After the flight of the angels, he did not feel quite the same. He wasn’t sure what had changed, but he felt as if he were at an angle inside himself. The sudden sight of the angels seemed to have twisted his neck in some obscure way. Besides, after their heavenly brilliance had passed, the world seemed a little darker.
He had entered another marvellous street. The moonlight made the chessboard universe quiver. At first, as he went down the street, he noticed huge white and silver forms looming high up in the air. He noticed the great extensions of their dazzling and partially concealed forms. They filled him with an unaccountably holy terror. The forms, alive in a way that only the most awesome things are alive, encompassed him with their total knowledge of his being. As he passed under them, he became even lighter. He felt himself changing into light.
The huge white forms above were recomposing him as he passed beneath their blinding radiance. They transformed him subtly. They re-ordered his being. Into the holes that terror had opened in him, they seemed to pour a dizzying understanding of all the nameless things he would need to know when he would need to know them.
It struck him that he was being filled to bursting with future knowledge and with joy enough to last all the darkness that was to come. He had no way of explaining it, but as he passed beneath the vast wings of the brilliant forms – radiating light like a new star – he seemed to feel an understanding of things before his time, beyond his time, beyond his life and quest, an understanding that flowed through from all the past and future ages.
As he went he heard strange whisperings within him, as if many voices in code were reciting, gently, into his heart and spirit, all the secret laws of known and unknown universes.
He had always thought himself invisible. He had always thought that invisibility was the worst thing that could befall a person or a people. But as he went under the beautiful power of the radiant wings hovering between earth and star, it occurred to him that he was becoming more invisible than he had ever known before, more invisible than he ever suspected was possible.
It frightened him that there were gradations of invisibility, gradations and depths. His mind spun in the pure horror of this notion. He felt himself sinking into those depths as he passed beneath the charged immanent wings. And as he sank deeper into new invisibilities he had a sudden monstrous suspicion of the endlessness of it, the bottomlessness of it, till he could imagine a stage of invisibility that shaded into the eternal, the infinite.
At that point his mind plunged into total darkness. He found himself spinning in that darkness. Then he felt himself falling, falling away from himself, falling without end into a darkness that got deeper and more unbearable. The only thing he could do to rescue himself from the sheer terror of his internal abyss was to scream. He screamed in absolute horror of becoming more invisible than he already was. So loud and so piercingly did he scream that the entire island seemed to resound with it. After a while he wasn’t sure if it was him or if it was the universe that was screaming. He felt himself falling through layers of the world’s unheard agony.
And when he stopped screaming, he stopped falling. And when he opened his eyes he found himself bathed in the most splendid black starlight. And up above, like a forgotten god of the mountains, a towering colossus made of primal light, was the startling presence of the great archangel of invisibility.
One moment she was there; the next moment she was gone. Her presence was so brief that it seemed a lightning flash of eternity had passed through him. When the great archangel disappeared, leaving a glorious intensity of lights in the giant spaces she had occupied, with her wing span alone seeming to cover the entire island, he felt that he too had become completely insubstantial, and mightier. He was not sure how, or in what way.
‘I don’t understand anything at all,’ he said to the wind.
‘Don’t try to understand,’ the voice, his guide, said to him. ‘Understanding comes beyond trying. It comes from beyond.’
‘Beyond where?’
The voice stayed silent.