The Green Child
Herbert Read
 The first and last parts of the story are told as a third-person narrative, but the middle part is written in the first person. The story begins in 1861 with the faked death of President Olivero, dictator of the South American Republic of Roncador, who has staged his own assassination. He returns to his native England, to the village where he was born and raised. On the evening of his arrival Olivero notices that the stream running through the village appears to be flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover the cause. The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill, where through a lighted window he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window, his "leap into the world of fantasy". The miller initially offers no resistance and allows Olivero to release the woman, whom he recognises by the colour of her skin to be Sally, one of the two green children who had mysteriously arrived in the village on the day he left, 30&nbsp;years earlier; Olivero also recognises the miller as Kneeshaw, an ex-pupil at the village school where he had once taught. During a struggle between the two men Kneeshaw is accidentally drowned in the mill pond. The next morning Olivero and Sally continue on Olivero's quest to find the stream's destination, a pool in the moors high above the village. Paddling in its water, Sally begins to sink into the silvery sand covering its bed. Olivero rushes to her, and hand in hand they sink beneath the water of the pool. The book's second part recounts the events between Oliver leaving the village as its young schoolmaster and his return as ex-President Olivero. He travels to London initially, hoping to find employment as a writer, but after three years spent working as a bookkeeper in a tailor's shop he takes passage on a ship which lands him in Cádiz, Spain. Unable to speak the language, and in possession of a book by Voltaire, he is arrested as a suspected revolutionary. Held captive for two years, he learns Spanish from his fellow prisoners and determines to travel to one of the liberated American colonies he has learned of, where the possibility exists to establish a new world "free from the oppression and injustice of the old world". Freed in an amnesty following the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, Oliver makes his way to Buenos Aires. There he is mistaken for a revolutionary agent and taken to meet General Santos of the Roncador Army. Together they hatch a plot to seize the country's capital city and assassinate its dictator. The plot is successful and "Don Olivero" finds himself leader of the Assembly, making him the country's new dictator, a position he holds for 25&nbsp;years. Eventually he realises that his style of government is leading the country into stagnation and "moral flaccidity"; he begins to feel nostalgia for the English village where he was brought up, and resolves to escape. Wishing to avoid any suspicion that he is deserting Roncador, Olivero fakes his own assassination. The final part of the book continues the story from when Olivero and Sally disappear under the water. A large bubble forms around them, transporting them to the centre of the pool and ascending into a large grotto, from where they proceed on foot through a series of adjoining caverns. Sally tells Olivero that this is the country she and her brother left 30&nbsp;years ago. Soon they encounter her people, to whom Sally, or Siloēn as she is properly known, explains that many years ago she wandered off and became lost, but that she has now returned with one who "was lost too, and now wishes to dwell among us". Olivero and Siloēn are welcomed into the community, where life is ordered around a progression from lower to upper ledges: the first ledge teaches the pleasures of youth; on the second ledge the pleasure of manual work is learned; on the third of opinion and argument; and finally, on the upper ledge, the "highest pleasure", of solitary thought. Olivero soon tires of the first ledge, and leaving Siloēn behind he moves to the second, where he learns to cut and polish crystals, the most sacred of objects in this subterranean world. Eventually he is allowed to move to the highest ledge of all, "the final stage of life". There he is taught the "basic principles of the universe", that there is only Order and Disorder. "Order&nbsp;... [is] the space-filling Mass about them&nbsp;... Disorder is empty space". Olivero selects a grotto in which to spend what remains of his life alone, contemplating the "natural and absolute beauty" of the crystals he accepts from the crystal-cutters. Food and water is brought regularly, and he settles to the task of preparing his body for "the perfection of death", which when it comes he meets with a "peculiar joy". Removing Olivero's body from the grotto the attendants encounter another group carrying Siloēn, who died at the same time as Olivero. The pair are laid together in a petrifying trough, to "become part of the same crystal harmony", as is customary when any of the Green people die.