CRYSTAL FINGERS

Half exhausted, we enter the palace of Madame Nature. We are five warriors, strangers to this world. We are grey, and slimy, and warm. We slip past the crystal fingers reaching from the walls to clutch at us, and into the Room of the Pearls. From the floor rises the collection of the Penis of Time. The curtains are red, brown, and sometimes green and blue, with all the softer shades of these intermingled with them. The white cloaks of the fallen lie draped across the pink and grey boulders. They lie, cloaks over cloaks, swords over cloaks, the fallen over and under all. Sometimes they match the colours of the curtains. Our breath hangs in the air.
In this world no sun ever rises. The night is the same as the day and there is sparse and unchanging warmth. There is life but deeply hidden. We tread carefully past the fallen swords and over the crystals and draping fabrics. At every touch the fragments of the fallen tinkle downwards into an unknown. Like in a cathedral, we are welcomed by bells. This world can never be the same. It is the day of the invader. A new year-January 1st 1977.

To the Memory of Laurence Bailey