The Sound of His Horn Read Online Free Page B

forest on the other side, sloping far away, down from the bare ridge. But no real moonlight, in Europe, at least, could have been strong enough to allow me to see those other woods so clearly: it was as if I saw them under a fresh, gay summer's morning, and ah--they were such different woods; not black, monotonous pine-forest, but a fair greenwood of oak and beech and ash and sweet white-flowering hawthorn. It was so enormous a contrast: the difference between night and day, between prison and freedom, between death and life. And looking down from my low ridge, I could just see, over the tops of the nearer trees on that side, a pleasant open glade and in that glade the pale shining of water in a little lake. It was agony to set my legs in motion once more; it felt as if my muscles had turned to stone; but I moved, straight down towards that glint of water.
    There was one other thing I saw, and, again, I'd give so much to know which eyes I saw it with; for in my heart I'm still not convinced that the shock I received was real. But all I know is that I did notice something there, between me and those inviting woods, something at odds with experience; a phenomenon that would have been unremarkable enough in a dream and which might yet be not impossible in reality. I felt, as I stumped so painfully down that gentle slope, that in front of me there was a kind of weaker light within the moonlight, some zone of faint luminosity stretching far away on either hand, not straight, like a searchlight beam, but slightly meandering as though it followed the contour of the ridge. I know it's inconsistent with physical laws that so feeble a radiance could be visible in the stronger light of the moon, and yet I swear I was aware of it. Was I outlawed indeed by then, not from man's laws but from Nature's?
    Nothing could have kept me from trying to reach that water. Once over the first agony of moving my limbs again, I broke into a stumbling run. I must have gone like a blind man, with my arms stretched out, groping, in front of me, for it was in my hands that I felt the shock first. It was a searing burn across my hands and wrists, then a shock that jarred along every bone in my body and shattered its way upwards, tearing out at the top of my skull; my eyes were pierced by a pain of yellow light, and my body, bereft of all its weight and cohesion, went whirling and spiralling upwards like a gas into the dark.
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    3
    The body, with all its limitations, is a safe and reassuring thing to hold to. I had jumped the gap, no doubt, but I was still aware of the other side. I did not remember it in more or less definite pictures or words, you understand, as you remember the events of last week or one day a year ago, but I
was
conscious of having existed before, of having had a fairly full and complicated history before I woke up in that clean and comfortable bed. It was my hands that bridged the gap. They were incontrovertibly mine, and they hurt a little. I kept looking at them as they lay on the sheet in front of me, neatly bandaged all over and quite useless to me, but very dear to me.
    Apart from the slight pain in my hands I have rarely felt so well and tranquil and at ease in my body as I did that morning when I first began to speculate about where I was. It was not by any means my first day of consciousness. I knew that I had been in that bright and airy room, with its scent of flowers mingling with the fainter odour of drugs and disinfectant and floor-polish, for quite a number of days. The white painted door and window-frame, the pretty curtain and the white wood furniture were all familiar to me, and I knew the faces of my two nurses quite well; they had been looking after me for a long time. It was just that that day I completed a gradual transition from passive perception to active observation.
    Had it not been that the nurses were in uniform I should have said that I was in a private house rather than a hospital: the room was too