He stopped.
What he was seeing was something he had never heard of before, had come across no reference to in his readings. The more surprised he became, the more he felt an obscure ease that could no more be likened to any he had felt before than the moment itself could be compared to any earlier moment.
He was crossing from the east to the west, from below to above, climbing the hill close to the unseen point that lay in the midst of the empty space between the Great and the Middle pyramids.
A fluid winter’s morning, but . . . that flashing incandescent light had nothing to do with the time of day and was in no way connected to the brilliance of the sun. He could not tell its source exactly; it might be that it came from within himself, but it bore no resemblance to that sharp, radiant lightning flash that heralded the painful headaches that he had brought with him into this world and with whose agonies his oldest memories were linked. No, this was a different kind of luminosity, both erupting unawares and holding steady.
Did it issue from any particular direction?
If not, then . . . then how could it be that it was limited to that dividing space, neither extending beyond it nor lessening before its borders nor embracing what lay above those? Soft. Penetrating. Sweeping aside the emptiness itself.
It occurred to him that it might be old, stretch back to some ancient time, just like the breath of air that people had readied themselves to inhale upon the opening of the recently discovered Tomb of the Sun Boat, though this luminosity could not be identified with any place or space or temporality—there were no dimensions, no content, no words to be comprehended.
Unpent.
Ever flowing.
A sense of repose such as he had never known possessed him, along with a mysterious sense of arrival. As he continued to stare, a green appeared, a shade of a verdant fertility that he had never before seen, he the lover of colors and their shades, always so avid to capture their shifts and engrave them on his inconstant memory. This green was rich and ripe, a single shade that did not fade or weaken. He had never seen it in the leaves of the trees or the plants of the countries he had toured or in the roots of the cacti in whose varieties and species he was an expert or in the flooded rice paddies that lay between the villages along the road to his place of birth.
It was a green that radiated light and on which nothing could cast a shade. It did not change at the edges of the pyramids; could this luminosity issue from within them?
The brilliance prevented him from continuing, from moving his feet. Indeed, his astonishment started to fade, his questions to cease, his vitality to be expunged. He found himself submissive in the face of the inpouring stillness, the upwelling repose.
He readied himself to continue, to move, for what was promised was limitless.
He moved.
His foot left itself, his arm separated itself from itself, his chest disengaged itself from itself. It was not within his power to remain thus suspended, half in bodily form, half in a form that he had never before known, occupying a space between the two constructs that followed the outline of the physical shape but was not it, that both affirmed it and denied it. Such was his condition.
He abandoned his attempt to depart. He was incapable of looking backwards to discover what was happening to him. He advanced propelled, borne along, floating in a being without borders, formed of the light and the green, rising to that point at the apex without ascending.