The Indus red with blood. The nephelim are allies underground. Murk causes misery for centuries. Shimmer, Old Shiver, and a third spirit rage across the earth for twenty-nine years. Only the kindly are left alive. Shimmer sleeps. Ahalya visits. Shimmer is taken back past the beginning of the universe. He kneels. De Quincey frets, but Peg has faith.

A cataclysm on Sumatra; half the people of Asia are killed. Simple lives and the legend of the pastoral idyll. The high tower that would not let itself be built. Life with Sita, life with swallows. Murk returns to desecrate the Indus, but nothing can be done, so a life of healing shared with Silver.

Shimmer spends centuries strengthening the natural world to withstand the coming onslaught of Man. Kolkata at the mouth of the Ganges climbs the ladder of accumulation and desire. Shimmer trades in Kashmir and smelts ore in China. He raises ponies in Mongolia and gathers feathers on a high tableland in South America.

Chapter 9. Unlucky Mud decides to chop down a tree. Shimmer faces his misdeeds. Nearly four thousand years after sitting down behind the waterfall, Shimmer stands up; he gradually returns to living as a man, but in quiet, simple lives. A misstep, and a private hell.

Nephelim attack; a being intervenes. Shimmer, limping, goes east, paying his way by making articles of wood. Stepping across valleys, he goes to Turkey, up the Indus, revisits Kurukshetra, goes to the remotest ashram, where he finds Gliff. Shimmer takes a seat in a hollow behind a waterfall.

Teaching in a Chinese grove. Walking east across the north of Africa. Up into Europe to see how people who know only wood and stone live in the coniferous and hardwood jungle. He teaches them how to overwinter in the hills, how to raise a house on stilts. A ravenous search for gems and metals is ignited, which Shimmer cannot quench.

Chapter 8. The aftermath: guilt and overstimulation. Love and death on earth, or a life out among the stars, where he will not have to see Ahalya die again: Shimmer must choose. Interlude with Ahalya. Centuries of sleep. Sita. Shimmer's forgotten weapon cuts apart Murk and his gang when they attack as souls. Back to earth: apparitions and excursions.

The tutor killed, the Blue Prince blames himself. Shimmer steps into him, and the building of the allies' armies recommences. The League is cowed. Old Shiver, Sita, and Ahalya, too, have been moving in this royal family. Round Five. The tramp of boots. The fine souls gather. Open conflict. The Battle of Kurukshetra and the slaughter up against the hills.

Round Three. What if high and low were friends? Shimmer in the prince and in the drover's son. The dark purpose of the hidden league. Murk wins the round, on points. As lovely as the peaceful kingdom was, the spreading rot had torn down more. Round Four. The strategist and general. Wargames. Tutor to princes, one blue, one gold.

The war begins. Round One. A sacrifice throw by Shimmer, slowing Murk. Round Two. The peacemaker tracks Murk from town to town, gathers forces, goes into the forest. Murk's body killed; the round declared a tie.

De Quincey dreams. The lives of kings, centuries of taking care of marshes and wading birds, a darkness out of which a soul is screaming: Shimmer is split in three. The three souls' trial reunion. The weaver. Frustration at the rise of misdirected worship. Life on muddy earth, and a stable, quiet peace, but Murk arrives.

Chapter 7. The time pleat closes. Clouds of butterflies ascend from roosts in trees deep in an emerald valley; Shimmer does his best to guard them. A millennium goes by. Raiders return, but are defeated: peace. De Quincey: How can there have been so much of time? Wordsworth: Have we perfected our natures over time, or was there one step up?

More history of Old Kindom Egypt. The structure of the universe, a universe of worlds. Dark matter. The dimensions other than our own. Where the redshift went. New cosmologies.

A long schooltime of simple labor, and Shimmer walks the earth, teaching, watching. He is a goose, he is a woodland pool. East of Varanasi, beside the River Ganga, the magus Imhotep meets himself walking in a garden. Old Kingdom Egypt travels back in time to stabilize Gangetic society. Imhotep, Zoser, and the pyramids of Egypt.

Chapter 6. The Ice Age ends. Shimmer lives with Sita, Ahalya, Katrina Maria, always harried by Murk and his gang. Why? What end is served? Shimmer unintentionally kills a cousin, loses his sanity, and despairs. Eruption in Sumatra: almost every human dies. Centuries of recovery; Shimmer helps restore nature, and his sanity returns.

No rest: Mongolians must be led across the land bridge. Rafts along the coast to California, where Murk the Trickster schemes and maims. Garuda becomes trapped in Australia. Back in the Valley, he flies high inside an upward-reaching thunderhead; he sees earth's curvature, but falls, is broken. Release from physicality.

Chapter 5. Shimmer thinks how much more a bird knows of the world than a walking man, and someone hears: he becomes Garuda, the simurgh, the thunderbird. The speaking bird arranges a migration from eastern India into China, flies northeast to reconnoitre, and is frozen solid at the edge of the Ice Cap beyond the River Lena.

De Quincey asks of Wordsworth: "Can it be I am reminded only of my childhood in these images I dream?" A half-in, half-out life, not exactly human. Ahalya rescued. She and Shimmer walk to the sources of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. They find the Valley of the Robed Ones, and there a respite for Ahalya.

Horse-mounted raiders throughout the Indus Valley. Shimmer leads the fight against the raiders, then a migration to the far south, into Kerala.

Chapter 4. A nomadic people, The Brothers and The Sisters, on the Gangetic Plain. Shimmer born to Ahalya, unhappy in her marriage. Falls in love with Sita. Must bring news of some wonderful, new land: finds Nepal, leads the people there. Katmandu. Sabotaged scaffolding; Shimmer dies, Sita left alone. Aurelia. Rise of The Bharatas.

Joy along the Indus. Shimmer and Ahalya wed again and move upstream to tame water buffalo, farm, and love. "The Serpent was a buffalo, and profit was the Apple." Ahalya seduced by business. Shimmer, distraught, goes into the hills. Alone in the Karakoram Range. Goes home: "YOU NEVER LOVED ME!" Karla. Reconciliation.

Scouts come back from the river's end and are not believed: half the Earth lost, become a salt-tasting, useless, pitching ocean. Ocean-going curraghs. The Nation paddles north along the coast, crosses out of sight of land. The Poison Coast: thirst; Ahalya and child die in the boat. Father Indus, Mother Ganges.

Chapter 3. Bandits torment the Tanganyikan lakeshore people. Shimmer, a young curragh paddler, leads The Nation towards an eastern land remembered in the oldest legends. He is married to Ahalya. Two thousand people make a line of boats and rafts two miles long. The portage to a long river flowing east. Shimmer and Ahalya's first child, a daughter, arrives.

Life along Lake Tanganyika. Murk's villains re-emerge. Enslavement and revolt. Along the southwest coast of Africa, The Nation meets the people from Lesotho. Shimmer and Ahalya marry; the hoodlums re-appear; Ahalya is killed; Shimmer takes revenge. "I lead a flight of three Masai across dry level ground ..."