"Ah, there is a poor crazed old man, whose grief has driven him mad." Let them say it, Etowan Elacca thought. It had never mattered much to him what other people said about him, and it mattered even less now. Perhaps he had gone mad, though he did not think so. He meant to continue his morning strolls all the same; for what else was there to do?

During the first weeks after the lethal rain his gardeners had wanted to clear each plant away as it died, but he had ordered them to let everything be, because he hoped that many of them were merely injured, not dead, and would spring back after a time, as they threw off the effects of whatever poisonous substance the purple rain had brought. After a while it became apparent even to Etowan Elacca that most of them had perished, that there would be no new life arising from the roots. But by that time the gardeners had begun to disappear, and soon only a handful remained, barely enough to carry out the necessary maintenance in the sectors of the garden that survived, let alone to cut down and haul away the dead plants. He thought at first that he would handle that melancholy task himself, little by little as time permitted; but the scope of the project so overwhelmed him that he decided shortly to leave everything as it was, letting the ruined garden remain as a kind of funereal monument to its former beauty.

As he moved slowly through his garden at dawn one morning many months after the time of the purple rain, Etowan Elacca found a curious object jutting from the soil in the pinnina bed: the polished tooth of some large animal. It was five or six inches long and sharp as a dagger. He plucked it out, stared at it puzzledly, and pocketed it. Farther on, among the muornas, he found two more teeth, of the same size, thrust into the ground at a distance of about ten feet from one another; and he looked up the slope toward the fields of dead stajja plants and saw three more, still farther apart. Beyond were another two, and then a single one, so that the whole group of teeth marked out a diamond-shaped pattern covering a large area of his land.

He returned quickly to the house, where Xhama was preparing the morning meal.

"Where is Simoost?" he asked.

The Ghayrog woman replied, without looking up, "He is in the niyk orchard, sir."

"The niyks are long dead, Xhama."

"Yes, sir. But he is in the niyk orchard. He has been there all night, sir."

"Go to him. Tell him I want to see him."

"He will not come, sir. And the food will burn if I leave."

Etowan Elacca, astounded by her refusal, could not for the moment find words. Then, realizing that in this time of changes some new and bewildering further change must be in the process of occurring, he nodded curtly and turned without a word and went outside once more.