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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Before Sunrise [1]

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Before Sunrise [1]

A description

The air before sunrise was chilly. A few owls still hooted with screams human and inhuman through the hill-gullies. He slept on his camp-bed in a dream of narrow tunnels suffocating; under the blanket-layers of sleep, herculean, he tried to move a finger. With a sense of strain he woke. Lay staring in content at the canvas roof through which flooded diffuse light.

He sat up and the stretcher creaked: his parents deeper in the tent did not move. He stepped out to the grass floor. This was wild earth, he thought, we have tamed it within walls. He pulled off his pyjamas; on with bathing- trunks. He was sixteen.

Then he slid under the wall. The grass was wet outside; but the birds chattered and flew in the fir-plantation; On the thread of a bird’s voice is the pendulous earth hung. The mountain-shadow lay still half-way from their bases to the camping-ground. The sky was one-coloured except that it was darker to the west and bright above the near mountains. There are mountains upon mountains, they are gashed by sword-strokes of the rising sun, they are awake at early dawn before I walk stiffly with bare feet to bathe before sunrise; and grasses are wet to the skin, stones and thorns knock at the gates of flesh, but I am the animal unsad and blood-aware.

As he climbed over the fence on the path to the lake he felt cold, wished he had gone to sleep again. His eyes were stiff still, one eye saw blurred. He crossed a water-course with willows and fell of cutty-grass and felt through the trees the first chill of the lake-wind. He crossed his arms on his chest and hunched his shoulders for protection from the wind.

Remembering sleep he thought. Tent-bedded I lie safe in body and cloak of memory, but behind my musing eyes, beyond walls of bone, is reality not of me, where the sea in dark hills cupped whose waves are death or longing. . . slap rotted wood in multitudinous strife and quiet. He came out on the shingle-banks of the lake-shore, picking his way between thorn-bushes over moss where ran small grey insects. The sun had almost risen, the sky hadpage 2 grown very bright; shaking bladed tracks of sunlight were reflected on the water. The lake was about three miles wide: he stood at the lower end of it and looked as far as he could see over its length, twelve miles perhaps in all but hidden by the feet and heavy flanks of the mountains.

It is air and water in the vast lands of silten rivers, thought he: swollen and swift from the lake, home of the abyss-monsters yet calm in surface save to the blades of glinting wind.

1942? (1)