The Escapement was inked into the parchment of the hermit’s skin. Or perhaps the hermit was himself the clock in which the Escapement ticked and moved. The Stranger found himself hypnotised by the constant shifting of the land on the hermit’s skin. Then he saw himself, riding away from the cliffs and the dry riverbeds of that confluence. The storm had passed and the Titanomachy moved on. In its wake the rider found the debris of the war: a rock turned into a gaping mouth, with red, swollen gums; a golden tree, with fruiting reading glasses; here and there, half-buried in the ground, the skeletons of fish which played lovely, haunting music when the wind passed through them.

The Stranger rode towards the west, through sunrise and through sunset, until he came at last to the shores of the Great Salt Lakes. All was quiet, and the air was filled with the calming smell of bromide, and no waves lapped upon the shores.

In due course he came to the place where the ferryman waited.

When the Stranger awoke the hermit was gone, and sunlight streamed in through the cave entrance. In the ring of stones the fire was dead, though the embers were still warm. He saddled the horse and set out, away from the canyon. The storm had passed harmlessly in the night. The air felt clear and fresh.

He made good progress riding all throughout that day. Yet by nightfall he came unexpectedly upon a maze of tall misshapen cliffs above dry riverbeds. He thought it must have been a tributary in some long vanished time.

The Stranger traversed the narrow paths that led up to the cliffs, until at last he came to a cave.

A burning torch was driven into the ground outside the cave.

“Be not afraid, stranger. Come in peace.”

He went into the cave cautiously. The hermit stood by the small fire, warming his hands.

“I hope this isn’t going to keep recurring,” the Stranger said.

“The road to the Ur-shanabi is seldom linear,” the hermit said.

“Please,” the Stranger said. “I need to find it.”

“Why?” the hermit said.

And so the Stranger told him. He found many of the words confusing, the concepts hard. It was like dredging up an impossible memory, carried for too long within himself. And yet he told him of the child, how when he was born he emerged from the womb like a miner covered in coal, how he’d cut the umbilical cord and then removed his shirt and held the little person to his chest, skin to skin, giving him warmth, sharing his heartbeat.

“I’d sit every night with him and give him comfort and wait with him until he fell asleep,” he said. “And I would do it till the end of time, if only time would let me.”