Lying on his side facing the sea, he watched the brightening light, russet, magenta, sepia, blue, black. Bands of clouds, slightly tumescent as if themselves just awakened, hovered about the thin line of horizon and the sun capriciously played colors upon them, shifting with deft speed from one to the other as it rose in its path. The sea was calm, the air cool.

Propping himself on an elbow, he realized the posture would reveal to an observer a concentrated effort to enjoy a passive moment in full. Would the observer he wondered see or know that concentration had turned a passive moment of beauty into an irritating stimulus to move, which, he knew, would stay with him all day, unsettling his thoughts and actions.

"Beauty," a voice behind him said, "lies not in reckoning but in re-cognition."

The surprise of interrupted meditation and the shock of a human voice caused him to turn quickly. In the same movement, he was on his feet. The sight of the woman (she was tall, almost as tall as he, well-proportioned, of indifferently harmonious features, blonde hair, black. eyes), the sight of her on the porch, outlined as if by self-radiated light against the still-dark jungle, caused him to regret his haste in arising, which might be interpreted as overt hostility.

"If I were afraid, I would not have come. And did you not need me?" His silence produced a gesture of impatience which disturbed him. "Did you not need me?" she repeated.

'I don't know. I never thought about you." His mind was whirling. 'I knew you were there but never thought about you." Why was he lying at the beginning?

"Inasmuch as I am no longer 'there' but here, we might as well make the best of it." The same gesture of impatience.

"I'm sorry. Please come in."

She stepped through the doorway and answered another question before he could ask it. "Oh, you looked like you were miserable." Involuntarily, he remembered his dream, then those of his youth, where there had been others. The depth and warmth of her voice flowed as a liquid through the dawn, causing him to start. The gentle sexual reaction induced by the elves had been nothing compared to this.

Apparently oblivious to his discomfort, she looked around with the air of one unexpectedly transplanted to the hinterlands and said, "God! I should think you would be," taking in the entire scene, the straw hut, the piles of papyrus, the island, the sea, the sun, with a -gesture which revealed an already formed opinion of utter futility.

Her attitude put him on the offensive. He had grown surprisingly fond of his island. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to," he said petulantly.

'Damn right, I don't."He stared curiously at the perfectly formed red lips and wondered if such beauty was always a partner to such language. The mystery surrounding her appearance and her attitude of concealed power had produced in him a certain respect for whatever opinions she might have or express. Although he was displeased with her criticism of the island, he was pleased with her failure to include him as a part of the setting which she found so distasteful.

He got up and said, "Where did you come from? I’ve looked everywhere for someone."

"I’ve been here before."

"When? I don't remember."

She looked about as if searching for a place to sit and started across the room.

'Yes, please, sit here."

She neither looked at him nor spoke, but made her way to the open side of the house, facing the sea. She extended her arms and stood gazing at the sun, which was lost behind a range of rugged, multi-colored clouds on the other side of the water. Hypnotized, he observed the slow-motion rise of her breasts as she raised her arms, the capricious play of jungle and sea light competing in the longfall of blond hair, the curve of her body, which seemed arched tensely toward some directly attainable triumph of mystical thought.

She shook her head slowly and her hair moved in the same region of decelerated time in which her breasts existed, The sea light dominated and produced a whole range of incredible color, from the black of space to the crimson of wood fire. He had the feeling her mind was arched as was her body.

Her lips parted. 'On this God damn, god-forsaken island, of all the places in the world." She turned suddenly. "Yes, I would like to sit down. You have anything to drink?"

While he poured the juice, images of what he viewed as his childhood bewilderingly occupied his mind, interlaced with the confusion of the moment. He relived the days in tire fault and their manifold incidents of nuisance.

From the corner of his eye he saw that she was still at the opening toward the sea, again oblivious to his presence. As unobtrusively as possible he handed her the drink. She turned to him to accept it and, in so doing, freed his mind. The brightening light of nature at her back, night reluctantly releasing its tenacious hold, the sore air of dawn, the stiff movement of the breeze, the sea and a few last stars reflecting but dimly a transfigured image of the whole lay before him, this and the figure between him and the world. He stood in the darkness of the house end his world, the world with which he had mightily grappled, first defeated then victorious, seemed unbearable, and when it seemed thus, he knew it was lost. He marveled at his lack of regret over the loss and began to doubt the reality of those things closest to him, the mill and its works, the realms of the library.

. . . . .

After this, there were no thoughts; rather his thoughts took a form so foreign to him that they defied naming. To be sure, there were words exchanged which in later moments of disenchantment he longed to recall, but they came and went, had come and had gone, to exist once as a perfect, ephemeral evincement of the union of mind and body, of minds and bodies, where neither was.subservient, where "neither" was a non-concept, where all was one and touch and taste and fear and hope and pain and insight, entities though they remained, became so thoroughly entangled, so completely enmeshed that there was no undoing what was by this means wrought.

For an indefinite period, she was him, he was her. Time passed, but it too was a -non-concept, something laughable resorted to as a yardstick and mooring for the stability of a lesser existence. Days and nights became but different viewpoints providing the variation sought in millions of minutes of exploration of self and world. Sunlight and starlight, wind and rain, cold and warmth in endlessly variable combine gave infinitely varied stimulus to sensitive, all-receptive being, which thus unfolded into and revealed new modes of thought-feeling, gone as quickly as they had come, leaving faint trails of shimmering dust in the mind lost in cosmic beauty and earthly wonder.

He never understood her. After the embarrassing moments of the first meeting, he made no attempt to understand her, for he was ignorant and feared for the durability of the structure they had built and now occupied together. He saw that it was a unified thing, but in that very unity he perceived great weakness which he believed would show itself unmistakably and irrevocably should he turn the brute force of contemplative mind against it. He was therefore proud, in his ignorance of having restrained his instinct for examination. He accepted naturally what was offered and gave what he could, somewhat self-consciously confident that the continued existence of the complex structure which he observed so timorously was due largely to his own restraint.

Her bitterness, which had repelled him the first morning, disappeared when Eros and Agape exploded, but it lingered at the edge of his consciousness, never as strong doubt, merely as disconcerting, anomalous memory. The force of reality made impossible acceptance of implied conclusion that in her life with him she was only fulfilling her office. The magnitude of the contradiction was too great. He loved on the basis of a sincerity he had to find.

After its first great vault to the new level, life grew imperceptibly. The simple fact of being was sufficient. Prosaic tasks, as gathering and preparing food, were only diversion, never purpose. Hours of talking, laughing, loving, moments of crying, lent the world unsuspected purpose, imbued all activity with meaning which, he came to see, was. He understood that it was not to be sought. Meaning was to him who loved. The harsh experiences of self-love were transmuted, sublimated into realization of ubiquitous meaning. With the retrospection of his past life, he felt language was the falsifier, but language being his own work out of the unknown and unknowing past, he was forced to see himself as the prime falsifier. Out of a hundred thousand words, he asked himself, out of so many, where each is at least slightly different from another, out of this bounteous wealth of inventive thought made manifest, this pliable, even amorphous tool which nonetheless retained integrity. and identity, out of this vast body, why should two words be the exception? More important, why should the exception consist of those very words which were all-important: existence and meaning. Language, his language, arbitrarily separated; his reality demanded and required union.

One night, she said to him, "The word you are seeking is written among your ancestors. It is vesmaning."