A Fable

‘You may close——’ he said. Then he stopped. It was as though he didn’t anticipate the sound so much as he simply foreknew it, already motionless when the sound came into the window—an uproar thin and distant across the city, not diffuse now but localised and still curiously localised by source even when it began to move as if it were directed at some small specific object no larger than a man and it was not the yelling which moved but the object of it retreating slowly before the yelling—not turning back to the window but simply arrested beside it. Hooves clattered suddenly in the Place and a body of cavalry crossed it at trot and entered the boulevard leading toward the old eastern gate, already at canter and went on. Then for a time the sound of the hooves seemed to have dissolved into, been smothered by the yelling, until suddenly the cavalry had ridden as though into the yelling as into a weightless mass of dead leaves, exploding them, flinging and hurling them, to reappear the next second like centaurs in furious soundless motion intact in an intact visible cloud of swirling frantic screams which continued to swirl and burst in that faint frenetic tossing even after the horses must indubitably have been gone, still swirling and tossing in scattered diminuendo when the other sound began. It came up beneath them, beginning not as sound at all but rather as light, diffused yet steady from across the plain beyond the city: the voices of men alone, choral almost, growing not in volume but in density as dawn itself increases, filling the low horizon beyond the city’s black and soaring bulk with a band not of sound but light while above and into it the thin hysteric nearer screams and cries skittered and spun and were extinguished like sparks into water, still filling the horizon even after the voices themselves had ceased with a resonant humming like a fading sunset and heatless as aurora against which the black tremendous city seemed to rush skyward in one fixed iron roar out of the furious career of earth toward its furious dust, upreared and insensate as an iron ship’s prow among the fixed insensate stars.