The fire seized her,fed.There was no burnng but a cold and weightless dazzle and then a light that blinded,deafended,numbed,with her senses being subtracted until all that remained was the odor of desire,and that odor suffused ecery pore and everywhere it brought oblivion.

It was the wind that woke her.It was full of sand and stinging hot,and yet each particle of sand that blew against her skin was like a tiny,tingling penetration,invigorating and indecent.

The sand was nipping at her flesh like lover's kisses,the wind hotly seductive as it whirled through her hair.

From somerwhere in the winding,shadowed steets,a chime echoed.Its silvery tones shivered through Val's body;its vibrations pleasured heart and lungs and entrails.

A parrot flew by above-a gaudy slash of green and scarlet against searing blue sky-and the sight brought delight that was unbearable in its intensity.

Nor were simple,everyday sensations less capable of inspiring ecstacy.The odor of baking bread....of musky human sweat that wafted from the cloistered dooorways as she passed-each was author to an exquisite sensitivity of mind and loins,making of each pore a tiny vulva,ravenous for more.

It was difficult,if not impossible,however,to keep her concentration focused-when the slap of her sandaled feet on paving stones,the metallic ring of chimes,the gold threads in an ornately woven rug glipmsed in an open courtyard rung such sensual delight that she felt exhausted,frazzled,giddy with the unnatural opulence of her sorroundings.

As her wanderings led her deeper into the labyrinthine streets,Val caught sight,here and there,of other people:an old woman lying splay legged in an alleway,her grizzled,thinly furred sex exposed.She held a musical instrument,a long flute-like thing with a curved end,which she simultaneously used to play and penetrate herself,moaning out the notes as she played herself to orgasm.

From "The Safety of Unknown Cities" by Lucy Taylor in The Mammoth Book of Erotica ed. Maxim Jakubowski

Meditation

The contemplation of the world began from the noblest spectacle that the human senses present to us[ the infinite expanse and limitless motions of the stars]and that our underststanding can bear to follow in their vast reach;and it ended-in astrology.Morality began with the noblest attribute of human nature[free will],the development and cultivation of which give a prospect of infinite utility;and ended-in fanaticism or superstition.

Immanuel Kant,

Critique of Practical Reason, trans.Thomas Abbot.