The boy asked about the stone bowl in the center of the garden, which had seemingly been crafted by some soul for some purpose that was no longer being served; for all it did was fill up with rain and overflow into a stone gutter that ran out to the back wall of the Garden, opposite the Palace, and discharge through a grate of metal bars and run away into some place beyond of which the boy and the girl knew nothing save that it made sighing noises when the wind blew, as though many trees grew there. When leaves fell in the fall, this stone bowl would fill up with them and they would become limp and soggy and turn the water brown. The boy and the girl would scoop the leaves out with their hands so that the water might clarify itself in the next rainfall. But the purpose of having built the stone bowl in the first place was by no means clear to them.

El smiled and told the boy that his question was a good one and that it showed improvement in the power of his memory and of his intellect. Now was not the time for that question to be answered, but answers might come in due course. El then suggested the boy go and sleep or amuse himself in whatever manner he might choose, and summoned the girl.

Strangely exhausted by El’s questioning, the boy lay down on a bed of soft grass and slept until morning. His sleep, though, was filled with dreams of many such long conversations in the Garden with El.

When he awoke, dawn was approaching and the girl was standing there gazing down at him. “All night I walked in the Garden with El,” she said, “and answered many questions. Some of those were new, and forced me to consider things in a way I had not done before, but others struck me as familiar, as though I had answered them many times in the past—though my memory does not contain any clear recollections thereof.”

“Just now at the end of your conversation with El,” said the boy, “did he ask you whether you had questions for him?”

“He did,” the girl replied. “And I inquired about the shapes we perceive in the stars, and why they resembled certain forms of things here in the Garden, and whether they had been made thus by El or any other soul. I asked too about the red stars that glow so close together in yonder part of the sky,” she added, pointing toward a fiery blur that was low above the Garden’s west wall, paling in the light of the dawn.

“And did El supply answers to your questions?” the boy asked.