Declare

one of these vegetation-bound angels,” he went on, “and then eats it with the p-proper sacramentals , sugar and garlic and l-liquor and such, that p-person will share in the angel’s immortality, will n-never grow old or suffer f-fatal injury or illness. My father had known something of this—in the Gilgamesh story, a g-god tells the man Upanishtim to build a boat and take into it ‘the seed of all living creatures,’ and Upanishtim and his family do it, and s-survive the flood—and long afterward, Upanishtim gives Gilgamesh a th-thorny plant that will restore youth. But b-before Gilgamesh can take it home to his people, an old s-s- snake! —comes out of a well!—and eats the plant, and immediately c-casts off its old skin and returns, y-young again, to the well. So the plant w-w-worked as promised, but Gilgamesh d-didn’t get it.”
    “Maly did talk to me about this!” exclaimed Elena. She went on, almost to herself, “Oh, I think he did; I will have to tell old Cassagnac that my answer in 1941 was not accurate.” She looked up at Philby, her eyes gleaming in the light from the hotels across the street. “I was only twelve, but Maly said that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to keep her and Adam away from the other tree, the Tree of Life, which—”
    “Who’s that?” Philby shouted.
    He had grabbed her arm with his left hand, and with his right he was pointing at the taller of the two rocks out in the bay—for he had just noticed a silhouetted figure standing in the meadow on the inaccessible top. It was far too remote for him to be able to tell if it was a man or a woman… but one of its arms was waving. It was beck-oning.
    “Don’t move,” he added in a whisper, for with a sound like sudden rain the birds now swept up from the abyss below the cliff and were circling low over Elena and himself—the pigeons and gulls made no cries, but the flutter of their wings was like rushing banners, and Philby was now aware of an invisible third person here. Had the third person drawn the attention of the birds, or of the thing that animated the birds?
    Philby’s chest was suddenly cold. Is that thing aware that I’m trying to beg off, here? he thought. Trying to forsake the old covenant?
    The tourists along the cliff rail had been startled when he shouted, and now they hurried away as the low-flying pigeons and seagulls did not disperse—and Philby became aware of the ringing of a telephone.
    Hatif , he thought breathlessly—the call from the dead at night, foretelling another death—but where is it? He glanced at the figure out on the rock, fearful that it might be flying toward them through the twilight; but it was still there where he had first seen it, still beckoning.
    Rocking into cautious motion, Elena took two stiff steps toward a purse and a couple of abandoned toys that a woman had left behind on the sidewalk after snatching up her baby and hurrying away from the intrusive birds. Philby squinted at the toys and saw that one of them was a yellow plastic telephone; and then he realized that the ringing was coming from this toy.
    “Don’t— answer it,” he croaked.
    But Elena had bent down awkwardly, her white hair blown into her face by the battering breeze of the close wings, and she lifted the receiver, which was connected by a string to a plastic box with a smiling dial-face printed on it.
    She held the little receiver to her ear; the mouthpiece was pressed against her cheek.
    His face hot with humiliation, Philby babbled, “It will only be my w-wife, my l-last wife—she d-d-died five years ago, and she’s always c-calling me—d-don’t listen to her f-f-filth—”
    “It’s—a man,” Elena said tonelessly. “I—I think I know him.” She lifted the plastic receiver, with the telephone swinging below it on the string, not connected to anything else and with no antenna, and held the impossibly speaking thing toward him, as if for an explanation.
    Philby reached out—slowly, for he feared that any sudden move might provoke some kind of calamitous definition of the birds— and as he kept his eyes on the beckoning figure on the distant rock he pressed the toy receiver to his ear.
    “Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events,” said a British man’s voice from the unperforated earpiece, clearly enough for Philby to hear through the bandages, “wind and fire and sand-storms, gross and