Island, Page 35

  Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.

  "What on earth is that?" she wondered.

  "Just the boys playing with fireworks," he answered gaily.

  Susila shook her head. "We don't encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don't even possess them."

  From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.

  In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with

  tears.

  Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.

  "People of Pala," he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, "Your Raja speaking . . . remain calm . . . welcome your friends from across the Strait ..."

  Recognition dawned. "It's Murugan."

  "And he's with Dipa's soldiers."

  "Progress," the uncertain excited voice was saying. "Modern life ..." And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, "Truth," it squeaked, "values . . . genuine spirituality ... oil."

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  "Look," said Susila, "look! They're turning into the com pound."

  Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.

  "The throne of my father," bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, "joined to the throne of my mother's ancestors . . . Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future . . . To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala . . . The United Kingdom's first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa ..."

  The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.

  "Reactionaries," it was furiously yelling. "Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution ..."

  In a tone of horror, "They're stopping at Dr. Robert's bungalow," Susila whispered.

  The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. "Attention, Karuna." Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion—the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating

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  numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere—the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshiper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.

  There was the sound of a single shot; then a burst of shots from an automatic rifle.

  Susila covered her face with her hands. She was trembling

  uncontrollably.

  He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close.

  The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained—the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.

  The starters screeched; engine after engine roared into action. The headlamps were turned on and, after a minute of noisy maneuvering, the cars started to move slowly back along the road by which they had come.

  The loudspeaker brayed out the opening bars of a martial and at the same time lascivious hymn tune, which Will recognized as the national anthem of Rendang. Then the Wurlitzer was switched off, and here once again was Murugan.

  "This is your Raja speaking," the excited voice proclaimed. After which, da capo, there was a repetition of the speech about

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  Progress, Values, Oil, True Spirituality. Abruptly, as before, the procession disappeared from sight and hearing. A minute later it was in view again, with its wobbly countertenor bellowing the praises of the newly united kingdom's first prime minister.

  The procession crawled on and now, from the right this time, the headlamps of the first armored car lit up the serenely smiling face of enlightenment. For an instant only, and then the beam moved on. And here was the Tathagata for the second time, the third, the fourth, the fifth. The last of the cars passed by. Disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained. The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.

  "Karuna. Karuna." And a semitone lower, "Attention."

  Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England, in 1894, and is the author of many critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza. He died in 1963.