MISSION STATION 219

Mythology

I dreamed that I was two thousand miles away
from the mud hut and someone was outside the door
waiting to come in. Perhaps a goat stumbling across
the threshold and the dead fire caused the dream, or
maybe a memory of the masks on Harley's table,
bobbing up one after another into the sleeping mind,
like grotesque balloons at a carnival released towards
the ceiling, each with its individual expression of
terror and power.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier
than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage,
this dream of something outside that has got to come
in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form,
but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door,
an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed
against windows.

Later the presence took many odd forms: a troop
of black-skinned girls who carried poison flowers
which it was death to touch; an old Arab; a half-caste;
armed men with shaven heads and narrow eyes and
the appearance of Thibetans out of a travel book; a
Chinese detective.

You couldn't call these things evil, as Peter Quint
in The Turn of the Screw was evil, with his carroty
hair and his white face of damnation. That story of
James's belongs to the Christian, the orthodox
imagination. Mine were devils only in the African
sense of beings who controlled power. They were not
even always terrifying. I remember that at the age of
sixteen it was a being with the absurdly symbolic title
of the Princess of Time who haunted my sleep. Tfce