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The great ocean where the islands had been was not frozen. I saw it then as I have seen it ever since. I was flying across the northerly part, and underneath me was water, where Adalantaland had been, as if it had never been. It was not that there were no islands left anywhere in those seas but that now they were clustered or fringed around the coasts of the Isolated Northern Continent on one side and the main landmass on the other—these being the Northwest fringes that later played such a part in Rohandan history.
I wondered that the ocean was not frozen. And even as I flew across the last of the waters before reaching land, I saw ahead of me that the snows were melting there—had already melted in some places, leaving floods and lakes and muddy expanses everywhere. By the time I did reach the mainland, and was flying into it, the snows had all dissolved in water… I was flying over a scene of mud and water and new rivers. I could not land anywhere, but went straight across the continent looking down at a soaked and watery scene whose changes I was not able to assess because I not been that way before. When I reached the opposite coast, on another vast ocean, I was able to see that pressures of some awful intensity had squeezed higher the mountain ranges that run from extreme north to extreme south of the isolated continents—if one were to imagine these continents shaped in some soft substance, like clay or sand, but on a tiny scale, as on a child’s teaching tray, and then pressure applied by some force right down one side of them, so that they buckle up and make high ridges and long mountain chains separated by narrow gorges and highlands, so had those two great continents been affected, and I had to postulate all kinds of pressuring forces deep inside the substance of Rohanda, under the ocean; and the visible signs of these were in the vast waters muddied and full of weed, and crowding jagged icebergs, and a metallic or sulphurous smell.
I floated southwards along these tortured mountains seeing how forests and rock and rivers had been heaved up and down and toppled and spread everywhere until I reached the south of the Northern Continent turned sharply inland to seek out Klorathy and the other Ambien. Again, I was not familiar with the terrain, but could see that, while everything had been soaked, so that lakes and sprawling rivers stained brown with earth lay everywhere, and the landscape was all mud, all water, all swamp and fen and marsh, yet there were expanses of forests that had not been overturned and mountains that seemed intact, if shaken. And in fact it turned out that the southern continents, partly and patchily frozen and soaked and shaken and squeezed, had come off much better than the northern areas, and had not been entirely devastated. I travelled on in clouds of steam that whisked up past my bubble and made turbulence that tossed and spun me, so that I felt as sick as I had done in the tempests of the great disaster, and all the blue Rohandan skies were coiling and churning with cloud. This had been a high, dry, sharp-aired landscape, and it would shortly become so again—yet I descended to where I had left the others through baths of warm steam. They were still there. On a wet muddy plain surrounded by the mountains of the dwarves were the tents and huts of the tribes, and splashing through mud and shallow lakes, the savages were dancing: were propitiating their deity, the earth, their mother, their source, their provenance, their protector, who had unexpectedly become enraged and shown her rage. And so they danced and danced—and continued to dance on, through the days and the nights. When I joined Klorathy, he was exactly where I had left him, seated in the open of his tent, apparently unoccupied, watching the dance of his protégés. And Ambien was near him.
We told each other our experiences: mine more dramatic than theirs: they had briefly been visited by tempests of snow, which been dissipated almost at once by floods of rain, the earth had shaken and had growled and creaked, some of the mountainsides had fallen and there would be new riverbeds ru
We pieced together, among us, the following succession of events: The planet had turned over, had been topsy-turvy for some hours, and then righted itself—but not to its old position: Klorathy’s instruments, more sensitive than ours, told him that the axis of the earth was at an angle now and this would mean that as this angled globe revolved about its sun, there would no longer be eve
I remember my meek enquiry, which was I am afraid all impertinence, to the effect that some might consider recent events to merit that word, and remember Klorathy’s smiling, but firm, reply that: “if one did not use the exact and correct words, then one’s thinking would soon become unclear and confused. The recent events…”—I remember I smiled sarcastically at this little word, “events”—“…did not in any fundamental way alter the nature of Rohanda, whereas the failure of the Lock, and the Shammat delinquency, had affected the planet and would continue to affect it. That a catastrophe, a disaster. This was unfortunate.” And he kept the pressure of his bronze or amber gaze on me, making me accept it.
Which I did. But I was raging with emotion. I thought him cold and dispassionate. I was thinking that being able to view the devastation of a whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to he warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now. I have already said that “hindsight” is not the most comfortable of possible views of oneself or of events. The mention of Shammat affected me—I knew of course that it was all guilt. But while I was clear in my mind that our Sirian delinquencies and deceptions that I could not confess to had caused barriers between me and Klorathy, my emotions expressed this in anger and a growing irritation with Klorathy, even a dislike…
I left him and went to my own tent, which was set on a high rock, damp but at least not saturated, and sat there by myself, looking down on the weird scene—the savages dancing and singing, on and on, in the splashing brown water and the mud, illuminated by a moon that appeared fitfully among the tumultuous clouds, and vanished amid the mists and fogs. Ambien I came to talk to me. He was conciliatory and gentle, for he knew how I raged and suffered.