Gond

Gond is both a land with a past and a people caught up in Earth’s evacuation, but the poem gives it no stable, settled geography. It appears in the practical detail of Gondians being led away with punch-card passports and identity pins, in the judgment that the land has declined from better days, and in a catastrophic image of a city transformed into a spiral of heated gas. These different appearances make Gond a place whose history of civilization and decline is shadowed by the violence of its departure and physical destruction.

Historical Reference and Identity

A glossary note identifies Gond with historical Gondwana, or the Land of the Gond: a highland kingdom in central India described as highly civilized and lasting from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. The note traces its decline to a Mahratta invasion that scattered the Gond people and led to cultural decline. This historical gloss gives the name a long human past beyond the immediate scenes of the poem, where Gond is embedded in a future marked by radiation, evacuation, and ruin.

The poem does not spell out how its Gond relates geographically or politically to historical Gondwana, or how much of that history its future inhabitants inherit. The glossary establishes a deliberate association, rather than a detailed continuity. That distinction matters: Gond arrives with the resonance of a once-flourishing civilization, while the verses themselves show a land whose former greatness is remembered only as a contrast to present vulnerability. The name carries the weight of a lost history, but the poem leaves the intervening centuries unaccounted for.

Gondians and the Evacuation

One scene focuses not on the land but on a group of Gondians being led forth to escape Earth’s shame and sin. Their departure is rendered through small administrative objects: each person has a punch-card passport and an identity pin. The precise credentials make the mass removal legible as an organized process, while the verb describing the group as being led forth places them in the position of people conducted away rather than choosing their destination independently.

The passage surrounds this procession with a dissonant mixture of grief and ceremony. Tears and gnashing teeth mingle with cheerful songs from young space cadets, so the departure does not resolve into a single public mood. Gond’s people leave amid the machinery and pageantry of evacuation, but the bodily signs of distress remain audible alongside the songs. The juxtaposition gives the Gondians’ removal a double character: it is presented as part of an escape from Earth, yet its orderliness cannot make the catastrophe benign.

Fire and the Migrant City

Elsewhere, Gond is caught in the phototurb’s flame. The land is twisted into a spiral, described as a swirling pillar of torrid gases and then as a migrant city crossing Dorisvale. The sequence alters the scale of the image: a named place becomes a distorted form, then a mass of burning gas, and finally a city in motion. The image does not describe an ordinary journey from one settled location to another. Its movement is inseparable from violent transformation.

Calling this apparition a migrant city retains the human scale of a settlement even as the flame makes it unstable and nearly unrecognizable. Gond is not simply a fixed point on a map in this passage; it becomes something carried across the landscape in the wake of destruction. The poem offers no further account here of who survives or where the city goes. That omission leaves the image suspended between displacement and annihilation: motion is visible, but a safe arrival is not.

Decline and Narrative Significance

A separate passage describes Gond as a land that had once seen better days and was now ripe for evil to have its turn. The phrasing makes decline part of the place’s characterization. Gond’s former prosperity does not protect it from what follows; instead, its history sharpens the contrast between a remembered better condition and a present judged ready for harm. The text does not identify the particular causes of this deterioration in that passage, so the judgment remains broader than a political chronicle.

Taken together, the episodes bind the land’s historical resonance to the fate of its people and its changing physical image. The Gondians are processed through evacuation with passports and pins; Gond itself is described as diminished, then transformed by fire into a spiraling, migrating city. The poem thus presents displacement at several scales, from individuals led away from Earth to a whole named place made mobile by catastrophe. Gond’s significance rests in that contrast: the name recalls an old civilization, while the scenes attached to it register how little memory, order, or former greatness can guarantee against ruin.