Chronicon

Chapter 5.5
Gurges Mirabilis‏

"All our exchanges, from the northern coast of the Island of Cuba (from the southern side we have none so late,) come to us with glowing descriptions of the recent Aurora Borealis, which appears to have been as bright in the tropics as in the northern zones, and far more interesting. The sky was no more, or at least but for a moment, completely lit up from the horizon to the pole, but the light came and went, now here, now there, now in this direction, now in that, and each time varying in outline and brilliancy. During the three hours which followed it seems to have had almost every latitude and longitude possible in its field, and to have described every possible figure…"
-New Orleans Daily Picayune,September 7, 1859

…The northern sky, for an extent of some forty five degrees, was luminous with a mass of red light, from whence shot up towards the zenith the usual streaks, at times vivid and beautiful…

-New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 3, 1859

…again appeared in most resplendent brilliancy in the northern horizon last evening, being visible for a while just before and after the hour of midnight. The fainter or yellow lines of upshooting light could be clearly distinguished in the bright red illumination which extended wide around, lighting up the sky in such a manner as led the unmindful and even some of the fire companies to suppose that part of the city was about to be burnt out in a grand conflagration…

-The New Orleans Bee, September 2, 1859

'The City' Change of Weather '…Towards half past eight o'clock a singular phenomenon took place. The horizon from north to north east became of a deep crimson hue, which expanding slowly, made the sky appear as if lighted by a Bengal fire…At first it was supposed that some great conflagration had taken place on the outskirts of the city, but it was soon recognized that no natural fires could produce this particular hue…Crowds of people gathered at the street corners, admiring and commenting upon the singular spectacle. Many took it to be the sign of some great disaster or important event, siting numerous instances when such warnings have been given. Several old women were nearly frightened to death, thinking it announced the end of the world, and immediately took to saying their prayers. A fat old citizen tremblingly stated that this was the avant courier of a dreadful epidemic like cholera of 1833, whilst a French gentleman pooh-poohed, and gravely assured us that this was the well known sign of a revolution in Paris, requesting us to make a note of the date.

-New Orleans Daily Picayune, p.5

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On the solar storm's induction, they rode the dawn into the last temporal vent together; Catiche, Xquiq, Madimi, Cora and Nightingale aboard the gondola, calculating to be berthed by awaiting midwifery of familiar disposition on the other side of yesterwhen.
A silence of metabolic interioritys engulfed Lafitte's airship which the Æolipylæ had re-named 'Luna', as it slipped surging through the amniotic sussurus of the quicksilvered obsidian quern.

Here, moments do not pass consecutively like attendants bearing the bier
of hindsight & forethought over their heads towards some final ossuary;
change is the constant in which they occur. Restless thought consumed in the absolute ever present
burbling current of mute configurations, too immediate to signify; awareness erupting, a gasping fish surfacing alien in an atmosphere consisting of perpetual amazement, surfing a green room's conduit to the future.

Enveloped in the wide waste of flickering silence they were thus borne, their channel penetrating a declension of lifetimes to issue forth in some very remote parturition.
Crossing the abyss through the ring-pass-knot, their secret presence alone overheard eternity's hazardous choir, for the maelstrom in which they found themselves displaced ground the marrow meal of Time in service of the nine maids of the island mill beyond the earth's last outskirt.

A colotomy of distant gamelan syllables reverberates within the dark passage, stroboscopic with diffuse lit phantom lanterns; Paracelsian star jellies drifting behind membranes throbbing with nocturnal fires.
Strong myometrial contractions propel their moth through perinatal matrixes of the cosmogenetic intrauterine passage.
Centrifugal flotsams suspend in its swirling eddies, passing so near they could almost read the whitened pages of lost old shaman bones watermarked with the transcribed sheet-music of the gods' repertoire.

The velocity of the passage's interior circumference spun smooth, moist radiance shimmering moonlight-golden veins along the black walls, far into the recesses of the chasm. Within She could all be seen, serene talisman of utter turmoil. Ahead the maelstrom's cervix yawned, beckoning.

The hydrodynamic swarm gradually increased crescendo in headlong kettledrum, sounding a terrible cyclone of buffalo locomotives. Boiling, hissing a textured howl, a weep and moan on the tempestuous winds of Her voice, mad calliope giving birth on rippling whirl and plunging ascent; vortices climaxing in an ecstatic conflict of waters heaving and gyrating, swaying in gigantic dark swell and gleaming sapphirine spray.

Her progeny borne upward, Luna's moth approached the ring of surf surrounding the vast egress, to that precipice of Her prodigal cornucopia; having brought plumb the full expanse of the abyss to occasion their pridian present.

They were drowned in an unearthly shriek, like the shriek should all the steamers left behind them on the Mississippi collectively emit their steam in unison.

The roaring caldron cast them forth. A thick mist enveloped everything, and a magnificent rainbow hung over that bridge between Time and Eternity.

Disgorged from the belly of the beast and flying through the air like old Geppetto, Nightingale found his feet planted on the deck of a skyborne airship. Turning wild-eyed to Cora he evanesced: "Blue Fairy, look- I'm a real boy!" And he danced a little jig, hamstrings twitching in a virtual palsy as if inflicted by some delinquent, invisible behind the curtain.

Cora rolled her eyes, whispering aside to Xquiq and Aldina: "he keeps himself in clouds".

"Come, my coach, by the power of song we cross it."

They cast their hawsers then to the Skomorokhi waiting on Hinba down below.

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"We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message".
-Norbert Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

" O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives
The moths & atheists are doubly divine & dying
We live, we die and death not ends it."
- James Douglas Morrison