But there was only hazy glitter where the blue of the sky paled at the edge of the sea, and the sea took up the pallor and made it sparkle through the shimmering air. But when the earth shook and the fog and the floods came, everything changed, and then the great river flowed south for a week or more before it turned again and went north. The world is turned upside down. Where were you when the great convulsion came? I have never known anything so dangerous. It would have been infinitely better if it had never been made. Is there anything you need in the way of furnishing, for example? Do you prefer to write at a table or a desk? Would you like a typewriting machine? Perhaps you would rather dictate to a stenographer? Your great task is to recall, and if necessary to rediscover, what he knew. Once you know what instruments you require, you shall have those as well. You are blessed to be entrusted with it! It was flying low, very low, from the fortress. It skimmed overhead, no higher than a rooftop above them, and then moved away into the heart of the storm. Now go your ways, hunt, feed, and live. Do not make war. We are not here for war. Then he took the knife and cut the smallest possible window he could see through, no larger than the circle he could make with thumb and forefinger. Lyra took a deep breath and began to turn the wheels. But after only a few moments, she stopped and turned the instrument around. Are you all alone here? What you coming along here for? Metatron is gone forever. They looked tense and driven with purpose. The whole night did. But unlike her, the clouds seemed to know what they were doing and why, and the wind knew, and the grass knew. The entire world was alive and conscious. Coulter herself intervened and took the child to her own quarters. She led him past a pool with a fountain under a widespreading tree, and then struck off to the left between beds of plants toward a huge manytrunked pine. There was a massive stone wall with a doorway in it, and in the farther part of the garden, the trees were younger and the planting less formal. Lyra led him almost to the end of the garden, over a little bridge, to a wooden seat under a spreading, lowbranched tree. And so it might have been, if a certain cliffghast, busy feasting on a halfdead warrior, had not looked up just as a random searchlight caught the side of the crystal litter. Then he cut a window, and it was the sweetest thing they had ever seen. One of them wheeled to the edge of the road and raised its trunk to utter a trumpeting call. The herd of grazers all looked up as one and began to trot toward them. When they arrived, they stood patiently at the verge and let the wheeled creatures move slowly through them, checking, touching, counting. Who is the other child? The golden monkey was right. Basilides tells us that their bomb not only opened an abyss below the worlds, but also fractured the structure of things so profoundly that there are fissures and cracks everywhere. Somewhere nearby there must be a way down to the edge of that abyss.