Crematorium for Phoenixes Read Online Free PDF Page B

asteroid, the aircraft floated between the two
azures.
    Thus, surrounded by blue, starting from on
and ending in another, the men came to understand the truth that
mud had created the splendor of this world. Humanity was created
from the tears of God.
    So it was that the beauty, blessed with
mortality and eternity, filled the spaces between continents and
filled their souls with peace.
    The Behemoth levitated, hanging in the sky
like a fallen meteor and zipping over watery depths, passing island
after island in the Aegean. They looked like the projections of
sinewy roots, interwoven parts of Europe and Asia. After some hours
the zeppelin passed Cyprus and Rhodes—particles of other worlds
that had been thrown into the Mediterranean—and like a protrusion
cutting the horizon in front of them stood the outline of
Crete.
    The Behemoth approached the gravelly ground
while sheltered spots of greenery, mostly trees and bushes followed
by streaks of plantations, appeared here and there.
    The red hues of the island’s few houses were
scattered away from one another along the beach. Although Crete had
a pristine coastline, it did little more than keep people secluded
and isolated.
    In the distance stood the Palace of Knossos;
its straight columns were painted red like a warning to those who
dared to venture closer.
    Chapter
Six
    The hours went by in that stretchiness,
elongated and torn, that accompanies anything that man desires,
fears, loves, or hates.
    Illuminated by pale flames, the patients in
the leper colony moved soundlessly. They were translucent shadows
staggering around in sterile white corridors or just lying on the
floor.
    Sporadic talks were tainted by the quiet
steps of oncoming pain. The rustle of weekday vanity slowly
engulfed the colony’s vitality and the colony could do little in
opposition to it . . . .
    Good or bad everything is measured in a
different way that only the sickly people can understand.
    Under the lush canopy of trees, these people
had grown like stubble in the cracks of stone. They were being
forced to do the scariest thing in life—live to the end of it.
    Staying near the sea lined with rocks
covered in a muslin of greenery, and framed by blue granite blocks,
the patients were disconnected from everything.
    Every night, they gathered at the edge of
the cliff and screamed messages to their relatives below. Every
night was the last one for some of them.
    Worn like shells in the ocean of eternity,
people come and go, and often we are intermingled and become lost
among others.
    The soul is like a drop of molten iron that
has been heated and tempered, formed from all of the senses.
    This is why words sometimes remain choked in
the chest.
    Because from time to time a person wants
something—to drink from the cup of eternity.
    Such action is done without a lot of
talking. However, I will tell you the following story.
    Akuma, twenty-one years old, felt the right
side of his face.
    Bloated and swollen as usual, it was painful
to touch and felt simultaneously soft and rough.
    His right eye, a sobbing, festering, and
stinking hole, gave him a fuzzy, gray, and dark view of the
world.
    Slightly downturned, his lips were tightened
and stretched toward the right into a half smile that gave him the
look of a madman.
    Combined with the constant shaking of his
cheek, for sporadic convulsions made his rough and fuzzy sides play
disgusting beats, Akuma looked like a man whose right side had been
possessed by a demon.
    Whenever he thought about his past, it
always started as a shower of fragmented memories. The
recollections were like fossils that coalesced and precipitated
remembrances with the bitter, metallic taste of molten silver or
lead. They were often unexpected and accidentally recollected.
    There he was meeting her.
    Nothing more than offal now, those
weaknesses that filled his dreams. They were silly things like
verses of poetry, traveling and daydreaming that they were
together, merging them through