Dream d3297-s: The Unsame Quarter

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we climbed to the crest at dusk and found it unchanged from the fifth visit, from the fourth, from all the accounts filed since the place was first entered. The heath spread in every direction under a sky going grey at the rim - flat and dark and alike, the same moss, the same low umber scrub giving no landmark to distinguish east from north from west.

Lano moved ahead of me to the very top and stood there, nose lifted, turning by degrees as though measuring what each quarter carried. She stopped. Then turned again, slower, and stopped in the same place.

The surveyor had his instrument out. He too moved through the compass and paused. The one direction where he held longest was the one Lano had already marked. I did not ask him to name it. The clerk noted the pause and wrote nothing further.

From that direction the light arrived differently - not brighter, not warmer, but at an angle the rest of the heath refused. As if the land dipped somewhere just past the visible, some fold in the ground the eye could not confirm. The keeper sat at the lee of the mound, her back to that quarter, her hands open on her knees. She had been present on all five visits. She did not look up.

The record had gone. The relay was complete. Whatever the clerk had forwarded had traveled in one direction only, toward the distant reader, and nothing was expected in return. I understood this again standing at the crest - that the sending was the whole of it. No correction. No answer. The heath continued.

Lano stayed facing the marked quarter until the last variation in the light was gone and the dark had leveled everything. She made no sound.

The keeper rose and moved down the far side of the mound without turning. The clerk secured the case. We had stood here before and stood here again and the place held no record of that repetition. It went on. The mound crest went on. The one direction that differed faded into the one that didn't, and then there was only the heath.

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