Free The Tree of the Sun by Wilson Harris

that stood between the “percussion pepperbox” and the “true” or “atomic” revolver.
    The other half of another wall was lined with books in red leather binding, from the age of Homer to the age of Dante on to Dr Johnson, side by side with a startling display of weapons that ranged from models of variants of the sixteenth-century German wheellock through mid-seventeenth-century north Italian wheellock and late seventeenth-century Scottish all steel flintlock. (The Scottish models were particularly impressive with scroll or “ ramshorn ” butts.)
    There were guns with Spanish miquelet locks that were crude and angular with their huge-jawed cocks and right-angled steel and pan covers. There was the prepossessing English dog lock of the middle seventeenth century in which the cock and tumbler or axle were forged in one piece.
    There was an admirable French lock designed by one Marin le Bourgeois, a gunmaker, painter, sculptor, musician.
    “The dance of the guns,” Leonard sighed, almost flippantly , but the sense of his miraculous survival in history, the sense of having escaped jealous retribution, folly, his own and that of others, from the madness of hate or feud or war—across middle passage ages, middle passage generations , centuries—had not entirely faded as he retreated from Harlequin’s “holy of holies” and made his way to Eleanor’s bedroom.
    “A growing shock”, da Silva echoed the subtlest dispersal of gunfire, upon the ladder of fate on which he was painting scenes from Francis’s book as if each step or bar were a box in which times danced, “to see your characters unveiled before you within scenes that unravel a series of lusts and connections in you , their creator. In me as well upon the swings of conscience. Your daemon of conscience. Conscience indeed. What is the conscience of art in a promiscuous age, a vicarious age?” He was serious as he asked, yet laughing like an artist-clown, to veil his late twentieth-century naked discomfiture. Francis was laughing too from within the swings of the grave to the cradle to unveil his early-to-middle twentieth-century skeleton discomfiture —“ What is community Da Silva? Ours is a promiscuous age, a vicarious age, indeed.” He confronted da Silva as one who spoke unspoken thoughts and hidden dreams from the canvas or silver screen of the dead to the very hand that painted it or him with flying strokes or phantom bullets.
    “What is my greedy connection to Eleanor, yours to Julia and Jen? Are we not all greedy for immortality as we swing from the past into the present, the present into the future? I need Eleanor to return to Julia as vicarious queen. You need Julia to come to Jen as living lady-in-waiting with whom you play your games of divorce from death and re-marriage to life. We are immersed—as you make so plain in each brushstroke of hidden darkness or light—in the strangest intercourse of survival, those of us who suffer statistics of disaster, in each minute, and need to resense a bond of survival through ages.
    “There is, I know, an ineffectuality, no one can fathom, to material oppression that may illumine an individual’s life in a sudden moment, beyond expectation or control, and bring about a sense in him or her—his small life or hers—of unexpected kinship to the very kings or queens, to the greatest souls in time. That is the mystery of poverty. How does a mere straw, tossed on the rubbish heap of human waste, accumulate an intensity or new passion in creation, a brilliancy of surviving bodies within the most unpromising field of circumstance? Perhaps no one can say what everyone burns to say—I am the link between the apparently failed ones and the apparently great ones.”
    It was this link between ineffectually or miscarriage and complex human greatness that drew Francis to mask himself in Leonard, in bed, in Eleanor’s arms; to suspend himself over her—upon her perfumed body—within her perfumed body that