Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/158

Rh the heights, to the thousands of other worlds which every evening whisper to us with their lights through the black leaves of night ”

Waves and foam and wind were beating the rock:

“Down with the Integral! Down!”

“No, brothers, not ‘down.’ The Integral must be ours. And it shall be ours. On the day when it first sets sail into the sky we shall be on board. For the Builder of the Integral is with us. He left the walls, he came with me here in order to be with us. Long live the Builder!”

A second—and I was somewhere above everything. Under me: heads, heads, heads, wide-open, yelling mouths, arms rising and falling There was something strange and intoxicating in it all. I felt myself above everybody; I was, I, a separate world; I ceased to be the usual item; I became unity

Again I was below, near the rock, my body happy, shaken, and rumpled, as after an embrace of love. Sunlight, voices, and from above—the smiles of I-330. A golden-haired woman, her whole body silky-golden and diffusing an odor of different herbs, was nearby. She held a cup, apparently made of wood. She drank a little from it with her red lips, and then offered the cup to me. I closed my eyes and eagerly drank the sweet, cold, prickly sparks, pouring them down on the fire which burned within me.

Soon afterward my blood and the whole world began to circulate a thousand times faster; the earth seemed to be flying, light as dawn. And within me everything was simple, light, and clear. Only then I noticed on the rock the familiar, enormous letters: MEPHI, and for some reason the inscription seemed to me necessary. It seemed to be a simple thread binding everything together. A rather rough picture hewn in the rock—this, too, seemed comprehensible; it represented a youth with wings and a transparent body and, in the place ordinarily occupied by the heart, a blinding, red, blazing coal. Again I understood that coal—or no, I felt it as I felt without