Shikasta. Doris Lessing

again, again found themselves here – on and on, for some, while others had given up all hope of ever being strong enough to enter Shikasta and win its prize, which was, by enduring it, to be free of it forever; and hung and drifted, thin miserable ghosts, yearning and hungering for ‘Them’ who would come for them, would lift them out and away from this terrible place as a mother cat takes its kittens to safety. The idea of rescue, of succour, was evidenced here always, at this gate, as strongly as I have known it anywhere, and the clutch and cling of it was maddening me.

      ‘Ben,’ I said, and I was speaking to them all, through him, ‘Ben, you have to try again, there is no other way.’

      But he was weeping and clasping me, begging, pleading – I was in a storm of sighs and tears.

      He had not given up. I could not accuse him of that! Again and again he had hovered waiting at Shikasta’s ‘gates’, and when his turn came he had gone down full of purpose and determination that this time at last … but then, it was not until he left Shikasta, after months or years or a full life-span (whatever it was at that time) that he remembered, back in Zone Six, what he had set out to do. He had meant to save himself by the use of the terrors and hazards of Shikasta so that he would crystallize into a substance that could survive and withstand, but when he came to himself he realized he had spent his life again in self-indulgence and weakness and a falling away into forgetfulness. Again and again … so that now he regarded the place with such horror that he could not force himself to line up with the crowds of souls waiting at the Shikastan entrances for a chance of rebirth. No, he had given up. He was doomed, like all the rest here, to wait and to wait until ‘They’ came to take him away. Until I came … and he held me and would not let go.

      I said what I had said to them before, to him before: ‘You must all make your way across the plain to the other side, and you must patiently wait your turn – but it will not be so long a wait now, for Shikasta is being crowded with souls, they are being born in droves, more and more. Go, and wait and try again.’

      A great clamour and a complaint went up all around me.

      Ben cried, ‘But it is worse now, they say. It gets worse and harder. If I could not succeed then, why should I now? I can’t …’

      ‘You must,’ I said, and began to force my way through them.

      And now Ben let out a roaring raucous laugh, an accusation. ‘There you go,’ he shouted, 'you're all right, you can come and go as you please, but what of us?’

      I had passed through. Well away from them, I looked back. The crowd there wailed and lamented and swayed about under the force of their grief. But Ben took a step forward from them. And another. I pointed across the plain, and watched him take a painful step forward. He was going to try. He was on his way over that vast, painful plain. I heard them singing as I went on:

       Eye of God,

       Watching me,

       Pay my fee,

       Set me free,

       Here I am,

       Waiting here,

       Save me, God,

      Save me, Lord … on, and on, and on.

      Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless, I ran across the plain, feeling the dust thick and soft underfoot. I remembered the grasses and bushes and rivers of my last visit, while I stepped across dry channels and used dry riverbeds as roads. Crickets and cicadas, the shimmer of hot light on rock – this would be desert very soon. And I thought of what I must face when I at last was able to enter Shikasta.

      Sitting on an outcrop of low stone I saw a figure that was familiar, and I approached a female shape drooping in sorrow and lassitude so deep she did not move as I approached. I stood over her and saw it was Rilla, who on my last visit had been with the crowds at the Eastern Gate.

      I greeted her, she lifted her face, and I saw it set in dry, obdurate woe.

      ‘I know what you are going to say,’ said she.

      ‘Ben is trying again,’ I said. But when I looked back I could not see him: only the dust hanging reddish in the air, and the dry broken grasses. She looked with me, passively.

      ‘He is there,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’

      ‘It is no use,’ she said. ‘I have tried so often.’

      ‘Are you going to sit here for the rest of time?’

      She did not answer, but resumed her post, looking down, motionless. She seemed to herself a static weight, empty; to me she was like a whirlpool of danger. I could see myself, thinned and part transparent, could feel myself sway and lean – towards her, into her locked violences.

      ‘Rilla,’ I said, ‘I have work to do.’

      ‘Of course,’ said she. ‘When do you ever say anything different?’

      ‘Go and find Ben,’ I said.

      I walked on. Long afterwards I looked around – I did not dare before, for fear I would turn and run back to her. Oh, I had known her, I had known her well. I knew what qualities were shut up there, prisoners of her despair. She was not looking at me. She had turned her head and was gazing out into the hazy plains where Ben was.

      I left her.

      I had lost my way. Memories of the last time were not helping me, could not – everything had changed. I was looking for the abode of the Giants. I did not want to see them, because of the degeneration I knew I would find. But they were the quickest way to Taufiq. Taufiq’s condition, as captive of the Enemy, must be – could be no other – an excess of self-esteem, pride, silliness. I could contact Taufiq through the equivalent qualities here. The Giants, then … I had to!

      Far away across the deserts were towering peaks of rock, bare black rock, like clusters of fists held into a blood-red sky. Purple clouds, unmoving, thick, heavy. Beneath them drifts of sand hanging in the air like armies of locusts. A still, moribund world. My long spidery shadow lay behind me almost to the horizon, following me black and menacing, an enemy. Shadows lay across the sands to my feet from the peaks. Deep tormenting shadows, full of memories … one of them bulged, moved, separated itself … out came a troop of Giants, and at the first sight of them I felt the movement of the heart like a leaking of strength that means sorrow.

      This was the magnificence I remembered? These?

      They were tall, their forms were something of what they had been, but they had lost strength and substance. A company of lean, lean-to, shambling ghosts, their movements awkward, their faces empty and full of shadows, they came towards me across the blowing sands, which kept rising and obscuring them and then billowed away behind them, so that they appeared again on a background of suddenly darkened sky, which was a blackish grey on red, grey making turbid the purple clouds, grey heavying and dragging everything, and rising in mists around their feet. They waded towards me through the eddying sands, wraiths, shadows … this was the great race I had come to warn on my first visit, came to warn and sustain, and – it was no use, I could not help it, I heard a wail of mourning come from my lips, and this was echoed by a wail from them, but in them it was a battle cry, or so they meant it. A sad mourning cry, and every gesture, every movement, was stiff with ridiculous hauteur, this company of wraiths was sick with pride of a falsely remembered past, and they would have struck me down with the bones of their arms and hands if I had not held out to them the Signature. They recognized it. Not at once or easily: but they were pulled up short, and stood on the sands in front of me, about two hundred of them, uncertain, half remembering, looking at me, at each other, at the glinting gleaming Thing I was confronting them with … and I was looking from one worn attenuated face to another and yes, I could recognize in those faces the kingly beings I had known.

      After a while, at a loss as to what else to do, they turned about, enclosing me in their company, and walked, or stalked, or shambled towards the great rocks. Among