The Cleft Read Online Free PDF

the Memories.
    There is a way of not measuring, but getting a feel of the long process. The deep grave or pit where the girls were sacrificed was crammed with bones, and it was a deep hole. At its bottom were cracks and apertures where rocks had fallen outwards, and through these could be glimpsed the lower layers of bones, not fresh and whole, like the top layers, but fractured andfragmented, and lower down still, on the floor of this great hole was a layer of whitish stuff, the dust of bones. It was a deep layer. It must have taken a long time for these bones to turn to dust, even though winds and salty wet blew into the holes and gaps, hastening the process.
    It was not likely that these people who seemed to live in a dream were regular in their sacrificing, or regular in anything; impulses and rhythms we may hardly guess at governed their lives. But while there was no way of counting the skeletons or making an estimate of what the dust layers meant in terms of time, we may confidently say that we are talking of long periods of time – ages.
    Of changelessness, of an existence like those fish that wash back and forth on the tides, responding to the moon’s changes. And then the real change, the defining change, the birth of the deformed ones, the Squirts, the Monsters. The beginning of squirming emotional discomfort, unrest, discontent: the start of awareness of themselves, their lives. The start only, like the affront the stranded fish must feel at the probing stick.
    There is a part of this tale that has to remain dark. Yes, yes, previous attempts at solving the mystery have offered solutions more like myths than probabilities. How did the community of males begin? We cannot believe that the eagles fed the infants regurgitated rawmeat and kept them warm in their feathers. No, there is a solution and this is it.
    The defective infants put out on the Killing Rock were for – how long? – food for the eagles. And the very first Monsters must have been too. But then – but when we don’t know – boys kept as ‘pets’ and playthings by the Clefts escaped. We know that small boys as young as four, certainly aged five, six, seven, can achieve feats of endurance and even of strength. Two, three, four little boys ran away from the caves above the sea. The eagles, though they were very big, many times the size of the eagles we know, could not have carried children that size, not for fair distances. The children saw where the eagles flew back, to their nests, past the Killing Rock, over the valley, up the mountain – and they followed. Up on the ridge, where the eagles’ nests were, they did not linger. How terrifying those enormous birds must have been. Down the other side and into the valley where the great river was. The children had been reared on fish, and here were fish again, though different ones. They had been kept warm in the caves. But they were still little children, and how very large the valley they found themselves in must have seemed. How can we not admire them for their daring and their cleverness? The river was wide, deep, and rushed along. Yet they had to catch fish in it. How did they shelter? It did not at once become possible to make huts and sheds:they had never seen anything like them. They had seen the eagles’ nests and they dragged sticks and then larger sticks and made piles of them, and crept into them when dark came. Then they grew bigger and stronger and they began leaning fallen branches together to make shelters. This was an easy climate; they did not have to fear cold. But let us not forget the beasts in the forests that stood at a distance on either side of the great river. How they escaped the beasts has to remain a bit of a marvel. Did some god or goddess aid the little things? But in their records is never the mention of divine intervention. Yes, they were the children of the Eagle, but that is as far as divinity went, for them.
    We must remember