The Game Read Online Free

silently, and then along another corridor. She wore, at night, sensibly, she considered, in draughty corridors, a long black woollen evening skirt, over which she wore a long-sleeved black jersey with a cowl neck.She affected cuffed and pointed black velvet slippers. These clothes gave her a certain monastic, anachronistic grace; she was thin, and carried herself well although a little rigidly. She was, however, hung about with chains, medallions, crosses, knotting and clinking from neck to waist; she had three rings, all jewelled, the largest a large garnet, clustered round with seed pearls. Her head, covered with a crop of rust-coloured dry curls, she carried stiffly erect. From behind, she looked sexless; from the front, formidable, with huge nose and mouth and eyes too deep-set under almost colourless sandy lashes. Her skin was very white and spattered and blotched with freckles. These seemed unexpected, as though freckles should have been outgrown with childhood; they blurred and detracted from the general impression of well-ordered ugliness.
    She had decided not to go into the S.C.R. It was there, last week, that she had accidentally seen the first programme, but she could not imagine many other dons wanting to watch a travel programme about snakes, and was in any case peculiarly secretive about her own interests. The J.C.R., she had discovered, was usually empty at this time of night, since these girls were not interested in communal living and spent their evenings outside the college until the last possible moment. They showed, too, a commendable lack of interest in the television.
    She slipped in, closed the door, and stood with her back against it, breathing rapidly. The room was dark and the television was, in fact, switched on; Cassandra found that she was the back row of an audience – three girls curled on a sofa immediately in front of her, two more squatting at their feet. The room was silent, except for a soft rustle which came from the set itself. Cassandra thought of retreat; but no one looked at her, and then he spoke.
    ‘It is the apparent effortlessness of this movement that makes us feel it is mysterious. And we are naturally afraid of what we do not understand.’
    Cassandra found herself watching the progress of a longand apparently heavy snake across a sandy surface. The movement, even in so heavy a body, did seem to be unconnected with any effort; like a creature in a dream landscape it poured forward, stopped suddenly as though it were frozen, head raised, tongue flickering, and then flowed on again, stretched and easy. The ground underneath it seemed still and solid – behind it was a ribbon-like track.
    ‘They are worshipped in association with running water and with lightning. As a symbol – for the life, the life that drives us. Although in our culture, traditionally, we see them as the opposite.’
    The snake had come to the edge of a dark pool of water: it bowed its head, swaying the blunted, triangular snout slightly, slid under the surface, was lost, and then the camera held for a moment the raised head and the rippling trail of its body in the water as it swam out and away.
    ‘The people here tell me that during the night the anaconda changes into a dark boat with white sails, and skims over the swamp. They speak of it also as though it were winged. There’s an element of fear in what they say – I don’t know whether the wings and sails turn the creature into a ship of death, or a more ambiguous symbol of some kind of release from the earth. They believe also, erroneously, that the boas are poisonous.’
    There was the recognizable, inconclusive pause for thought; then a tentative ‘I suppose as a religious symbol it may well be more paradoxically used than any other – natural phenomenon.’ Then, more surely, ‘We know, in fact, very little about how snakes move. They have three basic types of progress – lateral, undulatory motion, rectilinear locomotion – which you have