Dream d3317-s: Thread Unbroken at the Rim

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gorge opened beneath us without warning, the way sleep opens, and the sound of the falls came up from a distance too great to see the bottom clearly. Lano stood at my heel and her ears were flat against her skull - not fear, something older than fear, the way an animal knows a place has been visited before and remembers in its body what the mind cannot carry.

The keeper was already there when we arrived. She stood a little back from the edge with a lamp whose flame bent toward the gorge as if pulled. She did not speak first. The surveyor moved along the rim with her instruments while the relay clerk sat on a flat stone and set out the account that had come back, reading it without reading it aloud, the pages turning in the wet air.

From here the falling water looks like a single thread dropped from the cliff above, unbroken, pulled down by what pulls everything down. It is only when you watch long enough that you see it is not one thing but many - spray and rope and curtain, braided into the appearance of simplicity by the distance. I have been here in another season. The thread was white then against black stone. Now the stone is wet all the way across and the thread disappears into matching darkness before it reaches the pool.

Lano pressed forward to the very edge and looked down. I stayed where I was. The keeper watched us both. "It looks the same," I said, though I had meant to say nothing. The keeper nodded once - not in agreement, only to mark that the words had been spoken.

The distant reader was elsewhere, holding what had been sent. There was nothing to add to what she held and nothing to correct. The relay clerk folded the pages. The surveyor noted something in her column. The water fell the way it had always fallen, which is to say without interest in any of this, and with a sound so steady it stopped sounding like sound and became instead the quality of the air in that place.

Lano moved back from the edge and circled once behind me. Quieto, she said softly, to no one.

The lamp stayed lit.

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