AND AS I stood there, seeing the world through the Masquerade’s eyes, an excruciating horror coursed through me. Revolving in the sky, high up above the people, I found myself looking down on the perforated zinc rooftops. My head was swirling, there was fire in my brain, and acids in my spirit. Evil whisperings flooded my mind. Horrible incantations of ritual power were breathed into the Jackal’s head by the blind old man, sorcerer of manifestations. Weighed down with hideous spells, I realised with the greatest terror I have ever known that I had entered the universal mind of evil things, numinous things, the thoroughfares of indescribable forces that were spreading their empires over the air and night-spaces of the world. I had entered the Masquerade’s mind, I was trapped, and didn’t know how to get out.
The Masquerade’s head was a mighty house. It was not one mind, but many; a confluence of minds. I wandered in its consciousness and found a labyrinthine kingdom. I saw its pyramids, its cities, its castles, its great palaces, its seas and rivers. I saw its moats and marshlands, its architectural wonders, its splendid dungeons and torture-chambers, its vast armies and police networks, its slaves, cabals, mind-engineers, spirit-distorters, reality-manufacturers, history-twisters, truth-inventers, soul-transplanters, dream-destroyers, courage-grinders, love-corrupters, hope-crushers, sleep-eaters, hunger-producers, money-farmers. I saw its great universities, its infernal libraries, its arid museums, its numberless colleges of spies, its control centres, its government-creating agencies, its heresiarchs, its unbelievably beautiful gardens and radiant plants, and astonishing canals, its numerous orchestras for the production of poisonous music, its cunningly seductive art, its spirit-mangling paintings, its negation-breeding poetry, and I even read some of its brain-scrambling books, written in the most hypnotising calligraphic hand. What shocked me more than anything else was the uncanny sense of order in the kingdom. There was no chaos, no confusion, no alternatives, no dialectic, no disturbances. It was almost peaceful, almost – paradisial. It was a strange kind of utopia. The wind was serene, the sunlight blessed, the water brilliant, the grass pure, the earth fertile. There were no dreams in the air, there was no tension, no poverty, no yearnings, no hunger. And there was, mostly, silence. Many minds flowed into the kingdom of the Masquerade. They flowed there from all over the world. They also flowed outwards. I could see the waves spreading to all nations. I saw the invisible Masquerades of the western world, saw their worshippers of order, money, desire, power, and world domination. I saw the great white Masquerades of the eastern nights, the goddesses who ate children in desert towns, the gods who ate their offspring in machines and secret wars. I saw the diverse goddesses of fear and nightmares, who were worshipped with the blood of dissenters, worshipped in dreams. I saw the powers of the Kingdom, how it manufactures reality, how it produces events which will become history, how it creates memory, and silence, and forgetfulness, how it keeps its supporters perpetually young and vigorous, how it protects them, seals their lives with legality.
I wandered lost and frightened, my entrails turning into fire, my feet bleeding on the invisible broken glass paths of the kingdom. I wandered the infernal mazes, with pepper bursts in my being, and I saw eyes opening in the air, following me, spying on me. Separated from my body, trapped in the Masquerade’s kingdom, I began to weep.
I wept for my terrible fate. I saw at once that if I lived I would have to struggle for ever and without much hope against the insidious permeating extensions of the Masquerade’s kingdom. I would have to fight against it, never certain of succeeding, never sure of companionship, possibly always betrayed by love. I would have to fight, to help spread some light which the darkness would devour, and I would run out of candles and lamps and all proverbial forms of illumination, till I found a way to incarnate light, to become a new illumination, shedding light and seeing by it, burning fiercely and gently for all the world that I had come to love, for all that I wanted to see, burning my being away, without rest, and without the certainty of transformation. I saw how my mother and father were doomed in the struggle. And I understood what mum meant when she buried her jewels in the sacred earth of the forest. And my heart grieved for all spirit-children, for all who had once been children, and for those who are children now – for in the Masquerade’s kingdom the world seemed so hard, the struggle so unremitting. My being always aches for joy. And it seemed better to return to the spirit world and play by the fountains with the beautiful fauns than to struggle against the empire of the Masquerade’s dominion, and to do this for ever, hoping every day that a miraculous light would emerge to make the world grow more beautiful for all.
As I wandered in the labyrinths I stopped and burst into the most profound weeping, and laughter echoed back at me from the immensity of the kingdom, from its glacial silence. I realised that my weeping was turned into laughter. And the laughter multiplied everywhere, blowing a volcanic wind through the Masquerade’s mind, regenerating the immeasurable negative powers all over the earth. And then I stopped weeping: I saw how my wailing was feeding the kingdom.
I was listening to the wind when a gentle voice said:
I turned, and saw the white horse.
‘I got here by accident,’ I replied.
Another voice, behind me, said:
‘You can’t come here by accident. You must know how to enter.’
I turned, and saw Madame Koto. She was enormous and extremely beautiful. She wore a golden robe. Her eyelashes shone with antimony.
‘I was in front of your bar and I looked up and then I found myself here.’
‘Liar!’ a harsh, more ancient voice cried.
It was the blind old man. He looked handsome and healthy, and was covered in silver bracelets. He was carried on a litter by nubile young women. Around him was a retinue of servants, and the resplendent peacock walked in front of him. The blind old man was a great chief in this kingdom.
‘I want to go back,’ I said.
‘Go back to where?’
‘I want to get out of this place.’
‘Get out then,’ the blind old man said, chuckling, as if he were an old antagonist, older than my memory, which on days when my body’s light dims goes back a thousand years.
I turned to Madame Koto for help: she had vanished. I turned to the white horse: only its black shadow remained. I turned to the blind old man, and the wind blasted volcanic ash into my eyes. The searing agony, eating deep into my spirit, made me scream. Tossing and shouting, I realised in a flash of intuition that, before it turns into wailing, laughter might release me from the spell of the kingdom. And I kicked about and fought and contorted and laughed on the sand, till someone threw water in my face and a woman’s voice said:
‘What is wrong with you? Are you mad?’
Someone else whacked me on the head. I opened my eyes and saw a red ghost peering at me and I screamed again and jumped and ran and found myself in the empty bar. There were flies all about. Dad was sitting in the shadow of a far corner. He had a green hat on his head. His face was lowered. He was mulling over a calabash of palm-wine.