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MODERN CLASSIC
The Four-Gated City
Doris Lessing
Book Five of the ‘Children of Violence’ series
Dedication
Once upon a time there was a fool who was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish to carry his purchases.
‘Make sure,’ said the man who sent him, ‘not to mix the two things – I want them separate.’
When the shopkeeper had filled the dish with flour and was measuring out the salt, the fool said: ‘Do not mix it with the flour; here, I will show you where to put it.’
And he inverted the dish, to provide, from its upturned bottom, a surface upon which the salt could be laid.
The flour, of course, fell to the floor.
But the salt was safe.
When the fool got back to the man who had sent him, he said: ‘Here is the salt.’
‘Very well,’ said the other man, ‘but where is the flour?’
‘It should be here,’ said the fool, turning the dish over.
As soon as he did that, the salt fell to the ground, and the flour, of course, was seen to be gone.
A dervish teaching story, from
The Way of the Sufi, by IDRIES SHAH
Contents
Copyright
About the Publisher
In its being and its meaning, this coast represents not merely an uneasy equilibrium of land and water masses; it is eloquent of a continuing change now actually in progress, a change being brought about by the life processes of living things. Perhaps the sense of this comes most clearly to one standing on a bridge between the Keys, looking out over miles of water, dotted with mangrove-covered islands to the horizon. This may seem a dreamy land, steeped in its past. But under the bridge a green mangrove seedling floats, long and slender, one end already beginning to show the development of roots, beginning to reach down through the water, ready to grasp and to root firmly in any muddy shoal that may lie across its path. Over the years the mangroves bridge the water gaps between the islands; they extend the mainland; they create new islands. And the currents that stream under the bridge, carrying the mangrove seedling, are one with the currents that carry plankton to the coral animals building the offshore reef, creating a wall of rocklike solidity, a wall that one day may be added to the mainland. So this coast is built.
RACHEL CARSON; The Edge of the Sea
In front of Martha was grimed glass, its lower part covered with grimed muslin. The open door showed an oblong of browny-grey air swimming with globules of wet. The shop fronts opposite were no particular colour. The lettering on the shops, once black, brown, gold, white, was now shades of dull brown. The lettering on the upper part of the glass of this