So Heaven sprang from the mind of a god, its conception stimulated by the desires of his fellows. It was laid by choice, rather than necessity, in a wilderness of ice and snow and rock, at the timeless Pole of the world, where only the mighty might make their home.
(What was it she was hunting?)
Beneath the dome of Heaven there stood, beside the Celestial City, the great forest of Kaniburrha. Vishnu, in his wisdom, had seen that there must be a balance between the metropolis and the wilderness. While wilderness can exist independent of cities, that which dwells within a city requires more than the tamed plants of a pleasance. If the world were all city, he had reasoned, the dwellers within it would turn a portion of it into a wilderness, for there is that within them all which desires that somewhere there be an end to order and a beginning of chaos. So, within his mind there had grown up a forest, pumping forth streams and the smells of growth and decay, uttering the cries of the uncitied creatures who dwelled within its shadows, shrugging in the wind and glistening in the rain, falling down and growing up again.
The wilderness came to the edge of the City and stopped. It was forbidden to enter there, just as the City kept to its bounds.
But of the creatures who dwelled within the forest, some were predators; these knew no boundaries of limits, coming and going as they chose. Chief among these were the albino tigers. So it was written by the gods that the phantom cats might not look upon the Celestial City; and so it was laid upon their eyes, through the nervous systems that lay behind them, that there was no City. Within their white-cat brains, the world was only the forest of Kaniburrha. They walked the streets of Heaven, and it was a jungle trail they trod. If the gods stroked their fur as they passed them by, it was as the wind laying hands upon them. Should they climb a broad stairway, it was a rocky slope they mounted. The buildings were cliffs and the statues were trees; the passers-by were invisible.
Should one from the City enter the true forest, however, cat and god then dwelled upon the same plane of existence—the wilderness, the balancer.
She coughed again, as she had so often before, and her snowy fur was sleeked by the wind. She was a phantom cat, who for three days had stalked about the wilderness of Kaniburrha, slaying and eating the raw red flesh of her kill, crying out her great-throated cat-challenge, licking her fur with her broad, pink tongue, feeling the rain fall down upon her back, dripping from off the high, hanging fronds, coming in torrents down from the clouds, which coalesced, miraculously, in the center of the sky; moving with fire in her loins, having mated the night before with an avalanche of death-colored fur, whose claws had raked her shoulders, the smell of the blood driving them both into a great frenzy; purring, as the cool twilight came over her, bringing with it the moons, like the changing crescents of her eyes, golden and silver and dun. She sat upon the rock, licking her paws and wondering what it was she had hunted.
Lakshmi, in the Garden of the Lokapalas, lay with Kubera, fourth keeper of the world, upon a scented couch set beside the pool in which the Apsarases played. The other three of the Lokapalas were absent this evening. . . . Giggling, the Apsarases splashed the perfumed waters toward the couch. Lord Krishna the Dark, however, chose that moment to blow upon his pipes. The girls then turned away from Kubera the Fat and Lakshmi the Lovely, to rest their elbows upon the edges of the pool and stare at him, there beneath the flowering tree where he lay sprawled amid wineskins and the remains of several meals.
He ran up and down the scale and produced one long wailing note and a series of goatlike bleats. Guari the Fair, whom he had spent an hour undressing and then had apparently forgotten, rose up from his side, dove into the pool and vanished into one of the many subaquaean caves. He hiccupped, began a tune, stopped, began another.