The old woman woke. She bowed over the loom where sleep had snatched her fingers from her mind. Her handiwork lay in tatters before her. First rats, then the insects had pulled apart the threads, frayed the weave, and gnawed the vegetable dies from loose strands. The cords, stronger than tooth and mandible, were intact. She bent to the woof and began a pattern fresh from a dream.

The design consisted in a series of knots repeated with the tiniest of variations that doubled and redoubled, interlocked and revolved as in a minuet. From the start her strokes were bold and decisive, the blend of geometry graceful, the cells of repetition seamless. Heat sprang in the weave from the friction of her swift pulling on resilient threads. Rich colour glowed in the pattern, ran along the interstices, and made sudden turns to reappear in distant, tonal echoes.

Sometimes the design went astray in the realisation. Random flaws took on body and force of their own. She learned from the process, coaxed back to the centre of the cloth a great, renegade gash that unchecked, would have bled into irreparable chaos. No conjunction of space and dynamic was the same when she began her work anew; but in the myriad combinations of texture and form, constants could be inferred from the length of her movements, from the delicate and vigorous limits to her strength, from the size of the loom itself, and the substance of the threads she used. Ten or so immaterial reins bridled the infinity of horses that tracked the cloth behind her galloping hands.

Nearly always the boundless complexity of the work overcame her mastery of the task. Inconsequential differences in the knotting became pernicious from one row to the next; and hazard, at first happy in colour's harmony, turned to strident clash. The fabric's integrity slowly leaked away. Rough patches, splotches of brittle bark wounded the texture; energy escaped from charred lumps and holed the weave; radiant hues dimmed and went sooty.

Here her eyes dulled with the strain. Her efforts bleared in and out of focus. Like thick drops of mercury, heavy poison, sensation condensed in her fingertips. She fell into sleep, left the cloth unattended before her. Irreverent jaws began masticating the strands.

So it had gone for ages, with only the rare exception. Once in the longest while the master weaver came into fortune. Elegance guided her touch; chance was felicity; the surface inscribed was impervious to fault; the rendition nudged perfection. She yanked on the final threads then, pulled the cloth from the loom, and held the gorgeous tapestry as high as she could to light her way to bed.

The fabric covered her face as she lay asleep, stayed luminescent and warm, and transpierced by her breath, was transformed. The shades of colour first ebbed away from over her mouth, nostrils and forehead, then disappeared at the contours of her eyes, her temples and chin. In an interval measured by the old woman's breathing, the cloth bleached pure white to dissolve into dust. Above the sleeping mistress, the perfect pattern held the air, then, intricate and splendid, left the room to go who knows where? The old woman drank of the deepest rest, and wore still a faint tattoo of her design on her cheek. The dreams within would bring her back to work when she woke, where she would cajole the threads once again in her search for beauty divine.