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08 - Anthem - Ayn Rand · Daily Classic Sci Fi Books

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  Chapter eight. It has been a day of wonder, this our first day
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  in the forest. We awoke when a ray of sunlight fell across our face.
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  We wanted to leap to our feet, as we have had to leap
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  to our feet every morning of our life. But we remembered suddenly that no
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  bell had rung, and there was no bell to ring anywhere. We lay
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  on our back. We threw our arms out, and we looked up at
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  the sky. The leaves had edges of silver that trembled and rippled like a
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  river of green, and fire flowing high above us. We did not wish
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  to move. We thought suddenly that we could lie thus as long as we
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  wished, and we laughed loud at the thought. We could also rise,
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  or run, or leap or fall down again. We were thinking that these
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  were things without sense. But before we knew it, our body had risen
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  in one leap. Our arms stretched out of their own will, and our
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  body whirled and whirled till it raised a wind to rustle through the leaves of
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  the bushes. Then our hands seized a branch and swung us high into a
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  tree. With no aim save the wonder of learning the stretch of our body.
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  The branch snapped under us, and we fell upon the moss that was
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  soft as a cushion. Then our body, losing all sense, rolled over
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  and over on the moss, dry leaves, and our tunic in our hair,
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  in our face, and we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing
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  aloud, laughing, as if there were no power left in us save laughter.
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  Then we took our glass box and we went into the forest. We
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  went on cutting through the branches, and it was if we were swimming through
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  a sea of leaves, with the bushes as waves, rising and falling and
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  rising around us, and flinging their green sprays high on the tree tops.
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  The trees parted before us, calling us forward. The forest seemed to welcome
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  us. We went on without thought, without care, with nothing to feel
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  save the song of our body. We stopped when we felt hunger. We
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  saw birds in the tree branches and flying from under our footsteps. We picked
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  a stone and scent it as an arrow at a bird. It fell before
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  us. We made a fire, We cooked the bird. We ate it,
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  and no meal had ever tasted better to us. And we thought suddenly
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  that there was this great satisfaction to be found in the food which we need
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  and obtained by our own hand. And we wished to be hungry again,
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  and soon that we might know again the strange new eating. Then we walked
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  on, and we came to a stream which lay as a streak of glass
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  among the trees. It lay so still that we saw no water, but
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  only a cut in the earth in which the trees grew down upturned, and
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  the sky at the bottom. We knelt by the stream, and we bent
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  down to drink. Then we stopped, for upon the blue of the sky
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  below us, we saw our own face for the first time. We sat
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  still, and we held our breath, for our face and our body were
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  beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we
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  felt no pity when we looked upon it. Our body was not like the
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  bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straight and thin, and hard
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  and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon
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  us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear from this being.
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  We walked on till the sun had set, when the shadows gathered among
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  the trees, we stopped in a hollow between the roots, where we shall
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  sleep tonight, and Suddenly, for the first time this day, we remembered
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  that we are the damned. We remembered it, and we laughed. We
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  are writing this on the paper we had hidden in our tunic, together with
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  the written pages we had brought for the World Council of Scholars, but never
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  given to them. We have much to speak of to ourselves, and we
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  hope we shall find the words for it in the days to come. Now
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  we cannot speak, for we cannot understand. End Chapter eight.