284
PARTISAN REVIEW
nsmg, and falling into a paralyzing sea of white drifting fire and
smoking spume by which it seemed overwhelmed: and all this time
a sound, like a high sound of singing, yet as
sustain~d
in harmony as
telegraph wires, or like the unbelievably high perpetual sound of the
wind where there is nobody to listen, which perhaps does not exist,
or the ghost of the wind in the rigging of ships long lost, and perhaps
it was the sound of the wind
in
its toy rigging, as again the boat
slanted onward: but even then what further unfathomed deeps had
it oversailed, until what birds of
ill
omen turned heavenly for it at
last, what iron birds with saber wings skimming forever through the
murk above the gray immeasurable swells, imparted mysteriously
their own homing knowledge to it, the lonely buoyant little craft,
nudging it with their beaks under golden sunsets in a blue sky, as
it sailed close in to mountainous coasts of clouds with stars over them,
or burning coasts at sunset once more, as it rounded not only the
terrible spume-drenched rocks, like incinerators in sawmills, of Flat–
tery, but other capes unknown, those twelve years, of giant pinnacles,
images of barrenness and desolation, upon which the heart is thrown
and impaled eternally! - And strangest of all how many ships them–
selves had threatened it, during that voyage of only some three score
miles as the crow flies from its launching to its final port, looming
out of the fog and passing by harmlessly
all
those years-those years
too of the last sailing ships, rigged to the moonsail, sweeping by into
their own oblivion-but ships cargoed with guns or iron for im–
pending wars, what freighters now at the bottom of the sea he, Sigurd,
had voyaged in for that matter, freighted with old marble and wine
and cherries-in-brine, or whose engines even now were still somewhere
murmuring:
Frere
Jacques!
Frere
Jacques!
What strange poem of God's mercy was this?
.
Suddenly across their vision a squirrel ran up a tree beside the
cage and then, chattering shrilly, leaped from a branch and darted
across the top of the wire mesh. Instantly, swift and deadly as light–
ning, one of the lynx sprang twenty feet into the air, hurtling straight
to the top of the cage toward the squirrel, hitting the wire with a
twang like a mammoth guitar, and simultaneously flashing through
the wire its scimitar claws: Astrid cried out and covered her face.
But the squirrel, unhurt, untouched, was already running lightly
along another branch, down to the tree, and away, while the infur-
