112 I N A G U A 



walked down a street without being aware of its existence. 

 The same avenue from a thirty-story window or from the 

 sanctuary of a manhole between the car tracks belongs to two 

 different worlds; people assume the proportions of scurrying 

 ants or conversely loom skyward like Brobdingnagian monsters. 

 From a thirty-story window a man appears but a mote in a 

 horde of swirling insects, from a manhole he dwarfs the street 

 in which he walks. My submerged position in the pool placed 

 me in the manhole category and put a new value on everything 

 I saw. Only when I have begged, borrowed or stolen an airplane 

 and gazed at the Inaguan surf from the height of a thousand feet 

 will I feel that I have begun to exhaust its potentialities. 



I do not know if snails and other gastropods are conscious 

 of color; certainly my assumption of a snail's viewpoint placed 

 me in a world in which pure brilliancy of hue was the domi- 

 nating factor. I was surrounded by a weird cosmos of yellow in 

 which great scarlet carpets spread crazily between corridors 

 of mauve and lavender. Emerald green towers, splotched with 

 iridescent pink, stood out boldly against lacy draperies of 

 orange and warm Van Dyke brown. Behind all this was a vast 

 heaving horizon of deep indigo, an azure space that oddly was 

 never quiet but advanced and rose to the clear blue sky, where 

 it rapidly altered to pale green and then sheer molten gold, 

 which in its turn changed to dazzling white, pure and glittering, 

 edged with shimmering halos of rainbows. Then the horizon 

 receded and the world was tinged with yellow again amid great 

 floods of cerulean blue and glitterings of royal purple; there 

 were protruding spaces of leaf green, islands of dark saffron and 

 deep shadows of russet. 



It was a world studded with volcanoes, perfect symmetrical 

 cones like that of Fujiyama, each with a crater at the top, only 

 unlike Fujiyama, these volcanoes were of pale green daubed 

 with large splotches of rose pink. On all sides and alternately 



