The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read Online Free

to be its own source not only of light but of dark.
    Its only rivals for lucency were the lumps of rock that Alexis brought back from an area of the garden frequented only by him. To the others, the very fact that this district was rocky, without vegetation and mainly grey and brownish in colour made it dull.
    ‘You all have such vapid tastes,’ Alexis said. ‘You’re childish.You ask for everything to be pretty, and you don’t bother whether it’s interesting.’
    At the time when they were in love, Corydon, trying to share Alexis’s interest, accompanied him on his expeditions. Alexis shewed him how, by using one lump of rock on another, it was possible to shape a tool, with which you could extract from the rocky mass a third lump, which to Corydon looked exactly like the first two.
    ‘Yes, but it comes from a deeper layer,’ Alexis said. ‘Doesn’t that interest you? And, look: there’s a streak of gleaming, lucid material running through it.’
    ‘Yes,’ Corydon said, trying to please his lover, ‘I see it: a sort of gleaming grey. But quite honestly, Alexis, it seems an awful lot of effort just to get a strip of gleaming grey, which is a dull colour even though it gleams, when the women produce a gleaming crimson without any effort at all. And that comes from deep inside them, too.’
    Later, when Chloe and Alexis were lovers, she too went on an expedition with Alexis, and he chipped her out a piece of rock with a yellowish gleam in it. But ‘Quite honestly, Alexis,’ Chloe confessed, ‘it’s neither so yellow nor so gleaming nor so interesting as the eyes of a cat when he lurks in the dark beneath a bush.’
    After that, Alexis went on his expeditions alone, and the others, as they travelled about the lusher parts of the garden, merely heard the distant chip-chip of his tools on the rock-face.
    On one of her travels Amaryllis discovered a tree that grew bright blue pineapples. Everyone was delighted by this botanical fantasy. They all assembled to eat a special blue-pineapple luncheon, for which they sat in a circle on the grass, shaded by a pagoda which Corinna had almost finished building.
    From his place in the circle, Strephon suddenly reached towards the centre and pulled out, from beneath the pile of blue pineapples, the huge, yellow, five-fingered leaf that was serving as a plate. ‘It’s wasted as a plate,’ Strephon said. ‘I shall make it into a hat.’ Giggling, he ran off with the huge leaf, and most of the others, giggling too, rose and ran after him.
    Corydon was getting up to join the chase, but Alexis, who was sitting next to him (they were still very fond of each other), pushed him down again. ‘Never mind that childishness’,Alexis said. ‘Look.’
    Corydon looked into the palm of Alexis’s hand, which was spread before him. In the middle lay a tiny drop of blood.
    ‘Beautiful,’ Corydon said. ‘Which of the women gave you that?’
    ‘None of the women. Unless the earth itself is a woman.’
    ‘Do you mean you got it out of the rock?’
    ‘I had to dig harder and chip finer than ever before.’
    ‘I suppose it fell from one of the women as they walked on the rocks,’ Corydon said, ‘and soaked in.’
    ‘It couldn’t have soaked so deep,’ Alexis replied. ‘Besides, it isn’t blood. Touch it.’
    Corydon pressed the pad of his index finger against the object in Alexis’s palm. He rolled it about for a moment, then tried to score its surface with his fingernail, but couldn’t.
    ‘Even so,’ Corydon said, rather uneasily, ‘it might be blood. Blood does harden after a while.’
    ‘Blood shrivels, and loses its colour and eventually powders,’ Alexis said. ‘This doesn’t. Neither has it smell or taste. It’s some days now since I took it from the rocks, and it hasn’t changed. I think it will last for ever.’
    ‘Even so,’ Corydon said, trying to become cheerful again, ‘it still seems hardly worth the effort. The women produce blood in so much