As Algy turned the pages of his book of verse, he could hear a gentle, soft rustling just above his head. It was hard to be quite sure, because the forest was alive with peculiar noises of all kinds, but Algy was almost certain that there was someone there.
However, the rainforest foliage was tangled and dense, and at first he couldn't see what kind of creature might be making the noise. But when a ray of sunlight suddenly burst through the green canopy, Algy thought that he caught a glimpse of a little brown monkey glowing in the sunshine, peering down at him from a precarious perch on a massive leaf. A vague memory drifted back to him… wasn't this the same little monkey he had encountered in a moonlit dream on his very first night in the forest?
Rubbing his eyes, Algy looked again, but the sunlight dazzled him and the complex layers of leaves played tricks with his senses, so that he was able to imagine that he saw all kinds of things that might – or might not – really be there…
As he looked back down at his book, the leaves above him rustled again, and Algy thought that he heard a hushed voice whispering, but so very quietly that it could just have been his imagination. "Turn to page 62," it seemed to say. "Turn to page 62."
Flicking through the wee volume until he found that page, Algy looked up at his hidden companion and smiled, for this is what he had read:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.
[Algy is of course reading Caliban's famous lines from Act 3 Scene 2 of The Tempest by the late 16th/early 17th century English playwright William Shakespeare.]
{ A special tumblr collaboration between @pangarina-angelin-a and @adventuresofalgy }
