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[168]
"I don't expect you've ever heard of a place called Vheissu."
She had not.
He started telling her about Vheissu. How it was reached, on camel-back over a vast tundra, past the dolmens and temples of dead cities; finally to the banks of a broad river which never sees the sun, so thickly roofed it is with foliage. The river is travelled in long teak boats which are carved like dragons and paddled by brown men whose language is unknown to all but themselves. In eight days' time there's a portage over a neck of treacherous swampland to a green lake, and across the lake rise the first foothills of the mountains which ring Vheissu. Native guides will only go a short distance into these mountains. Soon they will turn back, pointing out the way. Depending on the weather, it is one to two more weeks over moraine, sheer granite and hard blue ice before the borders of Vheissu are reached.
"Then you have been there, she said."
He had been there. Fifteen years ago. And been fury-ridden since. Even in the Antartic, huddling in hasty shelter from a winter storm, striking camp-high on the shoulder of some as yet unnamed glacier, there would come to him hints of the perfume those people distill from the wings of black moths. Sometimes sentimental scraps of their music would seem to lace the wind; memories of their faded murals, depicting old battles and older love affairs among the gods, would appear without warning in the aurora.
"You are Godolphin," she said, as if she had always known.
[. . .]
[170]
"The colors. So many colors." His eyes were tightly closed, his forehead resting on the bowed edge of one hand. "The trees outside the head shaman's house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the moonlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colours is the same from day to day.
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