Ivan Yefremov: The Land of Foam

The young man and woman, overwhelmed by the mass of information they had been given, again pressed close to the magnifying glass. The stone seemed even more mysterious and incomprehensible to them.

The pure, clear and deep colour of the sea… and on it the figures of three men linked in fraternal embrace. The brilliant, scintillating stone and the golden tinge on the perfect, undraped bodies stood out with even greater force in the cold, dull gallery of the museum… The young girl, full of life and feminine charm, seemed to be standing on the seashore.

With a sigh the young sailor straightened his aching back. The girl still kept her eyes on the stone. The shuffling of feet and the noise of an approaching excursion group resounded down the corridors. Only then did the girl tear herself away from the case. The switch clicked, the frame was lifted and the blue-green crystal lay sparkling on its velvet bed.

“We’ll come here again, won’t we?” asked the sailor. “Of course we shall,” answered the girl. The young man took her gently by the arm and they walked down the white marble staircase deep in thought.

The flat rock jutted far out into the sea. It had retained the warmth of day and the youth sitting there was not in the least disturbed by the fresh gusts of wind that found their way between the cliffs. The sea, invisible in the darkness of night, splashed faintly against the foot of the rock.

The young man stared into the distance, contemplating the point at which the end of that silver band called the Milky Way disappeared into the darkness. He was watching the falling stars; a cluster of them had flashed up to pierce the sky with their fiery needles, and disappear behind the horizon, fading like burning arrows falling into the water. Again the fiery arrows flashed across the heavens, flying into the unknown, to the fabled lands that lay beyond the sea on the very borders of Oicumene. (Oicumene — the name given by the ancient Greeks to the inhabited world which was surrounded by water, Oceanos .)

“I will ask grandad where they fall,” decided the youth and thought how wonderful it would be to fly like that through the sky direct to some unknown destination.

But then he was no longer a youth — a few more days and he would attain the age of a warrior. He would never be a warrior, however, but would become a famous artist, a sculptor of renown. His innate ability to see true forms in nature, to sense and remember them, made him different from most people… Or so his teacher, the sculptor Agenor, had told him. And so it was, for there, where others passed indifferently by, he would halt in sheer amazement, seeing that which he could neither comprehend nor explain. The countless manifestations of nature charmed him by their constant mutations. Later his vision grew clearer and he learned to distinguish the beautiful and retain it in his memory. There was elusive beauty in all things, in the curve of the crest of a running wave, in the locks of Thessa’s hair when the wind played in them, in the stately columns of the pine trunks and in the menacing rocks that rose proudly over the seashore. From the moment he first became conscious of this he had made the creation of beautiful forms his aim in life. He wanted to show beauty to those unable to perceive it for themselves. And what could be more beautiful than the human body! To mould it, however, was the most difficult of all the arts…

This told him why the living features he retained in his memory were not to be found in the statues of the gods and heroes he saw all round him and which he was being taught to make. Even the most skilled sculptors of Oeniadae (Oeniadae — Pandion’s birthplace, at the south-western tip of Northern Greece. The story belongs to the early period in Greek history, before the classical era .) could not mould a convincing image of the living human body.

The youth felt instinctively that certain features expressing joy, will power, wrath or tenderness were crudely exaggerated, and to give this artificial prominence to certain forcefully expressed features the artist had sacrificed all else. But he must learn to depict life! Only then would he become the greatest sculptor in his country and people would acclaim him and admire the things he would create. His would be the first works of art to perpetuate the beauty of life in bronze or stone!

The youth had been carried far away into the land of dreams when he was aroused by a bigger wave crashing against the rock. A few drops of water fell on the youth’s face. He shivered, opened his eyes and smiled, embarrassed, in the darkness. Oh, Gods! That dream was probably still far away in the future… In the meantime his teacher Agenor was constantly upbraiding him for his clumsy work and for some reason or another the teacher was always right… And there was his grandfather… Grandad showed little interest in Pandion’s progress as an artist, he was training his grandson with a view to making him a famous wrestler. As though an artist needed strength! Still, it was a good thing grandad had trained him like that, had made him more than ordinarily strong and hardy; Pandion liked to show his strength and prowess at the evening contests in the village, when Thessa, his teacher’s daughter, was present, and to note the gleam of approbation in the girl’s eyes.

With burning cheeks the youth jumped to his feet, every muscle in his body tensed. He thrust out his chest as if to challenge the wind and raised his face to the stars; suddenly he laughed softly.

He walked slowly to the edge, peered into the seemingly bottomless gloom, gave a loud cry and sprang from the rock. The calm, silent night immediately came to life. Below the rock there was the sea whose waters wrapped his hot skin in a cooling embrace, sparkling with tiny dots of fire around his arms and shoulders.

The waves, in their play, forced the youth upwards, striving to throw him back. As he swam in the darkness he estimated the undulations of the waves and confidently threw himself at the high crests that appeared suddenly before him. It seemed to Pandion that the sea was bottomless and boundless, that it merged with the dark sky in a single whole.

A big wave lifted the youth high above the sea and he saw a red light far away along the coast. An easy stroke and the wave obediently carried the youth to the shore, towards a scarcely visible grey patch of sand.

Shivering slightly from the cold he again climbed on to the flat rock, took up his coarse woollen cloak, rolled it up, and set off at a run along the beach towards the light of the fire.

The aromatic smoke of burning brushwood curled through the adjacent thickets. The feeble light of the flames lit up the wall of a small hut built of rough-hewn stones with the eaves of a thatched roof projecting over it. The wide spreading branches of a single plane-tree protected the hut from inclement weather. An old man in a grey cloak sat by the fire, deep in thought. On hearing the approaching footsteps he turned towards them his smiling wrinkled face the tan of which showed darker in the frame of a grey curling beard. “Where have you been so long, Pandion?” asked the old man reproachfully. “I’ve been back a long time and wanted to talk to you.”

“I didn’t think you’d come so soon,” answered the youth. “I went to bathe. And now I’m ready to listen to you all night, if you like.” The old man shook his head in refusal. “No, the talk will be a long one and you have to be up early in the morning. I want to give you a trial tomorrow and you will need all your strength. Here are some fresh cakes — I brought a new stock of them with me — and here is the honey. It’s a festive supper tonight: you may eat as becomes a warrior — little and without greed.”