The Longing House

The history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. – Borges

After a severe and unexpected setback in my professional life, I decided to take a few days off and go for a holiday in the mountains. I wanted to reassess, I suppose, but I also wanted to forget. I chose the place I went to more or less at random, mainly because there was a bird sanctuary there and also something called a lava park on the slopes of a nearby volcano. The birds, I thought, might sooth my wounded soul; and the lava park re-awaken a sense of wonder at the strangeness of the world. As for the hotel, I picked that because of its price and its proximity to those other attractions. I did not really think about its name until I arrived there late on a weekday afternoon, just in time to check into my room, take a hot bath and then go to the restaurant for dinner.

I noticed that the signage varied in curious ways: sometimes it was ‘The Longinghouse’, sometimes ‘The Longing House’; and once, on a mat, ‘LonGing HoUsE’. Later one of the wait staff told me that the owner had in his youth wanted to become a writer; then studied as an architect, thinking he might express himself through the designing of buildings; and finally settled on hotel management as a way of combining his need for self-expression with his desire to serve a community. The décor was faux Victorian English, all heavy oak and red leather, and the menu, unusually for that time and place, featured vegan alternatives, with a marked emphasis upon fresh vegetables in the cuisine. The clientele they hoped to attract, my waitress said, was single urban women looking for a healthy, safe and quiet place to recharge their batteries.

There was only one other person in the restaurant besides me, a woman in her forties perhaps who fitted that description, with a bobbed haircut and a sharp, almost predatory profile, sitting alone on a raised floor on the other side of the room, a bottle of red wine open before her. She seemed self-possessed, indeed self-absorbed, as she slowly ate her food, pausing now and again to sip her wine. The hotel’s policy was, if you did not finish a bottle at a sitting, you could take it back to your room with you; and that is what she did when, in time, she gathered up her possessions and, without once looking in my direction, left the room. It was dark by then and I did not see which way she went. When I finished my own meal, I went out into the courtyard where several late model expensive cars, alongside my own older and cheaper one, were parked, and crossed over to the adjoining building in which my room was situated.

I had noticed, earlier, that the foyer doubled as what they called on their website ‘The Library’. Three self-contained booths, with bench seating before wooden tables, stood parallel to each other beneath high shelves which ran the length of the wall. They contained a number of heavy old books, all bound in red and gold, plus some knickknacks which seemed incongruous to me. I remember a pair of horses cast in some kind of silver metal; a doll made out of straw and dressed in blue and white checked gingham, with long golden plaits; and the grimacing head of a demon which was, I found out later, the spirit who inhabited the volcano and caused it, on occasion, to erupt. I am a reader and I was curious to find out what this collection of old books might be; however, by this time, after a long day’s drive, a hot bath and a heavy evening meal, all I wanted to do was sleep. I decided I would look at them more closely in the morning. 

Next morning, however, I slept late and had to hurry to make the breakfast room at the appointed time; so I took only a cursory glance at the spines of the books. It was enough. I saw that they included a number of volumes of two of the most famous of all the many sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: the 9th, the so-called Scholar’s Edition, which began publication in 1875 and completed in 1889; and the even more famous 11th edition of 1911, which came out all at once, was the last published in England and the first to include substantial contributions from American scholars. It was, I knew, beloved of the Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, who owned a full set, all twenty-nine volumes, including the index. It was, some say, a pinnacle as well as a milestone; within three years the world would descend into war and Europe as she had been would disappear forever, along with much of her wisdom and her learning.

Over breakfast, which I ate alone in a private room on an upper floor of the restaurant, I tried to remember the Borges story whose plot turns upon the discovery of an entry in an encyclopaedia concerning a mythical land which, as the tale unfolds, becomes increasingly real, to the point where it replaces the configuration of our world with its own. I couldn’t recall the exotic names which make up the title of the story, nor could I figure out how the various entities — there are three — related to each other; but I felt sure I could find the story without too much trouble online and determined I would do so once I had investigated in more detail the volumes in the library.

Alas, when I returned there, I found the woman I had seen the night before in the restaurant sitting in the middle alcove of the library with her immaculately coiffured bobcut, her laptop open, a black coffee in a paper cup beside her, and a glass of water next to that. I paused but she did not look up. Behind her was one of the two sets of encyclopaedias, those from the 9th edition, which I could not come near without disturbing her. I could, however, examine those of the 11th. I photographed their spines with my mobile phone and, at random, took down one of the volumes and opened it. It was #27-28, TON to ZYM, and the first entry concerned Tonalite: ‘in petrology, a rock of the diorite class, first described from Monte Adamello near Tonale in the Eastern Alps. It may be described as a quartz-diorite containing biotite and hornblende in nearly equal proportions.’

That didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular so I returned the volume to its place on the shelf. The woman with the bobcut had still not shown any sign she even knew I was there, although she must have. I was in her line of sight, had she looked up from her screen; but she did not. I felt obscurely ashamed of myself, as if I was stalking her; or rather as if I wanted her to notice me, wanted her to engage with me in some way. In fact, what I really wished for her to do was move out of the way so I could look at the spines on the volumes of the 9th edition; but how could I do that? Especially since she did not deign to register my presence. I left the rest of the volumes unexamined and returned to my room, first to look at the photo of the books of the 11th edition, then to see if I could find the Borges story.

They were, for what it is worth, these: Vol. 3-4 AUS to CAL; Vol. 5-6 CAL to CON; Vol. 9-10 EDW to FRA; Vol.11-12 FRA to HAR; Vol. 19-20 MUN to PAY; Vol. 27-28 TON to ZYM; plus a supplementary, one of the so-called New Volumes: Vol. 31-32 ENG to ZUL. All encyclopaedias (not to say all books) go out of date as soon as they are published; all are in a constant state of revision. In the case of the Britannica, in its print-based phase at least, these revisions came out as supplementary volumes; which is why 31-32 took up a comparatively large alphabetical range compared with the others.

I noted that this particular edition combined two volumes of the original publication between one set of covers, suggesting it was published later than 1911. However, since I had neglected to look at the imprint page, I did not know when. Beyond that, I felt a kind of vertigo in the face of the vastness of the enterprise, the sheer amount of information, much of it since proved erroneous, contained in even these few books; the impossibility of ever comprehending what it amounted to or what its significance, if any, might have been. There are those, I know, who have read editions of the Britannica from beginning to end; an American businessman, Amos Urban Shirk, did so with the 11th and afterwards with the 14th (which he said was a great improvement). I felt so intimidated I could not even read in full the one and half pages devoted to a description of Tonalite.

On the question of its veracity or indeed reliability I’ll quote another American, the writer Willard Huntington Wright, an art critic, a modernist, a Germanophile, a cocaine addict, later an alcoholic, who in the 1920s published, under the name S S Van Dine, a series of popular detective fictions featuring a private eye called Philo Vance. In 1917, under his own name, Wright wrote Misinforming a Nation, an extended critique of the 11th edition saying, amongst much else, that it was ‘characterized by misstatements, inexcusable omissions, rabid and patriotic prejudices, personal animosities, blatant errors of fact, scholastic ignorance, gross neglect of non-British culture, an astounding egotism, and an undisguised contempt for American progress’. The date, 1917, is surely significant as the year in which the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies and against Wright’s beloved, if brutal and antiquated, Prussians.

The Borges story, as I had anticipated, wasn’t hard to find. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington State, had posted it at a site called, mysteriously, politicalshakespeares. It is of course the famous Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius (1940) and, at a little over 5000 words, one of Borges’ longest stories; nevertheless, still short enough to be read at a sitting. Understanding its complexities, however, might take a little longer. I won’t attempt a summary but will essay a brief exposition of its subject matter. Uqbar is a fictional country, notionally in the area north of Iraq, between the Black and the Caspian Seas, where Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are now. Tlön is a world invented by the inhabitants of Uqbar, a part of their mythology, you might say, their literature perhaps, or even their philosophy. Meanwhile Orbius Tertius is a secret society, founded in the late seventeenth century by some extreme idealists, who included Bishop Berkeley, and whose ambition was (or is) to project these two imaginary worlds into our own in such a way as to replace what we call reality with their own mythic constructions. If the attempt is successful (and in the story it seems that it will be) Earth will become Tlön.

The story turns upon a sentence found in an encyclopaedia, describing a belief held by an heresiarch of Uqbar: ‘For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.’ The encyclopaedia in question, Borges says, is The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), ‘a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902’. Three separate copies of this cyclopaedia are examined in the course of the story and in one of them, at the very end of Vol. XLVI, between pages 917-921, is an entry on Uqbar. This doesn’t appear in the other two, both of which conclude Vol. XLVI with Uppsala. Meanwhile in all three copies XLVII begins with a consideration of the ancient city of Ur. This I interpret as a sly, typically Borgesian nod to the notion of an ur-text as the original or earliest version of a piece of writing, to which later revisions may be compared to ascertain their status.

The 1902 Encyclopaedia he mentions is more usually called the 10th edition (1902–03) and is in fact a reprint of the 9th edition, along with an 11-volume supplement, with the succeeding volumes numbered from where the 9th left off; that is, from 25 to 35. Of these additions, the 34th volume is an atlas containing more than 120 maps, with a gazetteer, while the 35th volume has an index to all 34 previous volumes, a list of the contributors to them, and a key to the abbreviated symbols used as signatures to the articles. Here, for the very first time, ‘X’, signifying anonymity, appears. Borges’ description of the New York reprint as ‘delinquent’ refers to numerous mistakes in the production of the work, including errors of pagination which are crucial in a such a large, indexed work.

Does the Anglo-American Cyclopedia exist? Yes, it seems so: ‘a literal (but delayed and pirated) reprint of the 1902 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Typically bound in black and gold, the cyclopaedia was originally sold door-to-door in those countries where copyright could not be enforced.’ Including, I suppose, Argentina. This information took the wind out of my sails. There were no black and gold volumes in the so-called library at The Longing Hotel. Perhaps I had been hoping, subliminally, to find in one of them some equivalent to Borges’ discovery of the entry on Uqbar. I was probably thinking, half-unconsciously, that I might find an entry relating to Tlön — hence my choice to take down the volume Ton to Zym, of the 11th, the day before. Had there been an entry for it, I now realise, Tlön would have appeared in the previous volume, which wasn’t on the shelf. Later, when I had the opportunity, I looked at it again and ascertained there was no entry relating to Uqbar in it either.

If you have been following my somewhat desultory narrative thus far you will have realised that I was suffering from a form of delusion which is often indulged following a professional setback of some kind. A kind of magical thinking perhaps. As if I might find something in one of those books which would redeem me from the blow to my ego consequent upon my failure to progress in my working life. Something rare and unknown, something that, in its exceptionalism, would guarantee my own unique value. I was half aware of this myself; half aware, too, that my positioning of the woman with bobcut and laptop, like a dragon before treasure, between myself and my desire, was itself a form delusive thinking: so long as her presence prevented me from examining the books, I could hold on to the notion that in them lurked some extraordinary discovery which only I could make.

So that, when I next ventured out of my room, on some pretext or other, into the foyer / library and found her sitting there still, gazing at her screen, as before (but with the addition of a half-eaten sandwich on a plate beside her left elbow), I felt relieved. I decided to return to my original plan and spend the day exploring some of the attractions of the local area. I went back to my room and got myself ready for a walk in the woods. With canvas shoes on my feet, a straw hat on my head and a feeling that wasn’t too far away from a childlike excited anticipation, I set off to visit the bird sanctuary. It was about half an hour’s drive away from the hotel, down leafy, narrow mountain roads, a glade or two in a valley on the lower, gentler slopes of the volcano.

For some reason the navigator in my car took me to the opposite side of the sanctuary from the Visitor’s Centre where I had planned to begin my walk. It was a vestigial carpark, unsealed, with spaces (one of which was taken) for just three or four vehicles; but there was a noticeboard, with a map, and I decided, rather than driving further round the sanctuary, to walk to the Centre. The path was broad but unsealed, stony in parts, smooth in others. Sometimes there were steps. It went up for a while, through trees, then down, crossed a small area of open grassland, and plunged, more steeply, down to a creek bed. Another rise, another descent and soon I was walking down a paved road upon which the Visitor’s Centre hove into view: a low, modernist building, with architectural decorations, constructed on the shore of what might have been an artificial pond.

It was curious how few birds I saw on that walk, which took maybe twenty minutes. In fact I saw only one: a small, dark, anonymous silhouette flying from branch to branch in the canopy. The lack of birds, however, was more than made up for by the proliferation of bird watchers. I must have encountered a dozen or more, conspicuous by the equipment they carried: cameras, small and expensive, or large and expensive, with extravagant zoom lenses upon them; binoculars slung around their necks. I even met one couple, a man and woman, carrying fully extended tripods as tall as they were as the laboured along one of the paths. These people, without exception, regarded me with undisguised irritation. I was, I realised, a distraction, a disturbance, someone likely to scare away the birds, which were fugitive, shy, perhaps irritated themselves by the unfailing attention of the twitchers and photographers. Can birds be too much watched, too much photographed? Yes, I think they can.

There were not many people in the Visitor’s Centre, mostly tourists rather than bird-watchers, mostly old, queueing to use the facilities, which were compact, to say the least, and could only cater for one person, of any sex, at a time. I looked briefly at the photographs on the walls of mammalian wildlife that inhabited the sanctuary — black bears, red foxes, a kind of giant flying squirrel — as well as charts showing pictures of the birds I had not seen. I understood then that, because we were up on the slopes on a volcano, where the forest begins to thin and the trees to shrink in size, the bird life was not just sparse, it was small as well. The sanctuary was home to warblers, finches, tree creepers, buntings, flycatchers and the like and it was probably for this reason there were so many photographers about, hoping to catch a glimpse, or rather an image, of one of the tiny, rare creatures which populated the lower slopes of the mountain.

After I had looked at the wall displays, I bought a drink of water from the kiosk and went outside to sit down and drink it. The air was loud with the croaking of frogs. The pond, which was shallow, had a ridged bottom, as if there were heating elements concealed beneath the concrete. Or was it for freezing? The woman who sold me the tetra pack of pure mountain water said that, small though it was, the pond was used for ice skating in winter. The sky, which had started out cloudy, was clearing and there were scintillations of light on the surface of the water, below which I seemed to see some kind of black, spreading stain. When I took a closer look I realised there were hundreds, probably thousands, of tadpoles moving in great clouds, like nebulae, over the bottom of the pool towards the deeper water. Their black bodies seemed still to be connected to each other by the jelly of the spawn in which the eggs they had hatched from were laid.

It was impossible to imagine all of these tiny fish-like things growing legs, re-absorbing their tails and, eventually, hopping out on to the land. Indeed, I have heard somewhere that under certain circumstances a tadpole will remain a tadpole for the term of its natural life, however long that is — not very long, I suspect. Perhaps in time they might become salamanders. And it was then, irrelevantly, that I thought of a joke my son once told me. Not a very good joke, and a sound joke too; but it works in print. What do you call a fish without an eye? he asked. Of course I didn’t know so he supplied the answer: a fsh. These tadpoles, however, had eyes, bulbous extrusions which also seemed to partake of the jelly of the spawn from which they had come. I shuddered and turned away.

On the way back I took a different route and was suddenly surrounded by birdsong. ‘Song’ might not be the right word. I heard cheeps and trills, chirping sounds, squawks, the breathy, strangled suspense that presages the bush warbler’s shrill; then the shrill itself. Once I stopped for a man poised in the middle of the track, his camera held to his eye, pointing upwards into the canopy. He was quite still, indeed preternaturally so, and I could not understand how he could hold that pose without any camera shake. But that supposes it was moving footage he was taking, whereas it was more likely he was waiting for a particular bird to present itself to his lens in such a way that it would be worth his while to press the shutter button. I waited for what seemed like ages but was probably only a minute or so, before he sighed and lowered the camera from his eye. Had he even got the shot? I could not tell and he did illuminate me as I passed.

Further along I came to a rest house on the brow of small hill from which you could view the volcano, if it had not been shrouded still. I descended to the bank of another creek, running through a valley whose sides were dense with a growth of vivid green ferns which made a circle with their unfurling fronds; and spanned at intervals by mossy green logs like bridges which could only be crossed by small creatures, mammals, reptiles, even tree creeping birds. The path climbed again and I came out near the patch of grassland mentioned earlier. This, I learned at the Visitor’s Centre, was a good place from which to see the volcano so I walked down the path a way to see if the vapour had cleared yet from the sky. It had, or nearly so: the profile of the enormous flattened cone, with its rounded peak, was visible almost in its entirety: there was just a single patch of cloud obscuring the highest eminence, where the notch of the crater was, and even this looked as if it was about to dissipate.

Here I did something which is so out of character it perplexes me still. I stood and gazed at that cloud as if I could, by the power of my will alone, make it go away. I saw the ragged black shadow it cast upon the green and purple slopes of the mountain; I saw the ineffable blue of the summer sky behind; I imagined that cloud as a dragon, a lizard, a fish with fins and a tail. Sometimes it seemed as if it was indeed dissolving; at others it seemed to thicken and grow. I knew the volcano was active, that steam often rose from its crater; but could not tell if that was what I was seeing. I must have spent fifteen minutes engaged in this futile enterprise; in the end I left, with the summit still enshrouded. I felt strange, light-headed, almost free. When I returned to the carpark I discovered that the path I had taken through the sanctuary resembled a figure eight, otherwise known (when lying on its side) as the infinity symbol.

In town, beside the railway station, was a vast emporium, where several hundred boutiques selling branded merchandise stood side by side along covered avenues where shoppers in fashionable clothes, with fashionable dogs on leads, browsed. Various national and international brands had outlets here and people would come by train from the metropolis, not simply for the convenience, or the lower prices, but to have a day out. There were many restaurants and cafes too and at one of these, which called itself a bistro, I ate a lunch of meat and salad and bread. It was themed after a Mongolian yurt, and there were veritable tents inside, where you could sit cross-legged and dine, scattered here and there beneath the vast domed timber superstructure which mimicked the lattice of flexible poles which, on the high plains, would be covered by felt or some other fabric.

Afterwards I went into the old town to look for gifts to take back to my wife and my son. For my wife I bought a pale yellow jade pendant in the shape of a cat’s head, because she is and always has been a cat fancier. I knew that she would receive it ecstatically, wear it for a few days then add it to her collection of similar things, some of which I had also given her, others which she had received as gifts from family members, from friends, perhaps (who knows?) from admirers who pre-dated my arrival on the scene or even (perish the thought) remained contemporary with me. For my son I bought, from the same shop, a small oblong piece of green glass which, though undistinguished, I thought he might treasure, keeping it beside him at his desk when he was gaming, or carrying it with him in his pocket when he went out to work, servicing machines.

Then I went back to the hotel. Where, to my astonishment and perplexity, the Dragon Lady still sat before her laptop. I had more or less forgotten about her and to find her there again seemed like a re-entry into a tedious yet oppressive nightmare. It isn’t too much to say that her continued presence there among the encyclopedias affronted me. It was like a calculated insult, especially since, as before, she refrained from giving any indication that she knew that I was there. On the other hand, there was something admirable in her absorption. Her day, it seemed, had been a long one, judging by the empty take away coffee cups, the plastic water bottles and the discarded sandwich wrappings which surrounded her workplace. It was the kind of situation which, in a soap opera, demands a theatrical sigh that is overheard (and ignored) by the one who had occasioned it; but I suppressed this uncharitable urge, went to my room and prepared for my evening bath.

She was in the restaurant that evening too, in her usual place, on the raised portion on the other side of the room from where I sat; but this time we were not alone. A young couple had arrived — if those in their thirties may be called young — and they were in the first flush of the kind of romance which wants the world to see how much they love each other and how wonderful that love is. I watched them, covertly, as they wished to be watched. I do not know that the Dragon Lady even knew they were there; although they were visible from where she sat, with her back to the kitchen and a view out the window to the carpark. She had her bottle of red wine before her, sipping judiciously, as was her wont. As before, she finished her meal, gathered her things, picked up the unfinished bottle and made her way, past the lovers, towards the door.

It was then that she gave the only indication that she knew of my existence and perhaps even of my vague obsession with her. As she crossed the room she paused, as you do when you think you may have forgotten something; but she did not look back at her abandoned table but sideways, at me. Our eyes met, briefly, and she smiled, enigmatically but not conspiratorially: as if she knew something that I did not and, whatever it was, would never be divulged; or not to me. I had not seen her properly before. I mean I had only seen her in profile. Her face was round, rather plain, with full lips and almond shaped eyes; but I was struck, above all, by the signs of fatigue around those almond eyes and the worry lines on her forehead. This was the face of one who suffered, in the normal course of her days, from what I assumed to be a too great a commitment to her work.

When I returned, later, to my room I saw that the hotel staff had cleaned the desk where she had sat of its detritus. This meant that there was no longer any obstacle to my examining the volumes of the 9th edition she had, as it were, sat on guard before. The irony was that I no longer wished to do so. That look had destroyed my obsession, let alone my ambition. It was only out of a sense of duty (duty to what?) that I photographed their spines; and it is that same sense of duty that demands I record them here: Vol. VIII ELE to FAK; Vol. XIV KAO to LON; Vol. XX PRU to ROS; Vol. XXIV URA to ZYM; Vol. XXVIII ELE to GLA (new volumes); Vol. XXXI MOS to PRE (new volumes); Vol. XXXV Index.

The so-called New Volumes belonged to the 10th edition, the one published in 1902-3 and pirated in America in 1917, the one that Borges and his colleague consulted; and Vol. XXXV functions as the index for all of the thirty-four volumes which precede it, including the atlas. If there were anything about Tlön, Uqbar or Orbius Tertius in this edition, I thought, the way to find it would be to consult the index. But I wasn’t going to do that until the morning. And if the Dragon Lady had returned to her station, I would not do so at all. Tomorrow was, after all, my last day here. I intended to check out of The Longing Hotel, visit the Lava Park and then drive home to the city.

Next morning there was no sign of the Dragon Lady. She wasn’t there when I went to breakfast and she wasn’t there afterwards either. I did look into the Index but found nothing under any of those three words. No surprises there. I also looked into Vol. XXXI MOS to PRE in case there was an entry for Orbius Tertius; but there was not. I could not really understand any more why I had thought there might be. My vanished obsession seemed to have nothing to do with anything except perhaps the distressed state of mind I had been in when I first arrived at the hotel. Curiously enough, that too seemed to have departed. I wouldn’t say I was better but I was no longer compulsively re-playing the events of my recent humiliation in my mind.

When I went to return my key to reception, I mentioned my fellow guest to the young woman behind the counter, who doubled as a waitress and was, I knew, inclined towards gossip. It was she who had told me about the hotel owner who had once wanted to write.

Oh, her, she said. She left this morning.

What’s her story? I asked.

She’s a regular, the receptionist said. She comes here all the time. Every time she has a new book to write.

Oh, a writer, I said.

Yes, romances. She’s very successful but she publishes under a pseudonym and I don’t know what it is. I think the name she uses here is fake too. Amazing really. She writes a whole book each times she comes up. Or so she says. Takes her all of three days.

That is amazing, I said. She seemed very focused.

Oh yes, that’s her. We don’t like her because she’s rude to the staff. Well, not exactly rude, dismissive. She likes things just so and if they aren’t, she gets cranky. But her money’s just as good as anyone else’s.

With that, she ripped the paper receipt out of the terminal that had just debited my credit card and handed it to me.

Do come again.

It was only when I was walking to the car that it occurred to me I had the whole thing the wrong way round. Maybe, I thought, she is not a character in my story; maybe I am a character in hers. That would explain the enigmatic look, for instance, as well as her studied refusal to otherwise acknowledge me. Perhaps I had become the protagonist — or the antagonist — in her latest romance novel. Perhaps my evocation of her was actually her evocation of me. Was she writing me or was I writing her? After all, in this world, it is hard to tell who is a demon and who a subordinate god.

The Lava Park was further up the mountain than I had been before, past the treeline, where the truncated cone seemed vaster and more imposing than it had looked from lower down; though its colours were the same: sombre green, bruise blue, purple, black in the shadows, with one or two white streaks of snow lingering in gullies or on ridges. There was an enormous carpark, almost empty this weekday morning, and a gigantic, moribund Visitor’s Centre which had closed, perhaps due to some degeneration of the concrete out of which it was made. You passed this monstrosity and then crossed a bridge to the other side, where a newer Visitor’s Centre had been constructed. It was a circular tower, and it looked as if it did not have much time left before it too became a ruin.

A cluster of souvenir shops had been built beside the gates that led to the path which climbed up to the temple on the side of the mountain. The lumpy, twisted shapes of the solidified lava were all about; there was a key detailing the outcrops resemblances to things of this world: bears, perhaps, or pagodas. Dragon ladies. I paid no attention, preferring to look at them as things in themselves. The lava flow followed an eruption in the year 1783, nearly 250 years ago; the last time that malevolent demon stirred. In the interim, plants had begun to colonize the field and it was these impromptu gardens which I found enticing. Lichens and mosses had been succeeded by herbs and small shrubs. Some, azaleas or dwarf rhododendrons, pale orange and yellow, were still flowering; after them had come the miniature pines and the other dwarf trees. No matter how grotesque the original formation might have been, the growth of plants had softened their harshness and made an order which, while never symmetrical, was always pleasing to the eye.

There were few people about; and as I climbed I heard the tolling of a bell, reverberating in the quiet, still air of the day. Soon I came to the bell itself; one of the kind you see in temples all across the land, rung by retracting then letting go a horizontal wooden shaft with a muffled, metal tip, which strikes the side of the bell, which tolls. Usually only temple monks are allowed to ring them; unusually, here, anybody could ring the bell and most people did. I did too and heard the sound roll up towards the flank of the mountain. It seemed the bell was calling to the mountain while the mountain was calling to the bell. The volcano had been shrouded as I drove in but now, without any intervention on my part, the vapours had cleared and you could see its dark silhouette against the pale blue sky. Its profile resembled, a guidebook said, a sleeping man. Or rather a subordinate god.

After I had paid my respects at the temple, dropped some coins into the wooden repository, and made my wish, I went to sit on a bench beneath an aged pine tree which, by the thickness of its needles and the twistiness of its trunk, had probably been planted rather than grown here spontaneously. There was a view of the mountain; now and again, another pilgrim rang the bell and its deep sonority rolled through the air. A wind from the south blew up, whispering in the pines and ruffling my hair; it passed and then came again, as breath follows breath until we cease to be. Somehow the events, such as they were, of the last few days had freed me – to wander at will in other worlds than my own. I thought I had never known such peace before nor ever would again. And then I thought that, having once attained peace, how would I ever lose it? Even if only its memory remained.