In his companion collections of short stories. The Sleepers of Roraima and The Age of the Rainmakers, Wilson Harris reaches through time and presents to the contemporary reader legends of the Amerindian people. It is not his intention merely to record such legends as the superstitious mythopoetic rationalizing of a "primitive" people; rather, Harris uses these legends to explore and activate the original and timeless quality of the imagination, a quality which twentieth-century man has nullified by his obsession with totalities or fixed perspectives of time, history and race. Through his stories, Harris demonstrates the error of such limited perception, which may be overcome if the imagination is reactivated as the original and vital human force. It is the imagination which destroys the limiting concepts of past, present and future, unifying all that has been, is and will be, in the moment now, the eternal present. (p. 218)

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