HAD feet any more, a drop of water landed on top of his head, which alerted him to the fact that he had lost his hat, and caused him to notice all the many drippings around him and to sense the invisible mass of stone over his head. The glowing, flowing river-fog smelled like something Noah remembered but could not identify: perhaps blood, catmint, or cedar tea. It did not seem to Noah that he had been standing there long, but July had already stepped out and here she came returning from her exploration of this dark place. She was carrying a fish, like the phosphorescent ones but lividly alive: high forehead like a whale, eyes with the vertically slanted irises of cat in dim light, and eye-like spots along its sides. The fish did not struggle as it calmly regarded the two of them. “Where did you get … that?” Asked Noah.
Chapter 2
The Head Underground Onward and downward they chased through a tunnel of night, falling unconscious. Noah began to regain his senses as the two linked wagons slowed and Lucy turned sharply to come up behind the buckboard, then clambered up into it and lay down there, still in her traces. From his seat atop the cask wagon Noah could see a series of phosphorescent fish stuck on the points of lumpy stalagmites at the edge of a greenish, flowing fog. Each glowing fish was impaled over a series of others, each less luminous, each more incorporated into the stone. The stalagmites wavered in the flowing green light, as if each was a tower of little yellow-green people struggling to hold the glowing fish aloft. Noah climbed down into the tight enclosure Lucy had made of the wagons. In the even paler light there he could see his hands, like two pale frogs, but he could not see clear to his feet. As he stood wondering whether he even Metaphysical Times, Vol XIV, no. 1, page 18
said.
“From a man in black, fishin inner river,” July “Inner River?”
Noah ducked under the wagon tongue and took a very few steps nearer to the thickly flowing fog which, because of the reddish river beneath it, looked kind of yellow when he closer to it. Looking up, he could not see through the fog to the other side of the river. He wondered if there even WAS another side. “There IS no other side.” said a man sitting in the river not more than ten feet upstream, but whom Noah had not even noticed. This man wore a black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat resembling the one Noah had lost, beneath which his face appeared grey and lumpy. “I didn’t say anything,” said Noah. Wondering silently who this man might be. “Your uncle and your father,” said the man (in answer to the question Noah had not really asked). “But we are all brothers and sisters here.” He stood up and walked out of the water toward Noah.