The Overlook Press

It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done. It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time. I fill papers, drawers, entire rooms with records, notes, thoughts, while she grows foggier with each passing day.

I nod. He’s right. But I want to cry for being stupid, for giving him the tools to make this incision.

The Welsh say, “She is casting rain,” not “it is raining,” and in Pwyll’s day men still knew why. Rain and sun, crops and the wombs of beasts and women, all were ruled by that old, mysterious Goddess from whose own womb all things had come in the beginning. The wild places were Hers, and the wild things were Her children.

Over the bay the cloud had thinned away to long streamers of apricot and pale violet, tinged on the underside with jade. The snowfields and glaciers were washed with delicate shades of lavender and faded rose-pink, and the sea rippled with a long streak of molten gold

She wanted to have this moment to herself. The unearthly beauty of it struck a shaft straight into her heart.

The sound of waves breaking was caught and amplified here, filling her head with music.

Alice spread her arms and legs like a starfish pinned on the sheet ice and laughed delightedly at the sky.

It continually shifted and re-formed itself, molecules of water and ice and the forces of wind and cold fretting against each other, dissolving and crystallising, creeping in the glacier bottom or flying before the blizzard.

Science was seductive because of its orderliness, its silent pathways through the maze along which you followed the patient thread of conjecture.

Every day Antarctica seemed to offer a fresh set of superlatives and a continual reminder of how far she had travelled from the ordinary world.