Chapter 2: Tulip Lake

The music of love is a duet in which woman plays most of the notes. Man is a low, thumping bass, with an occasional blowing of the horn. Woman is an always changing symphony of purrs and chirps, of meows and snarls, of moans and babblings, of groans and loud, ethereal, screaming wails.

Tomek had practised his part of the duet of love and life, over and over. Every night on the Fatherland, he had grunted, trumpeted, and howled at the moon, waiting for the distant apes to respond in kind. This is the song of man.

Soon, he will hear the song of woman.

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Tomek headed south, guided perhaps by the warm perfumed mists that seemed to forever blow in from that direction. To have a look ahead, he walked up a long incline, the backridge of a triangular promontory that rose up from the terrain like a giant sphinx.

From the top, the view was magnificent. He saw below him a most beautiful sight. A resplendent sight. An almost perfectly round lake, surrounded, bordered, by a field of bright red flowers. A brook gurgled somewhere, and warblers sang by the shore, their singing reflecting off the waters, making the lake itself seem musical.   With the sun shining and the wind blowing, the flowers seemed to move in waves, an undulating sea of red around the lake within.

The whole lake looked like a giant mouth. The mouth of a deep underground well. The mouth of the Motherland.

From the top of the sphinx, the scents were strong.

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