I looked down at the ground. It was fluffy. It seemed to be made of flakes of agar-agar; they were not dull flakes, but they were not shiny either. It was something in between, which I had never seen in my life: black agar-agar.
I heard then the voice of seeing. It said that my assemblage point had assembled a total world with other great bands of emanations: a black world.
I wanted to absorb every word I was hearing; in order to do that I had to split my concentration. The voice stopped; my eyes became focused again. I was standing with don Juan just a few blocks away from the square.
I instantly felt that I had no time to rest, that it would be useless to indulge in being shocked. I rallied all my strength and asked don Juan if I had done what he had expected.
“You did exactly what you were expected to do,” he said reassuringly. “Let’s go back to the square and stroll around it one more time, for the last time in this world.”
I refused to think about don Juan’s leaving, so I asked him about the black world. I had vague recollec-tions of having seen it before.
“It’s the easiest world to assemble,” he said. “And of all you’ve experienced, only the black world is worth considering. It is the only true alignment of another great band you have ever made. Everything else has been a lateral shift along man’s band, but still within the same great band. The wall of fog, the plain with yellow dunes, the world of the apparitions?all are lateral alignments that our assemblage points make as they approach a crucial position.”
He explained as we walked back to the square that one of the strange qualities of the black world is that it does not have the same emanations that account for time in our world. They are different emanations that produce a different result. Seers that journey into the black world feel that they have been in it for an eternity, but in our world that turns out to be an instant.
“The black world is a dreadful world because it ages the body,” he said emphatically.
I asked him to clarify his statements. He slowed down his pace and looked at me. He reminded me that Genaro, in his direct way, had tried to point that out to me once, when he told me that we had plodded in hell for an eternity while not even a minute had passed in the world we know.
Don Juan remarked that in his youth he had become obsessed with the black world. He had wondered, in front of his benefactor, about what would happen to him if he went into it and stayed there for a while. But as his benefactor was not given to explanations, he had simply plunged don Juan into the black world to let him find out for himself.
“The nagual Julian’s power was so extraordinary,” don Juan continued, “that it took me days to come back from that black world.”
“You mean it took you days to return your assemblage point to its normal position, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yes. I mean that,” he said.
He explained that in the few days that he was lost in the black world he aged at least ten years, if not more. The emanations inside his cocoon felt the strain of years of solitary struggle.
Silvio Manuel was a totally different case. The na-gual Julian also plunged him into the unknown, but Silvio Manuel assembled another world with another set of bands, a world also without the emanations of time but one which has the opposite effect on seers. He disappeared for seven years and yet he felt he had been gone only a moment.
“To assemble other worlds is not only a matter of practice, but a matter of intent,” he continued. “And it isn’t merely an exercise of bouncing out of those worlds, like being pulled by a rubber band. You see, a seer has to be daring. Once you break the barrier of perception, you don’t have to come back to the same place in the world. See what I mean?”
It slowly dawned on me what he was saying. I had an almost invincible desire to laugh at such a preposterous idea, but before the idea coalesced into a certainty, don Juan spoke to me and disrupted what I was about to remember.
He said that for warriors the danger of assembling other worlds is that those worlds are as possessive as our world. The force of alignment is such that once the assemblage point breaks away from its normal position, it becomes fixed at other positions, by other alignments. And warriors run the risk of getting stranded in inconceivable aloneness.
The inquisitive, rational part of me commented that I had seen him in the black world as a ball of luminosity. It was possible, therefore, to be in that world with people.
“Only if people follow you around by moving their own assemblage points when you move yours,” he replied. “I shifted mine in order to be with you; otherwise you would have been there alone with the al-lies.”
We stopped walking, and don Juan said that it was time for me to go.
“I want you to bypass all lateral shifts,” he said, “and go directly to the next total world: the black world. In a couple of days you’ll have to do the same thing by yourself. You won’t have time to piddle around. You’ll have to do it in order to escape death.”
He said that breaking the barrier of perception is the culmination of everything seers do. From the moment that barrier is broken, man and his fate take on a different meaning for warriors. Because of the transcen-dental importance of breaking that barrier, the new seers use the act of breaking it as a final test. The test consists of jumping from a mountaintop into an abyss while in a state of normal awareness. If the warrior jumping into the abyss does not erase the daily world and assemble another one before he reaches bottom, he dies.
“What you are going to do is to make this world vanish,” he went on, “but you are going to remain somewhat yourself. This is the ultimate bastion of awareness, the one the new seers count on. They know that after they burn with consciousness, they somewhat retain the sense of being themselves.”
He smiled and pointed to a street that we could see from where we were standing?the street where Ge-naro had shown me the mysteries of alignment.
“That street, like any other, leads to eternity,” he said. “All you have to do is follow it in total silence. It’s time. Go now! Go!”
He turned around and walked away from me. Ge-naro was waiting for him at the corner. Genaro waved at me and then made a gesture of urging me to come on. Don Juan kept on walking without turning to look. Genaro joined him. I started to follow them, but I knew that it was wrong. Instead, I went in the opposite direction. The street was dark, lonely, and bleak. I did not indulge in feelings of failure or inadequacy. I walked in inner silence. My assemblage point was moving at great speed. I saw the three allies. The line of their middle made them look as if they were smiling sideways. I felt that I was being frivolous. And then a windlike force blew the world away.
Epilogue
A couple of days later, all the nagual’s party and all the apprentices got together on the flat mountaintop don Juan had told me about.
Don Juan said that each of the apprentices had already said goodbye to everybody, and that all of us were in a state of awareness that admitted no sentimentalism. For us, he said, there was only action. We were warriors in a state of total war.
Everyone, with the exception of don Juan, Genaro, Pablito, Nestor, and me, moved a short distance away from the flat mountaintop, in order to allow Pablito, Nestor, and me privacy to enter into a state of normal awareness.
But before we did, don Juan took us by the arms and walked us around the flat top.
“In a moment, you’re going to infend the movement of your assemblage points,” he said. “And no one will help you. You are now alone. You must remember then that intent begins with a command.
“The old seers used to say that if warriors are going to have an internal dialogue, they should have the proper dialogue. For the old seers that meant a dialogue about sorcery and the enhancement of their self-reflection. For the new seers, it doesn’t mean dialogue, but the detached manipulation of intent through sober commands.”
He said over and over again that the manipulation of intent begins with a command given to oneself; the command is then repeated until it becomes the Eagle’s command, and then the assemblage point shifts, accordingly, the moment warriors reach inner silence.