Page:Evgenii Zamyatin - We (Zilboorg translation).pdf/157

exactly, yes, exactly, like the faces of our women: tender, rosy, and not overgrown with hair. Also their breasts were free of hair, firm breasts of wonderful geometrical form. As to the males, only a part of their faces were free from hair, like our ancestors’, and the organs of reproduction were similar to ours.

All this was so unbelievable, so unexpected, that I stood there quietly (I assert positively that I stood quietly) and looked around. Like a scale: overload one side sufficiently and then you may gently put on the other as much as you will; the arrow will not move.

Suddenly I felt alone. I-330 was no longer with me. I don’t know how or where she disappeared. Around me were only those, with their hair glistening like silk in the sunlight. I caught someone’s warm, strong, dark shoulder.

“Listen, please, in the name of the Well-Doer, could you tell me where she went? A while, a minute ago, she . . .”

Long-haired, austere eyebrows turned to me.

“Sh . . . sh . . . silence!” He made a sign with his head toward the center of the clearing where there stood the yellow skull-like stone.

There above the heads of all I saw her. The sun beat straight into my eyes, and because of that she seemed coal-black, standing out on the blue cloth of the sky—a coal-black silhouette on a blue background. A little higher the clouds were floating. And it seemed that not the clouds but the rock itself, and she herself upon that rock, and the crowd and the clearing—all were silently floating like a ship, and the earth was light and glided away from under the feet. . . .

“Brothers!” (It was she.) “Brothers, you all know that there inside the Wall, in the City, they are building the Integral. And you know also that the day has come for us to destroy that Wall and all other walls, so that the green wind may blow over all the earth, from end to end. But the Integral is going to take these walls up, up into