Free Tales and Imaginings by Tim Robinson Page B

faintly, but he had to grope blindly for the rest of the network. Pushing it in front of him he waded out a few steps and then knelt down, his knees sinking a little into the mud. Very carefully he leaned forward and rested his body on the boat; the water welled up through it, the pieces strained apart, but it held together. He plunged his hands down into the mud and drew himself forward until his knees were off the bottom. The boat sagged beneath him: he thought it would let him sink right down to the mud, but it didn’t. He felt it yield and adjust itself under his weight, and when he lifted his hands from the bottom it floated him free. It revolved slowly on the stagnant water, showing him first the black silhouette of the river-bank and his little hut, then the faint glow of a cigarette among the group of men further upstream, then the mist shifting and billowing out on the river, and then his own hut again. He put his hand down into the mud and held the boat still as he stared up at the land. The water made little sucking noises around him. A spasm of doubt made him stagger to his feet, straddling the boat, sinking ankle-deep in the mud. He splashed ashore, went up and peered into his hut as if he thought he had forgotten something. A little flame had broken through the crust of ash on his cooking-fire ; he stood and watched it flickering in the darkness for a while. Then he turned abruptly, kicked down his flimsy shelter and bundled it onto the embers. As he leaped down the bank and into the water again the matting blazed up brilliantly. The boat was waiting for him. He waded out with it till the water reached his thighs and threw himself onto it. The sudden burst of flame had attracted the attention of the people further up the river; he heard them calling and running, and when they gathered round the blaze he saw them outlined against the light like the little figures of a shadow-play, miming amazement. As the little boat spun and drifted the plume of fire seemed to swing around him in wider and wider circles. Then mist enclosed him and the bright little scene vanished.
    The pounding of his heart, the afterimage of the blaze, both died away. He lay half-submerged in the water with his head on the buoyant metal canister, and closed his eyes and opened them a few times to see if the blackness was the same inside him and out. He felt that the boat had stopped turning around, but there was no way of telling whether it was moving or not. The mild warmth of the water and the silence soon made him drowsy; he lapsed into a passive state, feeling himself suspended in time between the act of tearing himself out of the city and whatever ordeal the river might impose. It seemed to him best to wait, to become part of the stillness.
    After a while he was aroused by a gentle undulation of the water which separately stirred each piece of the boat; through the gaps between them he saw, very far below, little wisps and knots of light coming and going. He looked up. Stars, such as he had never seen before, lay in a broad band across the sky between the huge vague darknesses above either river-bank. Prostrate on his boat, which conformed to the water’s surface like a patch of scum, he twisted his neck to marvel up at this glittering population bound together by love for the law of its own fantastic geometry. Among its millions , perhaps a hundred greater lights distilled the worship of tremulous hosts into the serenity of gods. As he watched, a particle of burning truth was flung the length of the river from one jubilant congregation to another. He began to realize for the first time the magnitude of the claim he was making by his presence in this self-rejoicing world, and the searching purification that would surely be required of him before he could be part of it. He felt the encrustations of his arm and cheek, remembered the making of his boat from the litter of the shore, and knew himself to be a creature of mud, smelling of that