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floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the
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ceilings are flat; each bay, sep-arated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems,
indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its
passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem, too, an appropriate setting for
some tale out of Mallory . . ."
"Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later
to become a common motif . . ."
"Faugh!" said Render softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.
"Shh!" said Jill (Fotlock that was her real last name) DeVille.
But Render was impressed as well as distressed.
Hating Jill's hobby, though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken
his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water on his head than to admit he occasionally
enjoyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting all out of
breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.
So he ran his eyes over everything, burnt everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again
out of the still smoldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date
he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in
this man-ner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.
The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over
his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ig-noring his guide, realizing this to be
the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two
sessions with Eileen Shallot.
He wandered with her again.
Where the panther walks to and fro on the limb over-head . ..
They wandered.
Where the buck turns furiously at the hunter . . .
They had stopped when she held the backs of her hands' to her temples, fingers spread wide, and
looked sideways at him, her lips parted as if to ask a question.
"Antlers," he had said.
She nodded, and the buck approached.
She felt its antlers, rubbed its nose, examined its hooves.
"Yes," she'd said, and it had turned and walked away and the panther had leapt down upon its back and
torn at its neck.
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She watched as it bayonetted the cat twice, then died. The panther tore at its carcass and she looked
away.
Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock . . .
She watched it coil and strike, coil and strike, three times. Then she felt its rattles.
She turned back to Render.
"Whythese things?"
"More than the idyllic must you know," he had said, and he pointed.
. . .Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou.
She touched the plated hide. The beast yawned. She studied its teeth, the structure of its jaw.
Insects buzzed about her. A mosquito settled on her arm and began to sting her. She slapped at it and
laughed.
"Do I pass?" she asked.
Render smiled, nodded.
"You hold up well."
He clapped his hands, and the forest was gone, and the swamp was gone.
They stood barefoot on stirring sands, and the sun and its folding ghost came down to them from the
surface of the water high above their heads. A school of bright fish swam between them, and the
seaweed moved back and forth, polishing the currents that passed.
Their hair rose and moved about like the seaweed, and their clothing stirred. Whorled, convoluted and
twisted, pink and blue and white and red and brown, trails of seashells lay before them, leading past walls
of coral, heaps of seasmoothed stone, and the toothless, tongueless mouths of giant clams, opened.
They moved through the green.
She stooped and sought among the shells. When she stood again, she held a huge, eggshell-thin trumpet
of pale blue, whorled at the one end into a concavity which might have been a giant's thumbprint, and
corkscrewing back to a hooked tail through labyrinths of spaghetti-fine pipette.
"That's it," she said. "The original shell of Daedalus."
"Shell of Daedalus?"
"Know you not the story, m'lord, how the greatest of artificers, Daedalus, did go into hiding one time
and was sought by King Minos?"
"I faintly recall. . ."
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"Throughout the ancient world did he seek him, but to no avail. For Daedalus, with his arts, could
near-duplicate the changes of Proteus. But finally one of the king's ad-visers hit upon a plan to locate
him."
"What was that?"
"By means of this shell, this very shell which I hold be-fore you now and present to you this day, my
artificer."
Render took her creation into his hands and studied it.
"He sent it about through the various cities of the Aegean," she explained, "and offered a huge reward to
the man who could pass through all its chambers and corridors a single strand of thread."
"I seem to remember . . ."
"How it was done, or why? Minos knew that the only man who could find a way to do it would be the
greatest of the artificers, and he also knew the pride of that Daedalus-knew that he would essay the
impossible, to prove that he could do what other men could not."
"Yes," said Render, as he passed a strand of silk into the opening at its one end and watched it emerge
from the other. "Yes, I remember. A tiny slip-knot, tightened about the middle of a crawling insect an
insect which he induced to enter at the one end, knowing that it was used to dark laby-rinths, and that its
strength far exceeded its size."
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