Descendants Red Quotes

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave - a towering wall of blue. You will drown, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

History favors the underfoot and the oppressed, Your Majest," he says. "The years are long, but eventually, always, fortunes shift. The people rise. Such is the way of things. Either let change come willingly, help it along, or face the wrath of such force. It might not be you, or even your children. But the day will come when Reds storm the gates of your castles, break your crowns, and slit the throats of your descendants as they beg for the mercy you will not show now.

The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?

One time a Fuckwit brought a snowball into work to prove that the planet getting warmer was just a story to scare little ones and I don’t know for sure but I like to think he (or at least all his descendants) got eaten by sharks.

There is only a black fence and a wide field and a barn of Wyeth red. The smell of anger chokes the air. Ravens of September rain descend. Some say a mad mad hermit man lived here talking to himself and the woodchuck. But he's gone. No reason. No sense. He just wandered off one day, past the onions, past the fence. Forget the letters. Forget love. Troy is nothing more than a black finger of charcoal frozen in lake ice. And near where the owl watches and the old bear dreams, the parapet of memory burns to the ground taking heaven with it.

A sea of red lights, and I slow down. My job now is to gather everyone together and tell them we have to let her go. I won't tell anyone over the phone, because I didn't like hearing the news from the doctor that way. I have maybe a week to handle the arrangements, as the doctor said, but the arrangements are overwhelming. How do I learn how to run a family? How do I say goodbye to someone I love so much that I've forgotten just how much I love her?

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each windowpane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone!

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide. A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. Then it will drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear. We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far away over wood and water poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.

Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison.

I have said that there is no "average" American. That is due to the circumstance that the people of the United States differ from each as widely as the parts they live in. The New Yorker is a different specimen of man from the Westerner; the latter is entirely different again from the people of Texas. The Middle West, such States for instance as Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska or Iowa, have an entirely different psychology from that of Florida or Lower California. Their habits of life, their modes of thought, even their language is different. Still further, it must also be considered that millions of foreigners and descendants of foreign born people live in the United States and are part of the entire population that is known as "American". Add to this more than 10 million negroes, not to mention the score of different Indian (red-skin) tribes, who are the real, indigenous Americans. In this conglomeration of races it is impossible to speak of the "average" American, nor can any adequate estimate of American psychology be made on such a basis.

The Sioux, like all American Indians, are descendents of Asian nomads who crossed the thousand-mile Bering Land Bridge in various migrations between 16,500 and 5,000 BC.

Anyways, the Russians, no longer Red, are in the red - which, after throwing off the shackles of communism, is like having an irony curtain descend on them.

You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she’s pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women, and every person inherits from those ancestors the same preference. Why is that man a slave to his genes? He is not. He has free will. But you just said he’s in love because it is good for his genes. He’s free to ignore the dictates of his genes. Why do his genes want to get together with her genes anyway? Because that’s the only way they can get into the next generation; human beings have two sexes that must breed by mixing their genes. Why do human beings have two sexes? Because in mobile animals hermaphrodites are less good at doing two things at once than males and females are at each doing his or her own thing. Therefore, ancestral hermaphroditic animals were outcompeted by ancestral sexed animals.

There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.

Remember the year I stopped eating apples? Remember the summer I kept bringing home abandoned chairs? A lucid Vincent wrote to his brother: I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. His self-portrait now hangs in the Fogg. Remember the summer I had to walk to the Lake just to feel anything at all? When I descend late in the afternoon there’s a blue plate of heart- shaped cookies, there’s an orange on the kitchen counter. I notice a crack in the seam of the ceiling, a spider vein on the inside of my knee. What a still still life! The rest of the day is a slanted floorboard. The rest of the day is the color of absinthe. Note the personal and detached attitude. Note the application of arbitrary color. The tilted perspective. This poem is all surface. You may stand where you choose. This poem has no vanishing point.

Rise up smiling, and walk with me. Rise up in the armor of thy body and what shall pass shall make thee unafraid. Walk among the yellow hills, for they belong to thee. Walk upon grass and let thy feet descend into soft soil; in the end when all has failed thee the soil shall comfort thee, the soil shall receive thee and in thy dark bed thou shalt find such peace as is thy portion. In thine armor, hear my voice. In thine armor, hear. Whatsoever thou doest, thy friend and thy brother and thy woman shall betray thee. Whatsoever thou dost plant, the weeds and the seasons shall spite thee. Wheresoever thou goest, the heavens shall fall upon thee. Though the nations shall come unto thee in friendship thou art curst. Know that the Gods ignore thee. Know that thou art Life, and that pain shall forever come into thee, though thy years be without end and thy days without sleep, even and forever. And knowing this, in thine armor, thou shalt rise up. Red and full and glowing is thy heart; a steel is forging within thy breast. And what can hurt thee now? In thy granite mansion, what can hurt thee ever? Thou shalt only die. Therefore seek not redemption nor forgiveness for thy sins, for know that thou hast never sinned. Let the Gods come unto thee.

Here ease and comfort are the legacy,   The round and glowing cheek, the red, ripe mouth,   Here each possesses immortality   In his descendants’ happiness and health.   And thus in pure contentment, cloudless days,   The child grows up and fathers in his turn.   Amazed, we never cease to ask: Are these   High gods descended here or are they men?   Apollo, when he kept sheep, looked completely   The handsome shepherd in both form and face: 9900 Where Nature uninsulted rules serenely,   All worlds commingle, gods and men change place.

They were a large family of women-always women, although I guess guys factored in there somewhere, seeing as how the family had been around for over a thousand years. Descended from a megapowerful white witch named Maeve Brannick, they’d dedicated themselves to ridding the world of evil. Unfortunately, I fit their definition of evil. The girl scowled. “You are something,” she hissed, leaning in closer. “I can feel it. Whatever you are, it’s not human. So you can either tell me what kind of freak you are, or I can cut you open and find out myself.” I stared at her. “You are one hard-core little kid.” Her scowl deepened. “I’m looking for the Brannicks,” I said in a rush. “And I’m guessing you are one because…you know, red hair and the violence and everything.” “What’s your name?” she demanded as the stinging at my neck became actual pain. “Sophie Mercer,” I said through clenched teeth. Her eyes widened. “No way,” she said, sounding for the first time like the middle schooler she probably was. “Way,” I croaked.

And among those that came from the vaulted heavens of silver, the Tiste Andii, dwellers of Darkness in the Place before Light, Black Dragons numbering five, and in their league sailed red-winged Silanah, said to dwell among the Tiste Andii in their Fang of Darkness descending from the vaulted heavens of silver.

Going somewhere?” Tamlin asked. His voice was not entirely of this world. I suppressed a shudder. “Midnight snack,” I said, and I was keenly aware of every movement, every breath I took as I neared him. His bare chest was painted with whorls of dark blue woad, and from the smudges in the paint, I knew exactly where he’d been touched. I tried not to notice that they descended past his muscled midriff. I was about to pass him when he grabbed me, so fast that I didn’t see anything until he had me pinned against the wall. The cookie dropped from my hand as he grasped my wrists. “I smelled you,” he breathed, his painted chest rising and falling so close to mine. “I searched for you, and you weren’t there.” He reeked of magic. When I looked into his eyes, remnants of power flickered there. No kindness, none of the wry humor and gentle reprimands. The Tamlin I knew was gone. “Let go,” I said as evenly as I could, but his claws punched out, imbedding in the wood above my hands. Still riding the magic, he was half-wild. “You drove me mad,” he growled, and the sound trembled down my neck, along my breasts until they ached. “I searched for you, and you weren’t there. When I didn’t find you,” he said, bringing his face closer to mine, until we shared breath, “it made me pick another.” I couldn’t escape. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to. “She asked me not to be gentle with her, either,” he snarled, his teeth bright in the moonlight. He brought his lips to my ear. “I would have been gentle with you, though.” I shuddered as I closed my eyes. Every inch of my body went taut as his words echoed through me. “I would have had you moaning my name throughout it all. And I would have taken a very, very long time, Feyre.” He said my name like a caress, and his hot breath tickled my ear. My back arched slightly. He ripped his claws free from the wall, and my knees buckled as he let go. I grasped the wall to keep from sinking to the floor, to keep from grabbing him—to strike or caress, I didn’t know. I opened my eyes. He still smiled—smiled like an animal. “Why should I want someone’s leftovers?” I said, making to push him away. He grabbed my hands again and bit my neck. I cried out as his teeth clamped onto the tender spot where my neck met my shoulder. I couldn’t move—couldn’t think, and my world narrowed to the feeling of his lips and teeth against my skin. He didn’t pierce my flesh, but rather bit to keep me pinned. The push of his body against mine, the hard and the soft, made me see red—see lightning, made me grind my hips against his. I should hate him—hate him for his stupid ritual, for the female he’d been with tonight … His bite lightened, and his tongue caressed the places his teeth had been. He didn’t move—he just remained in that spot, kissing my neck. Intently, territorially, lazily. Heat pounded between my legs, and as he ground his body against me, against every aching spot, a moan slipped past my lips. He jerked away. The air was bitingly cold against my freed skin, and I panted as he stared at me. “Don’t ever disobey me again,” he said, his voice a deep purr that ricocheted through me, awakening everything and lulling it into complicity.

Okay, but, uh, what if they escape? I've seen Jurassic Park. Did you know birds are directly descended from raptors? That's a scientific fact. Raptors in my bedroom, Henry. And you want me to go to sleep like they're not gonna bust out of their enclosures and take over the island the minute I close my eyes? Okay. Maybe your white ass.

Mutter Erde ist keine Maschine Henry Red Cloud is the direct 5th generation descendant of Chief Red Cloud

What is death but descending into a dark, eternal sleep?

All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms.

Pilgrims Tuscan reds and ochre hues Olive greens and skies of blue Sunlit valleys full of charm Secluded homestead and hilltop farm Over hills skim birds in flight Aromas whet the appetite Autumn rustle fills the air Revealing grace of trees laid bare Pathways meander through the vale Inviting travelers its height to scale Sunset rewards as evening ends And pilgrims to the night descend

myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.

They only learn of their folly when they hear the medBots descending behind them to carry her broken body up to Olympus. She never returns. Still the Proctors do not interfere. I’m not sure why they even exist.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

At evening the autumnal forests resound With deadly weapons, the golden plains And blue lakes, above them the sun Rolls more darkly by; night enfolds The dying warriors, the wild lament Of their broken mouths. But in the grassy vale the spilled blood, Red clouds in which an angry god lives, Gathers softly, lunar coldness; All roads lead to black decay. Beneath the golden boughs of night and stars The sister’s shadow reels through the silent grove To greet the ghosts of heroes, their bleeding heads; And the dark flutes of autumn sound softly in the reeds. O prouder sorrow! you brazen altars Today an immense anguish feeds the mind’s hot flame, The unborn descendants.

The stories aren’t what I expected; they’re like German fairy tales, except for the absence of red-hot iron slippers and nail-studded casks. I wonder if this mercy descends from the original tellers, from the translator or from the publisher

Very few people know where they will die, But I do; in a brick-faced hospital, Divided, not unlike Caesarean Gaul, Into three parts; the Dean Memorial Wing, in the classic cast of 1910, Green-grated in unglazed, Aeolian Embrasures; the Maud Wiggin Building, which Commemorates a dog-jawed Boston bitch Who fought the brass down to their whipcord knees In World War I, and won enlisted men Some decent hospitals, and, being rich, Donated her own granite monument; The Mandeville Pavilion, pink-brick tent With marble piping, flying snapping flags Above the entry where our bloody rags Are rolled in to be sponged and sewn again. Today is fair; tomorrow, scourging rain (If only my own tears) will see me in Those jaundiced and distempered corridors Off which the five-foot-wide doors slowly close. White as my skimpy chiton, I will cringe Before the pinpoint of the least syringe; Before the buttered catheter goes in; Before the I.V.’s lisp and drip begins Inside my skin; before the rubber hand Upon the lancet takes aim and descends To lay me open, and upon its thumb Retracts the trouble, a malignant plum; And finally, I’ll quail before the hour When the authorities shut off the power In that vast hospital, and in my bed I’ll feel my blood go thin, go white, the red, The rose all leached away, and I’ll go dead. Then will the business of life resume: The muffled trolley wheeled into my room, The off-white blanket blanking off my face, The stealing secret, private, largo race Down halls and elevators to the place I’ll be consigned to for transshipment, cased In artificial air and light: the ward That’s underground; the terminal; the morgue. Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap, A booted man in black with a peaked cap Will call for me and troll me down the hall And slot me into his black car. That’s all.

Then set out after repeated warning the grizzly Afghan Duryodhan in blazing sun removed sandal-wood blooded stone-attired guards spearing gloom brought out a substitute of dawn crude hell’s profuse experience Huh a night-waken drug addict beside head of feeble earth from the cruciform The Clapper could not descend due to lockdown wet-eyed babies were smiling . in a bouquet of darkness in forced dreams The Clapper wept when learnt about red-linen boat’s drowned passengers in famished yellow winter white lilies bloomed in hot coal tar when in chiseled breeze nickel glazed seed-kernel moss layered skull which had moon on its shoulder scolded whole night non-weeping male praying mantis in grass bronze muscled he-men of Barbadoz pressed their fevered forehead on her furry navel . in comb-flowing rain floated on frowning waves diesel sheet shadow whipped oceans all wings had been removed from the sky funeral procession of newspaperman’s freshly printed dawn lifelong jailed convict’s eye in the keyhole outside in autumnal rice pounding pink ankle Lalung ladies

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgul the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms. As if to his eyes some sudden vision had been given, Gandalf stirred; and he turned, looking back north where the skies were pale and clear. Then he lifted up his hands and cried in a loud voice ringing above the din: The Eagles are coming! And many voices answered crying: The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming! The hosts of Mordor looked up and wondered what this sign might mean. There came Gwaihir the Windlord, and Landroval his brother, greatest of all the Eagles of the North, mightiest of the descendants of old Thorondor, who built his eyries in the inaccessible peaks of the Encircling Mountains when Middle-earth was young. Behind them in long swift lines came all their vassals from the northern mountains, speeding on a gathering wind. Straight down upon the Nazgul they bore, stooping suddenly out of the high airs, and the rush of their wide wings as they passed over was like a gale. But the Nazgul turned and fled, and vanished into Mordor's shadows, hearing a sudden terrible call out of the Dark Tower; and even at that moment all the hosts of Mordor trembled, doubt clutched their hearts, their laughter failed, their hands shook and their limbs were loosed. The Power that drove them on and filled them with hate and fury was wavering, its will was removed from them; and now looking in the eyes of their enemies they saw a deadly light and were afraid. Then all the Captains of the West cried aloud, for their hearts were filled with a new hope in the midst of darkness. Out from the beleaguered hills knights of Gondor, Riders of Rohan, Dunedain of the North, close-serried companies, drove against their wavering foes, piercing the press with the thrust of bitter spears. But Gandalf lifted up his arms and called once more in a clear voice: 'Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom.' And even as he spoke the earth rocked beneath their feet. Then rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate, high above the mountains, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire. The earth groaned and quaked. The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise. 'The realm of Sauron is ended!' said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.' And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell. The Captains bowed their heads...

I know what you are,” I whispered. Adrian didn’t flinch. “Do you.” His voice was a low rasp. I reached into my clutch, pulled out a tiny shard of glass I’d kept from before—why, I didn’t even know—and without flinching, sliced my palm open. Blood welled instantly, hot and red. His nostrils flared. His eyes bled crimson. “You’re insane,” he growled, stepping back. “No,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m curious.” He moved in a blur, faster than I could blink, grabbing me by the throat—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to hold me still. His fangs had descended, sharp and glinting.

I saw the sky descending, black and white, Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore The skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates, And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers tore The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits Its victim and tonight The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath; The wild ingrafted olive and the root Are withered, and a winter drifts to where The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles. I saw my city in the Scales, the pans Of judgement rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations. Every dove is sold. The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold On serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph. In Boston serpents whistle at the cold. The victim climbs the altar steps and sings: “Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings: I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.” At the high altar, gold And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

When the ship cracks in the typhoon, we cover our heads and tell ourselves that all will resolve back to normal. But we are unbelieving. This time may not be like the other times that with time grew into cheerful anecdotes. The stories we heard, about the ten thousand buried in the quake, were, after all, true. And more irredeemable than any human catastrophe, the dinosaurs trailed across the desert to their end. They left no descendents to embellish their saga, but only the white bones and the marks in the clay for archeologists to make into footnotes. Our hour may be this hour, and our end the dinosaurs’. So perhaps there will be no revolving back at all, and only archives, full of archetypes, like the composite photographs of movie heroines. But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood. Philosophy, like lichens, takes centuries to grow and is always ignored in the Book of Instructions. If you can’t Take It, Get Out. I can’t take it, so I lie on the hotel bed dissolving into chemicals whose adventure will pursue time to her extinguishment, without the slightest influence from these few years when I held them together in human passion.

I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street, and not force me to exist in an "elsewhere". I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Grey Street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be a poet, I should spend my imaginative life among the nightingales instead of among the wax-eyes and the fantails. I wanted my life to be the "other world".

I ask him if he tried to rape Nyla. “Laws are silent in times of war,” Tactus drawls. “Don’t quote Cicero to me,” I say. “You are held to a higher standard than a marauding centurion.” “In that, you’re hitting the mark at least. I am a superior creature descended from proud stock and glorious heritage. Might makes right, Darrow. If I can take, I may take. If I do take, I deserve to have. This is what Peerless believe.” “The measure of a man is what he does when he has power,” I say loudly. “Just come off it, Reaper,” Tactus drawls, confident in himself as all like him are. “She’s a spoil of war. My power took her. And before the strong, bend the weak.” “I’m stronger than you, Tactus,” I say. “So I can do with you as I wish. No?” He’s silent, realizing he’s fallen into a trap. “You are from a superior family to mine, Tactus. My parents are dead. I am the sole member of my family. But I am a superior creature to you.” He smirks at that. “Do you disagree?” I toss a knife at his feet and pull my own out. “I beg you to voice your concerns.” He does not pick his blade up. “So, by right of power, I can do with you as I like.” I announce that rape will never be permitted, and then I ask Nyla the punishment she would give. As she told me before, she says she wants no punishment. I make sure they know this, so there are no recriminations against her. Tactus and his armed supporters stare at her in surprise. They don’t understand why she would not take vengeance, but that doesn’t stop them from smiling wolfishly at one another, thinking their chief has dodged punishment. Then I speak. “But I say you get twenty lashes from a leather switch, Tactus. You tried to take something beyond the bounds of the game. You gave in to your pathetic animal instincts. Here that is less forgivable than murder; I hope you feel shame when you look back at this moment fifty years from now and realize your weakness. I hope you fear your sons and daughters knowing what you did to a fellow Gold. Until then, twenty lashes will serve.” Some of the Diana soldiers step forward in anger, but Pax hefts his axe on his shoulder and they shrink back, glaring at me. They gave me a fortress and I’m going to whip their favorite warrior. I see my army dying as Mustang pulls off Tactus’s shirt. He stares at me like a snake. I know what evil thoughts he’s thinking. I thought them of my floggers too. I whip him twenty brutal times, holding nothing back. Blood runs down his back. Pax nearly has to hack down one of the Diana soldiers to keep them from charging to stop the punishment. Tactus barely manages to stagger to his feet, wrath burning in his eyes. “A mistake,” he whispers to me. “Such a mistake.” Then I surprise him. I shove the switch into his hand and bring him close by cupping my hand around the back of his head. “You deserve to have your balls off, you selfish bastard,” I whisper to him. “This is my army,” I say more loudly. “This is my army. Its evils are mine as much as yours, as much as they are Tactus’s. Every time any of you commit a crime like this, something gratuitous and perverse, you will own it and I will own it with you, because when you do something wicked, it hurts all of us.” Tactus stands there like a fool. He’s confused. I shove him hard in the chest. He stumbles back. I follow him, shoving. “What were you going to do?” I push his hand holding the leather switch back toward his chest. “I don’t know what you mean …” he murmurs as I shove him. “Come on, man! You were going to shove your prick inside someone in my army. Why not whip me while you’re at it? Why not hurt me too? It’ll be easier. Milia won’t even try to stab you. I promise.” I shove him again. He looks around. No one speaks. I strip off my shirt and go to my knees. The air is cold. Knees on stone and snow. My eyes lock with Mustang’s. She winks at me and I feel like I can do anything.

Nevertheless they come up with their own history of creation, the Dreaming. The first man was Ber-rook-boorn. He was made by Baiame, the uncreated, who was the beginning of everything, and who loved and took care of all living things. In other words, a good man, this Baiame. Friends called him the Great Fatherly Spirit. After Baiame established Ber-rook-boorn and his wife in a good place, he left his mark on a sacred tree—yarran—nearby, which was the home of a swarm of bees. “ ‘You can take food from anywhere you want, in the whole of this country that I have given you, but this is my tree,’ he warned the two people. ‘If you try to take food from there, much evil will befall you and those who come after you.’ Something like that. At any rate, one day Ber-rook-boorn’s wife was collecting wood and she came to the yarran tree. At first she was frightened at the sight of the holy tree towering above her, but there was so much wood lying around that she did not follow her first impulse—which was to run away as fast as her legs could carry her. Besides, Baiame had not said anything about wood. While she was gathering the wood around the tree she heard a low buzzing sound above her head, and she gazed up at the swarm of bees. She also saw the honey running down the trunk. She had only tasted honey once before, but here there was enough for several meals. The sun glistened on the sweet, shiny drops, and in the end Ber-rook-boorn’s wife could not resist the temptation and she climbed up the tree. “At that moment a cold wind came from above and a sinister figure with enormous black wings enveloped her. It was Narahdarn the bat, whom Baiame had entrusted with guarding the holy tree. The woman fell to the ground and ran back to her cave where she hid. But it was too late, she had released death into the world, symbolized by the bat Narahdarn, and all of the Ber-rook-boorn descendants would be exposed to its curse. The yarran tree cried bitter tears over the tragedy that had taken place. The tears ran down the trunk and thickened, and that is why you can find red rubber on the bark of the tree nowadays.” Andrew puffed happily on his cigar.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.

Trip Advisor: Travel the World with Haiku [D] Jerusalem, Israel Jews pray motionless and the Western Wall shakes. It's all relative. Capetown, South Africa And the coloured girls say, 'We're not Africaans, we're English.' In a total Africaans accent. Bulls Bay, Jamaica Weed, rum, guava jelly, Reggae, Marley, Red Stripe beer, O Baby, jerk that chicken. Istanbul, Turkey I asked my driver, 'Why do you believe in Allah?' He answers: 'If not, He hit me!' Cairo, Egypt Cairo International Airport, Porter drops my bags six times. Descendents of the Pharaohs, my ass. Santorini Island, Greece Greeks are like the current, They push you over and then Try to suck you in. Christiania, Denmark One thousand drug dealers, Five hundred thousand tourists. Alway$ Chri$tma$ here.*

It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.

ANA. Stop! [The trap stops]. THE DEVIL. You, Señora, cannot come this way. You will have an apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us. ANA. That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me: where can I find the Superman? THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora. THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. [They descend]. ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father! a father for the Superman! She vanishes into the void; and again there is nothing: all existence seems suspended infinitely. Then, vaguely, there is a live human voice crying somewhere. One sees, with a shock, a mountain peak shewing faintly against a lighter background. The sky has returned from afar; and we suddenly remember where we were.

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ‘And yet,’ I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding ‘Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot potatoes’, ‘and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. ‘Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame - a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

When he bet Julia that she wouldn’t dare to descend into the mine, located seventeen hundred feet below, it roused her fighting spirit and she proved him wrong. Grant surfaced from the deep mine, red-faced and perspiring, and joked that it was a good place “to leave the newspapermen.” “Would you not leave the politicians, too?” asked John H. Kinkead, the Nevada governor. “Yes,” Grant said drily, “but there ain’t room for all that ought to be put here.

All researches have failed to fix with any certainty the exact year of Flush’s birth, let alone the month or the day; but it is likely that he was born some time early in the year 1842. It is also probable that he was directly descended from Tray (c. 1816), whose points, preserved unfortunately only in the untrustworthy medium of poetry, prove him to have been a red cocker spaniel of merit. There is every reason to think that Flush was the son of that “real old cocking spaniel” for whom Dr. Mitford refused twenty guineas “on account of his excellence in the field.” It is to poetry, alas, that we have to trust for our most detailed description of Flush himself as a young dog. He was of that particular shade of dark brown which in sunshine flashes “all over into gold.” His eyes were “startled eyes of hazel bland.” His ears were “tasselled”; his “slender feet” were “canopied in fringes” and his tail was broad.

As the bartender struck a match to light her cigarette, she put her hand on his wrist to steady it. Travis saw him jump, draw back. He held his wrist, blew on it, looked at her reproachfully. Travis said: 'Why, you scratched him, Sarah.' 'Did I?' And as she turned and looked at him, he saw her hand twitch a little, and drew still further away from her. 'What - what's got into you?' he faltered. There was some kind of tension spreading all around the horseshoe-shaped bar, emanating from her. All the cordiality, the sociability, was leaving it. Cheery conversations even at the far ends of it faltered and died, and the speakers looked around them as though wondering what was putting them so on edge. A heavy leaden pall of restless silence descended, as when a cloud goes over the sun. One or two people even turned and moved away reluctantly, as though they hadn't intended to but didn't like it at the bar any more. The gaunt-faced woman in red and black was the center of all eyes, but the looks sent her were not the admiring looks of men for a well-dressed woman; they were the blinking petrified looks a blacksnake would get in a poultry yard. Even the barman felt it. He dropped and smashed a glass, a thing he hadn't done since he'd been working on the ship. Even the canary felt it, and stood shivering pitifully on its perch, emitting an occasional cheep as though for help. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

In the meantime, the Bear had attained the Avenue, where blinding, brilliant traffic travelled like a line of light from north to south, as if between worlds. But it was Jacob who saw the ladder, wrestled with the angel, and obtained a birthright under false pretenses. The Bear had done none of these things. He pulled the hat brim farther down on his face and walked south beneath the vault of darkness, above him like guardians or heralds the electric signs of bars and stores- white, orange, yellow, gold, red, brilliant blue and green, occasional imperial purple - as if they were angels that had descended to earth only to hire themselves out as lures for business, possibly for reasons of pity. The Bear walked beneath them like a resolute and powerful man, the saxophone case at his side swinging like a cache of fate, love, gold or vengeance. When he realised that he could have his pick of them - that all options, attributions and possibilities actually were open to him, that he was, at the moment, exalted, liberated, free - he stopped walking for a moment, put down the saxophone case, looked gradually around him at the Avenue, raised his snout and smiled broadly, and there on the pavement stretched out his great and inevitable arms. Aah. The night entered him like honey, and he began so heartily and with such depth of pleasure that it might have been for the first time in his life, to laugh out loud.

his knees. I ask him if he tried to rape Nyla. “Laws are silent in times of war,” Tactus drawls. “Don’t quote Cicero to me,” I say. “You are held to a higher standard than a marauding centurion.” “In that, you’re hitting the mark at least. I am a superior creature descended from proud stock and glorious heritage. Might makes right, Darrow. If I can take, I may take. If I do take, I deserve to have. This is what Peerless believe.” “The measure of a man is what he does when he has power,” I say loudly.

Man wills to make of earth, not one Jerusalem but two; this sacramental blood de- clears the double mind by which he wills to lift both lion and lamb beyond the killing to exchange unaccount- able and vast. Man's priestliness therefore bespeaks his refusal of despair; proclaims acceptance of a world which, by its murderous hand, subscribes the insupportable dilemma of its being—the war of lion and lamb having no other, likely outcome here than two im- possibilities: The one, a pride of victors feeding on the slain; but leaving the lion as he was before, trapped in ancient reciprocities by which at last all power falls to crows; And the other, a hymn to despair no victim will accept; it is not enough, in this paroxysm of two martyrdoms, to stand upon the ship- wrecks of the slain and praise the weak for weakness; the lamb's will, too, was life; he died refusing death. Sacrifice therefore Not written off, but recognized, a sign in blood of the vaster end of blood; a redness turning all things white; an impossibility prefiguring the last exchange of all. The old order, of course, unchanged; the deaths of bulls and goats achieving nothing; Aaron still ineffectual; creation still bloody; But haunted now by bells within the veil where Aaron walks in shadows sprinkling blood and bids a new Jerusalem descend. Endless smoke now rising Lion become priest And lamb victim The world awaits The unimaginable union By which the Lion lifts Himself Lamb slain And, Priest and Victim, Brings The City Home.

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to her feet.

it seemed clear that these ordinary-looking business-like men are responsible for acts which will remain when their red cheeks and top hats and check trousers are dust and ashes. Matters of great moment, which affect the happiness of people, the destinies of nations, are here at work chiseling and carving these very ordinary human beings. Down on this stuff of common humanity comes the stamp of a huge machine. And the machine itself and the man upon whom the stamp of the machine descends are both plain, featureless, impersonal.

I’ve had one or two occasions in my life when the proverbial red mist has descended. I’m not proud of them, but they happen occasionally. This was one of those occasions. I have no memory of getting out of bed, or even of the next few minutes at all, but when, finally, I came to rest, I was standing, panting and in pain, by the window, tangled in tubes, with IV drips on the floor, the fruit bowl in tiny fragments, the window broken, the bedclothes on the floor, and one of the pillows ripped to shreds and bits of it floating everywhere.

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill effects of its long neglect. The paint was as fresh and bright as ever. And the lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer — an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me,I thought:— The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle. Year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the Age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And yet, I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding Pick-em-up, Pick-em-up , hot potatoes — and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. Something quite remote from anything the builders intended had come out of their work and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame, a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame, which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians. And there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

Behind him was the loom of movement; ahead a furtive shifting. Gersen turned, in time to look into a horrid blood-red face with poisonous blue cheeks. Hildemar Dasce’s arm descended; a great weight curled over Gersen’s head; lightning exploded inside his skull. He tottered and fell to his knees. Dasce leaned over him. Gersen tried to dodge. The world reeled and toppled; he saw Suthiro grinning like a sick hyena, with his hand to the girl’s neck. Dasce struck again, and the world went dim. Gersen had time for an instant of bitter self-reproach, before another thunderous buffet extinguished his consciousness.

I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.

It sets one dreaming—to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we met innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen. We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.

For many years I kept grandfather’s church calendar with his notes written inside it. The words “Saved from calamity by these benefactors” were written in straight letters and red ink on the day of Joachim and Anna. I remember that calamity. Worried about supporting his failed children, grandfather had begun to lend money, secretly holding his debtors’ possessions in hock. Someone informed against him, and one night the police descended on the house to search it. There was a great commotion, but it all turned out fine. Grandfather prayed until sunrise, and in the morning I watched him write those words in the calendar.

I could do anything—be anything. I could be a blackberry farmer. I could worry about phone bills and nipping out to the corner shop for milk and bread of a morning. Little Declan Jr. could learn to walk and talk with his real father, alive and well, and I could teach him how to wear a waistcoat with just the right amount of tragic charm, take him to school in a few years, maybe makehim a little sister to look out for, someone to keep him on his toes. He could play a sport—tennis, maybe, or football. I’d attend parent-teacher meetings and have after-work drinks with the neighbors, talking about how well so-and-so is doing, and why yes, Declan Jr. is learning to play the piano. Top of his class, you know—he has his mother’s grace… I could see all of that, as clear in my mind as sunlight on fresh snow, and so much more. Just living day to day. One morning we could have picnics, my family and I, next to blue glacial lakes. One afternoon my son would be old enough to meet a girl, get in a fight, need to shave. One evening his sister will need help with her homework, and he’ll complain, but he’ll help. And then one day the Elder Gods would descend from a blood-red sky in chariots lashed together from bone and flame and take away all my blackberries.

… A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths , I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me. But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true. At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become. If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is as its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves. Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those from which we suffer, but not those which please us. To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

My Little Pony Game Helps You Get A Creator With My Little Pony games, you can enjoy many categories such as Dress Up games, Makeover games, riding games, racing games,...Each game brings you the different sentiments and it depends on your hobby that you can choose the suitable game for your free time. At our website, there are many My Little Pony games with full My Little Pony characters and you can meet them such as Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and Applejack,,They have the good friendship and relations as well. Now, you will go to our new game called My little pony hairstyle. This is a creator game for you that you can get an opportunity to make new hair for Rainbow Dash. As you know, she has a hairstyle attached to her name. Now, you will help her to change Little about her hairstyle. Not difficult to play this game , you just use your mouse and follow step by step instruction that you can find in this game at our website. I can tell more here to help you play this game easier. In the first game, you will choose a hairstyle in six styles. Then you will choose the color for her hair. You can take one in ten colors in this game such as blue, green, red, purple, yellow, light purple,.. And you mix color as your favorite color. With each my little pony character, you can see the different personality and fashion style. My little pony Rainbow Dash has always the unique hairstyle with the mixing color. This is the creator game because you can show your fashion style about the hair. Besides the dress up game and make up games, we have others games categories such as riding, racing, caring, cooking, fighting,,,All are free here, you can enjoy them at anytime and anywhere. Please recommend our website to your friends as well, you will have the more human counterpart. You will have the good experience, adventure when you come to our website. We provide also descendants games, Elsa games, Daby games, Io games,...It depends on the age, the hobby that you can choose the game in your free time. You can enjoy the life as a child with our games and forget all the worries and stress in your life. I hope that you will like our games as well. My Little Pony Angry is a puzzle game and your task in this game is to use your mouse to drag and drop the pieces and make a complete My Little Pony pictures. In this game, you will get an opportunity to meet again six main My Little Pony such as Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Twilight Sparkle of the cartoon My Little Pony, they are all very aggressive and angry. We think that this way they want to scare off enemies from Ponyville. You know that My Little Pony or Friendship Is Magic has the content that tells about six main My Little Pony and other supporting characters but with My Little Pony, the content focuses primarily on Twilight Sparkle and her friends, they find out the way to rescue Equestria Land. Each My Little Pony game can give you a good lessons about family, friends, relationship...This is a cheap entertainment and designed for everyone. I hope that you can get the perfectime here and we can make the relationship thank to My Little Pony games on our website. Have fun on our site Gamesmylittlepony.com

To Eva Descending the Stair Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear; The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running. (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.) The asteroids turn traitor in the air, And planets plot with old elliptic cunning; Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear. Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair: Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning. (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.) Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere, In solar schemes the titled suns go turning; Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear. Loud the immortal nightingales declare: Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning. (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.) Circling zodiac compels the year. Intolerant beauty never will be learning. Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear. (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!

Above the list of children she read: Mister Jackson Henry Clark married Miss Julienne Maria Jacques, June 12, 1933. Not until that moment had she known her parents’ proper names. She sat there for a few minutes with the Bible open on the table. Her family before her. Time ensures children never know their parents young. Kya would never see the handsome Jake swagger into an Asheville soda fountain in early 1930, where he spotted Maria Jacques, a beauty with black curls and red lips, visiting from New Orleans. Over a milkshake he told her his family owned a plantation and that after high school he’d study to be a lawyer and live in a columned mansion. But when the Depression deepened, the bank auctioned the land out from under the Clarks’ feet, and his father took Jake from school. They moved down the road to a small pine cabin that once, not so long ago really, had been occupied by slaves. Jake worked the tobacco fields, stacking leaves with black men and women, babies strapped on their backs with colorful shawls. One night two years later, without saying good-bye, Jake left before dawn, taking with him as many fine clothes and family treasures—including his great-grandfather’s gold pocket watch and his grandmother’s diamond ring—as he could carry. He hitchhiked to New Orleans and found Maria living with her family in an elegant home near the waterfront. They were descendants of a French merchant, owners of a shoe factory. Jake pawned the heirlooms and entertained her in fine restaurants hung with red velvet curtains, telling her that he would buy her that columned mansion. As he knelt under a magnolia tree, she agreed to marry him, and they wed in 1933 in a small church ceremony, her family standing silent.

Rosie flicks out her second knife and takes aim. It spins out of her hand like a star, straight at the Alpha’s chest. But the Alpha knocks it away easily. He raises a clawed hand at my sister and I feel a scream erupting in my throat, recognizing the motion from seven years ago. The swing will take my sister’s eye. I storm through the still-transforming Fenris, swinging my hatchet as if I’m hacking at tree limbs. Rosie’s eyes widen in horror as the Alpha’s claws being to descend. I grit my teeth and force my body forward, now ignoring the other wolves, desperate to reach her. A roaring scream, all human but as fierce as any Fenris howl, echoes through the parking lot. My head snaps to see its source: Silas is running toward Rosie, hunting knives in one hand, axe aloft in the other. His eyes burn brighter than any hellfire. He swings out just as the Alpha’s claws are about to reach Rosie’s face, knocking the monster out of the way.

Well, well, do we have a new girl?’ I looked up to see three girls standing behind Tak. The one in the middle was tall and slim with bronzed skin and long shiny black hair and she had that air about her that the popular girls at school back home did. I was instantly wary. Those girls had never been nice to me. ‘Don’t be shy, what’s your name?’ the girl on her left said. Curly red hair framed her perfect face and she put her hands on her ample, curvy hips, waiting for me to answer. ‘Pandora,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m Arketa,’ said the slim girl. ‘And this is Filis and Kiko.’ The red-head, Kiko, cocked her head and gave me an over-the-top smile. ‘We’re Aphrodite descendants.’ That explained why they were so attractive, I thought. ‘You know, you’re not pretty enough to hang out with us but you’re better than these losers,’ Filis said. She was shorter than the other two, with rich brown hair and an exotic looking face with full pouty lips.

It came to me suddenly that evil was, perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end, I thought, stability will always win. Stability can survive the triteness of Good Fairy Diamond; the flat voice, the rhymed couplet, even the irrelevant vocal statement of "There's a winding road runs down the hill, To the olde world town I love." All very poor weapons it would seem, and yet those weapons would inevitably prevail. The pantomime would end in the way it always ended. The staircase, and the descending cast in order of seniority, with Good Fairy Diamond, practising the Christian virtue of humility and not seeking to be first (or in this case, last) but arriving about halfway through the procession, side by side with her late opponent, now seen to be no longer the snarling Demon King breathing fire and brimstone, but just a man dressed up in red tights.

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.

Hearth to hearth, the Flame of War went. Over snow-blasted mountains and amongst the trees of tangled forests, hiding from the enemies that prowled the skies. Through long, bitterly cold nights where the wind howled as it tried to wipe out any trace of that flame. But the wind did not succeed, not against the flame of the queen. So hearth to hearth, it went. To remote villages where people screamed and scattered as a young-faced woman descended from the skies on a broom, waving her torch high. Not to signal them, but the few women who did not run. Who walked toward the flame, the rider, as she called out, “Your queen summons you to war. Will you fly?” Trunks hidden in attics were thrown open. Folded swaths of red cloth pulled from within. Brooms left in closets, beside doorways, tucked under beds, were brought out, bound in gold or silver or twine. And swords—ancient and beautiful—were drawn from beneath floorboards, or hauled down from haylofts, their metal shining as bright and fresh as the day they had been forged in a city now lying in ruin. Witches, the townsfolk whispered, husbands wide-eyed and disbelieving as the women took to the skies, red cloaks billowing. Witches amongst us all this time. Village to village, where hearths that had never once gone fully dark blazed in answer. Always one rider going out, to find the next hearth, the next bastion of their people. Witches, here amongst us. Witches, now going to war. A rising tide of witches, who took to the skies in their red cloaks, swords strapped to their backs, brooms shedding years of dust with each mile northward. Witches who bade their families farewell, offering no explanation before they kissed their sleeping babes and vanished into the starry night. Mile after mile, across the darkening world, the call went out, ceaseless and unending as the eternal flame that passed from hearth to hearth. “Fly, fly, fly!” they shouted. “To the queen! To war!” Far and wide, through snow and storm and peril, the Crochans flew.

The two girls descended the slope of the little mountain. A few steps round a turn in the pathway which skirted the foot of it took them to the pavilion. Near the water's edge, linking it with Lotus Pavilion farther along the shore, was a bamboo railing. The two old women who were on night watch in it, little imagining that an overspill from the hilltop party would come their way, had long since put their light out and gone to sleep. Dai-yu and Xiang-yun laughed when they saw that the pavilion was in darkness. "They've gone to sleep. Never mind. All the better. Let's sit outside here on the covered verandah and look at the moonlight on the water." They found a couple of drum shaped bamboo stools to sit down on. A great white moon in the water reflected the great white moon above, competing with it in brightness. The girls felt like mermaids sitting in a shining crystal palace beneath the sea. A little wind that brushed over the surface of the water making tiny ripples seemed to cleanse their souls and fill them with buoyant lightness.

ONCE it smiled a silent dell         Where the people did not dwell;         They had gone unto the wars,         Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,         Nightly, from their azure towers,         To keep watch above the flowers,         In the midst of which all day         The red sunlight lazily lay.         Now each visitor shall confess         The sad valley’s restlessness.         Nothing there is motionless—         Nothing save the airs that brood         Over the magic solitude.         Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees         That palpitate like the chill seas         Around the misty Hebrides!         Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven         That rustle through the unquiet Heaven         Unceasingly, from morn till even,         Over the violets there that lie         In myriad types of the human eye—         Over the lilies there that wave         And weep above a nameless grave!         They wave:—from out their fragrant tops         Eternal dews come down in drops.         They weep:—from off their delicate stems         Perennial tears descend in gems.

By midnight the governor had excused himself and members of the band had begun to slip away. A blind street harpist stood terrified upon the banquet table among the bones and platters and a horde of luridlooking whores had infiltrated the dance. Pistolfire soon became general and Mr Riddle, who was acting American consul in the city, descended to remonstrate with the revelers and was warned away. Fights broke out. Furniture was disassembled, men waving chairlegs, candlestands. Two whores grappled and pitched into a sideboard and went to the floor in a crash of brandyglasses. Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street vowing to shoot the ass off Jesus Christ, the longlegged white son of a bitch. At dawn the shapes of insensate topers lay snoring about the floor among dark patches of drying blood. Bathcat and the harpist lay asleep upon the banquet table in one another’s arms. A family of thieves were tiptoeing through the wreckage turning out the pockets of the sleepers and the remains of a bonfire that had consumed a good part of the hotel’s furnishings smoldered in the street before the door. These

Did they have all the ingredients for the seed cake, Miss Sophia? The caraway and rye, and the currants for the top?" "Yes," Sophia replied as the cook-maid disappeared into the larder. "But we could find no red currants, and-" Suddenly her words were smothered into silence as Sir Ross pulled her into his arms. His lips descended to hers in a kiss so tender and carnal that she could not help responding. Stunned, she struggled to retain her hatred of him, to remember the wrongs of the past, but his lips were utterly warm and compelling, and her thoughts scattered crazily. The pink rose dropped from her nerveless fingers. Sophia swayed against him, groping for his hard shoulders in a futile bid for balance. His tongue searched her mouth... delicious... sweetly intimate. Sophia inhaled sharply and tilted her head back in utter surrender, her entire existence distilled to this one burning moment. Through the pounding heartbeat in her ears she dimly heard Eliza's concerned voice echoing from the larder. "No red currants? But what will we top the seed cake with?" Sir Ross released Sophia's mouth, leaving her lips moist and kiss-softened. His face remained close to hers, and Sophia felt as if she were drowning in the silver pools of his eyes. His hand came to the side of her face, his fingers curving over her cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. Somehow Sophia managed to answer Eliza. "We f-found golden currants instead-" As soon as the words left her mouth, Sir Ross kissed her again, his tongue exploring, teasing. Her groping fingers touched the back of his neck, where the thick black hair curled against his nape. Sensation rustled through her, spurring her pulse to an intemperate pace. Taking advantage of her surrender, he kissed her more aggressively, hunting for the deepest, sweetest taste of her. As her knees weakened, his arms wrapped securely around her, supporting her body as he continued to ravish her mouth. "Golden currants?" came Eliza's dissatisfied voice. "Well, the flavor won't be quite the same, but they will be better than nothing." Sir Ross released Sophia and steadied her with his hands at her waist. While she stared at him blankly, he gave her a brief smile and left the kitchen just as Eliza reemerged from the larder.

The bast, dispersing in shreds in the sunset whispered "Time has begun." The son, Adam, stripped naked, descended into the Old Testament of his native land and arrayed himself in bast; a wreath of roadside field grass he placed upon his brow, a staff, not a switch, he pulled from the ground, flourishing the birch branch like a sacred palm. On the road he stood like a guard. The dust-gray road ran into the sunset. And a crow perched there, perched and croaked, there where the celestial fire consumed the earth. There were blind men along the dust-gray road running into the twilight. Antique, crooken, they trailed along, lonely and sinister silhouettes, holding to one another and to their leader's cane. They were raising dust. One was beard-less, he kept squinting. Another, a little old man with a protruding lip, was whispering and praying. A third, covered with red hair, frowned. Their backs were bent, their heads bowed low, their arms extended to the staff. Strange it was to see this mute procession in the terrible twilight. They made their way immutable, primordial, blind. Oh, if only they could open their eyes, oh if only they were not blind! Russian Land, awake! And Adam, rude image of the returned king, lowered the birch branch to their white pupils. And on them he laid his hands, as, groaning and moaning they seated themselves in the dust and with trembling hands pushed chunks of black bread into their mouths. Their faces were ashen and menacing, lit with the pale light of deadly clouds. Lightning blazed, their blinded faces blazed. Oh, if only they opened their eyes, oh, if only they saw the light! Adam, Adam, you stand illumined by lightnings. Now you lay the gentle branch upon their faces. Adam, Adam, say, see, see! And he restores their sight. But the blind men turning their ashen faces and opening their white eyes did not see. And the wind whispered "Thou art behind the hill." From the clouds a fiery veil began to shimmer and died out. A little birch murmured, beseeching, and fell asleep. The dusk dispersed at the horizon and a bloody stump of the sunset stuck up. And spotted with brilliant coals glowing red, the bast streamed out from the sunset like a striped cloak. On the waxen image of Adam the field grass wreaths sighed fearfully giving a soft whistle and the green dewy clusters sprinkled forth fiery tears on the blind faces of the blind. He knew what he was doing, he was restoring their sight. ("Adam")

Tim Finnegan’s Wake by Dr. Thom Dedalus When God reeled in good auld Tim Finnegan, And looked into his green Irish peepers, Said He, “Now, what was I thinkin’? Poor lad, he ain’t one of the keepers.” To hell Tim descended without any fear, To the devil, whom not much is lost on, Said he, “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here, Among all your old friends from South Boston.” Tim’s jokes night and day caused Satan to swear, As migraines crept behind blood red eyelids, “An eternity with you is just too much to bear. You’re going home to your wife and your nine kids.” So up pops Tim at his wake from his casket. “It can’t be,” went a howl from his wife. When he belched the sea from his own breadbasket, Said she, “Someone, hand me a knife.” Now Tim’s fishing off George’s Banks Catching codfish, haddock and hake. The happiest folk in town to give thanks, Is John Hancock for Finnegan’s wake. Finn’s now a legend among life underwriters, In Beantown and all over the States. In him beats the heart of a fighter. Sad to hear how they increased his rates. Finn’s tale is best told with a dram of Jameson. You’re entitled to whatever sense you can make. Just cause you’re dead, it don’t mean you’re gone. You may take comfort in Finnegan’s wake.

He clipped the male again, this time in the shoulder, sending Einar flying backward. He was vaguely aware of Cyn racing to Leilani. He could hear her calling out his own name, but he tuned everything out, including her. Con couldn’t go to her yet. The threat needed to be eliminated. A red haze had descended across his vision as he body-slammed Einar, who was attempting to stand. That male wasn’t walking out of here. He knew he wasn’t acting rational, that the threat could be put down easier than this, but he couldn’t stop the rage that had overtaken him. Einar pumped a fist against Con’s ribcage as they tumbled to the ground. He barely felt it as he slammed a left hook across the male’s jaw. Didn’t feel anything as he jabbed him in the gut, the ribs, the face. Over and over. He felt a bloodlust overtake him as he pounded at Einar’s face. This male had wanted to hurt Leilani, to take her from Con. Strong arms wrapped around Con, tackling him to the ground and rolling him off his target. “Con!” Cyn held him tight, his eyes wild as he kept him pinned down. “It’s done. You’re scaring her.” Those words snapped him out of the dark fog of savagery that had overtaken him. Leilani stood a few feet away, her eyes wide as she stared at him. Fuck, he had scared her. “I’m fine,” he rasped to his brother. Cyn paused before loosening his grip. When he did, Con stood, terrified he’d screwed things up for good. He didn’t glance at Einar, who he was certain was dead. He’d never lost control like that, had never even come close. It pierced him that Leilani had seen him kill someone, that he literally had blood on his hands in front of her now. “Leilani—” She jumped at him, throwing her arms around his neck on a sob. “You came for me.” Unable to do anything about the blood, he wrapped his arms around her and held tight. Of course he’d come for her. There was nowhere she could go that he wouldn’t follow. That realization slammed into him as if someone had actually struck him. They’d known each other less than two weeks but she’d changed his world without even trying. He would give up his role of leader for her. The thought should have terrified him, but it didn’t. He buried his face against her neck, inhaled her sweet, arilod scent. “I’m not letting you go after the moon cycle.” She sniffled, her fingers gripping his shoulders tight. “Good because I’m not going anywhere,” she said as she pulled back. Her eyes were bright with tears as she looked at him. “I would move to the mainland for you.” She blinked once in surprise before her lips pulled up into a smile. “No. This is your home— my home now.” No, he realized, she was his home, but he simply nodded and crushed his mouth to hers.

The battle for the Wall tended to ebb and flow like the tide, Haung noted. The attackers would crest the Wall and fight like demons for every stone of territory in an effort to establish a safe zone from which to expand their presence. The battle would descend from carefully ordered lines into pockets of a chaos. Each soldier forgot, in those moments, that they were fighting for their country, that they were weapons of their respective generals. In those moments, as swords stabbed and swung, as shields were raised and men screamed out in fear and anger, they were totally selfish, they were fighting only for their lives. That is not to say that there not moments of altruism, but even those had overtones of selfishness, of self-preservation. You saved the man next to you, if you could, so that they in turn could save you. Once the Mongols were pushed from the Wall, the tide ebbed and a moment of calm descended. Each man, Haung included, spent their first breath wondering whether they were still alive and unhurt. The second breath was given in thanks that all was well. With the third intake of life giving air, thoughts turned to their comrades. The selfishness and joy of survival was brushed away, hidden in the pit of shame that each man dug for themselves in their first real battle. In that small window between high and low tide, civilisation returned.

Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

Thank-You Notes Under the vigilant eye of my mother I had to demonstrate my best penmanship By thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers– Little red members of the Coldstream Guards– And thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster, But now I am writing other notes Alone at a small cherry desk with a breeze coming in an open window, thanking everyone I happen to see on my long walk to the post office today and anyone who ever gave me directions or placed a hand on my shoulder, or cut my hair or fixed my car. And while I am at it, thanks to everyone who happened to die on the same day that I was born. Thank you for stepping aside to make room for me, for giving up you seat, getting out of the way, to be blunt. I waited until midnight on that day in March before I appeared, all slimy and squinting, in order to leave time for enough of the living to drive off a bridge or collapse in a hallway so that I could enter without causing a stir. So I am writing now to thank everyone who drifted off that day like smoke from a row of blown-out candles– for giving up your only flame. One day, I will follow your example and step politely out of the path of an oncoming infant, but not right now with the subtropical sun warming this page and the wind stirring the fronds of the palmettos, and me about to begin another note on my very best stationary to the ones who are making room today for the daily host of babies, descending like bees with their wings and stingers, ready to get busy with all their earthly joys and tasks.

Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that the true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.

I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

Toward an Organic Philosophy SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow.

Under his master’s watchful eye, the boy crossed to the door, which was made of a dark, unpainted wood with many whorls and grains. He had to struggle to turn the heavy brass knob, but the coolness of its touch pleased him. The door swung open soundlessly on oiled hinges and the boy stepped through to find himself at the top of a carpeted staircase. The walls were elegantly papered with a flowery pattern. A small window halfway down let in a friendly stream of sunlight. The boy descended carefully, one step at a time. The silence and sunlight reassured him and quelled some of his fears. Never having been beyond this point before, he had nothing but nursery stories to furnish his ideas of what might be waiting in his master’s study. Terrible images of stuffed crocodiles and bottled eyeballs sprang garishly into his mind. Furiously he drove them out again. He would not be afraid. At the foot of the staircase was another door, similar to the first, but smaller and decorated, in its center, with a five-sided star painted in red. The boy turned the knob and pushed: the door opened reluctantly, sticking on the thick carpet. When the gap was wide enough the boy passed through into the study. Unconsciously he had held his breath as he entered; now he let it out again, almost with a sense of disappointment. It was all so ordinary. A long room lined with books on either side. At the far end a great wooden desk with a padded leather chair set behind it. Pens on the table, a few papers, an old computer, a small metal box. The window beyond looked out toward a horse chestnut tree adorned with the full splendor of summer. The light in the room had a sweet greenish tint. The boy made for the table. Halfway there, he stopped and looked behind him.

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

A goods train was approaching. The platform shook, and it seemed to her as if she were again in the train. Suddenly remembering the man who had been run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. Quickly and lightly descending the steps that led from the water-tank to the rails, she stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottom of the trucks, at the bolts and chains, and large iron wheels of the slowly-moving front truck, and tried to estimate the middle point between the front and back wheels, and the moment when that point would be opposite her. She wanted to fall half-way between the wheels of the front truck, which was drawing level with her, but the little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her, and then she was too late. The middle had passed her. She was obliged to wait for the next truck. A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on her head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling… A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light, lit up for her all that had before been dark, crackled, began to flicker, and went out for ever.

LXXII In sooth, it was no vulgar sight to see Their barbarous, yet their not indecent, glee, And as the flames along their faces gleam’d, Their gestures nimble, dark eyes flashing free, The long wild locks that to their girdles stream’d, While thus in concert they this lay half sang, half scream’d: Tambourgi! Tambourgi! thy ’larum afar Gives hope to the valiant, and promise of war; All the sons of the mountains arise at the note, Chimariot, Illyrian, and dark Suliote! Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote, To his snowy camese and his shaggy capote? To the wolf and the vulture he leaves his wild flock, And descends to the plain like the stream from the rock. Shall the sons of Chimari, who never forgive The fault of a friend, bid an enemy live? Let those guns so unerring such vengeance forego? What mark is so fair as the breast of a foe? Macedonia sends forth her invincible race; For a time they abandon the cave and the chase: But those scarves of blood-red shall be redder, before The sabre is sheathed and the battle is o’er. Then the pirates of Parga that dwell by the waves, And teach the pale Franks what it is to be slaves, Shall leave on the beach the long galley and oar, And track to his covert the captive on shore. I ask not the pleasure that riches supply, My sabre shall win what the feeble must buy; Shall win the young bride with her long flowing hair, And many a maid from her mother shall tear. I love the fair face of the maid in her youth, Her caresses shall lull me, her music shall soothe; Let her bring from her chamber the many-toned lyre, And sing us a song on the fall of her sire. Remember the moment when Previsa fell, The shrieks of the conquer’d, the conquerors’ yell; The roofs that we fired, and the plunder we shared, The wealthy we slaughter’d, the lovely we spared. I talk not of mercy, I talk not of fear; He neither must know who would serve the Vizier: Since the days of our prophet, the Crescent ne’er saw A chief ever glorious like Ali Pasha. Dark Muchtar his son to the Danube is sped, Let the yellow-haired Giaours view his horsetail with dread; When his Delhis come dashing in blood o’er the banks, How few shall escape from the Muscovite ranks! Selictar, unsheath then our chief’s scimitar: Tambourgi! thy ’larum gives promise of war; Ye mountains, that see us descend to the shore, Shall view us as victors, or view us no more!

Don’t look so grim. When you get home, I’m sure Randall will buy you all the rings you want. One for every day of the week,” Oscar said, thick with sarcasm, as they walked back toward the harbor. “I don’t care about the ring!” Camille shouted. She stopped walking and turned to Oscar. “I’m sorry, it’s just that…” Oscar patiently waited for her to finish her sentence. Camille looked away, embarrassed. She had scraped Randall’s skin with the ring, too. It had been one of their rare moments alone. He’d run his fingers down her back, nibbled on her neck, and she’d waited for her legs to turn to warm butter. She’d waited to feel the desire to kiss him. But the feelings hadn’t come. Camille had swept her hand up to stop him, and the ring had left a puffy red scratch on his arm. Oscar watched her fumble for words, his expression one of concern. “Never mind,” she said quickly and stepped up onto a raised sidewalk, out of the mud. “Never mind what?” “It’s private.” He continued walking in the street, his head level with hers. “Private between who?” “Between me and Randall. You wouldn’t understand,” she said and lifted her skirt as she descended back down into the muddy street where the sidewalk ran out. “And why is that?” he asked, sounding put off. Daphne’s place came into view. The air smelled of bitter salt water and of wood smoke curling up from the kitchen chimney. “Oh, Oscar, you’re a man of the sea. What could you possibly know about relationships?” He’d never courted a woman as far as Camille knew. She slowed her pace. Or had he? Oscar stopped in the middle of the cobblestoned walkway leading to Daphne’s front door. His eyes blazed with hurt and resentment. “I do apologize, Miss Rowen, I forgot mere sailors aren’t worthy of marriage. Isn’t that what your father always said?” Camille’s cheeks seared with heat. It was a stance her father had never parted from, but she hadn’t known he’d also impressed it upon Oscar. She fidgeted with her hands and fumbled for an apology. “No, that’s not what I meant. You’re a bachelor, that’s all.” Oscar shook his head, unable to meet her eyes. She’d sounded so patronizing. Oscar was handsome, young, and single, and for a man of his class, he made a decent living. Enough to attract an equally decent amount of attention from women, she supposed. Why hadn’t she ever thought of that? He retreated to the street. “I’m going for a walk.” “Oscar, wait-“ He pivoted on his heel. “You know, you’re wrong, Camille. And your father was wrong, too.” Oscar turned and disappeared behind the boxwood hedges. Camille clenched two fistfuls of her skirt and stomped up the steps, aggravated over her careless words. She’d been pompous and arrogant, and she hated that she’d hurt him. She cringed at the wounded way he’d looked at her.

If you don't tell me why you're avoiding me, then, like, we might as well just get it over with and stop being friends." He stiffens and turns red, even visible in the dim light. It dawns on me that we're never going to be best friends again. "It's...," he says. "It is very difficult... for me... to be around you." "Why?" It take him a while to answer. He smooths his hair to one side, and rubs his eye, and checks that his collar isn't turned up, and scratches his knee. And then he starts to laugh. "You're so funny, Victoria." He shakes his head. "You're just so funny." At this, I get a sudden urge to punch him in the face. Instead, I descend into hysteria. "For fuck's sake! What are you talking about?!" I begin to shout, but you can't really tell over the noise of the crowd. "You're insane. I don't know why you're saying this to me. I don't know why you decided you wanted to become BFFs all over again, and now I don't know why you won't even look me in the eye. I don't understand anything you're doing or saying, and it's killing me, because I already don't understand anything about me or Michael or Becky or my brother or anything on this shitty planet. If you secretly hate me or something, you need to spit it out. I'm asking you to give me one straight answer, one single sentence that might sort at least something out in my head, but NO. You don't care, do you!? You don't give a SINGLE SHIT about my feelings, or anyone else's. You're just like everyone else." "You're wrong," he says. "You're wro-" "Everyone's got such dreadful problems." I shake my head wildly, holding on to it with both hands. "Even you. Even perfect innocent Lucas has problems." He's staring at me in a kind of terrified confusion, and it's absolutely hilarious. I start to crack up. "Maybe, like, everyone I know has problems. Like, there are no happy people. Nothing works out. Even if it's someone who you think is perfect. Like my brother!" I grin wildly at him. "My brother, my little brother, he's soooo perfect, but he's- he doesn't like food, like, he literally doesn't like food, or, I don't know, he loves it. He loves it so much that that it has to be perfect all the time, you know?" I grabbed Lucas by one shoulder again so he understands. "And then one day he gets so fed up with himself, like, he was annoyed, he hated how much he loves food, yeah, so he thought that it was better if there wasn't any food." I started laughing so much that my eyes water. "But that's so silly! Because you've got to eat food or you'll die, won't you? So my brother Charles, Charlie, he, he thought it would be better if he just got it over with then and there! So he, last year, he-" I hold up my wrist and point at it-"he hurt himself. And he wrote me this card, telling me he was really sorry and all, but I shouldn't be sad because he was actually really happy about it." I shake my head and laugh and laugh. "And you know what just makes me want to die? The fact that, like, all the time, I knew it was coming, but I didn't do anything. I didn't say anything to anyone about it, because I thought I'd been imagining it. Well, didn't I get a nice surprise when I walked into the bathroom that day?" There are tears running down my face. "And you know what's literally hilarious? The card had a picture of a cake on it!" He's not saying anything because he doesn't find anything hilarious, which strikes me as odd. He makes this pained sound and turns at a sharp right angle and strides away. I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes, and then I take that flyer out of my pocket and look at it, but the music has started again and 'm too cold and my brain doesn't seem to be processing anything. Only that goddamn picture of that goddamn cake.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

Justin then turned to Eric. “… Jabidaya…” Indeed, Eric had dressed up as his favorite anime character, the perverted teacher of Natsumo Uzukami: Jabidaya. Waist-length white hair ran down his back like a lion’s mane. A headband with metal plate that had a dildo etched onto the center wrapped around his forehead, allowing two spiky locks from his wig to descend on either side of his face like a pair of testicles. A red jacket worn over a green long-sleeved shirt went down to his knees. Green pants and wooden geta sandals made up the rest of his ensemble. Judging from the quality of the outfit, it was one of those cheap ones that people bought online.

The Red Cedar of Vancouver. It is six hundred years old and can expect to live until the twenty-seventh century. There is something disturbing about finding yourself in front of a living thing which you know will be there in six centuries' time. As though it had already survived you. You feel dead in advance, and yet so far removed (a spatial depth, measurable in light-years) that all anxiety is dispelled. You even feel a little immortal through this tree that has survived so many of its descendants. There is no equivalent in the human species; no one lives to be proportionately as old as the four-thousand-year-old spruces of deepest Arizona.

This is Northumbria, spanning Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, the northernmost county in England. Here was once the frontier, the last place, where, in the second century, the Romans built their vast fortifications to hold back the Scots and the Picts: first Hadrian’s Wall, running from the banks of the Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west; and later, in a fit of optimism – or arrogance – the more northerly Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Forth in the east to the Firth of Clyde in the west, before abandoning it in favor of a consolidation of the southern defenses. In time, the remains of the Antonine Wall will come to be referred to as the Devil’s Dyke, but by then the Romans will be long gone, their fortresses already falling into ruin, leaving the blood to dry, and the land to bear their scars. Because the land remembers. So the Romans depart, and chaos descends. The Angles invade from Germania, battling the natives and one another, before eventually forging two kingdoms, Northumbria and Mercia, only to see them fall to the Norsemen in the ninth century, who will themselves be defeated by the kings of Wessex. More blood, more scars. In 927 AD, Northumbria becomes part of Athelstan’s united England. In 1066 William the Conqueror lands with his Normans, and crushes the Northumbrian resistance to Norman rule. The Norman castles rise, but they, like the Romans and the Angles before, are forced to defend themselves against the Scots. They leave their dead at Alnwick and Redesdale, Tyndale and Otterburn. The land has a taste for blood now. More conflicts follow – the Wars of the Roses, the Rising in the North, the Civil War, the Jacobite rebellions – and the ground makes way for new bones, but the blood never really dries. Dig deep enough, expose the depths, and one might almost glimpse seams of red and white, like the strata of rock: blood and bone, over and over, the landscape infused by them, forever altered and forever changing. Because the killing never stops.

I envision a valley, beyond red and blue, beyond flags and barbwires, beyond capitols and churches, where our descendants will sit together around a campfire and tell each other stories of the olden days - "remember when our ancestors used to live in tribes - they called it religion, nation, race and all that - how silly right!" I work towards that future.

April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.

I want to show you something,” he said, his voice dropping a little lower than usual and causing a shiver to run down my spine. “What?” I asked. “I said show, not tell. You have to come with me.” Curiosity nagged at me and the champagne urged me into recklessness. He’d promised to be nice after all, so why not? And even though I’d said I wanted to go back to the snooze fest party, I didn’t really. Given the choice, I’d just head back to the Academy. “You’d better not be about to whip your junk out again,” I warned. “Because I’ve seen way too much of you for my liking.” “Oh I think you liked it just fine,” he countered and the heat that flooded my cheeks at his tone stopped me from raising any further argument on the subject. He stepped a little closer to me and I fought against the impulse to lean in. “Come on then, don’t keep me in suspense,” I demanded though a little voice in the back of my head wondered if I meant something else by that statement. Darius’s mouth hooked up at one side and he inclined his head to yet another door on the other side of the room. I followed him as he led the way through the manor to a grand atrium before opening the door onto a dark stairwell which led down to what must have been an underground chamber. I eyed him warily but at this point I was pretty sure he’d have attacked me already if he was going to. Darius Acrux may have been a lot of things but it seemed he was a man of his word; he’d promised to be nice to me tonight and that was what he was delivering. I’d have to keep an eye on the time though, at midnight his Cinderella spell might come undone and he’d turn back into an asshole shaped pumpkin. Lights came on automaticaly as we descended and at the foot of the stairs, he opened another door and led me out into into an underground parking lot. I eyed the row of flashy sports cars in every make and model imaginable but he didn’t pause by them, instead leading me to the far end of the lot. A smile tugged at my lips as I spotted the lineup of super bikes. They were all top of the range, ultra-sleek, ultra-beautiful speed machines. My fingers tingled with the desire to touch them as the tempting allure of adrenaline called to me. “You said you could ride,” Darius said, offering me a genuine smile. “So I thought maybe you’d like to see my collection.” Damn, the way he said ‘my collection’ made me want to punch the entitlement right out of him but I didn’t miss the fire burning in his eyes as he looked at the bikes. That was a passion I knew well. He was a sucker for my kind of temptation too. “Have you done any modifications on them?” I asked, reaching out to brush my fingers along the saddle of the closest red beauty. “They’re top of the line,” he said dismissively like I didn’t know what I was looking at. “They don’t need any mods.” I snorted derisively. So he liked to ride the pretty speed machines but he didn’t know how to work on them. “Figures pretty boy wouldn’t know how to get his hands dirty,” I teased. “Maybe the kinds of bikes you’re used to riding need work to make them perform better but this kind of quality doesn’t require any extras. Besides, I could just pay someone to do it for me even if they did.” “Of course you could. That’s not really the point though.” And he was wrong about the kinds of bikes I was used to riding. I spotted four models amongst his collection which I’d ridden within the last six months. The others could easily be mine with a little bit of time and a tool or two. Not that I felt the need to tell him that. “You wanna take one for a ride?” he offered. “You can test your supposed skill against mine; there’s a circuit to the west of the estate.” My eyes widened at that offer. I’d missed riding since coming to the Academy and I hadn’t really thought I’d be able to get out again any time soon. ...

I remarked on the quai of the Vieux-Port in Marseille, shortly before sunset, a curiously scrupulous painter struggling with skill and speed on his canvas against the fading light. The spot of color corresponding to the sun gradually descended with the sun. Finally, nothing remained. The painter suddenly discovered he was far behind: he obliterated the red from a wall, painted over one of two last gleams lingering on the water. His painting, finished for himself, for me the most unfinished thing possible, looked very sad and beautiful.

I remarked on the quai of the Vieux-Port in Marseille, shortly before sunset, a curiously scrupulous painter struggling with skill and speed on his canvas against the fading light. The spot of color corresponding to the sun gradually descended with the sun. Finally, nothing remained. The painter suddenly discovered he was far behind: he obliterated the red from a wall, painted over one of two last gleams lingering on the water. His painting, finished for himself, for me the most unfinished thing possible, looked very sad and beautiful.

That’s crazy! We can’t go the way of—” “Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder—Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him. “Remember what we found in the DMZ?” “The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused. “After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him, love.” He looks at Amber. Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary. “We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity—they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else, and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were”—she licks her lips—“lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone.

He was a man who had his own urgent problems, but he visualized the life of this rejected girl, and it hurt him. She seemed to be full of energy, and—despite her deadly existence —operating on a high level of liveliness and good spirits. He began to question her casually. What kind of jobs had she held? Where did she sleep when she didn’t have a Wade Trask to provide a temporary haven for her? What about mail? Had she ever tried living in the Pripp section of the city? What about moving to the country? . . . It was a long list of questions. Riva replied, sometimes vaguely, but she seldom hesitated. In about an hour he had her life in outline. Her early childhood was dim. She had recollections of being with parents who moved, drove, flew—always seeking remoter distances of escape. And always the reaching red tape of the Great Judge’s registrars followed them. They were among the minority who were invariably refused group status. Their past connection with the Brain dogged them, brought them to ruin and hopelessness. The finale came with crushing unexpectedness. The Control descended one day upon the hovel where they lived. The father, unbelieving and protesting, was led out and put against the wall of the shack, and shot. There was no explanation, no further direct interference—but the breadwinner was gone. For mother and daughter, the time of nightmare had come. The transition to woman of the town took place in direct proportion to the need for food.

But Dhu Nuwas’s letter gave birth to a rumor that still lives. The kingdom of Himyar had long ago spread across the old territory once governed by the Sabeans, whose queen had journeyed north to see the great Israelite king Solomon in his capital of Jerusalem. And Dhu Nuwas was said to have sworn his oath to the Christians on the Ark. Perhaps the Ark of the Covenant, lost long ago, had in fact been taken down into Sabea by descendents of the queen, and Dhu Nuwas’s oath meant that he had the Ark in his possession; and perhaps Caleb, plundering the capital city of Himyar after his victory, took the Ark back across the Red Sea into Axum. It is still rumored to rest there, in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, in the ancient capital of the Axumites.

From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel. Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.

Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam.

You reap what you sow!” I scream at him as he fades. All the rage I’ve felt swells in me, blinding me, and fills me with a pulsing, tangible hatred that seeps away only as Apollo’s boots deactivate and he tumbles down through the swirling storm. I find my Howlers around his body. The snow is red. They stare at me as I descend, my knifeRing wet with the blood of a Peerless Scarred. I had not intended to kill him. But he should not have taken her. And he should not have called me a puppet. “They took Mustang,” I tell my pack. They look on silently. The Jackal no longer matters. “So now we take Olympus.” The smiles they give one another are as chilling as the snow.

the doorway were a rusty red, different from the rest of the building; I assumed they had survived the fire when the old abbey was burnt by the Danes. An oak door banded with iron stood closed, flat and unfriendly. Agatha rapped on it with her bony knuckles, the sound echoing down the corridor. There was no answer in reply to her knock but Agatha opened the door nonetheless and curtly beckoned us forward. Once we’d inched past her, she whirled about and disappeared, a black crow flapping towards the cloisters. Mary and I teetered on the first of three large steps bent in the middle from the passage of countless feet, which descended into the chamber.

The portrait had been discovered in 1860 when Mr. William Oakes Hunt, the town clerk of Stratford, employed a visiting art expert named Simon Collins to examine a group of portraits long lodged inside the Hunt attic. These paintings were believed to have descended from the aristocratic Clopton family. Mr. Hunt recalled as a child using the portraits for archery practice, but by 1860 he’d become curious as to their value. When hired to appraise these attic portraits, Simon Collins had just finished the prestigious job of restoring Stratford’s world-famous funerary bust of Shakespeare that hovered like a putty-nosed wraith over the poet’s tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Posed with pen and paper while sporting the pickdevant-styled pointy beard and up-brushed mustache popular from 1570 to 1600, the bust has long been championed as one of the most authentic likenesses of the poet; nevertheless, back in 1793 a curator named Edmond Malone had decided to whitewash the entire bust, which until then had been unique in portraying Shakespeare wearing a blood-red jerkin beneath a black sleeveless jacket.

We walk. We walk and I see only trees’ knees and dirt and scraggly weeds beneath my feet. The sun rises hotter, burns brighter, and as the day enlarges, my world narrows more, becomes this: My bones pestles grinding the bowls of my joints. Becomes the rope rubbing my wrists red. When the sun is high in the sky, I realize we will not be fed midday; when Safi whimpers in front of me and water streams down her leg, I know that we will not stop to relieve ourselves, that in this, we are livestock, too.

We walk. We walk and I see only trees’ knees and dirt and scraggly weeds beneath my feet. The sun rises hotter, burns brighter, and as the day enlarges, my world narrows more, becomes this: My bones pestles grinding the bowls of my joints. Becomes the rope rubbing my wrists red. When the sun is high in the sky, I realize we will not be fed midday; when Safi whimpers in front of me and water streams down her leg, I know that we will not stop to relieve ourselves, that in this, we are livestock, too. That we are expected to walk and drop filth like horses.

On both weekdays and weekends, Boomers descend on hardware stores to fill trolleys with paints, rugs, lawn ornaments, plants, light-fixtures and other gee-gaws to improve their already palatial homes. They move like predatory marauders, ready to snatch those red-hot deals off the central aisle stands.

If you don't tell me why you're avoiding me, then, like, we might as well just get it over with and stop being friends." He stiffens and turns red, even visible in the dim light. It dawns on me that we're never going to be best friends again. "It's...," he says. "It is very difficult... for me... to be around you." "Why?" It take him a while to answer. He smooths his hair to one side, and rubs his eye, and checks that his collar isn't turned up, and scratches his knee. And then he starts to laugh. "You're so funny, Victoria." He shakes his head. "You're just so funny." At this, I get a sudden urge to punch him in the face. Instead, I descend into hysteria. "For fuck's sake! What are you talking about?!" I begin to shout, but you can't really tell over the noise of the crowd. "You're insane. I don't know why you're saying this to me. I don't know why you decided you wanted to become BFFs all over again, and now I don't know why you won't even look me in the eye. I don't understand anything you're doing or saying, and it's killing me, because I already don't understand anything about me or Michael or Becky or my brother or anything on this shitty planet. If you secretly hate me or something, you need to spit it out. I'm asking you to give me one straight answer, one single sentence that might sort at least something out in my head, but NO. You don't care, do you!? You don't give a SINGLE SHIT about my feelings, or anyone else's. You're just like everyone else." "You're wrong," he says. "You're wro-" "Everyone's got such dreadful problems." I shake my head wildly, holding on to it with both hands. "Even you. Even perfect innocent Lucas has problems." He's staring at me in a kind of terrified confusion, and it's absolutely hilarious. I start to crack up. "Maybe, like, everyone I know has problems. Like, there are no happy people. Nothing works out. Even if it's someone who you think is perfect. Like my brother!" I grin wildly at him. "My brother, my little brother, he's soooo perfect, but he's- he doesn't like food, like, he literally doesn't like food, or, I don't know, he loves it. He loves it so much that that it has to be perfect all the time, you know?" I grabbed Lucas by one shoulder again so he understands. "And then one day he gets so fed up with himself, like, he was annoyed, he hated how much he loves food, yeah, so he thought that it was better if there wasn't any food." I started laughing so much that my eyes water. "But that's so silly! Because you've got to eat food or you'll die, won't you? So my brother Charles, Charlie, he, he thought it would be better if he just got it over with then and there! So he, last year, he-" I hold up my wrist and point at it-"he hurt himself. And he wrote me this card, telling me he was really sorry and all, but I shouldn't be sad because he was actually really happy about it." I shake my head and laugh and laugh. "And you know what just makes me want to die? The fact that, like, all the time, I knew it was coming, but I didn't do anything. I didn't say anything to anyone about it, because I thought I'd been imagining it. Well, didn't I get a nice surprise when I walked into the bathroom that day?" There are tears running down my face. "And you know what's literally hilarious? The card had a picture of a cake on it!" He's not saying anything because he doesn't find anything hilarious, which strikes me as odd. He makes this pained sound and turns at a sharp right angle and strides away. I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes, and then I take that flyer out of my pocket and look at it, but the music has started again and I'm too cold and my brain doesn't seem to be processing anything. Only that goddamn picture of that goddamn cake.

A great number of Americans have made the same startling discovery that Francis Dane did: They are related to witches. American presidents descend from George Jacobs, Susannah Martin, and John Procter. Nathan Hale was John Hale’s grandson. Israel “Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes” Putnam was the cousin of Ann Putnam. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott descended from Samuel Sewall; Clara Barton from the Townes; Walt Disney from Burroughs. (In a nice twist, the colonial printer who founded the American Antiquarian Society, where Cotton Mather’s papers reside today, was also a Burroughs descendant.) The Nurse family includes Lucille Ball, who testified before an investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Yes, she had registered with the Communist Party. No, she was not a Communist. In 1953, a husband leaped to a wife’s defense: “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair,” Desi Arnaz explained,

then.

Don’t the poets describe the fairest men and women in exactly the same way?” I teased back. “They have rosebud lips, cheeks as red as apples, large, soulful eyes, dark velvety eyebrows, curly black hair, and a beauty mark just like yours.” Her long, throaty laugh kept me company as she descended the stairs. As it faded I wondered, if boys and girls were so similar as love objects, both in painting and in poetry, why were they treated so differently when they grew into men and women? What was the difference between having a tool and not having one?

The King's Perspective There's a story of a king And this story is very true Some say it's just a rumor Some say it's just a ruse They called the man King Flip But that wasn't really his name His name was Filipileetos But that's too hard to say King FLip had a penchant For really expensive things He liked anything shiny And anything with bling He had the nicest castle Out of all the lands But that didn't stop him From wanting one even more grand So he bought a town called perspective And made the people build him a castle At the top of their highest mountain He didn't care if it was a hassle When the work was finally done He decided to go inspect it But when he arrived in the town of Perspective It was exactly as he'd left it He couldn't find a castle It wasn't on the mountain It wasn't on the breach It wasn't on the mainland He immediately grew angry And sought his just revenge On all those who had fooled him On the town, his army did descend When the people were all dead A red cardinal then appeared "King Flip, what have you done? You killed good people, I do fear." King Flip tried to explain That the town deserved to die For his castle was never build Or he would see it with his own eyes The bird said, "But King, you merely assumed. You didn't even try Look from a different perspective, Don't just look from your own two eyes." The bird then led him over to where The castle should surely be He then moved aside a boulder And King Flip feel to his knees For inside the mountain was the castle The most magnificent one ever build King Flip couldn't believe his eyes He quickly became wracked with guilt He had killed so many people. People he should have protected Simply because he couldn't see the castle from their perspective "Hide their bodies!" King Flip yelled "Hide every last one! Put them inside the mountain And then close those doors for good!" The kings army hid the bodies And King Flip fled the land HE went back to his old castle And never spoke of Perspective again Some say this story isn't true Some say it never existed But look at any map and you'll see There is no longer a town called Perspective.

He rushed forward, his fist drawn. There was another flurry, and Brianna stepped between us. “Stop!” “No!” I yelled, diving to move her. But it was too late. His fist swung out, glancing off my arm as I tried to pivot her, and caught her on the side of her face. The momentum tore her from my arms, and she staggered, collapsing to the floor. With a roar, I descended on him, red coloring my world as I pounded him over and over, my fists turning his skin bloody and bruised. It was a stern voice that stopped me cold. “Dante.” Richard’s tenor was loud. “Brianna is hurt. She needs you.” I stopped midswing, my brain kicking in. Richard put his hand on my shoulder. “I will make sure he is taken care of. Go to her.” I wiped my hands, looking down at the sniveling man on the floor. He was curled into a ball and had wet himself. I shook my head. “You come near her again, I will kill you.

Red’s

OOoooOOoooowwwwwww, Aaaaaaaagghghghgh” he cried out suddenly. Stopped in midair and slowly spinning, the problem revealed itself. As he was descending, a big tuft of his large, fluffy red beard had been sucked into the ‘biner break. Ever so irrevocably, the rest of his face appeared to be sucking into it too.

OOoooOOoooowwwwwww, Aaaaaaaagghghghgh” he cried out suddenly. Stopped in midair and slowly spinning, the problem revealed itself. As he was descending, a big tuft of his large, fluffy red beard had been sucked into the ‘biner break. Ever so irrevocably, the rest of his face appeared to be sucking into it too.

You better not bother the Chickcharnies while you're out here. Best to stay on their good side." The moonlight cast shadows on his face, but it was easy to see his teasing grin. She raised her eyebrows. "The Chickcharnies?" He pointed up into the palms and distant pines. "They're kind of like birds. They live up in the treetops --only on Andros Island and nowhere else in the world." Cyn scanned the darkness among the high branches. "What do you mean 'kind of like birds'?" He shrugged one shoulder. "Like owls. But they have three fingers, three toes, and they hang from the trees by their tails. You can spot their red eyes when they catch the light." Cyn clenched her teeth and squinted up into the trees, scanning for a pair of red eyes aimed her way. "They sound a little creepy." "If you see one, and you show it respect," Trent said, "you'll have good luck for the rest of your life." Cyn could use some good luck, for sure. She concentrated harder on finding those red eyes. None in sight, she furrowed her brow and set her gaze on Trent. "What do they do if you bother them?" His grin widened into that stop-your-heart smile that Cyn was finding harder to resist. "They turn your head around backward." "What?" "It's probably really painful," Trent said. Cyn swatted his arm, coming up against tight muscle. "You made that up." "Not really. It's island lore. People think the Chickcharnies descended from a big flightless owl they've found in fossils." "Have you ever seen one?" she asked skeptically. "Not yet. But you never know if one's around. I'd like to keep my head on straight, so I don't tease about them.".... Suddenly a huge screeching bird swooped down out of the trees, flew several feet over their heads, and veered up into a nearby copse of palms. Cyn yelped and ducked low. Trent pulled her close, tucking her against his chest. "Holy crap!" she said, "That was one pissed-off Chickcharnie. Hold on to your head.

I’ll call a cab and go to my car. I’ll sleep there for the night and figure out what to do in the light of day.” He’d started shaking his head about halfway through her proclamation and hadn’t stopped. “Do you honestly think I’m going to let you sleep in a car abandoned in some ditch on the side of the highway?” She scowled, hackles rising. “There’s no letting me. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.” I think. No, screw that. I know. “Hey,” he said, voice soft. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and, when she tried to yank away, held tight. “I know you can. You’ve already proven yourself.” Her frown deepening, she cast a suspicious glance in his direction. She was stuck in the middle of nowhere with no resources. Any idiot could see that. “I’ve proven nothing other than I can land myself in a huge mess.” One brow rose. “Oh? How long did you walk tonight? By yourself, in the dark?” “I didn’t have a choice, and I don’t have a choice now.” “There are always choices, Maddie. Don’t forget, you made a hell of a big one today.” “That doesn’t count,” she said, voice rising. Temper, temper, Maddie. She shook the voice away. “I know my options, and I’m going back to my car.” He studied her. Summing her up like the lawyer he used to be. “I don’t want to ask, but I’m going to anyway. Why don’t you want to call your family?” “Because I don’t want to.” The words shot out of her mouth, surprising her with their force. “What about friends?” Penelope and Sophie would walk through fire for her, but they weren’t an option, at least not tonight. “They’re probably at my mom’s house, consoling my family.” He scrubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. “Won’t they be worried?” “I’m sure they are,” she said. Her voice had taken on an edge that she hoped would pass for determined, but she feared that it bordered on petulance. “But I’m not calling them. I wrote a note and stole my own car from the parking lot, so it’s not like they’ll think I’ve been kidnapped.” “What did you do, hotwire the thing?” Amusement was plain in the deep tone of his voice. “If you must know, I have three extremely overprotective older brothers, a worrywart mother, and a . . .” She paused, trying out the words in her mind and deciding she wanted to own them. “. . . suffocating ex-fiancé. They insisted I have one of those industrial-strength, military-grade, combination-lock hideaway keys. My uncle brought my car to the church because his was in the shop. So really, it’s their fault this happened.” That was the moment she’d known she was going to run. Surrounded by the smell of gardenias that made her want to gag, she’d pushed her bridesmaids out the door, begging for a few minutes of peace and quiet. She’d gone over to the window, desperate for the smell of fresh air, and there sat her little Honda. The cherry red of the car had glowed in the sun like a gift from heaven. A sudden, almost reverent calm descended on her. It had felt like peace: a feeling so foreign to her that it had taken a moment to recognize it. Mitch laughed, pulling her away from those last minutes in the church and back to the temptation sitting next to her. “Princess, you really are something,” he said, still chuckling.

Get out of here, all of you," I continued. "This grave has been paid for by me and it belongs to nobody else. I died and am allowed to organize my funeral as I see fit. So, begone! My home is my castle and I will not tolerate any trespassers." "It's a scandal!" cried the decorated one. "A scandal without precedent!" A Public Prosecutor turned to me. "These inanities should be called to a halt," he hissed. "I arrest you in the name of the law, and I command the policemen to do their duty!" The policemen descended into the hole and placed their broad paws on my shoulder. But I looked at them sharply and said: "Have you no respect for the dead?" "But he is not dead! This is a complete sham!" a particularly brave Judge's apprentice cried out. "Ah, I beg your pardon!" I laughed, handing over my death certificate to the policemen. "Here, see for yourself. And in case the coroner's report is not sufficient you can always have a whiff, old donkey that you are." The decorated one leaned towards me. "The devil!" he exclaimed, hastily drawing back. "Please keep your distance, Sir," I admonished him. "Do I have to remind you of your whereabouts? It is a red-hot day in July, close to noon and you are in the presence of a corpse. I have every right to stink!" ("My Burial")

As he shook off his servant’s grip and staggered heavily to his feet, the sunlight streaming through the outside door struck him full in the face. Samantha gasped. A fresh scar, still red and angry, bisected the corner of his left eye and descended down his cheek in a jagged lightning bolt, drawing the skin around it taut. It had once been an angel’s face with the sort of masculine beauty reserved only for princes and seraphim.

You have never seen the sun set at this height. Come, look.’ The puller went to the edge and sat down, his legs hanging over the side. He saw that they hesitated. ‘Come. You can lie down and peer over the edge, if you like.’ Hillalum did not wish to seem like a fearful child, but he could not bring himself to sit at a cliff face that stretched for thousands of cubits below his feet. He lay down on his belly, with only his head at the edge. Nanni joined him. ‘When the sun is about to set, look down the side of the tower.’ Hillalum glanced downward, and then quickly looked to the horizon. ‘What is different about the way the sun sets here?’ ‘Consider, when the sun sinks behind the peaks of the mountains to the west, it grows dark down on the plain of Shinar. Yet here, we are higher than the mountaintops, so we can still see the sun. The sun must descend further for us to see night.’ Hillalum’s jaw dropped as he understood. ‘The shadows of the mountains mark the beginning of night. Night falls on the earth before it does here.’ Kudda nodded. ‘You can watch night travel up the tower, from the ground up to the sky. It moves quickly, but you should be able to see it.’ He watched the red globe of the sun for a minute, and then looked down and pointed. ‘Now!’ Hillalum and Nanni looked down. At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight. Hillalum rolled over and looked up, in time to see darkness rapidly ascend the rest of the tower. Gradually, the sky grew dimmer as the sun sank beneath the edge of the world, far away. ‘Quite a sight, is it not?’ said Kudda. Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

She was walking toward the beauty shop when Shay came out the door moving fast. The first thing Jill noticed was Shay’s hair and how it appeared really big. As Shay drew closer, Jill realized she looked like she was wearing a mask with big blue streaks over the eyes and giant red pouty lips. “What happened to you?” Jill asked in shock. “I’m not sure,” Shay said, looking just as stunned. “One minute, I was reading a magazine, and the next, two women that looked like Dolly Parton descended on me like vultures. They started putting stuff on my face, then they did all kinds of things to my hair.” Anne walked out of the shop next; her Napoleon hat ’do rode higher than ever. Ella followed with her little red hair ball reinflated. “Doesn’t Shay just look beautiful?” Ella chirped. She looked like a hooker who’d just survived a wind tunnel, but Jill nodded and tried to smile.

We are just in time for the famous Peabody Duck March. Led by their trainer, the ducks descend by elevator and parade down their own red carpet in the lobby to the fountain.

Teaching is no joke, sonny! ... Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, you've no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might as well talk about condolences! The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it 'ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren't get hold of it with both hands. It's too funny! Why, the priest who descends from the pulpit of Truth, with a mouth like a hen's vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, he's not been preaching: at best he's been purring like a tabby-cat. Mind you that can happen to us all, we're all half asleep, it's the devil to wake us up, sometimes — the apostles slept all right at Gethsemane. Still, there's a difference... And mind you many a fellow who waves his arms and sweats like a furniture-remover isn't necessarily any more awakened than the rest. On the contrary. I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.

The column swung into single file, with space between companies and platoons. Marching until 3:00 a.m., they stopped in a small forest, put their heavy packs on the ground, and unrolled their packs. The woods were thick. In the blackness, Roy could only see a few feet in front of him in the dark, and there wasn’t any acceptable cover. He had just put his pack down, when it started. A distant set of krumps went off somewhere in the distance and, moments later, the screaming shells descended, men yelled, and wood shrapnel flew from exploding trees. Roy hit the deck, grabbed his helmet, and held the fear back behind his clenched teeth. In the flash of the exploding shells, he saw his comrades and friends lying still, small, some crouched behind trees, some cursing, all helpless. Bigger shells came, shaking the landscape like a freight train speeding past a rickety station. Everything shook with diabolical red flashes and deafening roars. It went on and on, hour after hour.

My blood runs just as red as yours does, and I love and hope and dream just like you do. we are not born better or worse than anyone else, we're born human, and we build ourselves up from the same ground floor

PICTURE A CREAM-COLORED couch. Now visualize one brooding dark-haired sex machine (I’m assuming, but I have a strong feeling about this) sitting on one end and one golden being of near perfection on the other. Then there’s me, in the middle, literally squished between two yummy smelling men, and…I just want to escape. The pizzas have been demolished (I ate half of one myself) and now an awkward silence has descended. It doesn't help that I keep thinking of pornos and threesomes. I am honestly waiting for corny seventies music to start. I was here first. I don’t feel like I should have to be the one to move. But I’m awfully uncomfortable. There are other places to sit in the room; a recliner even. Ya know, super comfy, so comfy you can recline. So one of them could move to that. I almost think they’re enjoying this. Like, they’re having fun at my expense because they know I think they’re hot. Why did I blurt that out? “So, what’s with the name Kennedy?” Blake wonders in his deep timbre that doesn’t really sound like Graham’s, but reminds me of him all the same. I turn my head to the right, careful not to move any other body part, and meet his challenging gray eyes. He’s, like, two inches away. So close I can see green flecks in his eyes. I think he’s a little too amused by my predicament, if the upward curve of his mouth is anything to go by. One inky black eyebrow lifts as he waits. “It’s my name.” I raise a single eyebrow back. I can do that too, the look says. His smile deepens. “Yeah, but, what were your parents thinking? Kennedy? For a girl? And technically it’s a last name.” My eyes narrow. Oh, so it’s to be like that, is it? “So is Blake,” I retort and give myself an imaginary pat on the back. “And Graham,” I add triumphantly. “Leave me out of this,” Graham states from my left... “Did your parents have a thing for the Kennedys?” Two eyebrows go up this time. I get my mental pistols ready—it’s obvious there’s going to be a showdown. I straighten my spine. “What do you mean by a thing?” My, totally in this moment one hundred and forty-nine percent resented, roommate groans. He shrugs one broad shoulder. “You know. An infatuation. An unhealthy obsession. Fanaticism. A thing.” “You really shouldn’t have started this,” Graham intercedes, leaning around me to give his brother a look. My face is on fire and my hands are in tight fists in my lap. I stare at the television, which is on and no one’s paying attention to, and say very softly, “I’ll have you know, the Kennedys were, and are, an iconic family. I feel it an honor to be named after them.” Blake grunts. “Do you deny it?” I ask the TV. “Nope. I just wondered about your family.” I jerk my head around and give him a look full of venom. “We will not discuss my family.” He holds his hands up in surrender, but there's a gleam in his eyes. What is wrong with this guy? “Easy there, Ken.” I growl. Graham sighs beside me. “Don’t call me that,” I state through gritted teeth. He looks over the top of my head. “Touchy, isn’t she?” Graham’s head slumps against the back of the couch. “So, Blake,” I begin in a sweet voice, “what’s up with you and red?” I go still, holding my breath. Did I really just say that? That was so not nice. I wait with anticipation and dread. Graham stops moving on the other side of the couch. Blake stares at me, his lips parted. Then he looks at his brother. “What’s she talking about?” My about to be annihilated roomie makes a sound of dismay. I twist around to glare at him. He looks like a young boy who just had his hand caught in the cookie jar; guilty and disappointed that his fun has been halted. “Don’t say the word red, huh?” I jump to my feet and back away until both men are within my line of vision. “You know what?” They both look at me, obviously not knowing what. “This means war!

It was the cap, or rather the logo that was stitched to it. The grin was hideous. The huge teeth hung from the roof of the head like gleaming convex stalactites that descended from the middle of the crown down to the cap's brim. The cavernous mouth crowded the nose and eyes into the hairline and strained without success to close around incisors that claimed three quarters of the clownish face. Had the face been black or brown, it would have incited urban riots, so patent was its insult. But the face was red and Justice wore the cap with jaunty insouciance.

I could do anything—be anything. I could be a blackberry farmer. I could worry about phone bills and nipping out to the corner shop for milk and bread of a morning. Little Declan Jr. could learn to walk and talk with his real father, alive and well, and I could teach him how to wear a waistcoat with just the right amount of tragic charm, take him to school in a few years, maybe make him a little sister to look out for, someone to keep him on his toes. He could play a sport—tennis, maybe, or football. I’d attend parent-teacher meetings and have after-work drinks with the neighbors, talking about how well so-and-so is doing, and why yes, Declan Jr. is learning to play the piano. Top of his class, you know—he has his mother’s grace… I could see all of that, as clear in my mind as sunlight on fresh snow, and so much more. Just living day to day. One morning we could have picnics, my family and I, next to blue glacial lakes. One afternoon my son would be old enough to meet a girl, get in a fight, need to shave. One evening his sister will need help with her homework, and he’ll complain, but he’ll help. And then one day the Elder Gods would descend from a blood-red sky in chariots lashed together from bone and flame and take away all my blackberries.

Who am I? Flying, I live, and sometimes I make songs: flower songs, butterflies of songs— such as reveal my sentiments, such as express my heart. I arrive at the side of others. I descend and alight on earth, the red macaw of spring. I stretch my wings beside the flower drums, my song lifts and spreads over the earth.

But when he came upon the sacred place, I ventured forth from the cave, raising my tau”—a shepherd’s stick, with a curved iron handle—“and I felt a righteous power descend upon me. I struck the ground, and a bottomless chasm opened under their feet. Many were swallowed whole.” It inevitably reminded Rashid of the parting of the Red Sea. “From that pit vomited a swarm of demons, led by the Lord of Flies. I did strike him with my staff, but the demon was able to wrest it away. We fought all through the night, though despair was my greatest enemy.

modeled on a Tibetan phurba, a three-sided blade descending from a handle carved in the shape of a bulbous head with tentacles wrapped around the base of the blade. The knife was black from pommel to point and flecked with sparkling minerals.

These New World practices (enslavement and genocide) formed another secret link with the anti-human animus of mechanical industry after the sixteenth century, when the workers were no longer protected either by feudal custom or by the self-governing guild. The degradations undergone by child laborers or women during the early nineteenth century in England's 'satanic mills' and mines only reflected those that took place during the territorial expansion of Western man. In Tasmania, for example, British colonists organized 'hunting parties' for pleasure, to slaughter the surviving natives: a people more primitive, scholars believe, than the Australian natives, who should have been preserved, so to say, under glass, for the benefit of later anthropologists. So commonplace were these practices, so plainly were the aborigines regarded as predestined victims, that even the benign and morally sensitive Emerson could say resignedly in an early poem, 1827: "Alas red men are few, red men are feeble, They are few and feeble and must pass away." As a result Western man not merely blighted in some degree every culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship, as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples. With this extirpation of earlier cultures went a vast loss of botanical and medical lore, representing many thousands of years of watchful observation and empirical experiment whose extraordinary discoveries-such as the American Indian's use of snakeroot (reserpine) as a tranquilizer in mental illness-modern medicine has now, all too belatedly, begun to appreciate. For the better part of four centuries the cultural riches of the entire world lay at the feet of Western man; and to his shame, and likewise to his gross self-deprivation and impoverishment, his main concern was to appropriate only the gold and silver and diamonds, the lumber and pelts, and such new foods (maize and potatoes) as would enable him to feed larger populations.

Making for a summery, aesthetic contrast to all around her; Angela was moving against the current of commuters, the majority of whom were clad in muted attire. In her warm red, front-split, ruffled halter-neck cocktail dress that came to her knees, she was turning more than a few heads. Descending the wet concrete steps of the metro entrance with a grace that surprised Nicola, she reminded her of a cherry blossom falling.

Obeisance to Hiranyagarbha, the eternal Purusha, Self-born Lord from whom all kalpas and all beings emanate! Hiranyagarbha created only the waters first. He instilled virility into them. The waters were called Naara, they belonged to Nara; since they were his abode, he was called Naarayana. When Hiranyagarbha blessed them, a golden egg floated on those waters. After a year, Hiranyagarbha clove the egg in two: he made heaven and earth. He created fourteen worlds from the halves of the egg and, from between, he made cosmic space, akasa. He created the earth floating on the waters and the ten quarters in the firmament. Then he created mind, speech, love, anger and sexual delight. Hiranyagarbha made the Saptarishi, the seven sages, from his thought and the seven great families descended from them. He made the lightning, the thunderclouds, the red clouds and the rainbow. He made the devas of light from his mouth, the manes from his breast and the asuras of darkness from his loins. All kinds of creatures then flowed from him, as Apava generated aquatic life. When they were not fruitful, he cleaved himself and made man and woman.

The true antagonist of The Masque of the Red Death was the masque itself – the display of wealth and greed and privilege that allows the few to lock themselves away from the plight of the many.

It was already late afternoon when Junker Hinrich rapidly descended the heathland path; but the more clearly the distant turreted lodge loomed up before him the slower became his pace. Its upper storey rose above the high wall that surrounded its courtyard, a wall built as protection against roaming beasts of prey, and its red gateway gleamed a long way off in the autumn sun. The heathland blooms had faded, but in their place the leaves of the oaks surrounding the building had already produced their bright colours. An intense silence reigned; the branches that stretched over the roof lay motionless on its dark brown pantiles.

The white species will disappear henceforth from the face of the earth.” Other races—yellow, brown, and red—will rise up and take their places, obliterating their memory forever. But the creative period for humanity will be over. Human beings “will not quite have disappeared but will have completely degenerated … deprived of strength, beauty, and intelligence.” As Gobineau gloomily concludes, “Perhaps that fear, reserved for our descendants, would leave us cold if we did not feel, with secret horror, that the hands of destiny are already upon us.

Hindu astrology recognizes nine gems, called the Navaratna, meaning nine jewels, one to influence every planet: ruby for the sun, pearl for the moon, red coral for Mars, emerald for Mercury, yellow sapphire for Jupiter, diamond for Venus, blue sapphire for Saturn, hessonite for the ascending lunar node and cat’s eye for the descending lunar node.

The Aztecs located the Templo Mayor and surrounding sacred precinct – by far the grandest and most powerful nepantla-middled ritual time-place stretched out and put in place by human beings – at tlallinepantla (“in the middle of the earth”).159 Tlallinepantla coincided with the center of the earth (tlalli olloco),160 the navel of the earth (tlalxicco), the crossroads of the horizontal forces of the Fifth Sun-Earth Ordering, the confluence of vertical malinalli-twisting-spinning forces that ascend from below and descend from above the earth, and the axis mundi. Here is the meeting point of the four roads created by the four sons of Tonacatecuhtli~Tonacacihuatl (each associated with one of four intercardinal directions).161 In so doing, they arranged the earth into four quadrants and a center. Here, too, is the time-place defined by the crossing of two springs, red and blue (or yellow), on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Mendieta describes their crossing as formada a manera de una aspa de san Andrés (“shaped like a Saint Andrew’s cross”).162 Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc likewise describes a spot defined by two springs intersecting one another. Van Zantwjik, Berdan and Anawalt, and Heyden read Tezozomoc as claiming the two springs are Tleatl-Atlatlayan (“Fire Water, Place of Burning Water”) and Matlalatl-Toxpalatl (“Dark Blue Water, Yellow Water”). The former ran from east to west, the latter, from north to south, and so they crossed one another.163 López Austin and López Lujan, however, read Tezozomoc as identifying the two intersecting springs as Matlalatl (“Dark Blue Water) and Toxpalatl (“Yellow Water”).164 Either way, their intersecting divides the island into four quadrants and forms the St. Andrew’s cross depicted in Codex Mendoza, fol. 2r. Dúran says the Aztecs found the sight of yellow and blue streams “espanto” (“frightening, terrifying, astonishing, awesome”).165 Next to this spot was where an eagle perched upon a prickly pear cactus. Lastly, here, too, the Aztecs constructed their Huey Tocalli. After building their first temple at the site, the Aztecs ordered the surrounding area divided into four quarters, with the Huey Teocalli at their intersection. The roads of Tepeyac, Itztapalapa, and Tlacopan, which arranged the city into four quadrants and served as communication routes between the island and the surrounding lake shores, intersected at the Huey Teocalli, forming a grand human-constructed crossroads with the Huey Tecocalli at its center.166 All of these crossings and intersectings coincided with one another as well as with the center of the earth, the navel of the earth, and the axis mundi. Codex Mendoza (fol. 2r) depicts the founding of Tenochtitlan at this nepantla-middled, nepantla-intersecting time-place (see Figure 4.10).

And then, breaking from between the peaks, they appeared. Red cloaks flowing on the wind, they filled the northern skies. So many he could not count them, nor the swords and bows and weapons they bore upon their backs, their brooms flying straight and unwavering. Thousands. Thousands of them descended upon Orynth. Thousands of them now swept over the city, his soldiers gaping upward at the stream of fluttering red, undaunted and untroubled by the enemy force darkening the horizon. One by one by one, they alit upon the empty castle battlements. An aerial legion to challenge the Ironteeth. The Crochans had returned at last.

A girl who understood that a queen’s heart was made to break. Over and over again. And Sophie knew that hers would, too. When crops failed and people starved. When plague descended. When war swept its red cloak over the land.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

then a small stream just above the bottom of the canyon. There are good campsites in this area. Cross the bridge over the Middle Fork of the Swan River and go right for 50 feet on Middle Fork Road at mile 17.1 (10,203). The Colorado Trail diverges left into the woods onto a single-track trail. The trail crosses a small stream and curves right in the next 2 miles. Reach the North Fork of the Swan River and marshy bottom at about mile 19.4, crossing on a raised walkway and bridge, beyond which there is good camping. The trail turns right (east) and then curves left as it follows the perimeter of the camping area. Cross a road at mile 19.7 (9,981). Go right at an intersection at mile 20.1 (10,067). From here, the trail begins to climb out of the drainage. Keystone Ski Resort eventually comes into view along the high point of the ridge to the northeast. Where the trail twice intersects the West Ridge Loop Trail (from Keystone Gulch), first at mile 22.6 (11,114) and then at mile 23.8 (11,022), stay left. After a long descent on a series of switchbacks, the trail intersects Red Trail at mile 26.1 (10,035) and goes to the left again. After dropping into a small valley and passing a power line, take a right at the fork at mile 27.5 (9,973). Cross Horseshoe Gulch at mile 28.8 (9,458) and follow the trail as it heads north with camping 0.2 mile ahead. Intersect and go left at Blair Witch Trail at mile 29.4 (9,458). Intersect and go left at Hippo Trail at mile 29.7 (9,700). Descending with Breckenridge coming in view, at a switchback intersect Campion Trail at mile 31.8 (9,240), and go left. Reach neighborhood and pond at mile 31.9 (9,200). Cross Swan River on a bridge, then cross Revette Drive where one could park for a few hours. At mile 32.5 (9,203), cross CO Hwy 9 adjacent to where the free Summit Stage bus stops. Go right (north) on bike path, cross Blue River on a bridge, and reach Gold Hill Trailhead at mile 32.7 (9,197). Follow the bike path for 0.2 mile until reaching the Gold Hill Trailhead on the left and the end of Segment 6 at mile 32.9 (9,197).

Numerous members of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade had engaged in similar displays before. They’d stand on top of the building, wave a flag, shout slogans through megaphones, and scatter flyers at the attackers below. Every time, the courageous man or woman had been able to retreat safely from the hailstorm of bullets and earn glory for their valor. The new girl clearly thought she’d be just as lucky. She waved the battle banner as though brandishing her burning youth, trusting that the enemy would be burnt to ashes in the revolutionary flames, imagining that an ideal world would be born tomorrow from the ardor and zeal coursing through her blood.… She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest. Her fifteen-year-old body was so soft that the bullet hardly slowed down as it passed through it and whistled in the air behind her. The young Red Guard tumbled down along with her flag, her light form descending even more slowly than the piece of red fabric, like a little bird unwilling to leave the sky. The Red Union warriors shouted in joy. A few rushed to the foot of the building, tore away the battle banner of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade, and seized the slender, lifeless body. They raised their trophy overhead and flaunted it for a while before tossing it toward the top of the metal gate of the compound. Most of the gate’s metal bars, capped with sharp tips, had been pulled down at the beginning of the factional civil wars to be used as spears, but two still remained. As their sharp tips caught the girl, life seemed to return momentarily to her body. The Red Guards backed up some distance and began to use the impaled body for target practice. For her, the dense storm of bullets was now no different from a gentle rain, as she could no longer feel anything. From time to time, her vinelike arms jerked across her body softly, as though she were flicking off drops of rain.

Zara wakes to find herself one with the transcendental realm, outside of reality. And as she does the photonic realms become clearer to her. She chooses the most beautiful one. It is the land of Beautiful Immortal Sunset. Her eyes glow as she opens them finding herself standing alone on a cliffs edge and carved into the mountain side are images of Titans past. She breathes in deeply admiring the magnificence of the monuments when in the sky descending with the breeze a red phoenix appears amidst rainbow hues of light. As she lands flowers bloom all over the cliff and with the flowers a transformation as the bird becomes an image of Zara only far more beautiful. It is the one known as Beautiful Immortal Sunset. “You are here to steal my power?” “I am,” Zara replies warily, as the immortal walks around her as if gazing into her very soul. “A world is born to what place or end?” “It’s born in the mind.” As Zara replies she looks down with a look of awe realising she now stands upon the palm of the immortal’s hand; now a giant before her. “And you. Are you born?” “Only in the mind.” “And what is the ultimate answer?” Zara looks down, then up at the giant, “All questions are born in the mind, but the mind already knows the answers. It’s a game it plays with itself.” “And what wins this game?” “Experience.” “And what is the mother of all ways?” “A forgotten way.” Beautiful Immortal Sunset raises her hand and holding Zara before her she smiles. “The world never really begun Zara, nor will it ever really end. There is no one seeking and no one who becomes. This power you wish is yours, it always has been.

They descend into the seventh level of dimensional consciousness. It is a world. A perfect-looking world. A Garden of Eden. Topography of rolling hills and terraced mountains. Fields of purple, red, pink, and a sky of blue. The seventh level is a place where Buddha goes on vacation.

I was always asked to be happy, even as everything around me emphasized the virtues of suffering. Monks flagellated themselves into woodcuts, stripping themselves raw before God. The Tragedies instructed me to count no man happy before he was dead. I asked my confessor whether there was wisdom in these words. He said to me, "You are not yet a man Philip. You are young. Be joyous in your youth." Was I expected to be happy now, knowing that someday I was destined for sorrow? "Yes," he replied, as if that made perfect sense and I was simply too young to understand why. But the more I understood of my position, the expectations upon me, the scarcer that hope became. It was the map that haunted me most, hung above the desk of my tutor's room. There was shown the hollowing of France, in great strokes of red ink: all the land once ours, snatched with hungry hands by England during my father's reign. It was the fruit of his folly, a pair of shackles waiting to descend. My lifetime would be spent redeeming his lifetime of surrender, and no amount of cinnamon could change that.

Evie, daughter of Evil Queen, spotted Jay making his way toward the street and returned to strutting across a table, where disheveled urchins were trying to eat. They ogled Evie’s dazzling smile, dark wavy hair, and hypnotizing eyes. She wore all blue, with a necklace that had a red gem topped by a gold crown. She carried a red box-shaped purse. She was a natural beauty, but it was hard to tell under all the makeup. Her mom had taught her that looks were everything. She glanced around to see Jay was gone.

Try the gougères," Lumière interrupted, popping one into her mouth before she could continue. It was warmed by his flame and melted on her tongue- nothing at all like the perfectly good but usually rock-hard ones she and her father baked. "Ohhh..." she couldn't help saying. "It's been so long since we had a guest!" Mrs. Potts danced around on the table happily, somehow managing to fold a napkin with her spout-nose. She tossed it into Belle's lap: a swan shape that gracefully unfolded as it fell, almost like it was flying. Belle shrank back, worried it was actually going to fly. "I can't imagine why," she muttered. And then she was distracted by the food. Piles of it. More than a feast- a banquet. There was a whole leg of lamb, multiple terrines and soufflés, three soup courses, a delicate fish in white wine broth, an orange ice in between to clear the palate... There was a water glass, a golden glass for red wine, a crystal one for white, and a saucer for consommé. There were seven forks of descending size and different numbers of tines, the last three whose use she couldn't even begin to work out.

Recent genetic analysis has provided further hints; it appears that all living red foxes are descended from individuals who lived in the ancient Middle East. From there, they spread across the entire northern hemisphere.

This type of duopoly was common in China, with a state-run player sharing the market with a company controlled by a descendant of the red elite.

Blood red, for the House of Craving. It's the house of siphons—legacies like vampires, sirens, succubi and incubi, and a few others. They feed on blood, dreams, emotions, and so forth in exchange for their intimidating powers, including immortality. Golden yellow, for the House of Shifters. There were once animal shifters of all kinds, but now only the apex predators remain. Wolves, bears, lions, tigers, sea serpents, griffins… Theirs is the House of primal instinct and territorial savagery. Silvery blue, for the House of Elementals. The gods bless the descendants of this House with the ability to wield the four elements: fire, air, water, or earth. This House is far more devout in worshipping the gods, who handpick the elementals’ abilities for them at birth. And finally, emerald green for the House of Arcana. Full of magic-users—aka casters—of all origins. Fae, sorcerers, witches and wizards, mages…it’s a mixed bag of various talents, but everyone here has magic in their very blood, which they can wield. It's the House I was sorted into.

back to my mother!

In a hidden paradise where bountiful leaves danced with the emerald waves, a young woman epitomized the very spirit of femininity, radiating a serenity that mirrored the enchanting landscape surrounding her. This secluded island, a precious jewel far removed from the turmoil of the outside world, a realm where nature thrived in its most exquisite form. Each day, she wandered through the vibrant, verdant jungle, her heart alive with the symphony of chirping birds and the gentle rustle of leaves stirred by the soft caress of the breeze. The air was rich with the heady fragrance of blooming blossoms, and golden sunlight streamed through the lush canopy, casting a delicate mosaic of light and shadow upon the jungle floor. In this ethereal haven, she felt an intimate connection to the Earth, as if the very essence of nature cradled her in a loving embrace. The ocean, a breathtaking canvas of swirling blues and greens, held its own kind of magic. Majestic whales glided gracefully beneath the surface, their haunting songs weaving tales of the ocean's deepest secrets. Wise turtles ambled across the sunkissed sands, while playful dolphins frolicked in the waves, their joyous leaps celebrating the boundless freedom of life in harmony with nature. As the sun descended beyond the horizon, splashing the sky with vibrant shades of blazing red, gleaming gold, delicate pink and lavender, she often found herself standing at the water's edge, captivated by the breathtaking beauty that surrounded her. The gentle lullaby of the ocean, entwined with the whispers of the jungle, created a symphony of serenity that enveloped her, allowing her thoughts to drift like clouds in the vast sky above. In this tranquil paradise, time seemed to stand still, each moment stretching into eternity like a cherished memory. The island's mysteries slowly unfolded, revealing hidden waterfalls that sparkled like diamonds, secret groves filled with the sweet scent of jasmine and plumeria, and breathtaking vistas that stole her breath away. It was a realm of endless wonder, where every corner held a new discovery, each more enchanting than the last. Here, in the heart of the Pacific she uncovered her true self ~ a reflectiocn of the beauty that surrounded her. In this harmonious environment, she felt eternally at peace, wrapped in the loving arms of nature and the island's enchanting magic. Each day became a celebration of romance and life, a poignant reminder that the greatest treasures lie not in material possessions but in the simple joys of existence, the deep connections forged with the world around her, and the profound serenity of being truly alive, where love blooms in every heartbeat and every breath...

that this dying landscape belongs to the dead, the crofters and fighters and fishermen whose larochs sink into the bracken by Loch Assynt and Loch Crochach? - to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep and driven by deer to the ends of the earth - to men whose loyalty was so great it accepted their own betrayal by their own chiefs and whose descendants now are kept in their place by English businessmen and the indifference of a remote and ignorant government.

Of the rise of this singular people few authentic records appear to exist. It is, however, probable that they represent a later wave of that race, whether true Sudras, or a later wave of immigrants from Central Asia, which is found farther south as Mahratta; and perhaps they had, in remote times, a Scythian origin like the earlier and nobler Rajputs. They affect Rajput ways, although the Rajputs would disdain their kinship; and they give to their chiefs the Rajput title of "Thakur," a name common to the Deity and to great earthly lords, and now often used to still lower persons. So much has this practice indeed extended, that some tribes use the term generically, and speak of themselves as of the "Thakur" race. These, however, are chiefly pure Rajputs. It is stated, by an excellent authority, that even now the Jats "can scarcely be called pure Hindus, for they have many observances, both domestic and religious, not consonant with Hindu precepts. There is a disposition also to reject the fables of the Puranic Mythology, and to acknowledge the unity of the Godhead." (Elliot's Glossary, in voce "Jat.") Wherever they are found, they are stout yeomen; able to cultivate their fields, or to protect them, and with strong administrative habits of a somewhat republican cast. Within half a century, they have four times tried conclusions with the might of Britain. The Jats of Bhartpur fought Lord Lake with success, and Lord Combermere with credit; and their "Sikh" brethren in the Panjab shook the whole fabric of British India on the Satlaj, in 1845, and three years later on the field of Chillianwala. The Sikh kingdom has been broken up, but the Jat principality of Bhartpur still exists, though with contracted limits, and in a state of complete dependence on the British Government. There is also a thriving little principality — that of Dholpur — between Agra and Gwalior, under a descendant of the Jat Rana of Gohad, so often met with in the history of the times we are now reviewing (v. inf. p. 128.) It is interesting to note further, that some ethnologists have regarded this fine people as of kin to the ancient Get¾, and to the Goths of Europe, by whom not only Jutland, but parts of the south-east of England and Spain were overrun, and to some extent peopled. It is, therefore, possible that the yeomen of Kent and Hampshire have blood relations in the natives of Bhartpur and the Panjab. The area of the Bhartpur State is at present 2,000 square miles, and consists of a basin some 700 feet above sea level, crossed by a belt of red sandstone rocks. It is hot and dry; but in the skilful hands that till it, not unfertile; and the population has been estimated at near three-quarters of a million. At the time at which our history has arrived, the territory swayed by the chiefs of the Jats was much more extensive, and had undergone the fate of many another military republic, by falling into the hands of the most prudent and daring of a number of competent leaders. It has already been shown (in Part I.) how Suraj Mal, as Raja of the Bhartpur Jats, joined the Mahrattas in their resistance to the great Musalman combination of 1760. Had his prudent counsels been followed, it is possible that this resistance would have been more successful, and the whole history of Hindustan far otherwise than what it has since been. But the haughty leader of the Hindus, Sheodasheo Rao Bhao, regarded Suraj Mal as a petty landed chief not accustomed to affairs on a grand scale, and so went headlong on his fate.

The noise comes from Africa's stories being told. Millions upon millions of them; some told in descending liquid notes like the call of the Burchell's coucal before the rain, and some like the full roar of Johannesburg traffic. Some of these stories are ancient and wear fossilized coats of red dust and others are so fresh that they gleam with umbilical wetness,.......

Ten times the Shechinah came down unto the world:—At the garden of Eden (Gen. iii. 8); at the time of the Tower (Gen. xi. 5); at Sodom (Gen. xviii. 21); in Egypt (Exod. iii. 8); at the Red Sea (Ps. xviii. 9); on Mount Sinai (Exod. xix. 20); into the Temple (Ezek. xliv. 2); in the pillar of cloud (Num. xi. 25). It will descend in the days of Gog and Magog, for it is said (Zech. xiv. 4), "And His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives" (the tenth is omitted in the original).

The wild ingrafted olive and the root Are withered, and a winter drifts to where The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles. I saw my city in the Scales, the pans Of judgment rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations.

and among those that came from the vaulted heavens of silver, the Tiste Andii, dwellers of Darkness in the Place before Light, Black Dragons numbering five, and in their league sailed red-winged Silanah, said to dwell among the Tiste Andii in their Fang of Darkness descending from the vaulted heavens of silver

Aeddan was nothing like this brother. And, for some reason, that suddenly made it harder to keep on hating him for Mael's death. An accident? No, it hadn't exactly been that. The two of them had fought with every heated intention of ending the other. I knew the feeling-the red rage that descends in the middle of a fight, the blind driving need to kill, to win, at whatever cost. For Aeddan, the cost had been his own blood.

Suddenly, the man was thrown off her. Darcy looked around, but saw nothing. She rose up on her elbows to see the man climbing to his feet, shaking his head to clear it. His four comrades were looking up to the sky nervously. A huge, dark shape descended from the sky, vanishing quickly. Along with one of her attackers. Darcy was afraid to move and be taken as well. She remained still, her chest heaving. Another shape formed out of the dark sky. She could only stare openmouthed at the dragon coming right for her. Just before he touched down, the dragon shifted, taking the form of a man—a man that left her breathless and awestruck. There was no denying she was looking at a Dragon King. He stood naked, his hands at his sides while his gaze was riveted on the men who accosted her. The shadows kept much of him out of sight, but the streetlamps shed enough light of the hard sinew of his body that she wanted to see more. His lips peeled back in a snarl as he fought the four remaining men. He moved quickly, as if it were as effortless as breathing. The men began to throw huge bubbles of magic at the Dragon King. He dodged many of them. The few that hit him barely made an impact other than to infuriate him, if his bared teeth were any indication. The man—or whatever he was—who had stopped her in the pub was struck down with lethal force by the Dragon King. Darcy almost cheered, but it got lodged in her throat when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Had she not turned right then, Darcy would never have seen the second dragon swoop from the sky and wrap its talons around another of the men before flying away, crushing him. That left just two of her attackers. They and the Dragon King circled each other on the street. “She’s ours,” one of the red-eyed men said. The Dragon King merely raised a brow. “Think again, Dark.” More globes of magic flew from the two Dark, but the Dragon King was too fast. He came up behind one of the Dark and ripped out his spinal column. The same instant the dragon grabbed the other. Both Dark fell lifeless to the ground a moment later. Darcy hadn’t moved a muscle in the few minutes that had passed. The need that had assaulted her earlier with the Dark was now gone. But she wasn’t alone. The Dragon King’s gaze turned to her. Darcy watched him standing in the glow of the streetlight, completely mesmerized by the dragon tat that ran from the King’s right shoulder, under his armpit, and down his side to the top of his right thigh. The dragon’s head was at the front of the man’s shoulder and had his mouth open as if on a roar. He was rearing with his wings up and out. It was his long tail that stopped at the King’s thigh. The King glistened with sweat that made his muscles gleam in the light. Darcy had the absurd notion to run her hands all over his body, learning the feel of his hard muscles and warm skin. Her gaze traveled down his wide chest to his washboard stomach and narrow waist. Then lower...

In May 1941 the N.K.G.B., secret police, the ones with light blue epaulets and little red squares on them, descended one night into a great number of homes and deported many local families to Siberia. They came with an open truck, gave the family an hour to pack a few bundles, put them in the truck and they were gone. That same thing happened on two consecutive nights. A few thousand Czernoviters were deported, destination not mentioned, yet understood - Far East, Siberia.

I was amused, by the way, at one bit of native nomenclature in connection with the Goanese. Many of the Goanese are now as dark as most of the other Indians; but they are descended in the male line from the early Portuguese adventurers and conquerors, who were the first white men ever seen by the natives of this coast. Accordingly to this day some of the natives speak even of the dark-skinned descendants of the subjects of King Henry the Navigator as “the whites,” designating the Europeans specifically as English, Germans, or the like; just as in out-of-the-way nooks in the far Northwest one of our own red men will occasionally be found who still speaks of Americans and Englishmen as “Boston men” and “King George’s men.

France divided Vietnam into three parts: the French colony of Cochinchina, which encompassed the sprawling, sparsely peopled Mekong Delta in the South; and two “protectorates”—Annam, the poorest and most mountainous part of the country, just thirty miles wide at its narrowest point, and Tonkin, the densely populated Red River Delta. These protectorates were nominally overseen by a compliant descendant of the Nguyen emperors, but actually ruled—along with Laos and Cambodia—as part of the Indochinese Union by a French governor-general from his palace in Hanoi.

It was a complete life review. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was wonderful. It was so wonderful and memorable that I didn’t want it to end. There were people and experiences featured that I hadn’t thought about for years. Everything about my life was coming back in picture form. And, surprisingly, the first picture – the first movie frame – was of me riding a red tricycle; I was about 3 or 4 years old. Years later, after telling my dad about this life review experience, he disappeared into the attic of the family home only to emerge and descend with an old black and white photo, saying, “Here’s that picture of you on your red tricycle.” Coincidence, perhaps, but I really don’t think so. In addition to that powerful initial movie frame of me on a red tricycle, I remember, in general, additional life review highlights that included

the yellow of fresh egg yolks, and the warm purple of a healing bruise, fire reds and candy pastels of blue and pink and white rising up only to descend into a chaotic central mass, like a hornet hive, before trailing off in dark marks at the far left of the canvas. Black lines, like primitive boats with crosshatched oars, open into a shimmering sea of white.

The sight of Cinderella descending the staircase made Lenore's heart swell. Gabrielle's daughter looked so much like her. The same golden hair, with hints of red like the first leaves of autumn when touched by the sun. The same blue eyes, like cornflowers in midsummer.

Oh!” the Queen said, visibly shaken. “Is that a cupcake?” The crowning glory of the dessert table was a tower of pink flamingo feather cupcakes. Red turned to the royal baker, who was quivering in their boots. “Ma’am…Your Majesty, I’m so sorry….I found an old recipe of yours….” “Get it out of my sight!” the Queen hissed. Then she patted her brow with a red handkerchief. Red wondered what that was all about. She’d never seen her mother fall apart at the sight of a cupcake before. Then again, she realized she’d never really seen a cupcake before either. She wondered what they tasted like. But perhaps she’d never know, since the baker was taking a tray of them away. The Queen clapped again, back to looking like herself. “So! Birthdays are still illegal. Treats are discouraged! Especially cupcakes. What’s more, all laughter should be avoided before noon—it simply is not good for your heart to laugh so early! Perhaps it’s better not to laugh at all! This obviously means that jokes shall only be told every other Saturday, if one feels the absolute need.” But from her tone it was clear that no one should ever feel the need to tell a joke.

I was crucified on a pain extraction machine, one of billions that milk the world’s suffering and screams, all connected by swollen, organic cables, snaking under the foundations of reality. And there had to be a place where all the conduits of pulsing flesh, like the roots of old trees, converged into a single enormous pipe, where all the screams of fear from humanity mixed together, the despair and hopelessness of a madrepore with thousands and millions of living creatures with red mouths hanging wide open, screaming with clenched eyes, for eternity, in the hands of blind and deaf and impersonal executioners, the instruments of our terrifying destiny. Where did it go, the vertical conduit of human suffering? Who fed on our crying and unhappiness and helplessness and annihilation and mortality? Who enjoyed the crack of our bones, the pain of unrequited love, of the ravages of cancer and the death of the people we love, of burned skin, of torn-out eyes, of exploding veins? Who needed our ill-fated substance as clear as tears, like we needed air and water? I imagined a vertical pipe, like the needle of a syringe but with the diameter of the oldest baobab tree, descending to the center of the earth and feeding there, in the empty, spherical hypogeum, a people of necromancers and telepaths related to bedbugs, ticks, and mites. Hedonists of pain, visionaries of terror, archangels of being crushed alive, kings of destruction and hate …

nodding to each other and exchanging defeatist whispers about Marbella and the Costa Crime when Rushton descended angrily upon their inexperience. They had not known until now that the detective inspector’s invective could be so inventive and colourful, nor that his passion could run so high when the morale of his team was at stake. ‘In any case,’ he concluded his tirade, ‘you should be aware that for drugs offences we would get him back, even from Spain. Of course, you might have a limited interest in that, if you were back on the beat by then.’ Lambert chafed at this last delay when he was so close to his prey. Eventually, he left Rushton with instructions to contact him on the car phone with news of any developments and took Hook out with him to the old Vauxhall. He did not understand this: if Berridge had moved far from home, he should have been picked up. It was quiet in the middle of the day as they drove up the wide black tarmac drive of Old Mead Park. In the trimly kept communal gardens of the residences, pink and red camellias were still in full flower, and the bright blaze of the first Japanese azaleas lit up the front of the beds as the sun was hazed by high clouds. The birds sang of burgeoning spring and the gardens of diligent horticultural effort, but there was no visible human presence on the wide green lawns. High above them, as they got out of the old car in the deserted car park,

The city opened below them in a luminous sparkle of windows and signs and the electric spray from tram antennae; higher up, the sky was dotted with stars and red lights of radio stations' antennae. The scaffolding shook under the weight of all those goods teetering up there. Michelino said: "I'm scared!" From the darkness a shadow advanced. It was an enormous mouth, toothless, that opened, stretching forward on a long metal neck: a crane. It descended on them, stopped at their level, the lower jaw against the edge of the scaffolding.

Meanwhile there were, living in London, quite a few “Portuguese” merchants who were probably not as Christian as the Inquisition might have wished. These were the New Christians, the Marranos, descendants of Jews who had converted rather than face death or exile from Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, merely being baptized and attending church on a regular basis was not enough to allay suspicions, and the Inquisition, first in Spain and then Portugal, persecuted them for fun and the greater glory of God. Some families forwent the dappled sunlit hills and red-roofed towns of Iberia for the dreary, crowded, and pestilential confines of sixteenth-century London. There they could practice the religion of their ancestors in peace—providing they didn’t do it in public. When England went to war with Spain, again, these merchants went to court to prove that they were in fact Jewish, not Spanish, and so therefore shouldn’t have their stuff nicked by the state. They won their case and the resettlement of the Jews in England became a matter of common law. These were the Sephardim, the Jews of the Southern Diaspora, and they built a great synagogue in Bevis Marks in Aldgate, which opened in 1701. There it has survived fire, riots, and two rounds of bombing by the Germans and the IRA, to become the oldest synagogue in England still in use.

In 19951995, (scientist) Theunis Piersma showed that Red Knots find shellfish up to eight times more frequently than would be expected if they were doing random searches...As a knot's bill descends into the sand, it pushes on the thin rivulets of water between the rains, creating a pressure wave that radiates outward. If there's a hard object in the way - say, a clam or a rock - the water must flow around it, which distorts the pattern of pressure. The pits on the knot's bill tip can sense those distortions, detectings surrounding objects without having to make contact with them. This ability, which Piersma calls "remote touch" is impressive enough, but the knot improves it even further by probing the same areas repeatedly, stabbing its beak up and down several times a second. This stirs up the sand grains, which settle into a denser configuration, heightening the buildup of pressure from the beak and making the distortions more obvious. Every time the knot lowers its head, the foud around it becomes more obvious, as if it were using a kind of sonar based on touch instead of hearing.

South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

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They chiefly descended on him from the alphabet soup of organizations ostensibly designed to assist him.