It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest.
We awoke when a ray of sunlight fell across our face. We wanted to leap to our feet, as we have had to leap to our feet
every morning of our life, but we remembered suddenly that no bell had rung and that there was no bell to ring anywhere.
We lay on our back, we threw our arms out, and we looked up at the sky. The leaves had edges of silver that trembled
and rippled like a river of green and fire flowing high above us.
We did not wish to move. We thought suddenly that we could lie thus as long as we wished, and we laughed aloud at
the thought. We could also rise, or run, or leap, or fall down again. We were thinking that these were things without
sense, but before we knew it, our body had risen in one leap. Our arms stretched out of their own will, and our body
whirled and whirled, till it raised a wind to rustle through the leaves of the bushes. Then our hands seized a branch and
swung us high into a tree, with no aim save the wonder of learning the strength of our body. The branch snapped under
us and we fell upon the moss that was soft as a cushion. Then our body, losing all sense, rolled over and over on the
moss, dry leaves in our tunic, in our hair, in our face. And we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing aloud,
laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter.
Then we took our glass box, and we went into the forest. We went on, cutting through the branches, and it was as if we
were swimming through a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves rising and falling and rising around us, and flinging
their green sprays high to the treetops. The trees parted before us, calling us forward. The forest seemed to welcome us.
We went on, without thought, without care, with nothing to feel save the song of our body.
We stopped when we felt hunger. We saw birds in the tree branches, and flying from under our footsteps. We picked a
stone and we sent it as an arrow at a bird. It fell before us. We made a fire, we cooked the bird, and we ate it, and no
meal had ever tasted better to us. And we thought suddenly that there was a great satisfaction to be found in the food
which we need and obtain by our own hand. And we wished to be hungry again and soon, that we might know again this
strange new pride in eating.
Then we walked on. And we came to a stream which lay as a streak of glass among the trees. It lay so still that we saw
no water but only a cut in the earth, in which the trees grew down, upturned, and the sky at the bottom. We knelt by the
stream and we bent down to drink. And then we stopped. For, upon the blue of the sky below us, we saw our own face
for the first time.
We sat still and we held our breath. For our face and our body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our
brothers, for we felt no pity when we looked upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were
straight and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream,
and that we had nothing to fear from this being.
We walked on till the sun had set. When the shadows gathered among the trees, we stopped in a hollow between the
roots, where we shall sleep tonight. And suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered that we are the Damned.
We remembered it, and we laughed.
We are writing this on the paper we had hidden in our tunic together with the written pages we had brought for the
World Council of Scholars, but never given to them. We have much to speak of to ourselves, and we hope we shall find
the words for it in the days to come. Now, we cannot speak, for we cannot understand.