The Width of a Circle

Taylor slipped back exhausted into the cane chair and tilted his face to feel the cool of the dusk as it began to fall upon the great open grasslands. Then with a distant and wistful air, he positioned himself towards the guest, ready to speak.

"You should know that no one I can recall knew of him personally. He could have run guns, though I'm not sure. There were supposedly wives of a sort on several Pacific islands, and people I have met entirely by coincidence, have said that he never really existed at all. Just as an idea, a kind of yearning. An emptiness". This was relayed with a strange and suppressed intensity that mirrored the still potent heat of the day, now slowly vanishing.

It seemed to the guest that nearly everything Taylor said, was couched in a curiously off handed and casual manner that caught and irritated the mind.

"I don't understand" he said bemused. "How can a man who didn't exist, have such an impact, leave such an impression? It's absurd!" he said in an exasperated tone. "Yes", Taylor began slowly, "How many that do exist, can say they have done anything of consequence at the end of their lives? Certainly I can’t. That is, I often have a feeling that I..."

"Well, it's all highly irregular, and if you don't mind me saying so, it's preposterous!" said the guest, raising his voice even more. "No, I don't mind at all. My position is neutral, you see" said Taylor, in a tone that drifted off like the last of the evening light.

The snow leopard twitched with energy as she surveyed the orange plain below. The heat from her sweat slicked body rose into the air like fine curves of smoke. Her tensile form rippling with sinews sprung like sabres and her heart primed with a powerful beat. The distant thin clouds drifted high across the sky of intense blue. In a haze at the horizon, it met the moving and liquid grass that was filled with the buzz of an insect kingdom.

With its many kilometres of baseline sitting in the indistinct shimmer like a vast and obese Buddha, its peaks so above and removed from the concerns of animal repose and fury, was the mountain. Everything changes it seems, except for its great and dominant presence.