Sun Dance Read Online Free PDF

a suicide bomber almost took my life and limb.
    Moreover, dramatic scenes and faces had arisen as I hovered on the brink of death. Happenings totally unrelated to anything of which I was aware; not in my daily work, certainly not in memories, yet still they possessed an inexplicable familiarity. Was I subconsciously reaching for a wholesomeness, the caress of a breeze untainted by progress, its healing touch, the freedom to work at pace of each tide? An incessant calling filled the corridors of my mind, played like a torch flame on the cave paintings of survival, became rays of sunlight on shallow water that lit the union of radiation with the grains of being. The sun, the sun, I longed for the sun on my aching body.
    Yellow and bright on a white counterpane, sunlight poured through a tall window drawing a line across my bed. Three o’clock, one minute past, two, three, then five past, the long hand on the wall clock moved in jerks. My eye flitted between its hand and a shadow moving on the bed. The grandeur of a skyscraper opposite the hospital became the pointer of a sundial which crept across my counterpane until its dying shaft gave way to the glitter of a thousand office windows. The shadow of the skyscraper fell across the bed, a sundial without a sunset. I raised myself on an elbow and gazed at towers of concrete. Street lighting replaced sunsets.
    I lay back on the pillows, immobility had revalued attitudes. Behind glass rows of office workers sat at computer systems; by raising my head I could see them, the epitome of an imprisoned population dependent on a surfeit of cheap food produced by artificial means and adulterated by chemicals. The previous year I’d watched a colleague in Geneva die at fifty with stomach cancer.
    Another bout of fear gripped me. Forty flights up and an escalator, buildings leaned into my mind, half my life spent cooped in concrete, the prison walls of a system controlling my existence. Walls were crushing me, entombing me in the terror of claustrophobia. I panicked, “Nurse, is it possible to open my window, please?” I asked as steadily as possible.
    She smiled and shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow, if you’re a good boy,” and trying to restrain me, “don’t get up.”
    Though kindness surrounded me and treatment had been faultless, I pushed her arm to one side. Coughing and wheezing for the first time I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Shaking her head, the nurse helped me to stand tottering at the window ledge.
    Forty stories below car lights probed a haze of diesel fumes and weaved amongst bus roofs, a torrent of civilisation swept along the motorway, a species under pressure, threshing erratically in the quick-sands of a modern lifestyle. A planet killed by coal and the motorcar, the supreme irony of sunshine buried for three hundred million years being in released in three hundred. Death by diesel. I struggled to stop a frenzied train of thoughts from controlling my mind?
    Pavements jostled with earnest people, hurrying minions under constant surveillance, their private affairs stolen by hidden computers. It reflected my own hustling days, flagging a taxi to meetings, drinking coffee with pompous chairmen heading for the knighthoods nudged by political donations. I suffered research budgets cut by top brass civil servants retiring to index linked pensions paid for by the nation’s masses. Talk, talk, a facility for jargon in a safe pair of hands. Invited to fancy bow tie Geneva parties because I’d been introduced to some of the faceless Bond Market and currency manipulators. It didn’t take long to realize their interest was limited to speculating on how quickly scientific results could be turned into cash. From the safety of exclusive bunkers they viewed the world, natural or otherwise, as a giant bank vault. It left me in no doubt that financial fanatics controlled international affairs.
    Narrowly escaping death at the hands of another breed of fanatic had