Equilibrium was what Etowan Elacca prized above all else. He was a gentleman farmer, sixty years old, tall and straight-backed, with a full head of dazzling white hair. His father was the third son of the Duke of Massissa, and two of his brothers had served in succession as Mayor of Falkynkip, but government had never interested him: as soon as he came into his inheritance, he had purchased a lordly span of land in the placid rolling green countryside on the western rim of the Dulorn Rift, and there he had built a Majipoor in miniature, a little world, distinguished by its great beauty and its calm, level, harmonious spirit.

He raised the usual crops of the district: niyk and glein, hingamorts, stajja. Stajja was his mainstay, for there was never any wavering of demand for the sweet, buoyant bread that was made from stajja tubers, and the farms of the Rift were hard pressed to produce enough to meet the needs of Dulorn and Falkynkip and Pidruid, with close on thirty million people among them, and millions more in the outlying towns. Slightly upslope from the stajja fields was the glein plantation, row after row of dense, dome-shaped bushes ten feet high, between whose blade-shaped silvery leaves nestled great clusters of the plump, delicious little blue fruits. Stajja and glein were everywhere grown side by side: it had been discovered long ago that the roots of glein bushes seeped a nitrogenous fluid into the soil, which, when washed downslope by the rains, spurred the growth of stajja tubers.

Beyond the glein was the hingamort grove, where succulent, fungoid-looking yellow fingers, swollen with sugary juice, pushed up weirdly through the soil: light-seeking organs, they were, that carried energy to the plants buried far below. And all along the borders of the estate was Etowan Elacca's glorious orchard of niyk trees, in groups of five laid out, as was the custom, in intricate geometrical patterns. He loved to walk among them and slide his hands lovingly over their slim black trunks, no thicker than a man's arm and smoother than fine satin. A niyk tree lived only ten years: in the first three it grew with astonishing swiftness to its forty-foot height, in the fourth it bore for the first time its stunning cup-shaped golden flowers, blood-red at the center, and from then on it yielded an abundance of translucent, crescent-shaped, tart-flavored white fruits, until the moment of its death came suddenly upon it and within hours the graceful tree became a dried husk that a child could snap in half. The fruit, though poisonous when raw, was indispensable in the sharp, harsh stews and porridges favored in the Ghayrog cuisine. Only in the Rift did niyk grow really well, and Etowan Elacca enjoyed a steady market for his crop.

Farming provided Etowan Elacca with a sense of usefulness; but it did not fully satisfy his love of beauty. For that he had created on his property a private botanical garden where he had assembled a wondrous ornamental display, taking from all parts of the world every fascinating plant that could thrive in the warm, moist climate of the Rift.