The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.
All efforts proved in vain. Many of the most energetic in the search were relaxing their exertions, and yielding to a gloomy sorrow. There seemed but little hope for the child; (how much less than for the mother!) but now, from the interior of that dark niche which has been already mentioned as forming a part of the Old Republican prison, and as fronting the lattice of the Marchesa, a figure muffled in a cloak, stepped out within reach of the light, and, pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, plunged headlong into the canal. As, in an instant afterwards, he stood with the still living and breathing child within his grasp, upon the marble flagstones by the side of the Marchesa, his cloak, heavy with the drenching water, became unfastened, and, falling in folds about his feet, discovered to the wonder-stricken spectators the graceful person of a very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing.
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The patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants. Upon his seeming decease, his friends were requested to sanction a post-mortem examination, but declined to permit it. As often happens, when such refusals are made, the practitioners resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure, in private. Arrangements were easily effected with some of the numerous corps of body-snatchers, with which London abounds; and, upon the third night after the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave eight feet deep, and deposited in the opening chamber of one of the private hospitals.
There were five men with him in the dark, softly padded body of the car. They pointed out landmarks, but in the fog he could not tell which great vague, fleeting building was the High Court and which the National Museum, which the Directorate and which the Senate. They crossed a river or estuary; the million lights of Nio Esseia, fog-diffused, trembled on dark water, behind them. The road darkened, the fog thickened, the driver slowed the vehicle's pace. Its lights shone on the mist ahead as if on a wall that kept retreating before them. Shevek sat leaning forward a little, gazing out. His eyes were not focused, nor was his mind, but he looked aloof and grave, and the other men talked quietly, respecting his silence.
When he was back in ha rooms, after dinner in the Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the unlighted fire. It was summer in A-lo, getting on towards the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music. Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical Harmonies on the chapel harmonium. They were as familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti, Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.
Long after Takver had fallen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his head, looking into darkness, hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert, the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid eyes, wto had said that one must work with time and not against it
Suddenly the forest began again, in space not time: under the helicopter theinfinitely various green of leaves covered the slow swells and foldings of the hills ofNorth Sornol. Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov had never walked among wildtrees at all, never seen a wood larger than a city block. At first on Athshe he had feltoppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence oftrunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass andjumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outward and upwardtoward light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the totalvegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like theothers he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun tolike it. Gosse teased him, calling him Mr. Gibbon; in fact Lyubov looked rather like agibbon, with a round, dark face, long arms, and hair graying early; but gibbons wereextinct. Like it or not, as a hilfer he had to go into the forests to find the hilfs; andnow after four years of it he was completely at home under the trees, more so perhapsthan anywhere else.
And with that he was off, a light walk like a long-legged cat, a green flickeramong the dark oaks of Tuntar, gone. Tubab followed slowly after him, still without aglance at Lyubov. A fine rain fell without sound on the oak-leaves and on the narrowpathways to the Lodge and the river. Only if you listened intently could you hear therain, too multitudinous a music for one mind to grasp, a single endless chord playedon the entire forest. 2ff7e9595c
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