Forcing myself to run, I set off towards the forest, where I entered the first of the caves of light. I whirled my arm like a clumsy propeller, and felt the crystals recede slightly. By luck I soon reached a tributary of the river, and hurled myself like a wild man along its petrified surface.
For many hours, or days, I raced through the forest I can no longer remember, for all sense of time deserted me. If I stopped for more than a minute the crystal bands would seize my neck and shoulder, and I ran past the trees for hour after hour, only pausing when I slumped exhausted on the glass beaches. Then I pressed the jewels to my face, warding off the glac sheath. But their power slowly faded, and as their facets blunted they turned into nodes of unpolished silica.
Once, as I ran through the darkness, my arm whirling before me, I passed the summer house where Captain Shelley kept guard over his dying wife, and heard him fire at me from the veranda.
At last, late one afternoon, when the deepening ruby light of dusk settled through the forest, I entered a small clearing where the deep sounds of an organ reverberated among the trees. In the centre was a small church, its gilt spire fused to the surrounding trees.
Raising my jewelled arm, I drove back the oak doors and entered the nave. Above me, refracted by the stained glass windows, a brilliant glow of light poured down upon the altar. Listening to the surging music, I leaned against the altar rail and extended my arm to the gold cross set with rubies and emeralds. Immediately the sheath slipped and dissolved like a melting sleeve of ice. As the crystals deliquesced the light poured from my arm like an overflowing fountain.
Turning his head to watch me, the priest sat at the organ, his firm hands drawing from the pipes their great unbroken music, which soared away, interweaved by countless overtones, through the panels of the windows towards the dismembered sun.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.
For the next week I stayed with him, as the last crystal spurs dissolved from the tissues of my arm. All day I knelt beside him, working the bellows of the organ with my arm as the Pelestrina and Bach echoed around us. At dusk, when the sun sank in a thousand fragments into the western night, he would break off and stand on the porch, looking out at the spectral trees.
I remembered him as Dr Thomas, the priest Captain Shelley had driven to the harbour. His slim scholar’s face and calm eyes, their serenity belied by the nervous movements of his hands, like the false calm of someone recovering from an attack of fever, would gaze at me as we ate our small supper on a foot-stool beside the altar, sheltered from the cold allembalming wind by the jewels in the cross. At first I thought he regarded my survival as an example of the Almighty’s intervention, and I made some token expression of gratitude. At this he smiled ambiguously.
Why he had returned I did not try to guess. By now his church was surrounded on all sides by the crystal trellises, as if overtopped by the mouth of an immense glacier.
One morning he found a blind snake, its eyes transformed into enormous jewels, searching hesitantly at the door of the porch, and carried it in his hands to the altar. He watched it with a wry smile when, its sight returned, it slid away noiselessly among the pews.
On another day I woke to the early morning light and found him, alone, celebrating the Eucharist. He stopped, halfembarrassed, and over breakfast confided: ‘You probably wonder what I was doing, but it seemed an appropriate moment to test the validity of the sacrament.’ He gestured at the prismatic colours pouring through the stained glass windows, whose original scriptural scenes had been transformed into paintings of bewildering abstract beauty. ‘It may sound heretical to say so, but the body of Christ is with us everywhere here — in each prism and rainbow, in the ten thousand faces of the sun.’ He raised his thin hands, jewelled by the light. ‘So you see, I fear that the church, like its symbol — ‘ here he pointed to the cross ‘- may have outlived its function.’
I searched for an answer. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps if you left here—’ ‘No!’ he insisted, annoyed by my obtuseness. ‘Can’t you understand? Once I was a true apostate — I knew God existed but could not believe in him. Now,’ he laughed bitterly, ‘events have overtaken me.’
