He fed out a dark line of horse hair into the depths. The silver hook shone like an eye. Nervously, he held tight to the eye of the fish, so that whatever form the salmon might change into, the traveller would still have a grasp of its true self, thereby retaining his sense of himself and his sense of the girl, who existed in a further dimension. But, as had so often happened, the traveller was to lose sight of how things stood before. In the pool three silver eyes hung in the dark like stars. Then one eye closed. Suddenly, he found the weight of the salmon on the line. Instinctively, he jerked the hook home and began to draw in. Then, fearing to hurt the mouth of the girl, he slackened off. The fish broke free. With one flick of its tail the salmon changed everything in the nature of itself, so that the traveller, if he must follow on, must also lose his sense of himself.

He was stricken with guilt that he had come so close to completing his quest. And his last thought before the salmon changed back into a woman was: I should have gone by the pool and met her on the far side. I should have hauled in. Now I have no identity and that’s how you lose the loved one. Because you leave nothing for them to see except a mirror that distorts them into images of grotesqueness.

It was the traveller that was changing into everything he saw, not they that changed. He realized this as the salmon splashed to the surface of the pool. Then, changing shape, swam towards him.

Feeling wretchedly sad, Jonathan Adams found himself lying next to the ceiling. Below him he heard his daughter continuing with the story. He heard the wind again. The knocking. The feeling returned of being underwater. The journey had drained him. He descended slowly, then went up again. A car turned outside, its wheels churning up rain. For a while he felt like the traveller outside the Tower of Babel, stepping in and out of the consciousness of himself and others. He lay waiting for someone to come and relieve him, that he might continue on. But no one came.

And so Jonathan Adams died after a debilitating cancer of the bowel that he bore with courage. Up till the last the women read to him. Till dawn they read. And whenever they’d stop reading he’d open his eyes immediately and search the room to see why the voice had suddenly ceased.

“You’re a good man,” said Nurse Eitne.

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you say that?”

She did not know how to answer him.