The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
“The lions came out of their cages slowly, snarling and lashing their tails. They crouched, growling while the beaters and their dogs advanced to make them go forward to be hunted by the king. The dry wind offered chaos only. The dry wind sang the hunter hunted, the last kill far behind. The dry wind roared and raged, clashed spears on shields, bayed in the mastiff throats, sang in bowstrings death, death, death…”
“…The lion was gone. Where the lion had been was a sudden empty, giddy blackness, like the sensation produced by straightening up too quickly after bending down for a long time. Boaz-Jachin was aware of people again, taking photographs, eating sandwiches, drinking soft drinks. He listened for ghost-roars behind the voices, heard only the seethe of absence in the hollow of the silence, as one might hear the sea in a shell.”
“Boaz-Jachin let the being-with-the-lion come to him. He did not have to remember it – it came when he opened himself to it. He felt the lion-life, the weight and power and the surge of it like a river of violence, calm and huge. He felt the lion-life rush into the death that came to darken it, and he was at a moving point of balance in between.”
– From ‘The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz‘
By Russel Hoban.
Leave a Reply