Muscular control, at least partial control, appeared yet to be his for he focused his eyes and staggered to his feet. The earth had lost its solidity and rolled in dizzying curves around him. Neither the trees nor the wall of rock was immune. His new world had gone haywire. Angered and hurt, he threw himself to the ground and put his head in his hands. The artificial thoughts of unjustifiable outrage pushed all others to the rear: It's not true! Nothing is, not this world, not me, not my dreams! I entered, for some reason, to find it beautiful and receptive. It has repulsed me, so I in turn renounce it. I renounce the giver of clothes and watches, of sleep and dreams, of food and drink., of night and day, my benefactor. The last he spoke, looking up expectantly when he had done with it. Massive white cumulus formations lumbered good-naturedly overhead, the wind went its way. There being no natural or coincidental distraction, he was forced either to resolve the internal conflict or ignore it.

Hung as if by a malicious fortune within easy reach, a bunch of grapes attracted his attention. He rose again and succored himself.

. . .

Time, its passage eased by an unchanging environment, accelerated, and days, of which he would soon have lost count had he not had the foresight to begin a calendar, passed quickly. Disappearing slowly behind the mounting volume of monolithic time, his first awakening and the problems and difficulties associated with it came to occupy fewer and fewer of his thoughts.

It was more a period of animal sensation than human perception: eat, notch the calendar, sleep, eat, calendar, sleep. The only new experience was that of rain, which he at first welcomed, even collecting small quantities of water in various empty gourds. Coming not infrequently as it did, the moisture soon began to irritate him. Since the fruits of the trees and vines offered sufficient liquid nourishment he stopped tending the gourds and was thus left to suffer his wet clothes for naught. Eventually he constructed a leaky but not entirely ineffective roof under which he retreated when necessary, there to sit, often for hours, now passively lamenting his predicament, now actively cursing it. With the shelter constructed, his world became if not a static then a closed system in which the course of dynamics was limited, repetitive, and therefore readily predictable.

Once, he returned quite by accident to the tree which was to have been his springboard to the outer world, There were no signs of his earlier activity no marks on the trees no depression in the soft earth where he had fallen, so that he doubted it was the right one. Halfheartedly climbing the tree, he was convinced otherwise when, still some distance from the top, he discerned an indentation in the cliff above, a sight which stimulated his curiosity but which, inasmuch as the old dissatisfaction with his lot had lost its first force, caused no stirring of an irrepressible desire to escape as it once had. Life in the fault continued peacefully. The first dulling, that of the perception of time, was soon followed by a decrease in the receptivity of the physical senses, which eventually lowered him into an almost torporific state where he existed serene and untroubled.

The Eighty-fourth Day
Drowsing in the afternoon sun, he was awakened by a deep rumbling within the earth to a clarity of consciousness he had not known since the night on the cliff. When he tried to get to his feet, the dizzying sensations of his awakening after the fall also came back clearly, but it was now an external phenomenon, for the earth itself was shaking under him. The trees were trembling as if buffeted by a wind of great strength; he saw the ground part in several places, leaving massive cavities where he had recently walked in all security.

He flattened himself at the base of a tree and covered his head with his arms. On all sides he heard rocks tumbling from the precipice. At times his solid earth moved with a sickening rolling motion, and from the distance the sound of trees crashing upon one another came to him. The rumbling from below swelled and diminished as the earth heaved and subsided in great billowing distortions.

It was growing dark when silence at last settled upon the jungle. A loosened rock dropped into the depression now and then but he was satisfied the danger was past. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the perimeter. One entire side of the cliff had been leveled by the earthquake, not quite leveled, but the new slope offered little resistance to climbing. Heedless of the cuts on his hands and feet, he clambered, falling again and again, to the top.

Bursting over the rim, he found himself in a wide meadow of waist-high grass. Before him, in the distance, was a jungle; to the left, a mountain, its upper reaches bare, disappeared in clouds; to the right, down the mountainside, the meadow extended to the sea. He was intoxicated by the sight of the setting sun and stood transfixed. At last he turned. Behind was the depression of his former world; beyond, the jungle. The fault was half in darkness, the rest subdued and made indistinct by the deep shades of twilight. New thoughts stirred within him and past events reappeared in jumbled chronology: he relived the climb up the slope, the night on the cliff, the earthquake, the realization that he was trapped, the first sight of this larger world with its magnificent distances and unsuspected range of color.

A harsh scream, half-animal and half-human, like nothing he had heard, rent the twilight air. He whirled and saw a gigantic shape lumbering across the meadow. When the first shock passed and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he stared in disbelief at the roughly ungainly primeval beast. The scream came again from the ridiculously small head and he realized the dinosaur was charging him.

He was grateful for the nearness of the fault and plunged headlong down the rocky slope. More falling than running, he arrived at the bottom with such velocity that he tumbled several feet into the trees, where he lay unmoving, out of breath and trembling. He watched the serpentine neck protruding curiously over the rim of the precipice. The monster appeared dubious as to its ability to follow him but it was persistent in the observation of its lost quarry. Far into the night he watched the glowing red eyes weaving back and forth, occasionally disappearing, always returning.

In the bright morning light which fell directly into the fault over the collapsed wall he awoke abruptly and out of habit reached for fruit. When he found none at hand, he remembered what had happened. The familiar pattern of life, having been broken once, vanished quickly. He looked around. All was as it had been except the leveled wall and the brighter morning light. The only evidence of the previous night's adventure was a bruised and sore body. The monster was gone. He made his way back to the clearing, several times glancing uneasily toward the new path to the outer world.

Squatting painfully, he munched thoughtfully on his store of fruit. What had it been like, that world up there? It must have been another dream. The rising gray pinnacle, the vast reaches of jungle and meadow, the vaster regions of sea, the faintly hued and strongly colored span of sky bounded below by the distinct edge of the sea, open above. Only of the great beast's reality was he certain.

His strength restored, he once more made his way up the crumbled wall and crouched in the grass so that he could see but not be seen. On the far side of the meadow, several of the animals were grazing quietly or picking leaves from the trees. Ignoring the uncomfortable position—the grass was too high to be seen over in a kneeling position, not high enough to conceal him standing—he half stood, looking on all sides, for some minutes as if to confirm the reliability of the memory he had so recently mistrusted. The island and its world were as he had remembered them and yet they were different. It was, he decided, the light of early morning coming from the glowing red sun just risen above the jungle which made the difference. With their tones of suppressed intensity and their shades of hidden strength, the sluggish, colored rays, mingling with the crisp bite of the not yet dissipated night air, made him stretch and yawn. He imagined he was awakening for the first time.

With some difficulty he repressed an impulse to run to the sea. He knew the dinosaur last evening had appeared slow only because of its mass and he doubted that, even with the advantage of surprise, he could reach the water before they, with their ridiculous, mincing gait, could. The possible fallacious nature of his assumption that they would not follow him into the sea urged itself into his consciousness and fixed him in his awkward position while his mind obstinately wandered far from the course of thought he had intended: he realized he was seeking justification for a certainly foolish and possibly fatal action, that of leaving the proven safety of his haven below ground level, and thus he was led to ponder the meaning of the enigmatic inscriptions which he now easily repeated to himself. Was this the meaning? The meaning of the inscription on the cliff anyway. But if so, then what of the other? What of justice? What was justice? What was justice to him?

These questions unanswered others, unformulated, he found himself crawling through the grass without having consciously decided on a course of action. Only then, in the midst of unpremeditated action, did he become aware of the fact that there was no choice.

The sun rose slowly, like an object fixed to some distant pivot closer to itself than to him, which he caused to move by the slow pace of crawling. It poured out warmth matched by that radiating from the deep brown soil and the dense grasses through which he made his way with difficulty. Since the downward slope made it possible to see the horizon, he paused now and then to seat himself facing the ocean and expectantly watch the unpretentious silence of greatness, as if the noble air of certitude which he perceived were about to manifest itself in more familiar form.

As he drew near the sea, the pauses and glances in the direction of the feeding animals became less and less frequent. At length he broke out of the meadow onto a wide beach of fine white sand, superheated and made dazzling by the mid-afternoon sun. Murmuring ceaselessly, numberless small waves tentatively fingered the extremes of land, advancing cautiously only to break under themselves and retreat unseen. The dark surface stretched to the edge of the sky, a boundary which it respected with precise, meticulous care, giving way suddenly to blue space and full-blown clouds which spread from there to the mountain and, it seemed, even beyond.

The water was warm and he swam until the sun had disappeared. Having lost his fear of the dinosaurs, which he occasionally glimpsed far up the meadow, he lay on the beach and looked at the stars as they became brighter in the darkening sky. For the first time his thoughts were seriously occupied by the possibilities of the future. Earlier concern with the problems of escaping the fault and the nature of the greater world had been immature and insignificant because they lacked the eager anticipation of the imminent realization of some of the potential he was beginning to see within himself. Where before he had been faced with an inanimate adversary which encircled him definitively but which did not possess the ability to retreat or advance, to parry his attacks or exploit his weaknesses, now, that which kept him from pondering the formation of a life of his own was an enemy embodied in a form as mobile as his own, an enemy whose inferior intelligence was, he believed, more than compensated for by its superior size. During the brief moment when such restraining thoughts waned he easily visualized the shelter he could build from the resources of the island and the idyllic life which lay before him, open as the sea and vast as the heavens. But the animals had to be reckoned with. Trying to reckon with them, he fell asleep.

White light from invisible sources was on all sides. It was a familiar region but this time he was standing alone. There were no strange figures, no silver path, no cryptic inscriptions on which to focus, only a towering, flimsy construction of thin boards. He could see nothing more than that part of the structure at which his eyes were directed, so that when he shifted his gaze, the one part disappeared as another came into view. Thus he could discern neither a top nor a bottom, a beginning nor an end. At one point he was running up a precariously sloped board only to slip and catch himself with one hand. Dangling in space, he crazily caught sight of a city in the midst of a great expanse of sand far below. Later he was approaching the intersection of several boards and watched helpless as the single nail holding them together came loose. He leaped.

A dinosaur’s scream awakened him. He was on his feet at once, facing the mountain. A number of impressions registered simultaneously: the rising red sun, which he had already seen once, the early morning purple haze, the rushing and roaring rote behind him, which seemed louder in the air of dawn, and three of the monsters poised ominously at the edge of the beach. His sudden movement caused them all to break out in their monotonous, deafening expression of frustration. His first thought was that they, for some reason, would not venture onto the beach, but he dared not believe. Minutes passed and their screams slowly died away. At last the four, man and beasts, as if of rock, were fixed solidly, the three seemingly as incredulous as the one. The morning sun was well up in the sky when he decided it was a stalemate. The lesser consciousness has the greater patience. They had come no closer. Now he moved.