Briefing for a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing Page B

buildings, in what seemed like the centre of the old city, what might very well have been the former central square, was an expanse of smooth stone which was not interrupted by flowers or by water channels. The square was perhaps seventy or a hundred yards across, andin it was an inner circle, about fifty yards across. It was a little cracked, where earth had settled under it, and some grass grew in the cracks, but it was nearly flat, and it waited there for what I had to do. I knew now what this was. I had to prepare this circle lying in its square, by clearing away all the loose dirt and pulling out the grass. And so I began this task. It took longer than it should have done, because I had no tools at all. But I tore off a strong branch and used it as a broom. And when the dirt was all swept away and the grass pulled up, I brought water in my cupped hands from near channels, and splashed it down. But this took too long, and then I searched until I found a stone that had a hollow in it which might have been used as a mortar for crushing grain once, and I used that to carry water. To clear and prepare that circle in the midst of the city took me nearly a week, during which I worked all day, and even at night when the moon came up. Now I lay down to rest between the sun’s setting and the moon’s rising, and worked on under the moon, lying down again to rest between moon-fall and sunrise, if there was this interval.
    I was not tired. I was not tired at all with the work. I was not even particularly expectant of anything. I knew only that this was what I had to do, and could only suppose that my friends must have told me so, since it was after my dream of them that I had known it.
    Now the moon was in its last quarter and making a triangle, sun, earth, moon, whereas when I had reached that coast it was full, and sitting on the plateau’s edge and staring into the moon’s round face I had had my back to the sun, which was through the earth, and the sun stared with me atthe moon. Then the pulls and antagonisms and tensions from sun and moon had been in a straight line through the earth, which swelled, soil and seas, in large bulges of attraction as the earth rolled under the moon, the sun; but now the tension of sun and moon pulled in this triangle, and the tides of the ocean were low, and the great sky was full of a different light now, a fainter bluer moonlight, and the stars blazed out. I did not know why I thought so, but I had come to believe that it was the next full moon that I was waiting for.
    I moved my pile of drying leaves to the edge of the circle in the square. Now that all expanse of stone was washed and clean, patterns glowed in it, continuous geometrical patterns that suggested flowers and gardens and their correspondence with the movements of the sky. Even in the thinning moonlight the patterns loomed up milkily, as I lay on my elbow in my pile of leaves. I lay there in the dimming moonlight, and listened to the wind in the grasses, the tinkling of the water that ran invisibly in its channels, and sometimes the hard crackle when one of the dried leaves of my bed cartwheeled and skittered across the stone floor as I watched and watched all night, in case I might be wrong, and the visiting Crystal descended now, in the moon’s wane. When I was ready to sleep, I lay on my back, with one arm out over the stone which held the day’s warmth, and I closed my eyes, and let the moon and the starlight drench my face. My sleep was ordered by the timing of the moon. I was obsessed by it, by its coming and going, or rather, by its erratic circling in wild crazy loops and ellipses around the earth, so that sometimes it lay closer to the North,sometimes circled lower over my head, at 15 degrees South, sometimes it looped lower still, so that with my head to the North, and my feet pointing to the Antarctic, the path seemed at knee level. In the dark of space was a blazing of white gas, and in the luminous envelope of this