light and glided away from under the feet....
“Brothers!” (It was she.) “Brothers, you all know that there inside the Wall, in the City, they are building the Integral. And you know also that the day has come for us to destroy that Wall and all other walls, so that the green wind may blow all over the earth, from end to end. But the Integral is going to take these walls up into the heights to the thousands of other worlds which every evening whisper to us with their lights through the black leaves of night....”
Waves and foam and wind were beating the rock:
“Down with the Integral! Down!”
“No, brothers, not ‘down’. The Integral must be ours. And it shall be ours. On the day when it first sets sail into the sky, we shall be on board. For the Builder of the Integral is with us. He left the walls, he came with me here in order to be with us. Long live the Builder!”
A second—and I was somewhere above everything. Under me: heads, heads, heads, wide open yelling mouths, arms rising and falling.... There was something strange and intoxicating in it all. I felt myself above everybody; I was,—I,—a separate world; I ceased to be the usual item; I became unity....
Again I was below, near the rock, my body happy, shaken and rumpled, as after an embrace of love. Sunlight, voices, and from above—the smile of I-330. A golden-haired woman, her
whole body silky-golden and diffusing an odor of different herbs, was near by. She held a cup, apparently made of wood. She drank a little from it with her red lips and then offered the cup to me. I closed my eyes and with avidity I drank the sweet cold prickly sparks, pouring them down on the fire which burned within me.
Soon afterward my blood and the whole world began to circulate a thousand times faster; the earth seemed to be flying, light as down. And within me everything was simple, light and clear. Only then I noticed on the rock the familiar, enormous letters: M E P H I, and for some reason the inscription seemed to me necessary. It seemed to be a simple thread binding everything together. A rather rough picture hewn in the rock; this too, seemed comprehensible; it represented a youth with wings and with a transparent body, and in the place ordinarily occupied by the heart,—a blinding, red, blazing coal. Again, I understood that coal, or no, I felt it as I felt without hearing every word of I-330 (she continued to speak from above, from the rock), and I felt that all of them breathed one breath and that they were all ready to fly somewhere like the birds over the Wall.
From behind, from the confusion of breathing bodies,—a loud voice: