Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Will you try?

PATIENT:

If I remember.

DOCTOR Y:

Good. Now here is Nurse Kincaid.

PATIENT:

Yes, I know. I know her well. She fills me full of dark. She darks me. She takes away my mind.

DOCTOR Y:

Nonsense. I’m sure she doesn’t. But if you don’t want Nurse Kincaid either, we’ll simply leave a tape-recorder here. You know what a tape-recorder is, don’t you?

PATIENT:

I did try and use one once but I found it inhibiting.

DOCTOR Y:

You did? What for?

PATIENT:

Oh some damned silly lecture or other.

DOCTOR Y:

You give lectures do you? What sort of lectures? What do you lecture about?

PATIENT:

Sinbad the sailor man. The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y:

Stop it! Please. Don’t start that again. Please.

PATIENT:

Around and around and around and around and …

DOCTOR Y:

Around what? You are going around what? Where?

PATIENT:

I’m not going. I’m being taken. The current. The North Equatorial, from the North African Coast, across, past the West Indies to the Florida Current, past Florida around the Sargasso Sea and into the Gulf Stream and around with the West Wind Drift to the Canaries and around past the Cape Verde Islands around and around and around and around …

DOCTOR Y:

Very well then. But how are you going to get out?

PATIENT:

They. They will.

DOCTOR Y:

Go on now. Tell us about it. What happens when you meet them? Try and tell us.

He gives lectures. Schools, universities, radio, television, politics? Societies to do with? Exploration, archeology, zoology? Sinbad. “Bad sin.” Suggest as a wild hypothesis that just this once patient may have committed a crime and this not just routine guilt?

DOCTOR Y.

Accept hypothesis. What crime?

DOCTOR X.

Setting off from the Diamond Coast, first there is the Southerly coastal current to get out of. Not once or twice or a dozen times, on leaving the Diamond Coast, the shore-hugging current has dragged us too far South and even within sight of that African curve which rounded would lead us in helpless to the Guinea current to who knows what unwanted landfalls. But we have always managed just in time to turn the ship out and pointing West with Trinidad our next stop. That is, unless this time we encountered Them. Around and Around. It is not a cycle without ports we long to reach. Nancy waits for poor Charlie in Puerto Rico, George has his old friend John on Cape Canaveral, and I when the ship has swung far enough inshore wait to see Conchita sitting on her high black rock and to hear her sing her song for me. But when greetings and farewells have been made so many times, they as well as we want the end of it all. And when the songs have been heard so often, the singers no longer are Nancy, alone, poor Charlie alone, or any of us. The last few journeys past the garden where Nancy waits, she was joined by all the girls in her town, and they stood along the wall over the sea watching us sail past, and they sang together what had so often called poor Charlie and his crew in to them before.

Under my hand

flesh of flowers

Under my hand

warm landscape

You have given me back my world,

In you the earth breathes under my hand.

My arms were full of charred branches,

My arms were full of painful sand.

Now I sway in rank forests,

I dissolve in strong rivers,

I am the bone the flowers in flesh.

Oh now we reach it—

now, now!

The whistling hub of the world.

It’s as if God had spun a whirlpool,

Flung up a new continent.

But we men stood in a line all along the deck and we sang to them:

If birds still cried on the shore,

If there were horses galloping all night,

Love, I could turn to you and say

Make up the bed,

Put fire to the lamp.

All night long we would lie and hear

The waves beat in, beat in,

If there were still birds on the dunes,

If horses still ran wild along the shore.

And then we would wave each other out of sight, our tears lessening with each circuit, for we were set for our first sight of Them, and they, the women, were waiting with us, for on us their release depended, since they were prisoners on that island.

On this voyage there were twelve men on board, with myself as Captain. Last time I played deckhand, and George was Captain. We were four days out from shore, the current swinging us along fair and easy, the wind coming from the North on to our right cheeks, when Charles, who was lookout, called us forward and there it was. Or, there they were. Now if you ask how it is we knew, then you are without feeling for the sympathies of our imaginations in waiting for just this moment. And that must mean that you yourselves have not yet learned that in waiting for Them lies all your hope. No, it is not true that we had imagined it in just such a form. We had not said or thought, ever: They will be shaped like birds or be forms of light walking on the waves. But if you have ever known in your life a high expectation which is met at last, you will know that the expectation of a thing must meet with that thing — or, at least, that is, the form in which it must be seen by you. If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes then if there is such a creature in that sea you will not see anything less, or more — that is what you are set to see. Armies of angels could appear out of the waves, but if you are waiting for a one-eyed giant, you could sail right through them and not feel more than a freshening of the air. So while we had not determined a shape in our thoughts, we had not been waiting for evil or fright. Our expectations had been for aid, for explanation, for a heightening of our selves and of our thoughts. We had been set like barometers for Fair. We had known we would strike something that rang on a higher, keener note than ourselves, and that is why we knew at once that this was what we had been sailing to meet, around and around and around and around, for so many cycles that it might even be said that the waiting to meet up with Them had become a circuit in our minds as well as in the ocean.

We knew them first by the feeling in the air, a crystalline hush, and this was accompanied by a feeling of strain in ourselves, for we were not strung at the same pitch as that for which we had been waiting.

It was a smart choppy sea and the air was flying with spray. Hovering above these brisk waves, and a couple of hundred yards away, was a shining disc. It seemed as if it should have been transparent, since the eye took in first the shine, like that of glass, or crystal, but being led inwards, as with a glass full of water, to what was behind the glitter. But the shine was not a reflected one: the substance of the disc’s walls was itself a kind of light. The day was racingly cloudy, the sky half cloud, half sun, and all the scene around us was this compound of tossing waves and foam, and flying spray, of moving light, everything changing as we watched. We were waiting for strangers to emerge from the disc and perhaps let down, using the ways of humanity, a dinghy or a boat of some kind so that we, standing along the deck’s edge, grasping fast to ropes and spars, might watch Them approach and take their measure — and adjust our thoughts and manners for the time. But no one appeared. The disc came closer, though so unnoticeably, being part of the general restless movement of the blue and the white, that it was resting on the air just above the waves a few paces off before we understood by a sinking of our hearts that we were not to expect anything so comfortable as the opening of a door, the letting down of a ladder, a boat, and arms bending as oars swung. But we were still not expecting anything in particular when it was already on us. What? What we felt was a sensation first, all through our bodies. In a fever or a great strain of exhaustion, or in love, all the resources of the body stretch out and expand and vibrate higher than in ordinary life. Well, we were vibrating at a higher pitch, and this was accompanied by a high shrill note in the air, of the kind that can break glasses — or can probably break much more, if sustained. The disc that had been in our eyes’ vision a few yards away, an object among others, though an object stronger than the others, more obliterating — seemed to come in and invade our eyes. I am describing the sensation, for I cannot say what was the fact. It was certain that this disc rose a little way up from the waves, so that it was level with our deck, and then passed over us, or through us. Yet when it was on us, it seemed no longer a disc, with a shape, but it was more a fast beating of the air, a vibration that was also a sound. It was intolerable while it lasted, as if two different substances were in conflict, with no doubt of the outcome — but it did not last more than a moment, and when my eyes had lost the feeling of being filled with a swift-beating light, or sound, and my whole body from having been stretched or expanded or invaded, as if light (or sound) had the capacity of passing through one’s tissues, but in a shape as definite as one’s own, then I looked to see if George, who stood nearest to me, was still alive. But he was gone, and when I turned in terror to see where he was, and where the others were, they weren’t there. No one. Nothing. The disc, which had again become a crystal disc, hovering over the waves on the other side of the ship, was lifting into the sky. It had swept away or eaten up or absorbed my comrades and left me there alone. All the ship was empty. The decks were empty. I was in terror. And worse. For all these centuries I had been sailing around and around and around and around for no other reason than that one day I would meet Them, and now at last we had indeed inhabited the same space of air, but I had been left behind. I ran to the other rail of the ship and clung there and opened my mouth to shout. I might indeed have shouted a little, or made some feeble kind of sound, but to what or to whom was I shouting? A silvery shining disc that seemed, as it lifted up and away into the air, that it ought to be transparent but was not? It had no eyes to see me, no mouth to acknowledge my shouting with a sound of its own. Nothing. And inside were eleven men, my friends, who I knew better than I knew myself. Since we do know our friends better than we know ourselves. Then, as I stood there, gazing into the scene of blue and white and silver that tossed and sprayed and shook and danced and dazzled, sea and air all mixed together, I saw that I was looking at nothing. The disc had vanished, was no more than the shape of a cell on my retina. Nothing.