nor of being the first to land upon
the grass, but the crew apparently had their orders; I was courteously
tapped upon the shoulder--I presume the warders are polite when they
enter the condemned cell at dawn--my chute was strapped upon me and the
instructions I had already read in their printed form at least sixty
times were repeated verbally, so much to my confusion that when I was
finally in the air I do not know to this day whether I counted six,
sixty, six hundred, or six thousand before jerking the ripcord. Whatever
the number, it was evidently not too far wrong, for although I received
a marrowexploding shock, the parachute opened and I floated down.

But no sooner were my fears of the parachute's performance relieved than
I was for the first time assailed with apprehension at the thought of my
destination. The grass, the weed, the destroying body which had devoured
so much was immediately below me. I was irrevocably committed to come
upon it--not at its edges where other men battled with it
heroically--but at its very heart, where there were none to challenge
it.

Still tormented and dejected, I landed easily and safely a few feet from
the goat and just behind the rearquarters of one of the sheep.

And now I pause in my writing to sit quite still and remember--more
than remember, live through again--the sensation of that first physical
contact with the heart of the grass. Ecstasy is a pale word to apply to
the joy of touching and resting upon that verdure. Soft--yes, it was
soft, but the way sand is soft, unyieldingly. Unlike sand, however, it
did not suggest a tightlypacked foundation, but rather the firmness of a
good mattress resting on a wellmade spring. It was resilient, like
carefully tended turf, yet at the same time one thought, not of the
solid ground beneath, but of feathers, or even more of buoyant clouds.
My parachute having landed me gently on my feet, I sank naturally to my
knees, and then, impelled by some other force than gravity, my body fell
fully forward in complete relaxation until my face was buried in the
thickly growing culms and my arms stretched out to embrace as much of
the lush surface as they could encompass.

Far more complex than the mere physical reactions were the psychical
ones. When a boy I had, like every other, daydreamed of discovering new
continents, of being first to climb a hitherto unscaled peak, to walk
before others the shores of strange archipelagoes, to bring back