gmb website - ocean of time extract

It was to an island satiated with festival that the three mysterious strangers came. In those days, the country people went out of their way to be pleasant and welcoming to visitors, but those men, from first setting foot on Norday, didn't seem to care what the islanders thought of them. They climbed through fences and trespassed on the Glebe and the Bu. Simon Taing of the Bu came out and remarked that the gentlemen were in his barleyfield. They looked at the farmer coldly, and made some measurements and set up a tripod, right there in the middle of the barley, and looked in all directions through some kind of an instrument, and one of them spoke some numbers, and another made notes in a large notebook. Lucky, the Bu collie, didn't like the look of them, it seemed, for he went circling behind the man with the theodolite and suddenly made a grab at the man's trouser-leg. 'Keep that brute under control,' the man taking notes said . . . Simon Taing called in the dog, and said that Lucky had never been known to seize anyone before - all the same, it was his land they were trespassing on, his barley, the winter bread of the people, and he would be glad to know what they were there for, anyway . . .

© GMB 1994

He told her, in hesitant stumbling phrases – because she urged him [the telling gave him small pleasure] – how he had been since childhood in quest of the grail of poetry, like every man and woman born [but most give up the search soon, in the struggle of getting and spending]. He had been fortunate – words were his business; and the hard rock of language, mined and laboured at, might break open and reveal the ore; and out of that gold every poet fashions the chalice sufficient for his offering. [The grail itself is never to be found this side of time.]

© GMB 1994

	from Beside the Ocean of Time published 1994 John Murray (Publishers)Ltd 50 Albemarle Street London W1X 4BD
Beside the Ocean of Time published 1995 Flamingo PB