Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany Page B

dawned over the sands moonlit chases with gunshots echoing among the pyramids bullets biting into the sandstone of the sphinx’s paw as they had not since Napoleon’s time temples in the jungle the small plane’s engine growling as it settled among the monuments in the Valley of the Kings the sound of the twentieth century infiltrating the silence of a past so deep its bottom was source and fundament of time and of mankind itself and Poonkin’s voice acute to his own century said “You want those—you can have ’em. Somebody livin’ upstairs left ’em. Last white man in the building to go, too. Moved out four months ago. I used to read me my Bible,” Poonkin explained “First thing I did whenthe war was over was learn me to read some. Only one in my family, too; but I wouldn’t read stuff like that. Can’t see good enough to read no more nohow” and when Sam came back after working an anxious two more hours in Mr. Harris’s basement warmer by a corner paraffin heater and better lit by two kerosene lamps the magazines were in a shopping bag on a dry sheaf of newspapers beside the cellar doors closed now the bag leaning up by the brick wall when he lifted it on the paper beneath was a picture of K K K men in bedsheets holding high a torch menacing the darkness of the black newsprint from within the photo’s right framing the shopping bag just sitting there Sam thought where anyone could have taken it
    Anyone at all.
    That evening Sam worked late at Mr. Harris’s. When he left the store, the sky above the second story cornice was blue-black.
    Carrying the shopping bag filled with a dozen and a half of Poonkin’s magazines between the snow mounded against the stoops and the slush by the cars along the curb, it struck him: it was the powerless who produced most of the myths of power, as it was the poor who articulated the most staggering fantasies of wealth—in the same way it was probably the Philistines and illiterates who perpetrated the soaring images of art and poetry, which, once they came loose from the Edgar Guests, from the Currier-and-Iveses, the rest of the world was seduced by; and real poets and artists doubtless exhausted their lives trying to make them happen. And so desire fueled the engines of the world. But because he was neither a poet nor an artist himself, Sam did not even try to hold onto the insight. And by the time he was climbing the tall stoop around the corner from the park, he had forgotten it.
    Inside, Sam took off his coat, took off his shoes, pants, shirt, socks, till he was just in the long johns Hubert had given him—and put on his suit jacket. Hubert was in class tonight—and would go over to eat with Clarice in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen afterward. Sam sat in Hubert’s wing chair, took a magazine from the shopping bag, slid one bare footatop the other . . . and began to page through for the stories about the blinding sand, the brittle mummies, the cursed scarabs, and the lean, light-eyed men whose years away from civilization had burnt them black as Arabs or mixed-blooded Negroes, dangerous men, wise in the ways of the jungle, the East, the desert, quick with their fists and fine shots to a man, who knew what to do, what to say . . . .
    On the wall across from his bed, the back window had a curtain over it—and a drape. But, on finishing his fourth story in his second magazine and turning to the fifth, Sam glanced up to see the light at the drape’s edge. Frowning, he closed the pages, put the magazine down, and stood. Was there some sort of light shining up from the alley?
    Sam walked across the rug and pulled away drape and curtain.
    Through the window, the yard below was blinding: by the black walls, snow had ceased falling, and some high breeze had swept clouds away from—his eyes ascended to the ascent of the moon—the full orb. It blazed on the platinum