6:43:16 BDST—in the sky right now here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside has ever proclaimed… slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing this is how it does happen—yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud…

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On the wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze, a gas jet burns, laminar and gently singing—adjusted to what scientists of the last century called a “sensitive flame”: invisible at the base, as it issues from its orifice, fading upward into smooth blue light that hovers several inches above, a glimmering small cone that can respond to the most delicate changes in the room’s air pressure. It registers visitors as they enter and leave, each curious and civil as if the round table held some game of chance. The circle of sitters is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your white hands or luminous trumpets here.

Camerons officers in parade trews, blue puttees, dress kilts drift in conversing with enlisted Americans… there are clergymen, Home Guard or Fire Service just off duty, folds of wool clothing heavy with smoke smell, everyone grudging an hour’s sleep and looking it… ancient Edwardian ladies in crepe de Chine, West Indians softly plaiting vowels round less flexible chains of Russian-Jewish consonants… . Most skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some are off again to other rooms, all without breaking in on the slender medium who sits nearest the sensitive flame with his back to the wall, reddish-brown curls tightening close as a skullcap, high forehead unwrinkled, dark lips moving now effortless, now in pain:

“Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found that all the signs had turned against him… . Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position and movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in dance… irrelevant dance. None of Blicero’s traditional progress, no something new… alien… . Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered it so… so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind… he means, only his personal wind. Yet… Selena, the wind, the wind’s everywhere… .”

Here the medium breaks off, is silent awhile… one groan… a quiet, desperate moment. “Selena. Selena. Have you gone, then?”

“No, my dear,” her cheeks mottled with previous tears, “I’m listening.”

“It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under ‘outside forces’—to veer into any wind. As if…