"On this night I was writing like a madman, scribbling down descriptions of the men who came and went in the tavern, children of all races it seemed, speakers of a dozen different languages.
"And for no apparent reason, I was possessed of a strange idea about life, a strange concern that amounted almost to a pleasant obsession. I remember that it came on me this night because it seemed somehow related to what happened after. But it wasn't related. I had had the idea before. That it came to me in these last free hours as a Roman citizen was no more than coincidence.
"The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously. There was an awareness somewhere of all things i had seen in my travels, an awareness of what it had been like in Massilia six centuries ago when the first Greek traders came, an awareness of what it had been like in Egypt when Cheops built the pyramids. Somebody knew what the light had been like in the late afternoon on the day that Troy fell to the Greeks, and someone or something knew what the peasants said to each other in their little farmhouse outside Athens right before the Spartans brought down the walls.
"My idea of who or what it was, was vague. But I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual -- and knowing was spiritual -- was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing . . .
"And as I drank a little more wine, and thought about it, and wrote about it, I realized it wasn't so much a belief of mine as it was a prejudice. I just felt that there was a continual awareness.
"And the history that I was writing was an imitation of it.
I tried to unite all things I had seen in my history, linking my observations of lands and people with all the written observations that had come down to me from the Greeks -- from Xenophon and Herodotus, and Poseidonius -- to make one continuous awareness of the world in my lifetime. It was a pale thing, a limited thing, compared to the true awareness. Yet I felt good as I continued writing.
"But around midnight, I was getting a little tired, and when I happened to look up after a particularly long period of unbroken concentration, I realized something had changed in the tavern.
"It was unaccountably quieter. In fact, it was almost empty. And across from me, barely illuminated by the sputtering light of the candle, there sat a tall fair-haired man with his back to the room who was watching me in silence. I was startled, not so much by the way he looked -- though this was startling in itself -- but by the realization that he had been there for some time, close to me, observing me, and I hadn't noticed him.
"He was a giant of a Gaul as they all were, even taller than I was, and he had a long narrow face with an extremely strong jaw and hawklike nose, and eyes that gleamed beneath their bushy blond brows with a childlike intelligence. What I mean to say is he looked very, very clever, but very young and innocent also. And he wasn't young. The effect was perplexing.
"And it was made all the more so by the fact that his thick and coarse yellow hair wasn't clipped short in the popular Roman style, but was streaming down to his shoulders. And instead of the usual tunic and cloak which you saw everywhere in those times, he wore the old belted leather jerkin that had been the barbarian dress before Caesar.
"Right out of the woods this character looked, with his gray eyes burning through me, and I was vaguely delighted with him. I wrote down hurriedly the details of his dress, confident he couldn't read the Latin.
"But the stillness in which he sat unnerved me a little. His eyes were unnaturally wide, and his lips quivered slightly as if the mere sight of me excited him. His clean and delicate white hand, which casually rested on the table before him, seemed out of keeping with the rest of him.