Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

Glad of company in this solitude, Niall said aloud: “I wish I could fly like you.”

Hearing his own words made Niall aware of their meaning. He again transferred himself behind its eyes, and again saw himself from the bird’s point of view. But it required an odd kind of effort to do this for more than a few seconds at a time, like being in two places at once. It had to be done sitting down, or would have induced a certain dizziness.

Once achieved, though, this change of viewpoint was extremely interesting — for example, he could see himself far more clearly than with his human eyes. Niall had always regarded himself as having rather good eyesight. But compared to the raven, his normal vision was little better than a myopic blur.

Tired of the staring match, the raven launched itself into flight. It cost Niall an effort to remain behind its eyes and not to return to his own point of view, but he succeeded, and found himself looking back on himself from a tree a hundred yards farther away.

He was beginning to enjoy this strange experience, and all his weariness had gone. Leaving his body behind had recharged it with energy, and he realized how much human tiredness is due to seeing the world through the limited vision of one pair of eyes.

Recognizing that the raven would remain immovably where it was until he moved on and gave it the opportunity to search for crumbs, Niall left a piece of the white pastry on the stone, and swung his pack onto his back. As he walked toward the nearest large bush, he made no attempt to maintain his double vision — he probably would have tripped and fallen. But once out of sight behind the bush, he watched the raven fly down to the stone and gobble down the pastry, after which it spent several minutes examining the ground for crumbs. Finally convinced that none remained, it flew back to the tree. Niall, unable to see anywhere to sit, went back to the stone. Within a few moments he was again looking at himself from behind the raven’s eyes.

He now attempted to suggest to the bird that it was time to move on. It resisted the suggestion, hoping that he was going to eat again. It took another ten minutes before it became bored and launched itself into the air. And Niall, who had been waiting patiently, suddenly found the ground receding beneath him. The sensation was so real that he had to reach down and touch the stone to assure himself that he was still sitting on it.

Niall had already experienced the sensation of flying under the guidance of Asmak, chief of the aerial survey. This time it was quite different. The raven’s sight was much sharper than Asmak’s, and everything appeared more precise and real. From a thousand feet in the air, the green lake looked surprisingly close — although it was at least ten miles away — and he could even see the spires of the spider city to the south. To the east lay the sacred mountain, and it was obvious even from this height that the domain of the chameleon men was far more green and beautiful than the moor below him.

It took Niall some moments to realize that the raven was flying in the opposite direction to the one he was interested in. It was flying southeast, and Niall could even see the silver-gray expanse of the sea in the distance. He tried suggesting that it should fly to the north or west, but to no effect. A hungry bird in search of prey is interested only in food, and everything else seems irrelevant.

At that point, the sight of the sacred mountain reminded him of the chameleon men, and made him aware that he was adopting the wrong approach. They would not have tried to persuade the bird to change direction against its will, but would have blended with its own natural impulses to make it feel that it wanted to change direction. Niall therefore tried implanting the suggestion that it was useless flying over woodland, where the ground — and potential prey — could not be seen. This had the desired effect. Convinced that this was its own idea, the bird curved to the north, giving Niall a glimpse of a distant mountain range, and then continued to the east.

Niall could even see the spot where he was still sitting — since the bird’s gaze was oriented toward it, associating it with food — and the terrain to the immediate north. It made him aware that he had been traveling in the wrong direction. A mile or so ahead lay a stretch of country with brown stagnant pools, tracts of black mud, and the yellow-green vegetation that betokened swampland. This extended as far as the bird’s eye could see. If Niall had continued in his present direction, he would have been forced to retrace his steps and would have wasted most of a day.

To the northwest, on the other hand, he could see an overgrown track, probably invisible from the ground, but quite distinct from the air, which wandered across an area of high moorland in the direction of the Valley of the Dead and the Gray Mountains.

After carefully noting its direction in relation to the spot where he was sitting, Niall changed the focus of his awareness until he could feel the cold and rough surface of the rock on which he was sitting. With the speed of thought, he ceased to be a quarter of a mile in the air, and was back on the ground, feeling slightly disoriented. Far away in the sky, he could see the raven flying westward with great flaps of its wings.

Niall used his compass to calculate the way toward the track he had seen from the air, then swung his pack onto his back and set out northwest. His years as a desert dweller had instilled in him a strong sense of direction, and this uncompromising moorland was, after all, a kind of desert.

Soon the ground underfoot was dry and hard, indicating that he was, at least, leaving the swamp behind. But as the Sun reached its zenith, he still found the going tiring and rough. When, at one point, he had to wade across a shallow stream, the feeling of cold water on his bare feet was so pleasant that he knelt in the water and drank deeply, then sat down on the bank with his toes in the stream. If there had been some shade, he might have been tempted to stretch out on the bank and doze; as it was, the flowing water soothed him into an almost hypnotic state, so he began to yawn. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a movement that he felt to be a nature spirit. It was not there when he tried to look directly, but after a few attempts at “looking sideways,” he was able to see it clearly, a tiny colored whirl of energy that seemed to delight in the rippling surface of the water, and danced up and down on it. After he had been staring at it for a few minutes, its shape changed and it became a tiny female, dressed in a minimal costume of some gauzy white material. But Niall was virtually certain that it was his own mind that had created this shape, by the same mechanism that creates faces in moving clouds.

The thought that he was once again in a domain where elementals held sway raised his spirits. But the track he had seen was still — at a guess — two or three miles distant, and it was time to move on.

At least this moorland was covered in heather instead of tall, prickly gorse bushes, so he could see for several miles around. To his right there was a long, low ridge, and he struck out in this direction, knowing that trackways often followed ridges.

Twice during the next hour he heard the cry of the raven as it flew above him. That it was the raven he had already encountered he had no doubt; its cry seemed as distinctive as a human voice. Was it following him because he had given it food? Or simply because he was the only other living being in this empty landscape?

The ridge proved to be farther than he thought, but an hour later, he was able to stand on top of an escarpment and look south over miles of open country, and north toward distant mountains.

After following the ridge for another half mile, he was relieved to see that his sense of direction had served him well, and that he had stumbled onto an old narrow track that ran from the southeast and cut across the ridge to the northwest. Unless he had been on the ridge, he would not have seen it at all, since heather and rocky moorland extended on either side.