oblivions between whose margins it throve. That was what Horemheb most feared, not knowing. Surely he feared that more than death. Otherwise he would not have made the journey. Indeed, life seemed a small enough, and a reasonable enough, gift to exchange for knowing, or understanding, or truth. To be sure, you must not misunderstand me here. Horemheb was not a vainglorious man, nor even a very proud one. He did wish to understand, but not really a great deal, and only in a small, modest way, and in a way suitable to himself, to his own lights and limitations. That would have been enough. It need not be significant from your point of view, for example. He just wanted, you see, to catch a glimpse of a part of the world, so to speak. To come to grips, truly, so to speak, with a particle of rock, a pebble, a grain of sand, a drop of water, perhaps a branch, such small things, that would have been enough for him. He did not seek to penetrate the mysteries of matter, say, that there should be such, or those of stars, and time, and worlds, and space. Nothing significant, you understand. Indeed, his ambitions did not even extend, really, to the pebble or the branch, so to speak. Rather he wanted to understand the brethren, and himself, and, if it must be anticipated, the beast, that which he knew, and the others did not, lay at the end of the string. That was the quest of his life, its purpose. Indeed, that was the meaning of the journey. Too, it was not that Horemheb had really chosen to make the journey. People seldom choose to make such journeys. Rather such journeys choose them. In a sense, one might even think of him as having been condemned to the journey, or destined for it, much as a stone is condemned to be subject to the law of gravity, or destined to abide beneath its sway, much as fire, without its choice or collusion, is condemned to be beautiful and savage, and water the medium of life’s nutrients and yet, at the same time, the most frightening of all substances, in whose suffocating depths it would be, for such as Horemheb, impossible. And so Horemheb left the village, and at night. He did not begrudge the others the walls, or the fence, or the cordiality and warmth of their hearths. Sometimes he envied them. But the journey had called him. He had been chosen by the journey. Perhaps that was why the stealthy ones had not claimed him, why he, of all the brethren, seemed invulnerable to their clasp. Or rather, perhaps more sensibly, it was because they knew he clung to the string, and that the string led to the platform. The stealthy ones, too, had their fears, and they were seldom found in the vicinity of the platform. They feared to go there. The string led to the platform. Perhaps that was why Horemheb had, for many times, over many tens of revolutions of his world, returned from this journey. Surely the brethren did not, as a folk, possess such invulnerability, such immunity from the stealthy ones. And indeed, sometimes the brethren, about their hearths, puzzled, and speculated, and wondered how it was that the stealthy ones did not claim him, as they had others, sometimes even in the brightness of the sun, in the heat of the day, in the summer, not only in the winters when the lantern fruits were shriveled on the frozen branches and their prints could be found in the snow, about the edges of the clearing, sometimes near the fence itself. The brethren knew about the string, but they did not understand it. Too, they knew about the platform, but they did not understand it, either. To understand the platform one must have, like Horemheb, come there at night. Then they might have understood.
Midway in his journey, near the string, Horemheb stopped and put his staff to one side. He sat down there, on the ground, prey to what might choose to have him, what he could not, in any case, have evaded, not crouching like the younger ones, ready to dart at the snapping of a twig, the crinkling of a leaf, to safety. He sat there, in the weariness and patience of age, too old for the journey and himself knowing it, yet having begun it once again, now not really with