Taurus 11. A man jumping into a river, melting, and flowing away.
The water in him is aware of other waters, the faraway seas and the river which is close, just beyond his bedroom window.
At night as he sleeps the water in him listens to the river, his veins and arteries are carrying the echoes of it through his heart.
Now he is running over the grass in the full moon toward the river’s bank.
Leaping he extends vastly toward the sea, bifurcates, becomes tributaries, brooks and waterfalls.
At last, relieved, he has become the river.
Azoth Oracle
In a special room in the library of Peth are shelves of history books with no word in them. Instead, when a book is opened one finds oneself looking into a window onto the past. There is a whole 20 volume history of Rome here that shows the coronation of emperors, daily life at the baths, the flogging of slaves, foreign battles being fought, sumptious dinners and every other imaginable scene of Roman life. The denizens of these pictures seem not to know they are being watched, and sometimes the picture fades away. But if one turns the page one finds another scene being enacted before one’s eyes.
The Historian Delabrius Ronar has recorded many conversations he overheard from these books, though he says his research was long and tedious, as so much of what he heard was not worth repeating.