It is five miles; old roadmiles looped from stone to shrunken stone across this flat, windy plain. How many journeys have been made along this way? What a multitude of steps sown among the unfriendly clumps of grimy vergegrass while different skies busied about their dull horizons. All lost, dry and windcracked, never holding. Some would be mine because I have walked this road before. Perhaps most of them are mine; not many people walk along here now, tramps and lovers only. Young saplings have been planted at intervals along the verge and I always feel a sad thrill when I hear the soft windcry of the urgently turning world snagged in their clean clefts, sighing:

. . . . . . . . . lay all too long with native ways...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . let eternals slip away.

They are quiet today, traces of snow in their open crotches like evidence of some recent large intimacy. Stretching away to miniscule edges, a land of silence and brilliance, the cold air clamped round every grassblade and breathing closely into my face. I am almost perfectly alone; one or two shuttered dreamcars have ground anxiously past with every sense averted; one or two birds bathe slowly in the limitless blue-white spaces above. From somewhere else the sun looks distantly on, throwing long threadbare shadows of blue ice.

This world is the work of God, yes, but it is also the play of the Buddhas; its forms and colours, its sounds and tastes, the prismatic refractions of purity staining an emptiness. This is the aspect I feel today, a vast serene clarity; miraculous frangibilities hanging in the sky. I glance behind me and look! look! all my old neglected footprints growing in the snow like dark clumps of leaves, following me over the white expanses, shyly to my lover's door. A sudden breath of wind, like a cool hand strumming the stillness, stirs up flusters of snow ^___no! It is snowlions: a pair, leaping and chasing over the glittering snowbed, playfully worrying the loose drifts and roaring their shivers of glacial air. They keep my company right up to the scattered outskirts of Town.

Having done the few absolutely essential chores required of me, I retire upstairs to look for a book that to lose myself in. This house is full of books. Every bedroom has its bookcase, there are bookshelves in the livingroom, in the hall, under the stairs, and on the landings. I'm sure no book brought into this house ever leaves it. I don't have any definite idea of what it is I want to read, but if it exists it will almost certainly be here.

The house is very quiet. All the Family are out or away, so the two dogs and I have the place to ourselves and I feel deliciously free. There is a tall bookcase on the landing above the front stair which seems to be a general purpose overspill retainer. As members of the Family have grown out of certain kinds of books and wanted space for others, these old ones have been tucked and crammed and squeezed into here. It looks most promising.

Sitting on the floor, running eyes and hand over faded clothbound covers, or the torn dished spines of abraded paperbacks, I feel enfolded within an ageless security. By the rattle of a sash or slight creak of a distant door, by the occasional flurry of rain against glass or a sudden draught, I know that the weather is still inclement, but wherever I am in the house I always feel as though I am walking on top of large, solid, brick-and-iron fires which never go out but tirelessly radiate the warmth of tradition and safety, affection and dignity. Something is looking after me which is more than just the wish of one person, or several people. it is a timeless, practical benevolence given form by this house and the family who live here. I think happily and easily of Amelia, who somehow seems to be part of the same experience.

Yes, this bookcase is the right one. The books on its lower shelves are all children's books, going back years. How strong and intense they all are. There's the Beatrix Potters, whose characters seem to nervously enjoy a brief, fragile summer before some impending season of utter sorrow. There's the ponderous, painstaking world of Babar and his many elaborate social obligations ^___gentle, Continental satire. There are comic annuals of coarse print and strenuous depiction. There are borrowers and hobbits, goblins and princesses, and then the wide-open country of fairy-tales, where the very air is capriciously magical and consequences are instantanaeous and total. These lovely books are like clothes the children themselves might once have worn: small but personal and well-fitting. I can see the earnest young minds wearing them, playing in them, discarding them without a thought, sleeping for ever. I have uncovered treasure.

One book in particular opens up overgrown, mossy old conduits of recognition. It includes a story about a painted lion which comes to life. There is a half-page picture above the title: a simple line drawing of the lion painted on a sign outside an inn, swinging from a bracket over a landscape as deep and detailed as an ocean. I feel, for some inexplicable reason, a strong kinship with that Lion, as though a wind blew right from his farthest horizon, through him, through my eyes, my heart, and beyond... my soul's invisible leash.

VI

Something that had always disturbed and fascinated the Lion, pressed so tightly against his familiar board, had been that thing ^___whatever it was^___ which sparkled and flashed between the trees some distance from the village green. It was, to the Lion, a narrow discontinuous line, edged with a greater density of foliage, which sometimes sent long needles of sunlight lancing across the countryside, sometimes seemed to be a bed of restless, silverset jewels, lighting the nearby trees from within. So, when the dawn of the second day nudged the world awake , the Lion climbed cautiously down from the sign, being as sure as possible that there was no-one about to see him, and made off toward this mysterious phenomenon. He need not, in fact, have been so careful because everyone in the village was so used to seeing him ^___or not quite seeing him^___ outside the inn that none of them ever noticed when he wasn't there.

You, of course, know that this mysterious thing was a river; a body of moving water flowing in one direction overall from a higher to a lower level. The Lion, also, after he had been oddly exalted by the brash scoury smell of it and the brilliant limpidity that seemed to hover just above it, made the connection between the word 'river' and what was before him. He remembered hearing the villagers talk of the river...crossing the river...going on the river...and when he came in full sight of it there were indeed some creatures crossing on it. They were some kind of bird, he thought, squatting ovable and quirktailed, bosomed to the wide sheet of windruckled wetness. They paddled in the clear inches with their flat orange feet, the burnished sheen of their heads sometimes flushing a deep oiled green. The Lion was deeply impressed with their handsomeness, their skill at floating. What magnificent friends they would make, he was sure, so he bounded out to greet them ^___but oh! Something gripped him right through to his bone. Something strong, cold, and implacable.

How all the birds and animals chuckled and twittered at the Lion, standing so bemused, staring at the wavelets that fanned across the surface then curled over in shiverous lips and slapped the pebbles by his wetted feet. He felt terribly foolish, more on account of his reaction than his mistake, but then when he licked his paw to dry it, he found that it tasted wonderful. What stuff, this water! You couldn't actually go on it (unless you were this kind of bird, or a man), but you could go into it, and it, with equal ease, could go inside of you. These birds were going right inside it, diving with mouths open, so which was going into what? Was there any difference between Duck (as he learned they were called) and River? And what was it they looked for again and again? To one duck who had just surfaced he called out:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ^___0 Prince of Birds, reveal, I pray,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What lies beneath this water?

All the ducks tutted and chattered with amusement at such archaic speech, while the one who had dived eyed him sideways, a short yarn of green weed trailing from its aquasmile, and drily replied: ^___More water, of course.

The Lion sat down and thought. More, and then more, water. Cold and willful all the way, nourishing and claiming. Fathoms, fetches, deeps, and blacks. Perhaps even the ground beneath him was on water, floating like a leaf, and the water went down and down till it flowed out into a reverse night, with stars that mirrored the ones in the sky. He looked across the river and the far bank was an entirely new continent: loose, free, with its own quite different seasons, its own exotic inhabitants. He imagined slow, stiff creatures, armoured with interlocking scales and dazzling feathers. They'd have spreading tails and massively strong legs. They'd incubate their eggs in their hot, red mouths.