“This way,” I said, and I took her to stand at the place where I had slept and regarded the falls and the water wheel.
She began to say something, but I stopped her. “Look. Just look,” I said.
So we stood there looking at the rushing, the splashing, the turning while I ordered my mind.
Then, “Come,” I said, turning her by the elbow and walking her toward the wood.
As we moved among the trees, a cloud obscured the sun and the shadows deepened. The voices of the birds grew more shrill and a dampness came up out of the ground. As we passed from tree to tree, their leaves became longer and broader. When the sun appeared again, its light came more yellow, and beyond a turning of the way we encountered hanging vines. The bird cries grew hoarser, more numerous. Our trail took an upward turn, and I led her past an outcropping of flint and onto higher ground. A distant, barely perceptible rumble seemed to come from behind us. The sky was a different blue as we moved through an open place, and we frightened a large, brown lizard that had been sunning itself on arock. As we took a turn about another mass of stone, she said, “I did not know this was here. I have never been this way before.” But I did not answer her, for I was busy shifting the stuff of Shadow.
Then we faced the wood once more, but now the way led uphill through it. Now the trees were tropical giants, interspersed with ferns, and new noises-barks, hisses, and buzzes-were to be heard. Moving up this trail, the rumble grew louder about us, the very ground beginning to vibrate with it. Dara held tightly to my arm, saying nothing now, but searching everything with her eyes. There were big, flat, pale flowers and puddles where the moisture dripped from overhead. The temperature had risen considerably and we were perspiring quite a bit. Now the rumble grew to a mighty roar, and when at length we emerged from the wood again, it was a sound like steady thunder that fell against us. I guided her to the edge of the precipice and gestured outward and down.
It plunged for over a thousand feet: a mighty cataract that smote the gray river like an anvil. The currents were rapid and strong, bearing bubbles and flecks of foam a great distance before they finally dissolved. Across from us, perhaps half a mile distant, partly screened by rainbow and mist, like an island slapped by a Titan, a gigantic wheel slowly rotated, ponderous and gleaming. High overhead, enormous birds rode like drifting crucifixes the currents of the air.
We stood there for a fairly long while. Conversation was impossible, which was just as well. After a time, when she turned from it to look at me, narrow-eyed, speculative, I nodded and gestured with my eyes toward the wood. Turning then, we made our way back in the direction from which we had come.
Our return was the same process in reverse, and I managed it with greater ease. When conversation became possible once more, Dara still kept her silence, apparently realizing by then that I was a part of the process of change going on around us.
It was not until we stood beside our own stream once more, watching the small mill wheel in its turning, that she spoke.
“Was that place like the village?”
“Yes. A shadow.”
“And like Amber?”
“No. Amber casts Shadow. It can be sliced to any shape, if you know how. That place was a shadow, your village was a shadow-and this place is a shadow. Any place that you can imagine exists somewhere in Shadow.”
“. . . And you and Grandpa and the others can go about in these shadows, picking and choosing what you desire?”
“Yes.”
“That is what I did, then, coming back from the village?”
“Yes.”
Her face became a study in realization. Her almost black eyebrows dropped half an inch and her nostrils flared with a quick inhalation.
“I can do it, too . . .” she said. “Go anywhere, do anything I want!”