Shikasta

I greeted her, she lifted her face, and I saw it set in dry, obdurate woe.

"I know what you are going to say," said she.

"Ben is trying again," I said. But when I looked back I could not see him: only the dust hanging reddish in the air, and the dry broken grasses. She looked with me, passively.

"He is there," I said. "Believe me."

"It is no use," she said. "I have tried so often."

"Are you going to sit here for the rest of time?"

She did not answer, but resumed her post, looking down, motionless. She seemed to herself a static weight, empty; to me she was like a whirlpool of danger. I could see myself, thi

"Rilla," I said, "I have work to do."

"Of course," said she. "When do you ever say anything different?"

"Go and find Ben," I said.

I walked on. Long afterwards I looked around - I did not dare before, for fear I would turn and run back to her. Oh, I had known her, I had known her well. I knew what qualities were shut up there, prisoners of her despair. She was not looking at me. She had turned her head and was gazing out into the hazy plains where Ben was.

I left her.

I had lost my way. Memories of the last time were not helping me, could not - everything had changed. I was looking for the abode of the Giants. I did not want to see them because of the degeneration I knew I would find. But they were the quickest way to Taufiq. Taufiq's condition, as captive of the Enemy, must be - could be no other - an excess of self-esteem, pride, silliness. I could contact Taufiq through the equivalent qualities here. The Giants, then... I had to!

Far away across the deserts were towering peaks of rock, bare black rock, like clusters of fists held into a blood-red sky. Purple clouds, unmoving, thick, heavy. Beneath them drifts of sand hanging in the air like armies of locusts. A still, moribund world. My long spidery shadow lay behind me almost to the horizon, following me black and menacing, an enemy. Shadows lay across the sands to my feet from the peaks. Deep tormenting shadows, full of memories... one of them bulged, moved, separated itself... out came a troop of Giants, and at the first sight of them I felt the movement of the heart like a leaking of strength that means sorrow.

This was the magnificence I remembered? These?

They were tall, their forms were something of what they had been, but they had lost strength and substance. A company of lean, lean-to, shambling ghosts, their movements awkward, their faces empty and full of shadows, they came towards me across the blowing sands, which kept rising and obscuring them and then billowed away behind them, so that they appeared again on a background of suddenly darkened sky, which was a blackish grey on red, grey making turbid the purple clouds, grey heavying and dragging everything, and rising in mists around their feet. They waded towards me through the eddying sands, wraiths, shadows... this was the great race I had come to warn on my first visit, came to warn and sustain, and - it was no use, I could not help it, I heard a wail of mourning come from my lips, and this was echoed by a wail from them, but in them it was a battle cry, or so they meant it. A sad mourning cry, and every gesture, every movement, was stiff with ridiculous hauteur, this company of wraiths was sick with pride of a falsely remembered past, and they would have struck me down with the bones of their arms and hands if I had not held out to them the Signature. They recognised it. Not at once or easily: but they were pulled up short, and stood on the sands in front of me, about two hundred of them, uncertain, half remembering, looking at me, at each other, at the glinting gleaming Thing I was confronting them with... and I was looking from one worn attenuated face to another and yes, I could recognise in those faces the kingly beings I had known.

After a while, at a loss as to what else to do, they turned about, enclosing me in their company, and walked, or stalked, or shambled towards the great rocks. Among these they had built a rough castle, or association of towers. These clumsy structures had nothing in common with what these Giants had built for themselves, in the First Time, but were expressions of pathetic grandiosity. I wanted to say, "Do you really imagine that this savage place is anything like what you created to live in when you were yourselves?"

They took me into a long hall of crudely dressed stone. Around the hall were set great chairs and thrones, and in these they placed themselves. At least they did have some inkling that they had been equal, a company of free companions. They sat in poses that said "power," in heavy robes that said "pomp," holding baubles and toys of all kinds, crowns and coronets, sceptres, globes, swords. Where had they found such rubbishy stuff? A trip must have been dared into Shikasta to fetch it!

I looked at these shadows and again was tormented with the need quite simply to keen out my mourning for the loss of all that the First Time had meant, but I was reminding myself not to waste my forces in this way, for I could not afford to let loose what I felt.

I held the Signature out before them, and asked them how they had fared since I had seen them last. A silence, a stirring, and the great hollow faces turned to each other in the shadows of the hall. I noticed I was finding difficulty in distinguishing their features, and peered closely at them. Shining black faces, the various hues of brown, of yellow, ivory, cream... but it was hard to see them. Over a hundred had trooped with me into the hall and filled the chairs and thrones, but it seemed as if there were fewer now. Some chairs stood empty. As I glanced around, chairs that had held occupants stood empty, as forms vanish in a deepening twilight. Only the Signature held light, and life, the Giants were so thin and grey and gone that they were almost transparent - yes, on a shift of pose they seemed to disappear, so that an enormous brown man in his gaudy robes would become a cloak folded over the back of a throne, and strong peering eyes searching my face for clues to memories only just out of mind would dwindle to the dull glitter of paste jewels in a broken tiara slung over the knob of a chairback. They were all dissipating and disappearing even as I sat there and watched.

I said to them, "Will you not take your chances on Shikasta? Will you not try to win through that way?" - but a hiss ran through the company, they moved their limbs and heads restlessly, they checked gestures of aggression, and would have killed me if it had not been for the Signature.

"Shikasta, Shikasta, Shikasta..." was the murmuring whisper all around me, and the sound was the hissing of a snake, was hatred, loathing - and a dreadful fear.

They were remembering a little of what they had been: the Signature induced this in them. Nothing much, but they did remember something splendid and right. And they knew what their descendants had become. That was what their faces stated: that even the word Shikasta confronted them with filth and ordure.

"I need to sit with you here," I said, "for as long as it takes me to make a visit to Shikasta."

Again the stirring rearing movement, like threatened horses.

I said, as it was my duty to do, even knowing that they would not listen (not could not, for otherwise I would not have wasted my energies, already depleting), I said, "Come with me, I'll help you, I'll do everything I can to help you win your way through and out."

They sat there frozen, this company of half-ghosts. They were unable to move. "Very well, then," I said. "You must sit where you are, till I come back. It is through you I can make this journey."

And surrounded by these hosts of the dead, sustained by their awful arrogance, I was able to part the mists that divided me from the realities of Shikasta, and search for my friend Taufiq.