THE MORNING WATCH
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found that in his sex he was as tightly shrunken as if he were a baby.
I could have died, he realized almost casually.
Here I
am!
his enchanted
body sang. I could be dead right now, he reflected in sleepy awe.
H
erc
I
am!
Now that he had his breath and was quiet he no longer tried to
control the rattling of his teeth but hung standing in the water, his head
so turned from the others that they might not see the silent unexpected
tears and, drowsily trying to make himself aware of the suffering to
which at this moment Jesus was submitting Himself, crying for tender–
n.ess and thankful wonder, gazed steadily into the beating sun.
But staying still so long, coldness at length overcame him, and after
swimming as fast as he could twice up and down the length of the
quarry, he stumbled out.
He had all but forgotten them; they were already drying themselves
with their shirts. Hobe's body was purplish; Jimmy looked as if he had
been caught in a blue net.
"What you trine to do?" Hobe asked. "Drownd yourself?"
"I was just swimming under water."
"I was damn near ready to dive in after you," Jimmy said, "when
you come up."
"We began to think you was drownded," Hobe said.
"No, I was all right," Richard said. He reached for his shirt.
«Heyy!"
he shouted.
Steering, serenely, his sutured brow, the sum of those several thrust–
ing curves which seemed not of themselves to exert strength but merely
to drink and send backward through them the energies of the guiding
head they guided, a snake more splendid than Richard had ever seen
before was just achieving a sandstone ledge and the first heat of the
risen sun. In every wheaten scale and in all his barbaric patterning he
was new and clear as gems, so gallant and sporting against the dun,
he dazzled, and seeing him, Richard was acutely aware how sensitive,
proud and tired he must be in his whole body, for it was clear that he
had just struggled out of his old skin and was with his first return of
strength venturing his new one. His style and brightness, his princely
elegance, the coldness of his eye and the knifelike coldness and sweet–
ness of his continuously altering line, his cold pride in his new magni–
ficence, were not at the first in the least dismayed, not even by Richard's
shout; only the little tongue, to Richard's almost worshiping delight
and awe, sped like a thready horn of smoke, the eye seemed to meet
Richard's and become colder and still more haughty, and the vitality of
his elegance advanced him still further along the stone: so that for a
few seconds Richard saw perfected before him, royally dangerous and to
