Roger Zelazny. The Guns of Avalon. The First Amber Pentology – Corwin’s Story: Book 2. Chapter 5, 6

Then long shadows, the dying of the wind, stillness . . . Only the click of hoof on rock and the sounds of breathing . . . Dimness, as they rushed together and the sun is foiled by clouds . . . The walls of the day shaken by thunder . . . An unnatural clarity of distant objects . . . A cool, blue, and electric feeling in the air . . . Thunder again . . .

Now, a rippling, glassy curtain to my right as the rain advances . . . Blue fracture lines within the clouds . . . The temperature plummeting, our pace steady, the world a monochromatic backdrop now. . . Gouging thunder, flashing white, the curtain flaring toward us now . . . Two hundred meters . . . One-fifty . . . Enough!

Its bottommost edge plowing, furrowing, frothing . . . The moist smell of the earth . . . Star‘s whinny . . . A burst of speed . . . Small rivulets of water creeping outward, sinking, staining the ground . . . Now bubbling muddily, now trickling . . . Now a steady flow . . . Streamlets all about us, splashing . . . High ground ahead, and Star‘s muscles bunching and relaxing, bunching and relaxing beneath me, as he leaps the rills and freshets, plunges through a racing, roiling sheet, and strikes the slope, hoofs sparkling against stones as we mount higher, the voice of the gurgling, eddying flow beneath us deepening to a steady roar . . . Higher, then, and dry, pausing to wring out the corners of my cloak . . . Below, behind, and to the right a gray, storm-tossed sea laps at the foot of the cliff we hold . . . Inland now, toward clover fields and evening, the boom of the surf at my back . . . Pursuing falling stars into the darkening east and eventual silence and night . . . Clear the sky and bright the stars, but a few small wisps of cloud . . . A howling pack of red-eyed things, twisting along our trail . . . Shadow . . . Green-eyed . . . Shadow . . . Yellow . . . Shadow . . . Gone . . .

But dark peaks with skirts of snow, jostling one another about me . . . Frozen snow, as dry as dust, lifted in waves by the icy blasts of the heights . . . Powdery snow, flour-like . . . Memory here, of the Italian Alps, of skiing . . . Waves of snow drifting across stone faces . . . A white fire within the night air. . . My feet rapidly numbing within my wet boots . . . Star bewildered and snorting, testing each step and shaking his head as if in disbelief . . . So shadows beyond the rock, a gentler slope, a drying wind, less snow . . . A twisting trail, a corkscrew trail, an adit into warmth . . . Down, down, down the night, beneath the changing stars . . . Far the snows of an hour ago, now scrubby plants and level plain . . . Far, and the night birds stagger into the air, wheeling above the carrion feast, shedding hoarse notes of protest as we pass . . . Slow again, to the place where the grasses wave, stirred by the less cold breeze . . . The cough of a hunting cat . . . The shadowy flight of a bounding, deer-like beast . . . Stars sliding into place and feelings in my feet once more . ..

Star rearing, neighing, racing ahead from some unseen thing . . . A long time in the soothing then, and longer still till the shivers go . . . Now icicles of a partial moon falling on distant treetops . . . Moist earth exhaling a luminescent mist . . . Moths dancing in the night light . . . The ground momentarily buckling and swaying, as if mountains were shifting their feet . . . To every star its double . . . A halo round the dumbbell moon . . . The plain, the air above it, filled with fleeting shapes . . . The earth, a wound-down clock, ticks and grows still . . . Stability . . . Inertia . . . The stars and the moon reunited with their spirits . . . Skirting the growing fringe of trees, west . . . Impressions of a sleeping jungle: delirium of serpents under oil cloth . . .

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