Paul Bowles - The Circular Valley.

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that people should come once again to the circular valley. A
man and a woman drove their automobile as far as a village
down in a lower valley; hearing about the ruined monastery and
the waterfall that dropped over the cliffs into the great
amphitheatre; they determined to see these things. They came
on burros as far as the village outside the gap, but there the
Indians they had hired to accompany them refused to go any
farther, and so they continued alone, upward through the
canyon and into the precinct of the Atlajala. It was noon when
they rode into the valley; the black ribs of the cliffs glistened
like glass in the sun's blistering downward rays. They stopped
the burros by a cluster of boulders at the edge of the sloping
meadows. The man got down first, and reached up to help the
woman off. She leaned forward, putting her hands on his face,
and for a long moment they kissed. Then he lifted her to the
ground and they climbed hand in hand up over the rocl(s. The
Atlajala hovered near them, watching the woman closely: she
was the first ever to have come into the valley. The two sat
beneath a small tree on the grass, looking at one another,
smiling. Out of habit, the Atlajala entered into the man.
Immediately, instead of existing in the midst of the sunlit air,
the bird calls and the plant odors, it was conscious only of the
woman's beauty and her terrible imminence. The waterfall, the
earth, and the sky itself receded, rushed into nothingness, and
there were only the woman's smile and her arms and her odor.
It was a world more suffocating and painful than the Atlajala
had thought possible. Still, while the man spoke and the woman
answered, it remained within. ''Leave him. He doesn't love
you.'' ''He would kill me.'' ''But I love you. I need you with
me." ''I can't. I'm afraid of him." The man reached out to pull
her to him; she drew back slightly, but her eyes grew large. ''We
have today,'' she murmured, turning her face toward the yellow
walls of the monastery. The man embraced her fiercely,
crushing her against him as though the act would save his life.
''No, no, no. It can't go on like this," he said. ''No." The pain of
his suffering was too intense; gently the Atlaj ala left the man
and slipped into the woman. And now it would have believed
itself to be housed in nothing, to be in its own spaceless self, so
completely was it aware of the wandering wind, the small
flutterings of the leaves, and the bright air that surrounded it.
Yet there was a difference: each element was magnified in
intensity, the whole sphere of being was immense, limitless.
Now it understood what the man sought in the woman, and it
knew that he suffet attain that sense
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