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the farmyard, carrying most of the instruments. The rest straggled along
behind us but stayed back, as I had repeatedly warned them to, a good twenty
yards from where we were working.
I said the rest stayed back-I should have said all the rest but Sunday. The
leopard had put up with seeing me go through mistwafls for about two days
after he and the girl had rejoined us and had contented himself with
overwhelming me with pleased greetings when I returned. Like all our humans,
he obviously had a powerfully remembered fear of the time lines, in spite of
having crossed one at Marie's place. But after Bill and I had penetrated
through ttie third wall we had encountered, I had heard something odd behind
me and looked to see Sunday coming through the mistwall behind us, tossing his
head, bis eyes closed and mewling like a lost kitten. He broke out and came to
me-still with his eyes dosed and evidently depending on nose alone-and it had
taken me fifteen minutes to soothe him back to quietness. However, going back
through the mistwall later, he had been much less upset; and two days later he
was accompanying us with the indifference of a veteran. Of course, as soon as
he started coming through the nustwatts after us, the girl did too. But it was
possible to order her not to; Sunday could not be kept back.
So, fat this case, as had become his habit, Sunday followed Bill and me up to
the mistwall and waited whOe we made our measurements and tests. These showed
it to be little different from the many other walls we had tested. But when we
finally went through this time, we found a difference.
We came out in a-what? A courtyard, a square, a plaza... take your pick. It
was an oval of pure white surface and behind, all about it, rose a city of
equal whiteness. Not the whiteness of new concrete, but the whiteness of
veinless, milk-colored marble. And there was no sound about it Not even the
cries of birds or insects. No sound at alt
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"... We were the first" wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner-
"Who ever burst,
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Into that silent sea....*
If you know that bit of poetry, if you love poetry the way I do, you will be
able to feel something like the feeling that hit Bill and me when we emerged
from the mistwall into that city. Those lines give it to you. It was with us
and that city beyond our time, as it had been with that sea and Coleridge's
Mariner. It was a city of silence, silence such as neither of us had ever
heard, and such as we had never suspected could exist-until that moment We
were trapped by that silence, held by it, suddenly motionless and fixed, for
fear of intruding one tiny noise into that vast, encompassing and majestic
void of sound-lessness, like flower petals suddenly encased in plastic. It
held us both, frozen; and the fear of being the first to break it was like a
sudden hypnotic clutch on our minds, too great for us to resist
We were locked in place; and pertafM we might have stood there until we
dropped, if it had be®n left to our own wills alone to save us.
But we were rescued. Shatteiingty and suddenly, echoing and reechoing off to
infinity among die white towers and ways before us, came the loud scrape of
claws on ft hard surface; and a broad, warm, hard, leopard-head butted me in
the ribs, knocking me off my frozen balance to fall with a deafening clatter
to the pavement, as my gun and my equipment went spilling all around me.
With that, the spell was smashed. It had only been that first, perfect silence
that operated so powerfully on our emotions, and that, once destroyed, could
never be recreated. It was an awesome, echoing place, that city, like some
vast, magnificent tomb. But it was just a place once its first grip on us had
been loosed. I picked myself up. "Let's have a look around," I said to Bill.
He nodded. He was not, as I was, a razor addict; and over the two weeks or
more since I had met him, be had been letting his beard go with only
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