Declare

castle of a ship; the river was flowing strongly backward tonight in his dream, and dark water crashed up on the embankment at the Square du Vert-Galant like a bow wave.
    In the roaring downpour he could no longer see the city on either side of the island ship—a turbulent sea appeared to extend out past the limits of perception—but he could see a dark square shape wallowing astern, a bargelike vessel apparently being towed by the ship. He didn’t want to look at it, and so he looked ahead.
    Dimly through the rain he could see the silhouette of a mountain rising above the sea, with vast columns or towers on the peak—and then he was reminded of the German plane that had flown low over his and Elena’s heads in the Rue de Savoie in the rain forty days ago, for he felt the wind of some massive shape rushing past under the clouds, toward the mountain, and he saw that some sort of aerial dogfight was going on over the dark mountain castle.
    And after a moment his stomach went cold, for a gust in the veils of rain made him revise his perspective, and he realized that the murky mountain was miles farther away than he had at first thought, and the swooping and diving shapes were much bigger than any airplanes.
    The combatants seemed not so much to fly through the air as to appear sequentially at a smoothly continuous number of points across the sky—like the moving intersection of closing scissors blades, or the tip of a crack rushing through a pane of glass. In the dream he understood that the battle was fought every year, but that in a bigger sense it was the identically same event each time, since the position of the stars overhead was the same; in a sense the battle only seemed to occur again and again because the night sky kept rotating around to the same position every year.
    Hale’s viewpoint was closer to the mountain now, and he could see a white dome amid the turrets at the top; the dome had not been there a few moments ago, and he understood that the dome was… the phrases came into his mind… “the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Companies,” which meant Death.
    The sky and the mountain faded then, but the dome was now fully visible as an oval, and there were dozens or hundreds of similar vast eggs around it, light and dark and black, crowded and piled as if on an undulating plain. There must have been thousands of them, perhaps millions. Hale was trying to estimate the scale of them, and the height from which he must be looking down on the plain, when a foamy wave rushed forward from behind him and hid them under bubbles and foam.
    The size of the bubbles jolted his perspective, and he lifted his head and saw that he was on his hands and knees in warm surf on a sunlit beach; the egg shapes had been grains of sand in the relative darkness of his shadow.
    A middle-aged man in a modern, rumpled sport coat and a cravat was striding toward him down the dazzling sand slope; the man’s face was pouchy and tired, but it creased in a jovial smile as the mouth opened—from the man’s arrogantly casual Marks & Spencer–style clothes Hale almost anticipated a plummy Oxbridge drawl—
    But it was a shrill piping like the cries of birds that came skirling out of the open mouth, and Hale flinched at the savage rhythm of the harsh whistling—the mouth opened wider, cleaving the face vertically, and the division quickly extended down through the neck—and then the man had split down the middle, and it was two dressed men standing on the sand facing Hale. One was the middle-aged original; the other appeared younger, but Hale had a sudden conviction that if he were to look into the face of that one, he would die.
    He spun away and threw himself toward the surf, but it had receded, and he fell toward the grains of sand; but as they rushed up in his vision, he saw that they were as immense and widely separated as planets or even stars, and then he was simply falling through a black abyss while incomprehensible constellations spun with titanic momentum around him.
    When he awoke, Elena was gone, leaving the faint cut-grass smell of her hair on the pillow and half of their money on the table for him. And just as he had begun to worry seriously about Marcel Gruey’s chances of getting a flight to Lisbon, he saw the note she had left:
    The stone dog at the north corner-edge of the first house we lived in is a dubok— the head is loose and can be lifted off. The Philippe St.-Simon passport and travel papers