Maia

Out through the curtain of falling water stepped a girl, perhaps fifteen years old: sturdy and well-made, the very picture of youthful energy and health, her naked body glistening as the cascade beat down upon it, pouring in streams from her shoulders, her out-thrust breasts and the firm curve of her buttocks. Laughing, she flung back her head and for a moment took the full force of the fall in her face; then, spluttering, she threw up her arms and spread her open hands to shield herself from the water. In this posture she rocked on her heels, swaying back and forth, now disappearing behind the water-curtain, now covered with it as by a bright, translucent cloak and again leaning forward to leave the torrent unbroken at her back.

Despite the bloom and opulence of her body and the words of her song, both her face and a certain ingenuous quality in her bearing suggested the child rather than the woman. Her absorbed, joyous movements as she played her game (not far removed from hide-and-seek or peep-bo), in and out of the water-curtain; her impulsive, unself-conscious delight, like that of a creature unreflectingly happy in the immediate moment; her very nakedness in this open (if lonely) spot-all denoted a girl who, while she might have learned already to know the world as a place where one could be tired, hungry or even ill, had never yet found it perilous or cruel, or become aware (except perhaps in. stories or songs) of the kind of danger which would certainly have been present to the mind of an older girl bathing alone in this wilderness. Not that she was unconscious of her early maturity and beauty: indeed, standing under the fall, deliberately moving so that the inexhaustible water deluged and caressed in turn her shoulders, her belly, thighs and rump, she appeared sensible of nothing else.

Longing for the future, dwelling on it, even enacting it in imagination-such blending of syrupy concoctions never includes the sharper ingredients infused by experience. These would be as unpalatable to the immature taste of young girls (who are free to exclude them from their dreams) as they often are to the taste of grown women (who are not free to exclude them from their lives).

At length, tiring of picking her way back and forth along

the cool, slippery recesses behind the fall and looking out- like a sentry from a castle-through rifts in the falling water, the girl burst through it once more, hop, skip and jump on the stones, plunged headlong into the pool and swam swiftly down to the shallow water at its foot. Here, as the sand and small gravel of the bed brushed her prone length, she came to rest, turned on her back and lay spread-eagled, legs apart, her head resting on a convenient, flat stump just above the surface.

" "The flowers of spring, Lord Cran, they cannot be

counted.'

Isthar, isthal a steer. 'They bloom in the green field where the mare was

mounted.' Isthar a steer, na ro, isthal a rondu.

'I will tell thee, my daughter-' "

She giggled, sinking a few moments below the surface, so that the words were lost in bubbling. Then, standing up, she began wandering here and there through the shallows, pulling the long-stalked lilies, gold and pink, piercing their fibrous, dripping stems with her thumb-nail and threading them into a wreath. A tangle of scarlet trepsls hung over the opposite bank, and she waded across and wrenched out half a dozen strands, twining them into the lily-garland until it was nearly as thick as her arm.

Hanging it round her neck, she stood dabbling her feet, picking up sticks between her toes and bending her head this way and that to smell the great collar of bloom that covered her shoulders. Then, off again like a child who cannot remain still but must find some outlet for its energy, she began gathering more flowers-pulling tufted heads off the clustering hellias, plucking daisies out of the grass, campions, orange ladies' cups-whatever came to hand. She made a belt, bracelets of flowers and a lopsided, fragile crown that would not hold together until she had bound it with another strand of trepsis. She put a crimson flower behind each ear and another in the hollow of her navel- whence it almost at once fell out. Then, smiling-for in imagination she was teasing an outraged, invisible companion-she tore up a sheaf of forget-me-nots and, pinching the thin stems one by one from the plant, threaded them in and out of the fleece of hair at her groin, until it

was first speckled and then almost completely hidden beneath a close mat of small, sky-blue flowers.

"I am the Queen of Bekla!"