Turning his head to watch Dr. Sanders, Father Batthus sat at the organ, his thin fingers drawing from the pipes their unbroken music, which soared away through the stained panels of the windows to the distant dismembered sun.

13 Saraband for lepers

For the next three days Sanders remained with Balthus, as the last crystal spurs dissolved from the tissues of his arm. All day he knelt beside the organ, working the footbellows with his jeweled arm. As the crystals dissolved, the wound he had torn in his arm ran with blood again, washing the pale prisms of his exposed tissues.

At dusk, when the sun sank in a thousand fragments into the western night, Father Balthus would leave the organ and stand out on the porch, looking up at the spectral trees. His slim scholar's face and calm eyes, their composure belied by the nervous movements of his hands, like the false calm of someone recovering from an attack of fever, would gaze at Sanders as they ate their small supper on a footstool beside the altar, sheltered from the embalming air by the jewels in the cross.

This emblem had been the joint gift of the mining companies, and the immense span of the crosspiece, at least five or six feet, carried its freight of precious stones like the boughs of the crystallized trees in the forest. The rows of emeralds and rubies, between which the smaller diamonds of Mont Royal traced starlike patterns, ran from one end of the crosspiece to the other. The jewels emitted a hard, continuous light so intense that the stones seemed fused together into a cruciform specter.

At first Sanders thought that Balthus regarded his survival as an example of the Almighty's intervention, and made some token expression of gratitude. At this Balthus smiled ambiguously. Why he had returned to the church Sanders could only guess. By now it was surrounded on all sides by the crystal trellises, as if overtopped by the mouth of an immense glacier.

From the door of the chancel Sanders could see the outbuildings of the native school and dormitory that Max Clair had described, presumably the home of the tribe of lepers abandoned by their priest. Sanders mentioned his meeting with the lepers, but Balthus seemed uninterested in his former parishioners or their present fate. Even Sanders's presence barely impinged upon his isolation. Preoccupied with himself, he sat for hours at the organ or wandered among the empty pews.

One morning, however, Balthus found a blind python searching at the door of the porch. Its eyes had been transformed into enormous jewels that rose from its forehead like crowns. Balthus knelt down and picked up the snake, then entwined its long body around his arms. He carried it down the aisle to the altar, and lifted it up to the cross. He watched it with a wry smile when, its sight returned, it slid away among the pews.

On the third day Sanders woke to the early morning light and found Balthus, alone, celebrating the Eucharist. Lying on the pew pulled up to the altar rail, Sanders watched him without moving, but the priest stopped and walked away, stripping off his vestments.

Over breakfast he confided: "You probably wonder what I was doing, but it seemed a convenient moment to test the validity of the sacrament."

He gestured at the prismatic colors pouring through the stained-glass windows. The original scriptural scenes had been transformed into paintings of bewildering abstract beauty, in which the dismembered fragments of the faces of Joseph and Jesus, Mary and the disciples floated on the liquid ultramarine of the refracted sky.

"It may sound heretical to say so, but the body of Christ is with us everywhere here-" he touched the thin shell of crystals on Sanders's arm "in each prism and rainbow, in the ten thousand faces of the sun." He raised his thin hands, jeweled by the light. "So you see, I fear that the Church, like its symbol"-here he pointed to the cross-"may have outlived its function."

Sanders searched for an answer. "I'm sorry. Perhaps if you left here-"

"No!" Balthus insisted, annoyed by Sanders's obtuseness. "Can't you understand? Once I was a true apostate-I knew God existed but could not believe in him." He laughed bitterly at himself. "Now events have overtaken me. For a priest there is no greater crisis, to deny God when he can be seen to exist in every leaf and flower."

With a gesture he led Sanders down the nave to the open porch. He pointed up to the dome-shaped lattice of crystal beams that reached from the rim of the forest like the buttresses of an immense cupola of diamond and glass. Embedded at various points were the almost motionless forms of birds with outstretched wings, golden orioles and scarlet macaws, shedding brilliant pools of light. The bands of color moved through the forest, the reflections of the melting plumage enveloping them in endless concentric patterns. The overlapping arcs hung in the air like the votive windows of a city of cathedrals. Everywhere around them Sanders could see countless smaller birds, butterflies and insects, joining their cruciform haloes to the coronation of the forest.

Father Balthus took Sanders's arm. "In this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist of Christ's body. Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time."

Toward the end, as they stood side by side with their backs to the altar, his conviction seemed to fail him. As the deep frost penetrated the church, the aisle transformed itself into an occluding tunnel of glass pillars. With an expression almost of panic Balthus watched the keys of the organ manual sealing themselves together as they merged into one another, and Sanders knew that he was searching for some means of escape.

Then at last he rallied. He seized the cross from the altar and wrenched it from its stand. With a sudden anger born of absolute conviction he pressed the cross into Sanders's arms. He dragged Sanders to the porch and propelled him to one of the narrowing vaults, through which they could see the distant surface of the river.

"Go! Get away from here! Find the river!"

When Sanders hesitated, trying to control the heavy scepter with his bandaged arm, Balthus shouted fiercely: "Tell them I ordered you to take it!"

Sanders last saw him standing arms outstretched to the approaching walls, in the posture of the illuminated birds, his eyes filled with relief at the first circles of light conjured from his upraised palms.

The crystallization of the forest was now almost complete. Only the jewels in the cross allowed Sanders to make his way through the vaults between the trees. Holding the shaft in his hands, he moved the crosspiece along the trellises that hung everywhere like webs of ice, looking for the weaker panels that would dissolve in the light. As they slid to the ground at his feet he stepped through the openings, pulling the cross with him.

When he reached the river he searched for the bridge he had found when he entered the forest for the second time, but the prismatic surface extended away in a wide bend, its light obliterating the few landmarks he might otherwise have recognized. Above the banks the foliage glowed like painted snow, the only movement coming from the slow traverse of the sun. Here and there a soft blur below the bank revealed itself as the illuminated specter of a lighter or river launch, but nothing else seemed to retain any trace of its previous identity.

Sanders followed the bank, avoiding the faults in the surface and the waist-high needles that grew together on the upper slopes. He came to the mouth of a small stream and began to walk along it, too tired to climb over the cataracts in its path. Although his three days with Father Balthus had rested him sufficiently to realize that some way still remained out of the forest, the absolute silence of the vegetation along the banks and the deep prismatic glow almost convinced him that the entire earth had been transformed and that any progress through this crystal world had become pointless.