“Fool,” said Ben, “what do you want to find?”
“Myself, and an end to hunger, and the happy land,” he answered.
“For I believe in harbors at the end.
O Ben, brother, and ghost, and stranger, you who could never speak, give me an answer now!”
Then, as he thought, Ben said:
“There is no happy land.
There is no end to hunger.”
“And a stone, a leaf, a door?
Ben?”
Spoke, continued without speaking, to speak.
“Who are, who never were, Ben, the seeming of my brain, as I of yours, my ghost, my stranger, who died, who never lived, as I?
But if, lost seeming of my dreaming brain, you have what I have not — an answer?”
Silence spoke. (“I cannot speak of voyages.
I belong here.
I never got away,” said Ben.)
“Then I of yours the seeming, Ben?
Your flesh is dead and buried in these hills: my unimprisoned soul haunts through the million streets of life, living its spectral nightmare of hunger and desire.
Where, Ben?
Where is the world?”
“Nowhere,” Ben said. “YOU are your world.”
Inevitable catharsis by the threads of chaos.
Unswerving punctuality of chance.
Apexical summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things done.
“I shall save one land unvisited,” said Eugene.
Et ego in Arcadia.
And as he spoke, he saw that he had left the million bones of cities, the skein of streets.
He was alone with Ben, and their feet were planted on darkness, their faces were lit with the cold high terror of the stars.
On the brink of the dark he stood, with only the dream of the cities, the million books, the spectral images of the people he had loved, who had loved him, whom he had known and lost.
They will not come again.
They never will come back again.
With his feet upon the cliff of darkness, he looked and saw the lights of no cities.
It was, he thought, the strong good medicine of death.
“Is this the end?” he said.
“Have I eaten life and have not found him?
Then I will voyage no more.”
“Fool,” said Ben, “THIS is life.
You have been nowhere.”
“But in the cities?”
“There are none.
There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.”
“On coasts more strange than Cipango, in a place more far than Fez, I shall hunt him, the ghost and haunter of myself.
I have lost the blood that fed me; I have died the hundred deaths that lead to life.
By the slow thunder of the drums, the flare of dying cities, I have come to this dark place.
And this is the true voyage, the good one, the best.
And now prepare, my soul, for the beginning hunt.
I will plumb seas stranger than those haunted by the Albatross.”
He stood naked and alone in darkness, far from the lost world of the streets and faces; he stood upon the ramparts of his soul, before the lost land of himself; heard inland murmurs of lost seas, the far interior music of the horns.
The last voyage, the longest, the best.
“O sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myself, I will hunt you down until you cease to haunt my eyes with hunger.
I heard your foot-falls in the desert, I saw your shadow in old buried cities, I heard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not find you there.