I said what I had said to them before, to him before: "You must all make your way across the plain to the other side, and you must patiently wait your turn - but it will not be so long a wait now, for Shikasta is being crowded with souls, they are being born in droves, more and more. Go, and wait and try again."
A great clamour and a complaint went up all around me.
Ben cried, "But it is worse now, they say. It gets worse and harder. If I could not succeed then, why should I now? I can't..."
"You must," I said, and began to force my way through them.
And now Ben let out a roaring raucous laugh, an accusation. "There you go," he shouted, "you're all right, you can come and go as you please, but what of us?"
I had passed through. Well away from them, I looked back. The crowd there wailed and lamented and swayed about under the force of their grief. But Ben took a step forward from them. And another. I pointed across the plain, and watched him take a painful step forward. He was going to try. He was on his way over that vast, painful plain.
I heard them singing as I went on:
on, and on, and on.
Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless, I ran across the plain, feeling the dust thick and soft underfoot. I remembered the grasses and bushes and rivers of my last visit, while I stepped across dry channels and used dry riverbeds as roads. Crickets and cicadas, the shimmer of hot light on rock - this would be desert very soon. And I thought of what I must face when I at last was able to enter Shikasta.
Sitting on an outcrop of low stone I saw a figure that was familiar, and I approached a female shape drooping in sorrow and lassitude so deep she did not move as I approached. I stood over her and saw it was Rilla, who on my last visit had been with the crowds at the Eastern Gate.