Raiazome: Island (Shanti, Shanti, Shanti)

The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and in some strange way more remote. Perhaps that was why he no longer resented its intrusion.

“Such an extraordinary sense of peace. Shanti, shanti, shanti. The peace that passes
understanding.”

The voice was almost chanting now—chanting, it seemed, out of some other world.

“I can shut my eyes,” it chanted on, “can shut my eyes and see it all so clearly. Can see the
church--and it’s enormous, much taller than the huge trees round the bishop’s palace. Can see the
green grass and the water and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between
the buttresses. And listen! I can hear the bells. The bells and the jackdaws. The jackdaws in the
tower--can you hear the jackdaws?”

Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as he now heard those
parrots in the trees outside his window, He was here and at the same time he was there—here in
this dark, sweltering room near the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the
edge of the Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound of the
bells dying away into the green silence.

“And there are white cloud,” the voice was saying, “and the blue sky between them is so pale,
so delicate, so exquisitely tender.”

Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April week-end he had spent there, before the
disaster of their marriage, with Molly. There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and
across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds
with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it,
coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation. That was how it should have been with himself
and Molly--how it had been then.

“And the swans,” he now heard the voice dreamily chanting, “the swans . . .”

Yes, the swans. White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet—a breathing mirror that
heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images were forever breaking and coming together
again, disintegrating and being made whole.

“Like the inventions of heraldry. Romantic, impossibly beautiful. And yet there they are--real
birds in a real place. So near to me now that I can almost touch them—and yet so far away,
thousands of miles away. Far away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly,
majestically . . .”

Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting as the curved white
breasts advanced—lifting, parting, sliding back in ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead
behind them. He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could hear the jackdaws in the
tower, could catch, through this nearer mingling of disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat,
weedy smell of that Gothic moat in the far-away green valley.

“Effortlessly floating,” Will said to himself. “Effortlessly floating.” The words gave him a
deep satisfaction.

“I’d sit there,” she was saying, “I’d sit there looking and looking, and in a little while I‘d
be floating too. I’d be floating with the swans on that smooth surface between the darkness below
and the pale tender sky above. Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and
far away, between then and now.” And between remembered happiness, she was thinking, and this
insistent, excruciating presence of an absence. “Floating,” she said aloud, “on the surface
between the real and the imagined, between what comes to us from the outside and what comes to us
from within, from deep, deep down in here.”

She laid her hand on his forehead, and suddenly the words transformed themselves into the
things and events for which they stood; the images turned into facts. He actually was floating.

“Floating,” the voice softly insisted. “Floating like a white bird on the water. Floating on a
great river of life—a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost
think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it flows irresistibly.

“Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more
profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and
unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And
it’s into that peace that you’re floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps
and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it’s sleeping. And I’m floating
with it.” She was speaking for the stranger. She was speaking on another level for herself.
“Effortlessly floating. Not having to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself
to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it’s
going—and knowing all the time that where it’s going is where I want to go, where I have to go:
into more life, into living peace. Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of
reconciliation.”