disasters, Leiningen contended, merely strengthened his argument that intelligence, directed aright, invariably makes man the master of his fate. Yes, Leiningen had always known how to grapple with life. Even here, in this Brazilian wilderness, his brain had triumphed over every difficulty and danger it had so far encountered. First he had vanquished primal forces by cunning and organization, then he had enlisted the resources of modern science to increase miraculously the yield of his plantation. And now he was sure he would prove more than a match for the "irresistible" ants. That same evening, however, Leiningen assembled his workers. He had no intention of waiting till the news reached their ears from other sources. Most of them had been born in the district; the cry "The ants are coming!'" was to them an imperative signal for instant, panic-stricken flight, a spring for life itself. But so great was the Indians' trust in Leiningen, in Leiningen's word, and in Leiningen's wisdom, that they received his curt tidings, and his orders for the imminent struggle, with the calmness with which they were given. They waited, unafraid, alert, as if for the beginning of a new game or hunt which he had just described to them. The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss. Let them come! They came at noon the second day. Their approach was announced by the wild unrest of the horses, scarcely controllable now either in stall or under rider, scenting from afar a vapour instinct with horror. It was announced by a stampede of animals, timid and savage, hurtling past each other; jaguars and pumas flashing by nimble stags of the pampas, bulky tapirs, no longer hunters, themselves hunted, outpacing fleet kinkajous, maddened herds of cattle, heads lowered, nostrils snorting, rushing through tribes of loping monkeys, chattering in a dementia of terror; then followed the creeping and springing denizens of bush and steppe, big and little rodents, snakes, and lizards. Pell-mell the rabble swarmed down the hill to the plantation, scattered right and left before the barrier of the water-filled ditch, then sped onwards to the river, where, again hindered, they fled along its bank out of sight. This water-filled ditch was one of the defence measures which Leiningen had long since prepared against the advent of the ants. It encompassed three sides of the plantation like a huge horseshoe. Twelve feet across, but not very deep, when dry it could hardly be described as an obstacle to either man or beast. But the ends of the "horseshoe" ran into the river which formed the northern boundary, and fourth side, of the plantation. And at the end nearer the house and outbuildings in the middle of the plantation, Leiningen had constructed a dam by means of which water from the river could be diverted into the ditch. So now, by opening the dam, he was able to fling an imposing girdle of water, a huge quadrilateral with the river as its base, completely around the plantation, like the moat encircling a medieval city. Unless the ants were clever enough to build rafts. they had no hope of reaching the plantation, Leiningen concluded. The twelve-foot water ditch seemed to afford in itself all the security needed. But while awaiting the arrival of the ants, Leiningen made a further improvement. The western section of the ditch ran along the edge of a tamarind wood, and the branches of some great trees reached over the water. Leiningen now had them lopped so that ants could not descend from them within the "moat." The women and children, then the herds of cattle, were escorted by peons on rafts over the river, to remain on the other side in absolute safety until the plunderers had departed. Leiningen gave this instruction, not because he believed the non-combatants were in any danger, but in order to avoid hampering the efficiency of the defenders. "Critical situations first become crises," he explained to his men, "when oxen or women get excited " Finally, he made a careful inspection of the "inner moat"--a smaller ditch lined with concrete, which extended around the hill on which stood the ranch house, barns, stables and other buildings. Into this concrete ditch emptied the inflow pipes from three great petrol tanks. If by some miracle the ants managed to cross the water and reached the plantation, this "rampart of petrol,' would be an absolutely impassable protection for the besieged and their dwellings and stock. Such, at least, was Leiningen's opinion. He stationed his men at irregular distances along the water ditch, the first line of defence. Then he lay down in his hammock and puffed drowsily away at his pipe until a peon came with the report that the ants had been observed far away in the South. Leiningen mounted his horse, which at the feel of its master seemed to forget its uneasiness, and rode leisurely in the direction of the threatening offensive. The southern stretch of ditch--the upper side of the quadrilateral--was nearly three miles long; from its centre one could survey the entire countryside. This was destined to be the scene of the outbreak of war between Leiningen's brain and twenty square miles of life-destroying ants. It was a sight one could never forget. Over the range of hills, as far as eye could see, crept a darkening hem, ever longer and broader, until the shadow spread across the slope from east to west, then downwards, downwards, uncannily swift, and all the green herbage of that wide vista was being mown as by a giant sickle, leaving only the vast moving shadow, extending, deepening, and moving rapidly nearer. When Leiningen's men, behind their barrier of water, perceived the approach of the long-expected foe, they gave vent to their suspense in screams and imprecations. But as the distance began to lessen between the "sons of hell" and the water ditch, they relapsed into silence. Before the advance of that awe-inspiring throng, their belief in the powers of the boss began to steadily dwindle. Even Leiningen himself, who had ridden up just in time to restore their loss of heart by a display of unshakable calm, even he could not free himself from a qualm of malaise. Yonder were thousands of millions of voracious jaws bearing down upon him and only a suddenly insignificant, narrow ditch lay between him and his men and being gnawed to the bones "before you can spit three times." Hadn't this brain for once taken on more than it could manage? If the blighters decided to rush the ditch, fill it to the brim with their corpses, there'd still be more than enough to destroy every trace of that cranium of his. The planter's chin jutted; they hadn't got him yet, and he'd see to it they never would. While he could think at all, he'd flout both death and the devil. The hostile army was approaching in perfect formation; no human battalions, however well-drilled, could ever hope to rival the precision of that advance. Along a front that moved forward as uniformly as a straight line, the ants drew nearer and nearer to the water ditch. Then, when they learned through their scouts the nature of the obstacle, the two outlying wings of the army detached themselves from the main body and marched down the western and eastern sides of the ditch. This surrounding manoeuvre took rather more than an hour to accomplish; no doubt the ants expected that at some point they would find a crossing. During this outflanking movement by the wings, the army on the centre and southern front remained still. The besieged were therefore able to contemplate at their leisure the thumb-long, reddish black, long-legged insects; some of the Indians believed they could see, too, intent on them, the brilliant, cold eyes, and the razor-edged mandibles, of this host of infinity. It is not easy for the average person to imagine that an animal, not to mention an insect, can think. But now both the European brain of Leiningen and the primitive brains of the Indians began to stir with the unpleasant foreboding that inside every single one of that deluge of insects dwelt a thought. And that thought was: Ditch or no ditch, we'll get to your flesh! * Not until four o'clock did the wings reach the "horseshoe" ends of the ditch, only to find these ran into the great river. Through some kind of secret telegraphy, the report must then have flashed very swiftly indeed along the entire enemy line. And Leiningen, riding--no longer casually--along his side of the ditch, noticed by energetic and widespread movements of troops that for some unknown reason the news of the check had its greatest effect on the southern front, where the main army was massed. Perhaps the failure to find a way over the ditch was persuading the ants to withdraw from the plantation in search of spoils more easily attainable. An immense flood of ants, about a hundred yards in width, was pouring in a glimmering-black cataract down the far slope of the ditch. Many thousands were already drowning in the sluggish creeping flow, but they were followed by troop after troop, who clambered over their sinking comrades, and then themselves served as dying bridges to the reserves hurrying on in their rear. Shoals of ants were being carried away by the current into the middle of the ditch, where gradually they broke asunder and then, exhausted by their struggles, vanished below the surface. Nevertheless, the wavering, floundering hundred-yard front was remorselessly if slowly advancing towards the besieged on the other bank. Leiningen had been wrong when he supposed the enemy would first have to fill the ditch with their bodies before they could cross; instead, they merely needed to act as steppingstones, as they swam and sank, to the hordes ever pressing onwards from behind. Near Leiningen a few mounted herdsmen awaited his orders. He sent one to the weir-the river must be dammed more strongly to increase the speed and power of the water coursing through the ditch. A second peon was dispatched to the outhouses to bring spades and petrol sprinklers. A third rode away to summon to the zone of the offensive all the men, except the observation posts, on the near-by sections of the ditch, which were not yet actively threatened. The ants were getting across far more quickly than Leiningen would have deemed possible. Impelled by the mighty cascade behind them, they struggled nearer and nearer to the inner bank. The momentum of the attack was so great that neither the tardy flow of the stream nor its downward pull could exert its proper force; and into the gap left by every submerging insect, hastened forward a dozen more. When reinforcements reached Leiningen, the invaders were halfway over. The planter had to admit to himself that it was only by a stroke of luck for him that the ants were attempting the crossing on a relatively short front: had they assaulted simultaneously along the entire length of the ditch, the outlook for the defenders would have been black indeed. Even as it was, it could hardly be described as rosy, though the planter seemed quite unaware that death in a gruesome form was drawing closer and closer. As the war between his brain and the "act of God'' reached its climax, the very shadow of annihilation began to pale to Leiningen, who now felt like a champion in a new Olympic game, a gigantic and thrilling contest, from which he was determined to emerge victor. Such, indeed, was his aura of confidence that the Indians forgot their stupefied fear of the peril only a yard or two away; under the planter's supervision, they began fervidly digging up to the edge of the bank and throwing clods of earth and spadefuls of sand into the midst of the hostile fleet. The petrol sprinklers, hitherto used to destroy pests and blights on the plantation, were also brought into action. Streams of evil-reeking oil now soared and fell over an enemy already in disorder through the bombardment of earth and sand. The ants responded to these vigorous and successful measures of defence by further developments of their offensive. Entire clumps of huddling insects began to roll down the opposite bank into the water. At the same time, Leiningen noticed that the ants were now attacking along an ever-widening front. As the numbers both of his men and his petrol sprinklers were severely limited, this rapid extension of the line of battle was becoming an overwhelming danger. To add to his difficulties, the very clods of earth they flung into that black floating carpet often whirled fragments toward the defenders' side, and here and there dark ribbons were already mounting the inner bank. True, wherever a man saw these they could still be driven back into the water by spadefuls of earth or jets of petrol. But the file of defenders was too sparse and scattered to hold off at all points these landing parties, and though the peons toiled like madmen, their plight became momentarily more perilous. One man struck with his spade at an enemy clump, did not draw it back quickly enough from the water; in a trice the wooden shaft swarmed with upward scurrying insects. With a curse, he dropped the spade into the ditch; too late, they were already on his body. They lost no time; wherever they encountered bare flesh they bit deeply; a few, bigger than the rest, carried in their hind-quarters a sting which injected a burning and paralyzing venom. Screaming, frantic with pain, the peon danced and twirled like a dervish. Realizing that another such casualty, yes, perhaps this alone, might plunge his men into confusion and destroy their morale, Leiningen roared in a bellow louder than the yells of the victim: "Into the petrol, idiot! Douse your paws in the petrol!" The dervish ceased his pirouette as if transfixed, then tore of his shirt and plunged his arm and the ants hanging to it up to the shoulder in one of the large open tins of petrol. But even then the fierce mandibles did not slacken; another peon had to help him squash and detach each separate insect. Distracted by the episode, some defenders had turned away from the ditch. And now cries of fury, a thudding of spades, and a wild trampling to and fro, showed that the ants had made full use of the interval, though luckily only a few had managed to get across. The men set to work again desperately with the barrage of earth and sand. Meanwhile an old Indian, who acted as medicine-man to the plantation workers, gave the bitten peon a drink he had prepared some hours before, which, he claimed, possessed the virtue of dissolving and weakening ants' venom. Leiningen surveyed his position. A dispassionate observer would have estimated the odds against him at a thousand to one. But then such an on-looker would have reckoned only by what he saw--the advance of myriad battalions of ants against the futile efforts of a few defenders--and not by the unseen activity that can go on in a man's brain. For Leiningen had not erred when he decided he would fight elemental with elemental. The water in the ditch was beginning to rise; the stronger damming of the river was making itself apparent. Visibly the swiftness and power of the masses of water increased, swirling into quicker and quicker movement its living black surface, dispersing its pattern, carrying away more and more of it on the hastening current. Victory had been snatched from the very jaws of defeat. With a hysterical shout of joy, the peons feverishly intensified their bombardment of earth clods and sand. And now the wide cataract down the opposite bank was thinning and ceasing, as if the ants were becoming aware that they could not attain their aim. They were scurrying back up the slope to safety. All the troops so far hurled into the ditch had been sacrificed in vain. Drowned and floundering insects eddied in thousands along the flow, while Indians running on the bank destroyed every swimmer that reached the side. Not until the ditch curved towards the east did the scattered ranks assemble again in a coherent mass. And now, exhausted and half-numbed, they were in no condition to ascend the bank. Fusillades of clods drove them round the bend towards the mouth of the ditch and then into the river, wherein they vanished without leaving a trace. The news ran swiftly along the entire chain of outposts, and soon a long scattered line of laughing men could be seen hastening along the ditch towards the scene of victory. For once they seemed to have lost all their native reserve, for it was in wild abandon now they celebrated the triumph--as if there were no longer thousands of millions of merciless, cold and hungry eyes watching them from the opposite bank, watching and waiting. The sun sank behind the rim of the tamarind wood and twilight deepened into night. It was not only hoped but expected that the ants would remain quiet until dawn. "But to defeat any forlorn attempt at a crossing, the flow of water through the ditch was powerfully increased by opening the dam still further. In spite of this impregnable barrier, Leiningen was not yet altogether convinced that the ants would not venture another surprise attack. He ordered his men to camp along the bank overnight. He also detailed parties of them to patrol the ditch in two of his motor cars and ceaselessly to illuminate the surface of the water with headlights and electric torches. After having taken all the precautions he deemed necessary, the farmer ate his supper with considerable appetite and went to bed. His slumbers were in no wise disturbed by the memory of the waiting, live, twenty square miles. Dawn found a thoroughly refreshed and active Leiningen riding along the edge of the ditch. The planter saw before him a motionless and unaltered throng of besiegers. He studied the wide belt of water between them and the plantation, and for a moment almost regretted that the fight had ended so soon and so simply. In the comforting, matter-of-fact light of morning, it seemed to him now that the ants hadn't the ghost of a chance to cross the ditch. Even if they plunged headlong into it on all three fronts at once, the force of the now powerful current would inevitably sweep them away. He had got quite a thrill out of the fight--a pity it was already over. He rode along the eastern and southern sections of the ditch and found everything in order. He reached the western section, opposite the tamarind wood, and here, contrary to the other battle fronts, he found the enemy very busy indeed. The trunks and branches of the trees and the creepers of the lianas, on the far bank of the ditch, fairly swarmed with industrious insects. But instead of eating the leaves there and then, they were merely gnawing through the stalks, so that a thick green shower fell steadily to the ground. No doubt they were victualing columns sent out to obtain provender for the rest of the army. The discovery did not surprise Leiningen. He did not need to be told that ants are intelligent, that certain species even use others as milch cows, watchdogs and slaves. He was well aware of their power of adaptation, their sense of discipline, their marvellous talent for organization. His belief that a foray to supply the army was in progress was strengthened when he saw the leaves that fell to the ground being dragged to the troops waiting outside the wood. Then all at once he realized the aim that rain of green was intended to serve. Each single leaf, pulled or pushed by dozens of toiling insects, was borne straight to the edge of the ditch. Even as Macbeth watched the approach of Birnam Wood in the hands of his enemies, Leiningen saw the tamarind wood move nearer and nearer in the mandibles of the ants. Unlike the fey Scot, however, he did not lose his nerve; no witches had prophesied his doom, and if they had he would have slept just as soundly. All the same, he was forced to admit to himself that the situation was far more ominous than that of the day before. He had thought it impossible for the ants to build rafts for themselves--well, here they were, coming in thousands, more than enough to bridge the ditch. Leaves after leaves rustled down the slope into the water, where the current drew them away from the bank and carried them into midstream. And every single leaf carried several ants. This time the farmer did not trust to the alacrity of his messengers. He galloped away, leaning from his saddle and yelling orders as he rushed past outpost after outpost: "Bring petrol pumps to the southwest front! Issue spades to every man along the line facing the wood!" And arrived at the eastern and southern sections, he dispatched every man except the observation posts to the menaced west. Then, as he rode past the stretch where the ants had failed to cross the day before, he witnessed a brief but impressive scene. Down the slope of the distant hill there came towards him a singular being, writhing rather man running, an animal-like blackened statue with shapeless head and four quivering feet that knuckled under almost ceaselessly. When the creature reached the far bank of the ditch and collapsed opposite Leiningen, he recognized it as a pampas stag, covered over and over with ants. It had strayed near the zone of the army. As usual, they had attacked its eyes first. Blinded, it had reeled in the madness of hideous torment straight into the ranks of its persecutors, and now the beast swayed to and fro in its death agony. With a shot from his rifle Leiningen put it out of its misery. Then he pulled out his watch. He hadn't a second to lose, but for life itself he could not have denied his curiosity the satisfaction of knowing how long the ants would take--for personal reasons, so to speak. After six minutes the white polished bones alone remained. That's how he himself would look before you can--Leiningen spat once, and put spurs to his horse. The sporting zest with which the excitement of the novel contest had inspired him the day before had now vanished; in its place was a cold and violent purpose. He would send these vermin back to the hell where they belonged, somehow, anyhow. Yes, but how was indeed the question; as things stood at present it looked as if the devils would raze him and his men from the earth instead. He had underestimated the might of the enemy; he really would have to bestir himself if he hoped to outwit them. The biggest danger now, he decided, was the point where the western section of the ditch curved southwards. And arrived there, he found his worst expectations justified. The very power of the current had huddled the leaves and their crews of ants so close together at the bend that the bridge was almost ready. True, streams of petrol and clumps of earth still prevented a landing. But the number of floating leaves was increasing ever more swiftly. It could not be long now before a stretch of water a mile in length was decked by a green pontoon over which the ants could rush in millions. Leiningen galloped to the weir. The damming of the river was controlled by a wheel on its bank. The planter ordered the man at the wheel first to lower the water in the ditch almost to vanishing point, next to wait a moment, then suddenly to let the river in again. This manoeuvre of lowering and raising the surface, of decreasing then increasing the flow of water through the ditch was to be repeated over and over again until further notice. This tactic was at first successful. The water in the ditch sank, and with it the film of leaves. The green fleet nearly reached the bed and the troops on the far bank swarmed down the slope to it. Then a violent flow of water at the original depth raced through the ditch, overwhelming leaves and ants, and sweeping them along. This intermittent rapid flushing prevented just in time the almost completed fording of the ditch. But it also flung here and there squads of the enemy vanguard simultaneously up the inner bank. These seemed to know their duty only too well, and lost no time accomplishing it. The air rang with the curses of bitten Indians. They had removed their shirts and pants to detect the quicker the upwards-hastening insects; when they saw one, they crushed it; and fortunately the onslaught as yet was only by skirmishers. Again and again, the water sank and rose, carrying leaves and drowned ants away with it. It lowered once more nearly to its bed; but this time the exhausted defenders waited in vain for the flush of destruction. Leiningen sensed disaster; something must have gone wrong with the machinery of the dam. Then a sweating peon tore up to him-- "They're over!" While the besieged were concentrating upon the defence of the stretch opposite the wood, the seemingly unaffected line beyond the wood had become the theatre of decisive action. Here the defenders' front was sparse and scattered; everyone who could be spared had hurried away to the south. Just as the man at the weir had lowered the water almost to the bed of the ditch, the ants on a wide front began another attempt at a direct crossing like that of the preceding day. Into the emptied bed poured an irresistible throng. Rushing across the ditch, they attained the inner bank before the slow-witted Indians fully grasped the situation. Their frantic screams dumfounded the man at the weir. Before he could direct the river anew into the safeguarding bed he saw himself surrounded by raging ants. He ran like the others, ran for his life. When Leiningen heard this, he knew the plantation was doomed. He wasted no time bemoaning the inevitable. For as long as there was the slightest chance of success, he had stood his ground, and now any further resistance was both useless and dangerous. He fired three revolver shots into the air--the prearranged signal for his men to retreat instantly within the "inner moat." Then he rode towards the ranch house. This was two miles from the point of invasion. There was therefore time enough to prepare the second line of defence against the advent of the ants. Of the three great petrol cisterns near the house, one had already been half emptied by the constant withdrawals needed for the pumps during the fight at the water ditch. The remaining petrol in it was now drawn off through underground pipes into the concrete trench which encircled the ranch house and its outbuildings. And there, drifting in twos and threes, Leiningen's men reached him. Most of them were obviously trying to preserve an air of calm and indifference, belied, however, by their restless glances and knitted brows. One could see their belief in a favourable outcome of the struggle was already considerably shaken. The planter called his peons around him. "Well, lads," he began, "we've lost the first round. But we'll smash the beggars yet, don't you worry. Anyone who thinks otherwise can draw his pay here and now and push off. There are rafts enough to spare on the river and plenty of time still to reach 'em." Not a man stirred. Leiningen acknowledged his silent vote of confidence with a laugh that was half a grunt. "That's the stuff, lads. Too bad if you'd missed the rest of the show, eh? Well, the fun won't start till morning. Once these blighters turn tail, there'll be plenty of work for everyone and higher wages all round. And now run along and get something to eat; you've earned it all right." In the excitement of the fight the greater part of the day had passed without the men once pausing to snatch a bite. Now that the ants were for the time being out of sight, and the "wall of petrol" gave a stronger feeling of security, hungry stomachs began to assert their claims. The bridges over the concrete ditch were removed. Here and there solitary ants had reached the ditch; they gazed at the petrol meditatively, then scurried back again. Apparently they had little interest at the moment for what lay beyond the evil-reeking barrier; the abundant spoils of the plantation were the main attraction. Soon the trees, shrubs and beds for miles around were hulled with ants zealously gobbling the yield of long weary months of strenuous toil. As twilight began to fall, a cordon of ants marched around the petrol trench, but as yet made no move towards its brink. Leiningen posted sentries with headlights and electric torches, then withdrew to his office, and began to reckon up his losses. He estimated these as large, but, in comparison with his bank balance, by no means unbearable. He worked out in some detail a scheme of intensive cultivation which would enable him, before very long, to more than compensate himself for the damage now being wrought to his crops. It was with a contented mind that he finally betook himself to bed where he slept deeply until dawn, undisturbed by any thought that next day little more might be left of him than a glistening skeleton. He rose with the sun and went out on the flat roof of his house. And a scene like one from Dante lay around him; for miles in every direction there was nothing but a black, glittering multitude, a multitude of rested, sated, but none the less voracious ants: yes, look as far as one might, one could see nothing but that rustling black throng, except in the north, where the great river drew a boundary they could not hope to pass. But even the high stone breakwater, along the bank of the river, which Leiningen had built as a defence against inundations, was, like the paths, the shorn trees and shrubs, the ground itself, black with ants. So their greed was not glutted in razing that vast plantation? Not by a long shot; they were all the more eager now on a rich and certain booty--four hundred men, numerous horses, and bursting granaries. At first it seemed that the petrol trench would serve its purpose. The besiegers sensed the peril of swimming it, and made no move to plunge blindly over its brink. Instead they devised a better manoeuvre; they began to collect shreds of bark, twigs and dried leaves and dropped these into the petrol. Everything green, which could have been similarly used, had long since been eaten. After a time, though, a long procession could be seen bringing from the west the tamarind leaves used as rafts the day before. Since the petrol, unlike the water in the outer ditch, was perfectly still, the refuse stayed where it was thrown. It was several hours before the ants succeeded in covering an appreciable part of the surface. At length, however, they were ready to proceed to a direct attack. Their storm troops swarmed down the concrete side, scrambled over the supporting surface of twigs and leaves, and impelled these over the few remaining streaks of open petrol until they reached the other side. Then they began to climb up this to make straight for the helpless garrison. During the entire offensive, the planter sat peacefully, watching them with interest, but not stirring a muscle. Moreover, he had ordered his men not to disturb in any way whatever the advancing horde. So they squatted listlessly along the bank of the ditch and waited for a sign from the boss. The petrol was now covered with ants. A few had climbed the inner concrete wall and were scurrying towards the defenders. "Everyone back from the ditch!" roared Leiningen. The men rushed away, without the slightest idea of his plan. He stooped forward and cautiously dropped into the ditch a stone which split the floating carpet and its living freight, to reveal a gleaming patch of petrol. A match spurted, sank down to the oily surface--Leiningen sprang back; in a flash a towering rampart of fire encompassed the garrison. This spectacular and instant repulse threw the Indians into ecstasy. They applauded, yelled and stamped, like children at a pantomime. Had it not been for the awe in which they held the boss, they would infallibly have carried him shoulder high. It was some time before the petrol burned down to the bed of the ditch, and the wall of smoke and flame began to lower. The ants had retreated in a wide circle from the devastation, and innumerable charred fragments along the outer bank showed that the flames had spread from the holocaust in the ditch well into the ranks beyond, where they had wrought havoc far and wide. Yet the perseverance of the ants was by no means broken; indeed, each setback seemed only to whet it. The concrete cooled, the flicker of the dying flames wavered and vanished, petrol from the second tank poured into the trench--and the ants marched forward anew to the attack. The foregoing scene repeated itself in every detail, except that on this occasion less time was needed to bridge the ditch, for the petrol was now already filmed by a layer of ash. Once again they withdrew; once again petrol flowed into the ditch. Would the creatures never learn that their self-sacrifice was utterly senseless? It really was senseless, wasn't it? Yes, of course it was senseless--provided the defenders had an unlimited supply of petrol. When Leiningen reached this stage of reasoning, he felt for the first time since the arrival of the ants that his confidence was deserting him. His skin began to creep; he loosened his collar. Once the devils were over the trench there wasn't a chance in hell for him and his men. God, what a prospect, to be eaten alive like that! For the third time the flames immolated the attacking troops, and burned down to extinction. Yet the ants were coming on again as if nothing had happened. And meanwhile Leiningen had made a discovery that chilled him to the bone-petrol was no longer flowing into the ditch. Something must be blocking the outflow pipe of the third and last cistern-a snake or a dead rat? Whatever it was, the ants could be held off no longer, unless petrol could by some method be led from the cistern into the ditch. Then Leiningen remembered that in an outhouse nearby were two old disused fire engines. Spry as never before in their lives, the peons dragged them out of the shed, connected their pumps to the cistern, uncoiled and laid the hose. They were just in time to aim a stream of petrol at a column of ants that had already crossed and drive them back down the incline into the ditch. Once more an oily girdle surrounded the garrison, once more it was possible to hold the position--for the moment. It was obvious, however, that this last resource meant only the postponement of defeat and death. A few of the peons fell on their knees and began to pray; others, shrieking insanely, fired their revolvers at the black, advancing masses, as if they felt their despair was pitiful enough to sway fate itself to mercy. At length, two of the men's nerves broke: Leiningen saw a naked Indian leap over the north side of the petrol trench, quickly followed by a second. They sprinted with incredible speed towards the river. But their fleetness did not save them; long before they could attain the rafts, the enemy covered their bodies from head to foot. In the agony of their torment, both sprang blindly into the wide river, where enemies no less sinister awaited them. Wild screams of mortal anguish informed the breathless onlookers that crocodiles and sword-toothed piranhas were no less ravenous than ants, and even nimbler in reaching their prey. In spite of this bloody warning, more and more men showed they were making up their minds to run the blockade. Anything, even a fight midstream against alligators, seemed better than powerlessly waiting for death to come and slowly consume their living bodies. Leiningen flogged his brain till it reeled. Was there nothing on earth could sweep this devil's spawn back into the hell from which it came? Then out of the inferno of his bewilderment rose a terrifying inspiration. Yes, one hope remained, and one alone. It might be possible to dam the great river completely, so that its waters would fill not only the water ditch but overflow into the entire gigantic "saucer" of land in which lay the plantation. The far bank of the river was too high for the waters to escape that way. The stone breakwater ran between the river and the plantation; its only gaps occurred where the "horseshoe" ends of the water ditch passed into the river. So its waters would not only be forced to inundate into the plantation, they would also be held there by the breakwater until they rose to its own high level. In half an hour, perhaps even earlier, the plantation and its hostile army of occupation would be flooded. The ranch house and outbuildings stood upon rising ground. Their foundations were higher than the breakwater, so the flood would not reach them. And any remaining ants trying to ascend the slope could be repulsed by petrol. It was possible--yes, if one could only get to the dam! A distance of nearly two miles lay between the ranch house and the weir--two miles of ants. Those two peons had managed only a fifth of that distance at the cost of their lives. Was there an Indian daring enough after that to run the gauntlet five times as far? Hardly likely; and if there were, his prospect of getting back was almost nil. No, there was only one thing for it, he'd have to make the attempt himself; he might just as well be running as sitting still, anyway, when the ants finally got him. Besides, there was a bit of a chance. Perhaps the ants weren't so almighty, after all; perhaps he had allowed the mass suggestion of that evil black throng to hypnotize him, just as a snake fascinates and overpowers. The ants were building their bridges. Leiningen got up on a chair. "Hey, lads, listen to me!" he cried. Slowly and listlessly, from all sides of the trench, the men began to shuffle towards him, the apathy of death already stamped on their faces. "Listen, lads!" he shouted. "You're frightened of those beggars, but you're a damn sight more frightened of me, and I'm proud of you. There's still a chance to save our lives--by flooding the plantation from the river. Now one of you might manage to get as far as the weir--but he'd never come back. Well, I'm not going to let you try it; if I did I'd be worse than one of those ants. No, I called the tune, and now I'm going to pay the piper. "The moment I'm over the ditch, set fire to the petrol. That'll allow time for the flood to do the trick. Then all you have to do is wait here all snug and quiet till I'm back. Yes, I'm coming back, trust me"--he grinned--"when I've finished my slimming-cure." He pulled on high leather boots, drew heavy gauntlets over his hands, and stuffed the spaces between breeches and boots, gauntlets and arms, shirt and neck, with rags soaked in petrol. With close-fitting mosquito goggles he shielded his eyes, knowing too well the ants' dodge of first robbing their victim of sight. Finally, he plugged his nostrils and ears with cotton-wool, and let the peons drench his clothes with petrol. He was about to set off, when the old Indian medicine man came up to him; he had a wondrous salve, he said, prepared from a species of chafer whose odour was intolerable to ants. Yes, this odour protected these chafers from the attacks of even the most murderous ants. The Indian smeared the boss' boots, his gauntlets, and his face over and over with the extract. Leiningen then remembered the paralyzing effect of ants' venom, and the Indian gave him a gourd full of the medicine he had administered to the bitten peon at the water ditch. The planter drank it down without noticing its bitter taste; his mind was already at the weir. He started of towards the northwest corner of the trench. With a bound he was over--and among the ants. The beleaguered garrison had no opportunity to watch Leiningen's race against death. The ants were climbing the inner bank again-the lurid ring of petrol blazed aloft. For the fourth time that day the reflection from the fire shone on the sweating faces of the imprisoned men, and on the reddish-black cuirasses of their oppressors. The red and blue, dark-edged flames leaped vividly now, celebrating what? The funeral pyre of the four hundred, or of the hosts of destruction? Leiningen ran. He ran in long, equal strides, with only one thought, one sensation, in his being--he must get through. He dodged all trees and shrubs; except for the split seconds his soles touched the ground the ants should have no opportunity to alight on him. That they would get to him soon, despite the salve on his boots, the petrol in his clothes, he realized only too well, but he knew even more surely that he must, and that he would, get to the weir. Apparently the salve was some use after all; not until he reached halfway did he feel ants under his clothes, and a few on his face. Mechanically, in his stride, he struck at them, scarcely conscious of their bites. He saw he was drawing appreciably nearer the weir--the distance grew less and less--sank to five hundred--three--two--one hundred yards. Then he was at the weir and gripping the ant-hulled wheel. Hardly had he seized it when a horde of infuriated ants flowed over his hands, arms and shoulders. He started the wheel--before it turned once on its axis the swarm covered his face. Leiningen strained like a madman, his lips pressed tight; if he opened them to draw breath. . . . He turned and turned; slowly the dam lowered until it reached the bed of the river. Already the water was overflowing the ditch. Another minute, and the river was pouring through the near-by gap in the breakwater. The flooding of the plantation had begun. Leiningen let go the wheel. Now, for the first time, he realized he was coated from head to foot with a layer of ants. In spite of the petrol his clothes were full of them, several had got to his body or were clinging to his face. Now that he had completed his task, he felt the smart raging over his flesh from the bites of sawing and piercing insects. Frantic with pain, he almost plunged into the river. To be ripped and splashed to shreds by piranhas? Already he was running the return journey, knocking ants from his gloves and jacket, brushing them from his bloodied face, squashing them to death under his clothes. One of the creatures bit him just below the rim of his goggles; he managed to tear it away, but the agony of the bite and its etching acid drilled into the eye nerves; he saw now through circles of fire into a milky mist, then he ran for a time almost blinded, knowing that if he once tripped and fell.... The old Indian's brew didn't seem much good; it weakened the poison a bit, but didn't get rid of it. His heart pounded as if it would burst; blood roared in his ears; a giant's fist battered his lungs. Then he could see again, but the burning girdle of petrol appeared infinitely far away; he could not last half that distance. Swift-changing pictures flashed through his head, episodes in his life, while in another part of his brain a cool and impartial onlooker informed this ant-blurred, gasping, exhausted bundle named Leiningen that such a rushing panorama of scenes from one's past is seen only in the moment before death. A stone in the path . . . to weak to avoid it . . . the planter stumbled and collapsed. He tried to rise . . . he must be pinned under a rock . . . it was impossible . . . the slightest movement was impossible . . . . Then all at once he saw, starkly clear and huge, and, right before his eyes, furred with ants, towering and swaying in its death agony, the pampas stag. In six minutes--gnawed to the bones. God, he couldn't die like that! And something outside him seemed to drag him to his feet. He tottered. He began to stagger forward again. Through the blazing ring hurtled an apparition which, as soon as it reached the ground on the inner side, fell full length and did not move. Leiningen, at the moment he made that leap through the flames, lost consciousness for the first time in his life. As he lay there, with glazing eyes and lacerated face, he appeared a man returned from the grave. The peons rushed to him, stripped off his clothes, tore away the ants from a body that seemed almost one open wound; in some paces the bones were showing. They carried him into the ranch house. As the curtain of flames lowered, one could see in place of the illimitable host of ants an extensive vista of water. The thwarted river had swept over the plantation, carrying with it the entire army. The water had collected and mounted in the great "saucer," while the ants had in vain attempted to reach the hill on which stood the ranch house. The girdle of flames held them back. And so imprisoned between water and fire, they had been delivered into the annihilation that was their god. And near the farther mouth of the water ditch, where the stone mole had its second gap, the ocean swept the lost battalions into the river, to vanish forever. The ring of fire dwindled as the water mounted to the petrol trench, and quenched the dimming flames. The inundation rose higher and higher: because its outflow was impeded by the timber and underbrush it had carried along with it, its surface required some time to reach the top of the high stone breakwater and discharge over it the rest of the shattered army. It swelled over ant-stippled shrubs and bushes, until it washed against the foot of the knoll whereon the besieged had taken refuge. For a while an alluvial of ants tried again and again to attain this dry land, only to be repulsed by streams of petrol back into the merciless flood. Leiningen lay on his bed, his body swathed from head to foot in bandages. With fomentations and salves, they had managed to stop the bleeding, and had dressed his many wounds. Now they thronged around him, one question in every face. Would he recover? "He won't die," said the old man who had bandaged him, "if he doesn't want to.'' The planter opened his eyes. "Everything in order?'' he asked. "They're gone,'' said his nurse. "To hell." He held out to his master a gourd full of a powerful sleeping draught. Leiningen gulped it down. "I told you I'd come back," he murmured, "even if I am a bit streamlined." He grinned and shut his eyes. He slept. *

* I've suddenly realised that Christmas time is fast approaching. Very soon all our London relations will be arriving and all the socialising and celebrations will quickly put paid to any communication here for quite some time. Before then, however, I will undoubtedly have finished my wonderful sunny sojourn in Corfu where I've been living over the last few weeks inside the pages of "My Family and Other Animals". Unfortunately, as the visible end of the book rapidly approaches, it seems like this will probably be my last chance to share some of the simple 'pleasures of living' that filled Gerald Durrell's magical childhood. I didn't want to leave 2013 on a spiritual story such as the one I added above. All of us have widely differing experiences and thoughts about what this invisible thing called "spirituality" actually is, (Or even, ‘IF’ there is such a thing at all). But there simply can’t be anyone who doesn’t love the simple, unadulterated release of shared laughter. Fortunately for us, alongside its unimaginable sufferings, life also seems to produce an inexhaustible supply of quirky and outrageous bubblings. Choosing an extract from literature's catalogue of the latter, (since it IS Christmas time, after all), last night I finished reading the heart-warming anecdote below. I found myself laughing so often throughout this passage that afterwards I thought it would make a wonderful pre-Christmas addition to the Tao Bums Chat Room as a kind of ‘spirit-lifter’ to top up the reader’s energies for this fast-approaching, annual onslaught of relatives. My yesterday’s reading suddenly seemed a charming serendipity. Shelter from the storm. * * Gerald Durrell wrote : SPRING had arrived and the island was sparkling with flowers. Lambs with flapping tails gambolled under the olives, crushing the yellow crocuses under their tiny hooves. Baby donkeys with bulbous and uncertain legs munched among the asphodels. The ponds and streams and ditches were tangled in chains of spotted toads' spawn, the tortoises were heaving aside their winter bedclothes of leaves and earth, and the first butterflies, winter-faded and frayed, were flitting wanly among the flowers. In the crisp, heady weather the family spent most of its time on the veranda, eating, sleeping, reading, or just simply arguing. It was here, once a week, that we used to congregate to read our mail which Spiro had brought out to us. The bulk of it consisted of gun catalogues for Leslie, fashion magazines for Margo, and animal journals for myself. Larry's post generally contained books and interminable letters from authors, artists, and musicians, about authors, artists, and musicians. Mother's contained a wedge of mail from various relatives, sprinkled with a few seed catalogues. As we browsed we would frequently pass remarks to one another, or read bits aloud. This was not done with any motive of sociability (for no other member of the family would listen, anyway), but merely because we seemed unable to extract the full flavour of our letters and magazines unless they were shared. Occasionally, however, an item of news would be sufficiently startling to rivet the family's attention on it, and this happened one day in spring when the sky was like blue glass, and we sat in the dappled shade of the vine, devouring our mail. 'Oh, this is nice Look... organdie with puffed sleeves ... I think I would prefer it in velvet, though ... or maybe a brocade top with a flared skirt. Now, that's nice... it would look good with long white gloves and one of those sort of summery hats, wouldn't it?’ A pause, the faint sound of Lugaretzia moaning in the dining-room, mingled with the rustle of paper. Roger yawned loudly, followed in succession by Puke and Widdle. 'God! What a beauty!. . . Just look at her . . . telescopic sight, bolt action.. .. What a beaut! Um ... a hundred and fifty . . . not really expensive, I suppose. . . . Now this is good value.... Let's see ... double-barrelled ... choke.... Yes ... I suppose one really needs something a bit heavier for ducks.' Roger scratched his ears in turn, twisting his head on one side, a look of bliss on his face, groaning gently with pleasure. Widdle lay down and closed his eyes. Puke vainly tried to catch a fly, his jaws clopping as he snapped at it. 'Ah! Antoine's had a poem accepted at last I Real talent there, if he can only dig down to it. Varlaine's starting a printing press in a stable. . . . Pah!... limited editions of his own works. Oh, God, George Bullock's trying his hand at portraits ... portraits, I ask you I He couldn't paint a candlestick. Good book here you should read, Mother: The Elizabethan Dramatists ... a wonderful piece of work . . . some fine stuff in it.... “ Roger worked his way over his hind-quarters in search of a flea, using his front teeth like a pair of hair-clippers, snuffling noisily to himself. Widdle twitched his legs and tail minutely, his ginger eyebrows going up and down in astonishment at his own dream. Puke lay down and pretended to be asleep, keeping an eye cocked for the fly to settle. 'Aunt Mabel's moved to Sussex. . . . She says Henry's passed all his exams and is going into a bank ... at least, I think it's a bank... her writing really is awful, in spite of that expensive education she's always boasting about.... Uncle Stephen's broken his leg, poor old dear . . . and done something to his bladder? . . . Oh, no, I see . . . really this writing ... he broke his leg falling off a ladder. . . . You'd think he'd have more sense than to go up a ladder at his age ... ridiculous.... Tom's married... one of the Garnet girls' Mother always left until the last a fat letter, addressed in large, firm, well-rounded handwriting, which was the monthly instalment from Great-aunt Hermione. Her letters invariably created an indignant uproar among the family, so we all put aside our mail and concentrated when Mother, with a sigh of resignation, unfurled the twenty odd pages, settled herself comfortably and began to read. 'She says that the doctors don't hold out much hope for her,' observed Mother. 'They haven't held out any hope for her for the last forty years and she's still as strong as an ox,' said Larry. 'She says she always thought it a little peculiar of us, rushing off to Greece like that, but they've just had a bad winter and she thinks that perhaps it was wise of us to choose such a salubrious climate.' 'Salubrious! What a word to use!' 'Oh, heavens!... oh, no... oh, Lord!...' 'What's the matter?' 'She says she wants to come and stay... the doctors have advised a warm climate!' 'No, I refuse! I couldn't bear it,' shouted Larry, leaping to his feet; 'it's bad enough being shown Lugaretzia's gums every morning, without having Great-aunt Hermione dying by inches all over the place. You'll have to put her off, Mother . . . tell her there's no room.' 'But I can't, dear; I told her in the last letter what a big villa we had.' 'She's probably forgotten,' said Leslie hopefully. 'She hasn't. She mentions it here . . . where is it? ... oh, yes, here you are: "As you now seem able to afford such an extensive establishment, I am sure, Louie dear, that you would not begrudge a small corner to an old woman who has not much longer to live." There you are! What on earth can we do?’ 'Write and tell her we've got an epidemic of smallpox raging out here, and send her a photograph of Margo's acne,' suggested Larry. 'Don't be silly, dear. Besides, I told her how healthy it is here.' 'Really, Mother, you are impossible!' exclaimed Larry angrily. 'I was looking forward to a nice quiet summer's work, with just a few select friends, and now we're going to be invaded by that evil old camel, smelling of mothballs and singing hymns in the lavatory.' 'Really, dear, you do exaggerate. And I don't know why you have to bring lavatories into it - I've never heard her sing hymns anywhere.' 'She does nothing else but sing hymns ... "Lead, Kindly Light", while everyone queues on the landing.' 'Well, anyway, we've got to think of a good excuse. I can't write and tell her we don't want her because she sings hymns.' 'Why not?' 'Don't be unreasonable, dear; after all, she is a relation.' 'What on earth's that got to do with it? Why should we have to fawn all over the old hag because she's a relation, when the really sensible thing to do would be to burn her at the stake.' 'She's not as bad as that,* protested Mother half-heartedly. 'My dear Mother, of all the foul relatives with which we are cluttered, she is definitely the worst. Why you keep in touch with her I cannot, for the life of me, imagine.' 'Well, I've got to answer her letters, haven't I?’ ‘Why? Just write "Gone Away" across them and send them back.' 'I couldn't do that, dear; they'd recognize my handwriting,' said Mother vaguely; 'besides, I've opened this now.' 'Can't one of us write and say you're ill?' suggested Margo. 'Yes, we'll say the doctors have given up hope,' said Leslie. ‘I’ll write the letter,' said Larry with relish. I'll get one of those lovely black-edged envelopes... that will add an air of verisimilitude to the whole thing.' 'You'll do nothing of the sort,' said Mother firmly. 'If you did that she'd come straight out to nurse me. You know what she is.' 'Why keep in touch with them; that's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.' 'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly. 'Nonsense, Mother. . . . Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats ... and there's Great Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a pen-knife .... They're 'bats.' 'Well, they're queer; but they're all very old, and so they're bound to be. But they're not mental,’ explained Mother; adding candidly, 'Anyway, not enough to be put away.' 'Well, if we're going to be invaded by relations, there's only one thing to do,' said Larry resignedly. 'What's that?' inquired Mother, peering over her spectacles expectantly. 'We must move, of course.' ‘Move? Move where?' asked Mother, bewildered. 'Move to a smaller villa. Then you can write to all these zombies and tell them we haven't any room.' 'But don't be stupid, Larry. We can't keep moving. We moved here in order to cope with your friends.' 'Well, now we'll have to move to cope with the relations.' 'But we can't keep rushing to and fro about the island ... people will think we've gone mad.' 'They'll think we're even madder if that old harpy turns up. Honestly, Mother, I couldn't stand it if she came. I should probably borrow one of Leslie's guns and blow a hole in her corsets.' 'Larry! I do wish you wouldn't say things like that in front of Gerry.' 'I'm just warning you.' There was a pause, while Mother polished her spectacles feverishly. 'But it seems so ... so... eccentric to keep changing villas like that, dear,' she said at last. 'There's nothing eccentric about it,' said Larry, surprised; 'it's a perfectly logical thing to do.' 'Of course it is,' agreed Leslie; 'it's a sort of self-defence, anyway.' 'Do be sensible, Mother,' said Margo; 'after all, a change is as good as a feast.' So, bearing that novel proverb in mind, we moved. *

* I think that all of us alive today in this technological bonanza age, are amongst the most fortunate beings in mankind’s history from the perspective of ‘ease of access to information.’ Any of us can, in the space of a few minutes, (without stirring from the comfort of our padded, tilting, and swivelling computer chairs), be reading,… a pdf.copy of an original, several thousand year old Chinese Taoist text,… an account of a 1930’s visit to one of the last genuine Taoist hermitages like John Blofeld’s,…. or listening to a live webcast of teachings being given at one of the many weird and wonderful centres around the world of our 21st century’s ‘Transmuted Taoism’. My own personal favourites from amongst all today's modern ‘soap box orators of Tao’ are the American, Wayne Liquorman, and the Englishman, Richard Sylvester. But when the devil gets into me and I experience one of my periodic cravings for something outrageous and rude, it’s always the devilishly-named ‘Mr Liquorman’, that I reach for first. To illustrate what I mean, below I’ve added two extracts taken from Wayne's book, "Acceptance of What Is". For me, his quirky,… (often bordering on the obscene, actually), anecdotes illustrate what for me is one of the most delightful qualities that I personally feel one can hope to be fortunate enough to come across in our spiritual quest, - a sincere teacher who has genuinely experienced what he is teaching,...AND YET,... who has an absolute killer of a sense of humour ! (But he is a bit 'off-colour', aka ‘Non PC’. So, if you feel at all prudish about these things,....Please Read No Further ! ) * * {1} This path of ‘jnana’, this path of knowledge, requires a transcendence of the mind; and that can only happen when the mind is utterly, thoroughly, ‘completely’ exhausted. After you have sought every ‘possible’ avenue into which you might enquire and ‘know’,… after you have thought again and again that you’ve GOT IT, only to find it slip through your fingers like jello; only then can there be some kind of surrender, some kind of ‘acceptance’ of the fact that the mind will not get you there. And it isn’t enough just to pay lip service to the fact that, “ The mind isn’t gonna help; the mind isn’t gonna know it” – That, too, has now just become something the mind KNOWS ! (Loud laughter) That is now the ‘new truth' that you’re holding sacred ! It gets subtler and subtler. That which you think you ‘know’, gets subtler and subtler. It’s really a process very much like a dog chasing its tail. Your mind is set in motion seeking itself, trying to catch itself. And if you have a mind that is strong, that has a lot of intellect behind it, you can get spinning VERY fast ! And you can ‘catch up ! ’ You can (laughter) ‘gain', on yourself ! And the faster you get spinning, the closer you gain on yourself,... then perhaps, if there is Grace,… you will disappear up your own ass ! This basically describes the path of ‘jnana’. I don’t know what ‘veda’ or ‘sutra’ it’s in, but it is essentially what we’ve set out to do here : (1) to enquire deeply, to look at that which is asking the questions (2) to look at that which is seeking, and (3) to find out if there is any substance there. * * {2} {Wayne} : The essence of these teachings I sometimes express by quoting my guru, Ramesh. He would often say, "All there is, is Consciousness. Consciousness, is all there is." { Q} : How do we know that? {A} : That is a 'pointer' in this teaching and not something which can be experientially known. What is being pointed at as happening is what Wei Wu Wei calls ‘apperception’, which is a knowing without a knower – or being. Some call it impersonal witnessing. These are just different ways of pointing to the absence of the involved “me.” However, the point is that that absence of the involved “me” is merely the absence of something that has been laid on top of “What Is”. An overlay. {Q} : Well,… who says so? {A} : I’m saying so. But it is not the truth. Okay? It’s just a pointer; a teaching tool. Mine. My tool. {Q} : So Advaita is like any other religion, then,… some believe it, and some don’t ? {A} : It is often turned into a religion by believers, despite some teachers’ efforts to the contrary. {Q} : Yes. If you believe in something, that turns it into a religion. {A} : That’s right. Taking something as an a priori truth – “It is, because I believe it.” – for many people is the basis for their religion. What we’re doing here, theoretically and hopefully, is not building another philosophy and not building another religion, but rather pointing unceasingly to “What Is.” And every time the mind attempts to build a philosophical or religious structure on this “What Is,” we kick it down. Any statement, from the most vociferous to the most benign, can be turned into a truth, worshipped and then built into a philosophy or religion. Anything. That is not my intention, and whenever I see it happening here, I try to bring it down,... because it’s not what we’re about. {Q} : But you are convinced that there is Oneness. {A} : No. I am not convinced there is a Oneness at all. There is no conviction,… there is no belief,… there is no truth that I have - that I am expounding to you here. None. Everything that I say is just a pointer, not a truth. {Q} : But don’t you believe that pointer? {A} : No. You don’t believe a hammer. It’s a hammer ! Do you believe a hammer? I’m saying this is a hammer and this is a screwdriver. I use this hammer to do this with and I use the screwdriver to do that with. Do I believe the hammer? No. There’s nothing to believe. It’s just a fucking hammer ! {Q} : Okay. {A} : Didn’t Ramana Maharishi say that, “It’s just a fucking hammer”? [Laughter] *

* It feels like an appropriate time to re-connect with the philosophical roots which underlie this forum,.... Taoism. I've already introduced the author of this extract, John Blofeld, in the introduction to a previous story. This account he wrote after one of his wanderings in the 1930s during his school's term holidays. It is taken from his book, "Taoism The Road to Immortality". As an aside, my initial attraction to Buddhism was due to a six month period I spent living in a Tibetan community in the Western Himalayas. Even now I don't think I've ever encountered another nationality for whom I've had such a profound respect and appreciation for the deep-seated kindness with which they seemed to treat everybody they met. Up until my meeting with them I had always thought that religion and philosophy were simply ideals that people talked about. Within the confines of my very limited experience I had just never considered that there might actually be people who lived what they talked. After my funds dried up in India I eventually ended up here in England and within a few years I had found a Tibetan Buddhist group where I thought I might be able to develop those same qualities myself. But us Westerners seem to carry our own karma, regardless of which bath of Eastern spirituality we immerse ourself in. Though this Western offshoot didn't work for me personally, nevertheless I've always been eternally grateful for my good fortune in having been able to spent time with the 'real thing', living inside that Tibetan community. As for Taoism, its roots and virtually its entire lifespan was in China, and moreover, in an ancient Chinese society that was utterly destroyed by Mao Tse Tung's Communist revolution in the 1940s and 50s. So, there's no going back there for anyone, ever again. The place and the society which created it, no longer exists. Perhaps rare accounts like these, by one of the very few Westerners who had the good fortune to experience life in a remote Taoist hermitage, are as close as we can ever get to the real thing. * * A 1935 VISIT TO A TAOIST MONASTERY The Taoists I had the good fortune to encounter were not over-superstitious. They included men both simple and urbane with a partly mystical partly humanistic philosophy. Though I do not remember hearing any of them deny the existence of gods and spirits, I did not find them unduly concerned with rituals. Like Buddhists, they understood that spiritual development lies with oneself, that neither gods nor sacraments help or hinder in the gradual refining or coarsening of man's essential being. Given the likelihood of enjoying a lifespan of from sixty to seventy or more years, they set out to achieve within that space of time an inner development capable of negating the effects of man's departure from the ways of nature and enabling them to eradicate evil propensities - acquisitiveness, passion, inordinate desire - which lead to selfishness and callousness if not to deceit and downright cruelty. They longed to refine their spirits. What does it matter if their concept of the goal was in some cases naive ? Doubtless that concept became more elevated as cultivation of the Way proceeded. To me they proved charming companions who added to the joy of spending a few days or weeks in superb natural surroundings. They provided me with opportunities to glimpse facets of a venerable civilisation which they alone among the educated Chinese of my generation had preserved more or less intact. Besides an engaging kindness, simplicity and candour, they had an enchanting gaiety. The sound of their laughter echoed through courts where, had they been within the precincts of a Western monastery, joy would have been swallowed up in a sanctimonious hush. One of the great secrets of their charm was their philosophy of 'not too much of anything', which taught them to combine spiritual aspiration with warm humanity. Their manner of life can be most satisfactorily conveyed by an account of a visit paid to one of the hermitages on Hua Shan; for, at the time, the ways of Taoists still had some novelty for me, so my senses were unusually alert to the impressions that came crowding in. To make the description more representative of the hermitages as a whole, I have woven into the narrative some details and characters encountered during subsequent visits to other holy mountains. The ex-general and ex-banker, both of whom belong to this category, may seem unusual and perhaps they were, but retired men of the world were by no means rarities in the smaller and more exclusive communities. In the winter of 1935 I happened to be in the neighbourhood of Hua Shan and decided to explore it. A northern Chinese winter is not the best of times for such expeditions; ice lay upon the precipitous paths, glazing the flights of steps hewn from living rock, and a cutting wind howled about the exposed upper slopes. Here and there clumps of trees stood close to the shrines of deities or fox-fairies, most of them looking as forlorn and in need of warm shelter as myself; otherwise the slopes were bare, having been denuded of their forests by generations of fuel gatherers from the teeming plains below. I never did succeed in reaching the temple that crowned the peak of what must be one of the most spectacular precipices in the world; as dusk approached, a chill mist blotted out the path and I sought refuge in a modest wayside hermitage, feeling hungry and miserably cold. All I could see of the place was a cluster of grey moss-encrusted roofs peeping above the high surrounding wall, also grey but showing less signs of poverty and neglect than many of the other hermitages. The ponderous lacquered leaves of the moon-gate were closed and unyielding. The young man I had met in the fields below and engaged as a guide, only to find that he had never set foot on the mountain in a life passed within a few bow-shots of its foot, suggested knocking as loudly as we could. So we pounded our fists against the smooth lacquer and shouted at the tops of our voices, but there came back no answering voice. It was bitterly cold and, if no one heard us, darkness might fall before we had found refuge elsewhere. Dismally our voices echoed among the rocks. Knuckles sore, arms aching, thoughts close to despair, we were about to give up when a voice, muffled by the thickness of the gate, cried: "Pu yao chi. An-men pu shih lung-tzu!" How comforting that sound, for all that we were being scolded for supposing the inmates deaf ! Now a heavy leaf creaked open, but beyond the lintel stood a sturdy old greybeard, cudgel in hand, who yelled: Honest men dont come calling at this hour of an evening ! Suddenly the old fellows grim expression changed to one of vast astonishment. Old Father Heaven ! A foreign dev -, er, er, a foreign guest ! Now he was all smiles and bows, pumping his clasped hands up and down in generous welcome, his eyes alight with smiling apology, his face aglow with human warmth. Taking the bag from my so-called guide and inviting him to go and sit by the kitchen fire, he led me across a modest courtyard to a room which appeared to be his own for, though no one was there, it was heated by , glowing brazier and rather stuffy. Motioning me to a couch, hurried out and soon returned with a basin of hot water, soap and face-towel. Next he set about brewing tea and soon we were facing each other across the brazier chatting like long separated friends. Like many denizens of isolated places, he seemed glad of new company and brimming over with talk. Within an hour, besides having learned something about their little community of five recluses and two serving lads scarcely in their teens, I had come to know most of the salient facts of his life. The son of an impoverished ironmonger, he had had scarcely three years of schooling before being compelled to pad the streets of his native Sian vainly hoping to find someone in need of a barely literate clerk. In despair he had entered the service of a city priest who made-such a poor living by divination and selecting sites for houses and tombs in the light of the science of feng-shui; that he could afford to pay no wages, only to meet the bare cost of the boys keep. Happily he had no objection to letting his new assistant make whatever use he liked of the books left behind by a more scholarly predecessor and gradually the latter became enthralled by works , setting forth all .aspects of cultivating the Way. Two or three years passed; then the youth set off for the mountains and, after wandering for several more years, settled on Mount Hua. At the time of our meeting, he had been doyen of the tiny community in that hermitage for at least a couple of decades. Your honourable abode must be lovely in summer, I remarked, but are you never weary of it ? Does time never lie heavily on your hands ? No, no, no! he answered vehemently, his old face lighting up with mirth. You talk as though this were a mansion crowded with noisy womenfolk with never a thought in their heads beyond buying clothes, dining off bird's nest and shark's fin, and playing mahjong for heavy stakes. That sort of thing, I have heard, makes many a man wish life were shorter. Here we have no time to be bored and, of course, you can have no idea of the beauty of this place. Winter is lovely on the whole. Had you come a day or two earlier, you would have seen the sky from this level as an inverted bowl of flawless turquoise. On most days, in the clear light of morning the peak rises like an island from a sea of mist that blots out all the world below. Bleak though it is today, if the fog lifts before tomorrow morning, you may feel embarrassed to find yourself floating above the clouds in what must surely be the court of the Jade Emperor, without having changed your workaday clothes in his honour, let alone your mortal skin! On clear nights both in winter and summer the moon is enormous. As for the stars, you can almost brush them with your hand. If you like plenty of company, come in spring or autumn when, on festival days, the path to the summit is so thick with pilgrims that it looks like a writhing serpent. Some bring flutes and jars of wine to pay honour to our mountain deity. Ah, you prefer peace and quiet ? Then come back in summer when the lower slopes are so densely carpeted with flowers that you might suppose someone had brought a giant Mongolian carpet to make a collar for our mountain god, from which his craggy neck rises not a hundred feet below where we are here. Behind our hermitage there is a pool fed by a hidden spring where the water is deep and crystal clear, the silence so awe-inspiring that you are afraid to dive lest the splash disturb the local genie. They say he is a dragon, by the way, but I cannot be sure of that, for no one is known to have encountered him since - when was it ? - shortly before the fall of the Ming dynasty, I believe. Even so, he might graciously manifest himself to you, a distinguished foreign guest.' How lovely you make it sound, Your Immortality. You seem to have no worries in this holy place. I suppose offerings made by the pilgrims are sufficient for all your needs ? I would not wish to depend on them, he replied. Ours is a small hermitage and we seldom have people coming to pass the night here, except during the great festivals when the temple at the peak and larger hermitages are filled to overflowing; but we prefer not to have too many visitors, though we should be sorry indeed to have none, for we enjoy, the conversation of widely travelled and learned guests like yourself, if I may presume to say so. Without offerings we could manage. Our needs are simple and two of our colleagues were once well off; though they abandoned their wealth when they left the world, you may be sure their families would help us if we were ever in dire need. For the most part we live off the proceeds of medicinal plants gathered on the mountainside. For example, we have . . . He mentioned a dozen or more names of plants that meant nothing to me, adding that there was a steady demand for them from Chinese physicians and medicine shops. Though most varieties brought in no more than half a silver yuan (little more than three pence) per basketful, that sum was enough in those days, to feed a community of seven for a couple of days or so. But how do you pass your time in winter when it is windy and cold like today ? Ah well, it is true that fog or heavy snowfalls sometimes isolate us for days at a time - but you see how snug we are. There is charcoal enough to last us. We have our books, our good tea, a mouthful or two of wine with evening rice to keep out the cold. Is all that not enough, do you think ? Though we have two boys to help, household chores keep us on the move-a good deal, especially in the mornings after we have warmed ourselves with hot tea and some vigorous tai chi ch'uan exercises. There is much to read and we have many books that repay rereading many, many times. We are fond of music, too, and have preserved some flute melodies so ancient that they may not have been heard elsewhere for centuries as far as we know. Do you write, Immortality, or paint, perhaps ? Blushing endearingly, the old man murmured No, no in a tone that surely meant yes. You cannot expect - well, you could say I like the fragrance of fine ink and the sha-shasha of a writing brush over paper made in the old way on this very mountain from barks and leaves that give it a pleasantly rough texture. My "writing" scarcely amounts to more than that, but two of my colleagues write fine verses. As to painting, ha-ha-ha of course not. That is, I do sometimes just try my hand at it, brushing crude landscapes with wavy strokes for mountains, mere dots and blobs to indicate clumps of trees or shadowed rocks. People? Animals ? How could an illiterate old creature like me dare ? Well, a long narrow blob perhaps with a suggestion of white upturned faces to suggest a line of pilgrims gazing up at the peak. Eh ? No, no, you cannot wish to see such trifles' - but he was already on his feet, a delighted expression giving something like youthful charm to his old face, and within a few minutes he had brought over quite a pile of unmounted ink paintings. I knew little enough of Chinese art in those days, but it seemed to me that some of his paintings were really beautiful. Mostly they were impressions of mountain vistas seen at different times of the year, Each with a couplet or four-line poem of his own composition in running grass-characters brushed on a corner of the page, relevant of course to the scene depicted. It may not have been great art, but it was certainly attractive. Years later I came to realise how lucky such recluses were to have escaped the kind of education available in government-run schools. Instead of having their minds corrupted by the usual second-hand versions of materialist ideas imported from the West, they had for their only models the masterly poems) essays and paintings in traditional style that one would expect to find in monastic libraries which had gradually been built up over the centuries. No wonder recluses who so often came from illiterate or barely literate families had, at least in some cases, accomplishments superior to those of a good many university students of the period! Having expressed my admiration of his poems and paintings in glowing terms worthy of the occasion, I asked how he managed to find time amidst his manifold pursuits for self-cultivation. Where is the conflict, young sir? All we do is part of cultivation. As to formal yogas and meditations, we perform them mostly during the first hour or two of the day and also late at night. We make no rules, so there are none to break and cause self-dissatisfaction. The secret is to sense when actions are timely and in accord with the Way or otherwise. It is a matter of learning to - to - how shall I say ? Of, of- ah, now I have it - of learning how to be ! Have you no worries, no anxieties at all ? Young sir, you must be joking! We are humans. Ills happen. But we have learnt that calamities pass like all things. When we are sick or short of money to buy necessities, we naturally feel anxious; but, when this has happened many times, one learns to accept the bad with the good, to see them as they are - a part of being and not to be dispensed with without damage to the whole. When you are sick, Immortality ? It is hard to imagine an immortal with a cough or hiccups ! I should have thought He chuckled heartily. Worse than that, young sir' Immortals not only break wind or belch like other people, they die ! Can it ever have been otherwise ? Becoming immortal has little to do with physical changes, like the greying of a once glossy black beard; it means coming to know something, realising something - an experience that can happen in a flash! Ah, how precious is that knowledge! When it first strikes you, you want to sing and dance, or you nearly die of laughing ! For suddenly you recognise that nothing in the world can ever hurt you. Though thunder roar and torrents boil, though serpents hiss and arrows rain - you meet them laughing ! You see your body as a flower born to bloom, to give forth fragrance, to wither and die. Who would care for a peony that stayed as it was For a lifetime, for a thousand or ten thousand years? A mere cabbage would be worthier of attention. It is well that things die when worn out, and no loss at all, for life is immortal and never grows with the birth of things or diminishes with their death. A worn-out object is discarded, life having ample materials to supply the loss. Now do you see ? You cannot die, because you have never lived. Life cannot die because it has no beginning or end. Becoming an immortal just means ceasing to identify yourself with shadows and recognising that the only "you" is everlasting life. Ah, what nonsense I am talking; theyll be waiting for us to join them at evening rice' Come'' In those days my Chinese was less fluent than it afterwards became, so I cannot be sure I have reported the substance of his memorable words correctly, the more so as forty years have passed since then. Yet what he said was at once so striking and so simple that I am sure I am sure I got the hang of it and that not too much has been lost in the retelling. For the first time in my life I realised that a man may have-no-faith in personal survival and yet recognise that, in losing himself' he loses nothing. I saw that, to a man ii his blissful state of mind, the loss of his spectacles would seem a greater inconvenience than merely dying ! He had used the Chinese equivalent of 'want to sing and dance' with reference to a sudden perception of death's real nature ! There was in him an abundance of joy not to be accounted for by anything within my understanding at that time; and it may be that this belated report of his conversation is more true to the spirit of his words than anything I could have written down on the spot. To see his smile was to sense his invulnerable serenity and I wonder now if the famed immortals of old attained to anything higher. Is there anything more, anywhere further to go than the direct intuitive perception that life holds no terrors, that death - like Cinderella's fairy godmother - holds out to us a new and shining garment' that the 'red slayer' never slays because there is no one to slay and no such thing as slaying ? Clearly the old gentleman had long ago reached a point at which the word 'I' had no more than a convenient functional meaning like the word 'home' in a game of Ludo. Yet far from passing his days in a trancelike state waiting for death's liberation, far from being lethargic and withdrawn, as though his present life were of no importance, he was keenly alert, sipping his tea with evident enjoyment, revelling in the brazier's warmth, but also quick to see to practical matters as when the charcoal embers needed stirring. Though clearly a holy-man in the best sense, he had not a touch of the solemnity we in the West are apt to associate with the saintly. The strongest lines in his face were those that come from ready smiles and laughter. Even his little weakness, an innocent vanity in having made himself into something of a scholar and a painter, was lovable. His qualities, I was to discover, were typical of cultivators of the Way. Evening rice, shared with the five recluses and with the two little boys who, having served us, sat at table and gobbled lion's shares, was a delightful meal. Though so very much junior to my five hosts, I was literally dragged into the seat of honour opposite the door. The food consisted mostly of vegetables and bean curd, but with slivers of ham and dried fish to give them flavour. Instead of rice, we had piping hot millet dumplings - coarse fare and cheap but tasty. From a pewter jug kept standing in hot water a delicious yellowish wine was poured into cups with about half the capacity of an egg-cup. Everyone drank several cupfuls, just enough to add to our conviviality. It appeared that they had no abbot, but my friend was treated with special deference, probably because, though far below some of the others in social standing and scholarship and rather younger than at least one of them, he had long been the doyen of their community. Of the others, the Miraculous Moss Recluse, an octogenarian, had once been a farmer, but had sold his plot of land to buy food for his family during a famine. The Cloud Mother Recluse, a burly and rather handsome black-bearded man in his middle forties, had run away from home to enter a hermitage as serving boy while still in his teens. The Fragrant Sesame Recluse, now sixtyish, described himself as a poor soldierman, but turned out to be an ex-general risen from the ranks in the army of Marshal Wu Pei-fu. Finally, the Tranquil Wisdom Recluse, a pot-bellied, jolly fellow also in his sixties, had until about ten years previously been a silk merchant in Chengtu, but had tired of the quarrels among his ladies and, renouncing his wealth (except for a sum of money spent on restoring the hermitage and adding to its amenities), had joined the community on an impulse born of a two-day stay there during the festival of the Pole Star Deity. Naturally, not all these details were forthcoming at dinner and I owe most of them to the Moon Rabbit Recluse, their doyen; even so, they were cheerfully unreticent and most willing to answer whatever questions I chose to ask. (Had only one, rather than two, of the five once been a man of substance and standing, the proportion would have been more typical of such communities in general.) Despite spiritually unpromising backgrounds, all were now devoted followers of the Way and could properly be described as adepts. Living in a place so remote from ordinary life and spending many hours a day in study or in contemplation with the mind turned in upon itself, they had been weaned from the world of dust and were as full of gaiety and laughter as a party of undergraduates, with some- thing of an undergraduate's fondness for prankish humour. For over twenty years, three of the five had been living together in what, until the ex-silk merchant's arrival, had been a ruinous hermitage. The former general had been with them only for a year or so, having 'left the world' in his native Kiangsu province after the defeat of the scholarly Marshal Wu during the civil wars of the 1920s. The two little boys were the sons of local farmers who had welcomed the opportunity of placing them in service with people able to make scholars of them. None of the five recluses had received much of an education in the modern sense, the general having risen from the ranks and the silk merchant having inherited his fathers business while still a high-school student. The lifelong Taoist had left the world as an illiterate teenager; my friend and the 8o-year-old had neither of them completed their primary education. Now, all except the ex-general were scholars in the traditional sense, and even he had discovered a flair for witty extempore doggerel. This was a common state of affairs not often taken into account by the critics of Taoism, who seem to be under the misapprehension that to be without a high school or university education was a grave disadvantage; that may be so generally, but not in circumstances such as these. Ignorant no doubt of matters outside their chosen field, the inmates were often erudite in the subjects that mattered for cultivation of the Way. All were steeped in the words of Lao and Chuang, in those of sages like Wei Po-yang and Ko Hung, and in the poems and essays of lovers of mountain solitudes. Their conversation, even when light and jovial, betrayed such learning. Their manners and attitudes were more redolent of what the Chinese mean by a background 'perfumed by books' than those of modern university students. It was their custom to rise at dawn, summer and winter, there being no clock or watch within the walls. Breakfasting in their cells on tea and millet gruel with scones or fried twists of dough, they usually remained in seclusion for the greater part of the morning, each performing such meditations, yogas or studies as seemed best to him, except on the days appointed for visits to their current teacher, an elderly recluse who resided further up the mountain. The stocky Cloud Mother Recluse, being younger than the others, had taken on the tasks of overseeing the serving boys, attending to the housekeeping and to the tiny patch of garden. He could be said to run things, to the small extent that running was needed, and could count on help from his elderly colleagues, of whom all but one were capable of carrying and lifting, etc., when necessary. Several of them took it in turns to go down the mountain or even travel to the provincial capital, Si-an, when such journeys were needed for stocking up supplies or selling the herbs they had gathered. Lunch was a communal meal, eaten with a good appetite and plenty of conviviality. Weather permitting, the afternoons were spent out of doors, either in the garden and tending the shrubs in the courtyard, or going further afield in search of herbs, or just walking about in what, during most of the year, must have seemed like fairyland. Besides their yogic exercises, they practised t'ai chi ch'uan under the general's expert guidance; and the two boys received instruction in wrestling and swordsmanship from him. Around sunset, they returned to their rooms and continued the serious cultivation practised in the mornings. Some passed much of the night in meditation. When pilgrims came for the festivals, these pursuits were interrupted and various rituals performed, which the old gentlemen enjoyed because it gave them opportunities to indulge in stately dance movements and show off their expertise with flutes, hu ch'in viols, and all kinds of percussion instruments. When the weather was inclement, they had amusements for whiling away the afternoons. Besides painting, calligraphy, composing poems and reading, they enjoyed preparing charms for the pilgrims (an additional source of income), employing the picturesque magic scripts which are so suggestive of nature's flow, of the passing of one thing into another. Also, the ex-general had grown very fond of the kind of chess known as wei ch'i, an exceedingly ancient game played with white and black stones, one hundred and sixty or more on each side. Popular among military and naval men in China and Japan, as well as among scholars, its 361-square board may be regarded as a battlefield, whether for a contest between two armies or between the opposing creative and destructive forces of nature. (It is said that in the cloud realms of immortals this game is played with the lives of human beings for stakes, each white gain saving a life, each black gain costing one.) Wei chi is Taoistic in character, for the skilful player learns to build up his strength wherever his opponent is weakest, thus emulating the action of water. Finding no worthy opponent among his colleagues, the general used to visit other hermitages in search of good players; for often the recluses would exchange visits and pass an afternoon sipping tea and nibbling melon seeds in hermitages at a comfortable distance from their own. Summer pastimes included visits further afield, picnicking at various beauty spots, swimming in the clear mountain streams and pools, holding contests in extempore verse making at places specially noted for views of the rising or setting sun, the full moon and so on. Some of the neighbouring communities included skilled gardeners expert in helping nature to excel herself, although, as if to redress the balance, one of their pursuits was as artificial as could well be imagined, for they loved to train shrubs to resemble birds and animals, including dragons, unicorns and phoenixes. There were also experts in the growing of dwarf trees and I have seen cedars or pines less than a foot in height which showed signs of being between fifty and a hundred years old. In most hermitages could be found miniature landscape gardens complete with mountains, pools, caves, trees and little houses and men, each garden rising from an oblong earthenware container about two foot long and one foot wide, or even smaller. When it was time for me to say farewell, collect my worthless 'guide' and go down the mountain back to Si-an and thence to Peking, the Moon Rabbit Recluse begged me to return one day. You must come in spring or autumn for one of our festivals, since you are fond of the sound of flutes by moonlight. You will hear some ancient melodies sacred to just one day of the year. In summer there are the wild flowers I spoke of and a pool so clear that you can peer down at a miniature forest of waving plants growing deeper down than a man can dive. Who knows but that its genie, the dragon I mentioned, will not emerge to make the acquaintance of a distinguished young foreign gentleman ? At least you will see fish darting in and out of the "forest" like tigers stalking their prey. If you insist on coming again in winter, choose the First Moon (February); it will be even colder than now, your teeth will chatter, but imagine how splendid this great mountain looks when everything is blanketed by snow ! That will inspire you to write poems filled with the spirit of the Way. The sky will be blue as sapphire, the sun red as persimmon. Seeing its light shining upon a universe of dazzling snow, you will understand what is meant by the "glistening void". Contemplating such a sight, you may well win suddenly to full attainment and thenceforth laugh your way through life, never having further cause for tears ! * * I hope my picture of those honourable immortals is worthy of them. Men of shy elusive wisdom, too simple to hold their own in scholarly debate, they had intuitive perception of a world of tranquil, joyous beauty far beyond my, in some ways more sophisticated, understanding. Nothing extraordinary was likely to happen in their company; there was none of the atmosphere of awesome and perhaps dark mysteries that one senses in temples where the folk religion predominates, no talk of conjuring up or subduing demons, nothing exciting or dramatic, nothing that can easily be caught in words. Apart from the beauty of the mountain scenery (which on that occasion was lost in mist) and a manner of life belonging to an ancient world then rapidly vanishing, there were no marvels. And yet such a hermitage was a place of miracles - miracles unspectacular but profound and light-bestowing. Outwardly jovial and relaxed, often engaged in pursuits that seemed irrelevant to mighty spiritual endeavour, the recluses lived and had their being perpetually on holy ground (by which I do not mean merely that they inhabited a holy mountain). Some no doubt were close to or had already attained true immortality; they had passed safely beyond the realm of passions and desires; but such was their modesty that a traveller who came upon them knowing nothing of their inner life might have enjoyed their hospitality and returned to the plains below unaware of having done more than pass a day or two in the company of cheerful and amusing old men ! It would not have occurred to them to speak, even to one another, of having attained anything at all. If one asked them such questions as whether they felt they still had far to go before reaching the end of the Way, their answers might lead one to suppose them idle creatures, pleasantly touched with madness. They would be sure to burst out laughing and protest that they had not thought of going anywhere at all, or do something unconventional such as mooing like a cow or dancing a few steps to indicate the folly of the question. They loved to refer to themselves as idlers or wanderers 'loafing about the world' and their eyes would twinkle if they found someone gullible enough to take them seriously. As soon as one had an inkling of what cultivating the Way implies, it became easier to decide what lay behind their smiling disclaimers. The atmosphere in temples or hermitages where no real cultivation was taking place was very different; there, recluses stood on their dignity and one sometimes felt as though watching a charade. With men of true attainment, their sincerity could never be in doubt. Even if one knew too little of their language to be able to converse with them, their presence was sufficient to communicate feelings of tranquil joy and an incredible stillness. When one practised meditation in their company, results could be achieved of a very different order from those normally obtained. In their vicinity, sorrows and anxiety fell away and serenity spilled forth. Beyond this, there is a dramatic means of identifying those rare beings who have reached the very highest attainment. During a conversation with such a being on some serious subject, an opportunity may occur to look, without making one's intention obvious, straight into his eyes, or, in special circumstances, he may himself choose to confer a revelation (as, on one unforgettable occasion, happened to me). In either case, it is as though for an ecstatic moment a curtain has been twitched aside revealing unimaginable immensities; for the space of a single flash of thought, one shares the vastness of a sage's inner vision! The bliss is indescribable, but not to be endured for more than a fraction of a second, its intensity being too great to be borne by ordinary mortals. Either he, knowing what is occurring, will lower his eyes, or one must tear away one's own. The fruit of such a momentous encounter is of inestimable worth, for never again will one's conviction of the reality of the supreme apotheosis waver. I cannot say whether any of the five recluses just described would have been able to provide such evidence of the highest possible attainment. Knowing nothing of such things at the time, I did not think to look for it; but I do remember feeling a lovely stillness in their presence, which was all the more remarkable in that I had not learnt to expect anything of the kind. Extraordinary signs of being far advanced along the Way are not peculiar to Taoists. I have occasionally met Chinese Buddhist monks and Tibetan lamas whose Presence in itself communicates joy and stillness. Indeed, at the higher levels of yogic accomplishment or spiritual insight, great differences among devotees of different faiths are not to be expected. An accomplished mystic attains the same experiential insight into Reality, whatever path he follows. The one notable difference between Taoists and Buddhists, apart from their views on the subject of reincarnation, is that the latter tend to put more stress in their teaching on compassion, which together with wisdom forms the very core of Buddhist practice. At one time I used to think that this difference pointed to a defect in the teaching and practice of Taoism - now I am not so sure. From the earliest times, Taoists have been chary about speaking of the need for such virtues as benevolence, filial piety, righteousness, compassion; for, as Lao-tzu says: 'Cease this talk of benevolence and righteousness and the people will be benevolent and kind.' He goes on to point out that making much of these virtues is a sure sign of their absence. Why stress what should be as common as the air we breathe ? A follower of the Way is by definition a stranger to anger, cupidity and selfishness. Aware that individuality is but a shadow, a delusion born of ignorance, he sees that 'I' and 'other' have no place in the seamless Tao, that causing harm to others is the very negation of wu wei and of the pure selflessness needed for attainment. At most one could say that the Taoist attitude to compassion is more negative than the Buddhist, and even this may be an assumption based on no more than a difference in the way of putting things. Writing this last chapter has caused me pain from which an accomplished Taoist would doubtless be immune. It is sad to recall that, even though the ancient hermitages still stand amidst the mountains, no smoke now rises above their roofs. Nothing remains but poems and memories, unless now and then some wayfarer surreptitiously thrusts a stick of lighted incense among the cold ashes in a tripod standing before a crumbling shrine. How gladly I would brave the coldest wind, the icy mountain paths and snowdrifts piled before the lacquer gates for the pleasure of once more sipping tea with an immortal, gazing upon his wise old face and hearing his merry laughter ! It is good that I reached China in time to see many lingering traces of the beauty that, even in those days, was fast vanishing. The other day I came across a poem written by Li Po in the depths of his mountain solitude. Drunk with wine and beauty, he cries: "I am three with the moon and my shadow!" In the China of today, living alone and cultivating stillness is a sheer impossibility. It is probably a crime to wish to do so ! *

* Q.E.D. Thank you for your very thorough explanation. I wish you every happiness with your path.

* Perhaps the entry below is more than a trifle too long. (I can’t help but notice that they do seem to be ‘awful growing'). But perhaps an explanation of the story behind it will act as a spoonful of honey to make the medicine go down. By chance, a few months ago, I bumped into the son of a friend of mine whom I’d last seen when he was still a child but who has since become a young man in his twenties who seems to be always off in some exotic corner of the world hot on the trail of rather exciting-sounding adventures. He generously offered to help me with a large, woodland-clearing bonfire that I had set out to do. While we worked together throughout that day several times we found ourselves enthusiastically discussing some of the ‘great books’ we had each read. Findlay mentioned that personally, one of his all-time-favourite authors was J.D. Salinger, and in particular, the short story I’ve added below. Other than his widely famous “Catcher in the Rye”, I had never read anything else by that author. But out of curiosity, I felt that I simply had to explore my young friend’s enthusiasm. Tantalisingly, the story he so glowingly recommended had the marvellously evocative title, "For Esme - With Love and Squalor" I was most pleasantly,…’ blown away’. See what you think : * * J.D. Salinger wrote: JUST RECENTLY, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding I'd give a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first arrived, I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I've since discussed the matter rather extensively with my wife, a breathtakingly level-headed girl, and we've decided against it--for one thing, I'd completely forgotten that my mother-in-law is looking forward to spending the last two weeks in April with us. I really don't get to see Mother Grencher terribly often, and she's not getting any younger. She's fifty-eight. (As she'd be the first to admit.) All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don't think I'm the type that doesn't even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting. Accordingly, I've gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I haven't met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody's aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct. In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn't one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn't using. When we weren't writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table. The training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to entrain for London, where, as rumour had it, we were to be assigned to infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By three in the afternoon, I'd packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I'd brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I'd slipped through a porthole of the Mauritania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I'd never get the damn thing on in time.) I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset but for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woollen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I'm still told, I wore at an angle all my own--slightly down over both ears). Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn't. In the centre of town, which was probably the wettest part of town, I stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly because the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my attention but partly because, after three years in the Army, I'd become addicted to reading bulletin boards. At three-fifteen, the board stated, there would be children's-choir practice. I looked at my wristwatch, then back at the board. A sheet of paper was tacked up, listing the names of the children expected to attend practice. I stood in the rain and read all the names, then entered the church. A dozen or so adults were among the pews, several of them bearing pairs of small-size rubbers, soles up, in their laps. I passed along and sat down in the front row. On the rostrum, seated in three compact rows of auditorium chairs, were about twenty children, mostly girls, ranging in age from about seven to thirteen. At the moment, their choir coach, an enormous woman in tweeds, was advising them to open their mouths wider when they sang. Had anyone, she asked, ever heard of a little dickybird that dared to sing his charming song without first opening his little beak wide, wide, wide? Apparently nobody ever had. She was given a steady, opaque look. She went on to say that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words they sang, not just mouth them, like silly-billy parrots. She then blew a note on her pitch-pipe, and the children, like so many underage weightlifters, raised their hymnbooks. They sang without instrumental accompaniment--or, more accurately in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. A couple of the very youngest children dragged the tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer's mother could have found fault with. I had never heard the hymn, but I kept hoping it was one with a dozen or more verses. Listening, I scanned all the children's faces but watched one in particular, that of the child nearest me, on the end seat in the first row. She was about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children's voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps just with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw her yawn. It was a ladylike yawn, a closed-mouth yawn, but you couldn't miss it; her nostril wings gave her away. The instant the hymn ended, the choir coach began to give her lengthy opinion of people who can't keep their feet still and their lips sealed tight during the minister's sermon. I gathered that the singing part of the rehearsal was over, and before the coach's dissonant speaking voice could entirely break the spell the children's singing had cast, I got up and left the church. It was raining even harder. I walked down the street and looked through the window of the Red Cross recreation room, but soldiers were standing two and three deep at the coffee counter, and, even through the glass, I could hear ping-pong balls bouncing in another room. I crossed the street and entered a civilian tearoom, which was empty except for a middle-aged waitress, who looked as if she would have preferred a customer with a dry raincoat. I used a coat tree as delicately as possible, and then sat down at a table and ordered tea and cinnamon toast. It was the first time all day that I'd spoken to anyone. I then looked through all my pockets, including my raincoat, and finally found a couple of stale letters to reread, one from my wife, telling me how the service at Schrafft's Eighty-eighth Street had fallen off, and one from my mother-in-law, asking me to please send her some cashmere yarn first chance I got away from "camp." While I was still on my first cup of tea, the young lady I had been watching and listening to in the choir came into the tearoom. Her hair was soaking wet, and the rims of both ears were showing. She was with a very small boy, unmistakably her brother, whose cap she removed by lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a laboratory specimen. Bringing up the rear was an efficient-looking woman in a limp felt hat--presumably their governess. The choir member, taking off her coat as she walked across the floor, made the table selection--a good one, from my point of view, as it was just eight or ten feet directly in front of me. She and the governess sat down. The small boy, who was about five, wasn't ready to sit down yet. He slid out of and discarded his reefer; then, with the deadpan expression of a born heller, he methodically went about annoying his governess by pushing in and pulling out his chair several times, watching her face. The governess, keeping her voice down, gave him two or three orders to sit down and, in effect, stop the monkey business, but it was only when his sister spoke to him that he came around and applied the small of his back to his chair seat. He immediately picked up his napkin and put it on his head. His sister removed it, opened it, and spread it out on his lap. About the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me staring over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house-counting eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It was oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are. I smiled back, much less radiantly, keeping my upper lip down over a coal-black G.I. temporary filling showing between two of my front teeth. The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress--a Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. "I thought Americans despised tea," she said. It wasn't the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she'd care to join me. "Thank you," she said. "Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment." I got up and drew a chair for her, the one opposite me, and she sat down on the forward quarter of it, keeping her spine easily and beautifully straight. I went back--almost hurried back--to my own chair, more than willing to hold up my end of a conversation. When I was seated, I couldn't think of anything to say, though. I smiled again, still keeping my coal-black filling under concealment. I remarked that it was certainly a terrible day out. "Yes; quite," said my guest, in the clear, unmistakable voice of a small-talk detester. She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone at a séance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands--her nails were bitten down to the quick. She was wearing a wristwatch, a military-looking one that looked rather like a navigator's chronograph. Its face was much too large for her slender wrist. "You were at choir practice," she said matter-of-factly. "I saw you." I said I certainly had been, and that I had heard her voice singing separately from the others. I said I thought she had a very fine voice. She nodded. "I know. I'm going to be a professional singer." "Really? Opera?" "Heavens, no. I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio." She touched the top of her soaking-wet head with the flat of her hand. "Do you know Ohio?" she asked. I said I'd been through it on the train a few times but that I didn't really know it. I offered her a piece of cinnamon toast. "No, thank you," she said. "I eat like a bird, actually." I bit into a piece of toast myself, and commented that there's some mighty rough country around Ohio. "I know. An American I met told me. You're the eleventh American I've met." Her governess was now urgently signalling her to return to her own table--in effect, to stop bothering the man. My guest, however, calmly moved her chair an inch or two so that her back broke all possible further communication with the home table. "You go to that secret Intelligence school on the hill, don't you?" she inquired coolly. As security-minded as the next one, I replied that I was visiting Devonshire for my health. "Really," she said, "I wasn't quite born yesterday, you know." I said I'd bet she hadn't been, at that. I drank my tea for a moment. I was getting a trifle posture-conscious and I sat up somewhat straighter in my seat. "You seem quite intelligent for an American," my guest mused. I told her that was a pretty snobbish thing to say, if you thought about it at all, and that I hoped it was unworthy of her. She blushed-automatically conferring on me the social poise I'd been missing. "Well. Most of the Americans I've seen act like animals. They're forever punching one another about, and insulting everyone, and--You know what one of them did?" I shook my head. "One of them threw an empty whiskey bottle through my aunt's window. Fortunately, the window was open. But does that sound very intelligent to you?" It didn't especially, but I didn't say so. I said that many soldiers, all over the world, were a long way from home, and that few of them had had many real advantages in life. I said I'd thought that most people could figure that out for themselves. "Possibly," said my guest, without conviction. She raised her hand to her wet head again, picked at a few limp filaments of blond hair, trying to cover her exposed ear rims. "My hair is soaking wet," she said. "I look a fright." She looked over at me. "I have quite wavy hair when it's dry." "I can see that, I can see you have." "Not actually curly, but quite wavy," she said. "Are you married?" I said I was. She nodded. "Are you very deeply in love with your wife? Or am I being too personal?" I said that when she was, I'd speak up. She put her hands and wrists farther forward on the table, and I remember wanting to do something about that enormous-faced wristwatch she was wearing--perhaps suggest that she try wearing it around her waist. "Usually, I'm not terribly gregarious," she said, and looked over at me to see if I knew the meaning of the word. I didn't give her a sign, though, one way or the other. "I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face." I said she was right, that I had been feeling lonely, and that I was very glad she'd come over. "I'm training myself to be more compassionate. My aunt says I'm a terribly cold person," she said and felt the top of her head again. "I live with my aunt. She's an extremely kind person. Since the death of my mother, she's done everything within her power to make Charles and me feel adjusted." "I'm glad." "Mother was an extremely intelligent person. Quite sensuous, in many ways." She looked at me with a kind of fresh acuteness. "Do you find me terribly cold?" I told her absolutely not--very much to the contrary, in fact. I told her my name and asked for hers. She hesitated. "My first name is Esme. I don't think I shall tell you my full name, for the moment. I have a title and you may just be impressed by titles. Americans are, you know." I said I didn't think I would be, but that it might be a good idea, at that, to hold on to the title for a while. Just then, I felt someone's warm breath on the back of my neck. I turned around and just missed brushing noses with Esme's small brother. Ignoring me, he addressed his sister in a piercing treble: "Miss Megley said you must come and finish your tea!" His message delivered, he retired to the chair between his sister and me, on my right. I regarded him with high interest. He was looking very splendid in brown Shetland shorts, a navy-blue jersey, white shirt, and striped necktie. He gazed back at me with immense green eyes. "Why do people in films kiss sideways?" he demanded. "Sideways?" I said. It was a problem that had baffled me in my childhood. I said I guessed it was because actors' noses are too big for kissing anyone head on. "His name is Charles," Esme said. "He's extremely brilliant for his age." "He certainly has green eyes. Haven't you, Charles?" Charles gave me the fishy look my question deserved, then wriggled downward and forward in his chair till all of his body was under the table except his head, which he left, wrestler's-bridge style, on the chair seat. "They're orange," he said in a strained voice, addressing the ceiling. He picked up a comer of the tablecloth and put it over his handsome, deadpan little face. "Sometimes he's brilliant and sometimes he's not," Esme said. "Charles, do sit up!" Charles stayed right where he was. He seemed to be holding his breath. "He misses our father very much. He was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa." I expressed regret to hear it. Esme nodded. "Father adored him." She bit reflectively at the cuticle of her thumb. "He looks very much like my mother--Charles, I mean. I look exactly like my father." She went on biting at her cuticle. "My mother was quite a passionate woman. She was an extrovert. Father was an introvert. They were quite well mated, though, in a superficial way. To be quite candid, Father really needed more of an intellectual companion than Mother was. He was an extremely gifted genius." I waited, receptively, for further information, but none came. I looked down at Charles, who was now resting the side of his face on his chair seat. When he saw that I was looking at him, he closed his eyes, sleepily, angelically, then stuck out his tongue--an appendage of startling length--and gave out what in my country would have been a glorious tribute to a myopic baseball umpire. It fairly shook the tearoom. "Stop that," Esme said, clearly unshaken. "He saw an American do it in a fish-and-chips queue, and now he does it whenever he's bored. Just stop it, now, or I shall send you directly to Miss Megley." Charles opened his enormous eyes, as sign that he'd heard his sister's threat, but otherwise didn't look especially alerted. He closed his eyes again, and continued to rest the side of his face on the chair seat. I mentioned that maybe he ought to save it--meaning the Bronx cheer--till he started using his title regularly. That is, if he had a title, too. Esme gave me a long, faintly clinical look. "You have a dry sense of humour, haven't you?" she said--wistfully. "Father said I have no sense of humour at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humour." Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn't think a sense of humour was of any use in a real pinch. "Father said it was." This was a statement of faith, not a contradiction, and I quickly switched horses. I nodded and said her father had probably taken the long view, while I was taking the short (whatever that meant). "Charles misses him exceedingly," Esme said, after a moment. "He was an exceedingly lovable man. He was extremely handsome, too. Not that one's appearance matters greatly, but he was. He had terribly penetrating eyes, for a man who was intrinsically kind." I nodded. I said I imagined her father had had quite an extraordinary vocabulary . "Oh, yes; quite," said Esme. "He was an archivist--amateur, of course." At that point, I felt an importunate tap, almost a punch, on my upper arm, from Charles' direction. I turned to him. He was sitting in a fairly normal position in his chair now, except that he had one knee tucked under him. "What did one wall say to the other wall?" he asked shrilly. "It's a riddle!" I rolled my eyes reflectively ceilingward and repeated the question aloud. Then I looked at Charles with a stumped expression and said I gave up. "Meet you at the corner!" came the punch line, at top volume. It went over biggest with Charles himself. It struck him as unbearably funny. In fact, Esme had to come around and pound him on the back, as if treating him for a coughing spell. "Now, stop that," she said. She went back to her own seat. "He tells that same riddle to everyone he meets and has a fit every single time. Usually he drools when he laughs. Now, just stop, please." "It's one of the best riddles I've heard, though," I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two. "May I inquire how you were employed before entering the Army?" Esme asked me. I said I hadn't been employed at all, that I'd only been out of college a year but that I like to think of myself as a professional short-story writer. She nodded politely. "Published?" she asked. It was a familiar but always touchy question, and one that I didn't answer just one, two, three. I started to explain how most editors in America were a bunch— "My father wrote beautifully," Esme interrupted. "I'm saving a number of his letters for posterity." I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking at her enormous-faced, chronographic-looking wristwatch again. I asked if it had belonged to her father. She looked down at her wrist solemnly. "Yes, it did," she said. "He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated." Self-consciously, she took her hands off the table, saying, "Purely as a memento, of course." She guided the conversation in a different direction. "I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me sometime. I'm an avid reader." I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn't terribly prolific. "It doesn't have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn't childish and silly." She reflected. "I prefer stories about squalor." "About what?" I said, leaning forward. "Squalor. I'm extremely interested in squalor." I was about to press her for more details, but I felt Charles pinching me, hard, on my arm. I turned to him, wincing slightly. He was standing right next to me. "What did one wall say to the other wall?" he asked, not unfamiliarly. "You asked him that," Esme said. "Now, stop it." Ignoring his sister, and stepping up on one of my feet, Charles repeated the key question. I noticed that his necktie knot wasn't adjusted properly. I slid it up into place, then, looking him straight in the eye, suggested, "Meetcha at the corner?" The instant I'd said it, I wished I hadn't. Charles' mouth fell open. I felt as if I'd struck it open. He stepped down off my foot and, with white-hot dignity, walked over to his own table, without looking back. "He's furious," Esme said. "He has a violent temper. My mother had a propensity to spoil him. My father was the only one who didn't spoil him." I kept looking over at Charles, who had sat down and started to drink his tea, using both hands on the cup. I hoped he'd turn around, but he didn't. Esme stood up. 'Il faut que je parte aussi," she said, with a sigh. "Do you know French?" I got up from my own chair, with mixed feelings of regret and confusion. Esme and I shook hands; her hand, as I'd suspected, was a nervous hand, damp at the palm. I told her, in English, how very much I'd enjoyed her company. She nodded. "I thought you might," she said. "I'm quite communicative for my age." She gave her hair another experimental touch. "I'm dreadfully sorry about my hair," she said. "I've probably been hideous to look at." "Not at all! As a matter of fact, I think a lot of the wave is coming back already." She quickly touched her hair again. "Do you think you'll be coming here again in the immediate future?" she asked. "We come here every Saturday, after choir practice." I answered that I'd like nothing better but that, unfortunately, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to make it again. "In other words, you can't discuss troop movements," said Esme. She made no move to leave the vicinity of the table. In fact, she crossed one foot over the other and, looking down, aligned the toes of her shoes. It was a pretty little execution, for she was wearing white socks and her ankles and feet were lovely. She looked up at me abruptly. "Would you like me to write to you?" she asked, with a certain amount of colour in her face. "I write extremely articulate letters for a person my--" "I'd love it." I took out pencil and paper and wrote down my name, rank, serial number, and A.P.O. number. "I shall write to you first," she said, accepting it, "so that you don't feel compromised in any way." She put the address into a pocket of her dress. "Goodbye," she said, and walked back to her table. I ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the way out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several, inches shorter than the other. He didn't look over at me. Miss Megley went next, then Esme, who waved to me. I waved back, half getting up from my chair. It was a strangely emotional moment for me. Less than a minute later, Esme came back into the tearoom, dragging Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. "Charles would like to kiss you goodbye," she said. I immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but was she sure? "Yes," she said, a trifle grimly. She let go Charles' sleeve and gave him a rather vigorous push in my direction. He came forward, his face livid, and gave me a loud, wet smacker just below the right ear. Following this ordeal, he started to make a beeline for the door and a less sentimental way of life, but 1 caught the half belt at the back of his reefer, held on to it, and asked him, "What did one wall say to the other wall?" His face lit up. "Meet you at the corner!" he shrieked, and raced out of the room, possibly in hysterics. Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. "You're quite sure you won't forget to write that story for me?" she asked. "It doesn't have to be exclusively for me. It can--" I said there was absolutely no chance that I'd forget. I told her that I'd never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it. She nodded. "Make it extremely squalid and moving," she suggested. "Are you at all acquainted with squalor?" I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I'd do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands. "Isn't it a pity that we didn't meet under less extenuating circumstances?" I said it was, I said it certainly was. "Goodbye," Esme said. "I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact." I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave the tearoom. She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness. * This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me. It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice. He was seated on a folding wooden chair at a small, messy-looking writing table, with a paperback overseas novel open before him, which he was having great trouble reading. The trouble lay with him, not the novel. Although the men who lived on the first floor usually had first grab at the books sent each month by Special Services, X usually seemed to be left with the book he might have selected himself. But he was a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact, and for more than an hour he had been triple-reading paragraphs, and now he was doing it to the sentences. He suddenly closed the book, without marking his place. With his hand, he shielded his eyes for a moment against the harsh, watty glare from the naked bulb over the table. He took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. He had been chain-smoking for weeks. His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He quickly did what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he pressed his hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment. His hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three or four times during his two weeks' stay at the hospital in Frankfort on the Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still drove a jeep combat-style, with the windshield down on the hood, armistice or no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in Germany. By driving with his windshield down, combat-style, Corporal Z hoped to show that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot was he some new son of a bitch in the E.T.O. When he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the writing table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against the wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled "Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel." It belonged to the thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried daughter of the family that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been living in the house. She had been a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category. X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman's book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an incontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." He started to write Dostoevsky’s name under the inscription, but saw--with fright that ran through his whole body--that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book. He quickly picked up something else from the table, a letter from his older brother in Albany. It had been on his table even before he had checked into the hospital. He opened the envelope, loosely resolved to read the letter straight through, but read only the top half of the first page. He stopped after the words "Now that the g.d. war is over and you probably have a lot of time over there, how about sending the kids a couple of bayonets or swastikas . . ." After he'd torn it up, he looked down at the pieces as they lay in the wastebasket. He saw that he had overlooked an enclosed snapshot. He could make out somebody's feet standing on a lawn somewhere. He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective. The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had been X's jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he usually came up to see X when he had a few rumours or gripes to unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty-four. During the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest; he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each hand. "Ya writin' letters?" he asked X. "It's spooky in here, for Chrissake." He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light on. X turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be careful not to step on the dog. "The what?" "Alvin. He's right under your feet, Clay. How 'bout turning on the goddam light?" Clay found the overhead-light switch, flicked it on, then stepped across the puny, servant's-size room and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing his host. His brick-red hair, just combed, was dripping with the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb with a fountain-pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right-hand pocket of his olive-drab shirt. Over the left-hand pocket he was wearing the Combat Infantrymen's Badge (which, technically, he wasn't authorized to wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze battle stars in it (instead of a lone silver one, which was the equivalent of five bronze ones), and the pre-Pearl Harbour service ribbon. He sighed heavily and said, "Christ almighty." It meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack and rebuttoned the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around the room. His look finally settled on the radio. "Hey," he said. "They got this terrific show comin' on the radio in a coupla minutes. Bob Hope, and everybody." X, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just turned the radio off. Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. "Jesus," he said, with spectator's enthusiasm, "you oughta see your goddam hands. Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?" X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail. "No kidding, hey. I goddam near fainted when I saw you at the hospital. You looked like a goddam corpse. How much weight ya lose? How many pounds? Ya know?" "I don't know. How was your mail when I was gone? You heard from Loretta?" Loretta was Clay's girl. They intended to get married at their earliest convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through the war, Clay had read all Loretta's letters aloud to X, however intimate they were--in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was his custom, after each reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the letter of reply, or to insert a few impressive words in French or German. "Yeah, I had a letter from her yesterday. Down in my room. Show it to ya later," Clay said, listlessly. He sat up straight on the edge of the bed, held his breath, and issued a long, resonant belch. Looking just semi-pleased with the achievement, he relaxed again. "Her goddam brother's gettin' outa the Navy on account of his hip," he said. "He's got this hip, the bastard." He sat up again and tried for another belch, but with below-par results. A jot of alertness came into his face. "Hey. Before I forget. We gotta get up at five tomorrow and drive to Hamburg or someplace. Pick up Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment." X, regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn't want an Eisenhower jacket. Clay looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. "Oh, they're good! They look good. How come?" "No reason. Why do we have to get up at five? The war's over, for God's sake." "I don't know--we gotta get back before lunch. They got some new forms in we gotta fill out before lunch.... I asked Bulling how come we couldn't fill 'em out tonight--he's got the goddam forms right on his desk. He don't want to open the envelopes yet, the son of a bitch." The two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling. Clay suddenly looked at X with new-higher-interest than before. "Hey," he said. "Did you know the goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place?" X said he knew all about it, and covered his tic with his hand. Clay stared at him for a moment, then said, rather vividly, as if he were the bearer of exceptionally good news, "I wrote Loretta you had a nervous breakdown." "Oh?" "Yeah. She's interested as hell in all that stuff. She's majoring in psychology." Clay stretched himself out on the bed, shoes included. "You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life." X bridged his hands over his eyes--the light over the bed seemed to be blinding him--and said that Loretta's insight into things was always a joy. Clay glanced over at him. "Listen, ya bastard," he said. "She knows a goddam sight more psychology than you do." "Do you think you can bring yourself to take your stinking feet off my bed?" X asked. Clay left his feet where they were for a few don't-tell-me-where-to-put-my-feet seconds, then swung them around to the floor and sat up. "I'm goin' downstairs anyway. They got the radio on in Walker's room." He didn't get up from the bed, though. "Hey. I was just tellin' that new son of a bitch, Bernstein, downstairs. Remember that time I and you drove into Valognes, and we got shelled for about two goddam hours, and that goddam cat I shot that jumped up on the hood of the jeep when we were layin' in that hole? Remember?" "Yes--don't start that business with that cat again, Clay, God damn it. I don't want to hear about it." "No, all I mean is I wrote Loretta about it. She and the whole psychology class discussed it. In class and all. The goddam professor and everybody." "That's fine. I don't want to hear about it, Clay." "No, you know the reason I took a pot shot at it, Loretta says? She says I was temporarily insane. No kidding. From the shelling and all." X threaded his fingers, once, through his dirty hair, then shielded his eyes against the light again. "You weren't insane. You were simply doing your duty. You killed that pussycat in as manly a way as anybody could've under the circumstances." Clay looked at him suspiciously. "What the hell are you talkin' about?" "That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat. So there was absolutely nothing brutal, or cruel, or dirty, or even--" "God damn it!" Clay said, his lips thinned. "Can't you ever be sincere?" X suddenly felt sick, and he swung around in his chair and grabbed the wastebasket--just in time. When he had straightened up and turned toward his guest again, he found him standing, embarrassed, halfway between the bed and the door. X started to apologize, but changed his mind and reached for his cigarettes. "C'mon down and listen to Hope on the radio, hey," Clay said, keeping his distance but trying to be friendly over it. "It'll do ya good. I mean it." "You go ahead, Clay. . . . I'll look at my stamp collection." "Yeah? You got a stamp collection? I didn't know you--" "I'm only kidding." Clay took a couple of slow steps toward the door. "I may drive over to Ehstadt later," he said. "They got a dance. It'll probably last till around two. Wanna go?" "No, thanks. . . . I may practice a few steps in the room." "O.K. G'night! Take it easy, now, for Chrissake." The door slammed shut, then instantly opened again. "Hey. O.K. if I leave a letter to Loretta under your door? I got some German stuff in it. Willya fix it up for me?" "Yes. Leave me alone now, God damn it." "Sure," said Clay. "You know what my mother wrote me? She wrote me she's glad you and I were together and all the whole war. In the same jeep and all. She says my letters are a helluva lot more intelligent since we been goin' around together." X looked up and over at him, and said, with great effort, "Thanks. Tell her thanks for me." "I will. G'night!" The door slammed shut, this time for good. X sat looking at the door for a long while, then turned his chair around toward the writing table and picked up his portable typewriter from the floor. He made space for it on the messy table surface, pushing aside the collapsed pile of unopened letters and packages. He thought if he wrote a letter to an old friend of his in New York there might be some quick, however slight, therapy in it for him. But he couldn't insert his notepaper into the roller properly, his fingers were shaking so violently now. He put his hands down at his sides for a minute, then tried again, but finally crumpled the notepaper in his hand. He was aware that he ought to get the wastebasket out of the room, but instead of doing anything about it, he put his arms on the typewriter and rested his head again, closing his eyes. A few throbbing minutes later, when he opened his eyes, he found himself squinting at a small, unopened package wrapped in green paper. It had probably slipped off the pile when he had made space for the typewriter. He saw that it had been readdressed several times. He could make out, on just one side of the package, at least three of his old A.P.O. numbers. He opened the package without any interest, without even looking at the return address. He opened it by burning the string with a lighted match. He was more interested in watching a string burn all the way down than in opening the package, but he opened it, finally. Inside the box, a note, written in ink, lay on top of a small object wrapped in tissue paper. He picked out the note and read it. 17, ----ROAD, -----DEVON JUNE 7, 1944 DEAR SERGEANT X, I hope you will forgive me for having taken 38 days to begin our correspondence but, I have been extremely busy as my aunt has undergone streptococcus of the throat and nearly perished and I have been justifiably saddled with one responsibility after another. However I have thought of you frequently and of the extremely pleasant afternoon we spent in each other's company on April 30, 1944 between 3:45 and 4:15 P.M. in case it slipped your mind. We are all tremendously excited and overawed about D Day and only hope that it will bring about the swift termination of the war and a method of existence that is ridiculous to say the least. Charles and I are both quite concerned about you; we hope you were not among those who made the first initial assault upon the Cotentin Peninsula. Were you? Please reply as speedily as possible. My warmest regards to your wife. Sincerely yours, ESME P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe whether you were wearing one during our brief association, but this one is extremely water-proof and shockproof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell at what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman. Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please write as soon as you have the time and inclination. HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHARLES It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift Esme's father's wristwatch out of the box. When he did finally lift it out, he saw that its crystal had been broken in transit. He wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn't the courage to wind it and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy. You take a really sleepy man, Esme, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac-with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact. *