Free Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Dennis Parry Page B

me?’
    Varvara pronounced some long word which was probably Turki. She could not translate it at the time, but later when her English vocabulary improved, I learnt that it meant ‘mushroom’ or ‘fungus’. These are not very reassuring words in the mouth of an amateur doctor, and my ignorance was perhaps fortunate.
    But after two or three minutes I should not have cared. All fears or speculations about the future were extinguished by a new intensity of present vision. Despite a tendency to lose the sharpness of their outlines, inanimate objects assumed a vastly increased significance: and also a kind of suppressed activity. Perhaps I can best describe this by saying that now, for the first time, I seemed to perceive that being a chair or a wash-basin or bed was a continual struggle by matter to retain its orderly and useful form, and one in which my sympathies ought to be actively engaged. If it had not been too much effort I should have applauded the furniture.
    I do not know what she gave me, except that it must have been some kind of hypnotic. Toadstools with this property are known to be used in parts of Central Asia for inducing trances. But none of the doctors of whom I have made inquiries can explain why a drug of this type should have allayed fever. Apparently its result ought to have been the opposite. Yet the fact remains that as soon as I swallowed the stuff my body began to feel deliciously cool and my headache ceased.
    Presently I felt a drowsiness which did not seem to threaten my heightened interior vision. The latter, I felt, would be continued and perhaps enhanced in sleep. But Varvara had other ideas.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘You must not sleep yet.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘It is bad.’
    ‘I doubt if I can keep awake.’
    ‘To help you,’ she said, ‘I shall talk.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘This will be a long talk and there is only one subject of which I know enough.’
    She meant her own life, which could be practically equated with the city of Hai-po-li or Doljuk. She spoke with unerring fluency, never hesitating for a word, as she sometimes did in ordinary conversation, and her gruff voice took on the cadences of a rhapsode. Early in her discourse I felt an extension of the drug’s power. Whereas before it had merely given life to inanimate objects, it now began to convert words into pictures as active and vivid as any on a stereoscopic screen. I could see what she described to me. It is a curious thing that my mind supplied many details which were necessarily left out of verbal description, and supplied them correctly, though I had no means of knowing this till much later. Unfortunately it is not possible to make printed words convey a third-dimensional effect: so that the reader will have to be content with a hotch-potch of topography, ethnology, and anecdote.
    Picture a high mountain in the middle-distance. It is summer and the snow-cap extends only about a fifth of the way down its slopes. Beneath there are forests of pine and cedar, though from forty miles away they appear only as a band of blackish-green. Below again, the foothills begin. There the soil is intensely barren; chiefly because it contains a very high proportion of mica splintered into billions of tiny crystals whose prisms catch the sun and reflect it with an intolerable brightness. There are four months of days in the year during which nobody in the city can bear to look northward for more than a few seconds at a time. Perpetual dazzle as well as filth plays its part in the eye diseases which are seen everywhere in the streets.
    These long burning slopes are the origin of the place’s Chinese name, which means Sea of Glass. They end about half a mile from the walls, where the oasis begins. The transition from sterility to luxuriance is astoundingly sudden. Over a brief ellipse, stretching east and west for eight miles at its furthest extent, the desert soil is made intensely fertile by a multiple outcrop of springs. Between the