When he got to Dante, whom he had always found a trial, Pierce used to employ a trick he had learned from Dr. Kappel at Noate, who had taught him the equivalent freshman course and had also found Dante unsympathetic. At the beginning of class, as Dr. Kappel had, he would draw a circle on the blackboard.

"The world," he would say.

A hatch mark on the world's edge. "Jerusalem. Beneath Jerusalem is Hell, going down sort of spirally or in a cone shape like this." A spiral to the center of the world circle. "In here are the souls of the damned, as well as many of the fallen angels. In the very center, in a frozen pit, a gigantic figure: the Devil, Satan, Lucifer." A little stick man. "Now." He drew a blip on the far side of the world, opposite Jerusalem.

"Over here is a seven-level mountain, Purgatory, standing all alone in the empty southern sea. Here on various levels are more of the dead, lesser sinners whose crimes have been forgiven but not paid for." With a sweep of chalk, he next drew a circle around the earth circle, and a crescent on it. "Above the earth, circling it, the moon. Above the moon, the sun." More circles, extending outward: "Mercury.

Venus. Mars." When he had got seven circles indicated around the circle of the earth, one more: "The stars, all fixed, turning around the earth once in twenty-four hours." He tapped the board with his chalk: "Outside it all, God. With myriads of angels, who keep it all rolling in order around the earth." Then he would step back, contemplating this picture, and he would ask, "Now what's the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe here, which is the picture Dante presents us with in his poem?" Silence, usually.

"Oh, come on," Pierce would say. "The very first most evident thing about this picture." A timid guess, usually from a girl: "It's very religiously inspired. . . ."

"No no no," Pierce would say, grinning, "no, the very first thing we notice." And grabbing up his copy of Dante, still grinning, flourishing it at them: "It's not true ! It's not true. There isn't any hell in the middle of the earth with the Devil stuck in it. False. Not so. There is not a seven-story mountain in the empty southern sea, or an empty southern sea either." He regarded his picture again, pointing out its features.

His students had begun to dare to chuckle. "The earth, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the center of the universe, or even of the solar system. Sun, planets, stars going around it: not the case. About God outside it all I give no opinion, but he's difficult to believe in in exactly this form. I would think.

"So." Turning to them again, fun over: "It's not true. This is not a true story and does not take place in the universe we live in. Whatever it is about this book that is important, and I think it is important," eyes lowered here reverently for a moment, "it's not that it is informative about the world we live on or in.

What we are going to have to discover is how it can be important to us anyway. In other words, why it is a Classic."

And then it was on, easily or at least more easily, into the dark wood, the sages and the lovers, the burning popes, the shit and spew, the dark journey downward and the light journey upward. It was a good trick, and Pierce had perfected it over two or three semesters when, one late autumn day, he turned from the completed picture to ask: "Now what is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?" And found himself regarded by a pirate band (with its captives) which made up his Intro to World Lit class, their eyes dully alive, mouths slightly open, at peace and fascinated.

"What," he said, without his wonted vigor, "is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?" They seemed to stir, noticing many things but uncertain which was first; they seemed, some of them, beguiled by his mandala, as though he had drawn it to entrance them. Others seemed asleep, or elsewhere, their abandoned bodies breathing softly. Those who took a hectic interest giggled at a joke or a game different from the one Pierce was playing. And Pierce felt grow within him the horripilating conviction that the distinction he was about to make would not be understood; that he did not, after all, wholly understand it himself any longer.

"It's not true," he said, gently, as to sleepwalkers he was afraid to wake. "It's really really not true." Making his way out of the building that day, past the squatting groups of beggars and the pamphleteers'

tables, Pierce found himself wondering how Frank Walker Barr was getting on with his classes these days. Old Barr, kind Barr, gently, tentatively suggesting that there might remain in this cold and clinker-built world some pockets yet of mystery, some outlying villages that had not yet been pacified, perhaps never to be reduced; Barr telling stories, insisting on the worth of stories, always with that saving chuckle-well it was coals to Newcastle now, it was worse than that, time had turned around and brought in a new sign, these kids believed the stories they were told.

"Well it makes a lot of sense," Julie said to him. "Astronomically there might be a long time to wait; but if we were in the cusp we could feel it, and be influenced by it, and see the signs; and we do-I do." Sitting cross-legged on his bed-their bed-she was coating, with dreamy care, her nails in bright lacquers, attempting a suite of symbols, star, moon, eye, sun, crown. "The cusp might be this blank time, anything can happen, the old age of one world and beginning of another; you're poised right at the change, and all things that were are now going to be different, everything conceivable is just for a second possible, and you see, like coming toward you out of the future, the next people, and you're watching them come forward, beautiful, and you're waiting to hear what they'll say, and wondering if you'll understand them when they speak." She held up her mystic hand to Pierce. "It makes a lot of sense," she said.

They're just going to dream their new world-age into being, Pierce marveled; but how otherwise did new world-ages come to be? You have to be on their side, he thought, you have to be: a pity and a love welled up in him for the children, the ragged ranks on pilgrimage along the only way there was to go, after all, making up the future as they went. And in the thought-cloud over every head a single question mark.

What they needed-what he was coming to need himself, for that matter-was not more stories so much as an account : an account, an explanation of why these world-tales, exactly these and not others, should be now abroad again, after long sleep, and why, though they could not on the face of it be true, they could just now seem to be true, or to be coming true. An account; a model; some means by which those who fed on notions as on bread might be able to tell which ones were really news and which were the old dreams still being dreamed, were stories inside which the human race had never completely awakened from, or did not know it had awakened from: for those who do not know they have awakened from a dream are condemned to go on dreaming it unaware.

Because the Age of Aquarius, no, it was fatuous, wasn't it? Surely it was not the age but the heart, it wasn't even all hearts, that turned from gold to lead and back to gold again; Moses had horns because of some error in translation from Hebrew to Latin or Latin to English, Jesus was as much Lamb or Lion as he was Fish, and the world turned on a bent tree for reasons of its own, which had nothing to do with us.

To start assenting to one of these huge stories or another-well, what did you do with all the other stories, for one thing, just as big and just as compelling, that appeared in the fabric of history if the fabric (a shot silk, a changeable taffeta) were looked at in a different light? No, surely Barr had only wanted to suggest that economic and social forces could not by themselves generate the bizarre facts of human history, and that to be unable to experience the titanic shuffling on and off stage of windswept allegories was to miss not only half the fun of history but to exclude yourself from how history, man's long life on earth, has been actually experienced by those who were creating it, which is just as much the historian's subject, after all, as the in-fact material conditions and discoverable actions are.

Let's just not be too hasty: that's all Barr was telling his students, his gray-suited and crew-cut students back at the end of the Age of Reason. Let's recognize-though it surprises and confuses us, it's so-that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly other physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.

But the Age of Reason was a shuttered mansion; what Pierce heard constantly now was how the real world that had seemed so clinker-built to Barr was beginning to come apart under investigation.

Relativity. Synchronicity. Uncertainty. Telepathy, clairvoyance, gymnosophists of the East levitating, turning their skins to gold by thought alone. Wishing maybe made it so, for the skilled wisher trained long enough in the right arts, arts so long suppressed by the Holy Office of imperial Reason that they had atrophied, languishing in prison. Strong acids, though, might dissolve those bonds, cleanse the doors of the senses, let the light of far real heavens in. That's what Pierce heard.

So what if Barr was wrong? What if inside and outside were not such exclusive categories, nor all the truth on one side of the equation? Because Moses did have horns, in some sense; Jesus was a fish; if those were only stories inside, like a dream, still they were outside any individual; nor could dreaming make them match the in-fact behavior of the constellations, which apparently they did. How come? How did that come to be? How for that matter had the centuries come in Pierce's mind to be colored panels which nothing he learned about could not be fitted instantly into, and from where came his certainty that the more highly colored and complete his crowded canvases became, the more he grasped history in its fullness? If he really did grasp history in its fullness, then were his colors inside or outside?

What if-made of its stuff after all, made of its not-so-solid atoms and electrons, woven utterly into its space-time continuum, its Ecology (new word found lying on the age's doorstep to be adopted and brought up)-what if man, and man's thought, and man's stories, embodied not only man's truth but truths about outside too, truths about how not only the human world but the whole great world as well goes on? What if those old, oft-told, eternally returning, so-compelling stories were compelling because they contained a coded secret about how the physical (or "so-called" physical) world operates, how it came to cast up man, and thus thought, and thus meaning, in the first place?

None of them were true, none of those stories! Not a single one of them. All right. But what if they were all true? The universe is a safe, a safe with a combination lock, and the combination of the lock is locked up inside the safe: that chestnut had given him an enormous comfort as an existentialist at Noate, a bitter pleasure. But we are the safe! We are made of dust: all right: then dust can think, dust can know. The combination is, must be, locked inside our hearts, our own pumping blood, our spinning brains and the stories they weave.

Could it be, could it be? How did he know? Almost with disdain, a shrinking as from the touch of something loathly, he had always avoided all systematic knowledge of the physical universe; he had carefully just-barely-not-failed every science course he had been made to take at Noate, and had forgotten their boring and ghastly contents as soon as he closed the last lab door behind him. Astronomy had been one of them. He remembered nothing of it except the fact, congenial to him at the time, that comets (those old omens) were actually nothing but large balls of dirty snow. What he knew of how the investigation into the nature of things was going in his time was confined to what he read in the papers or saw on television; only that, and the notions he was now receiving as though through the charged air, Julie's rumors of terrific revelations about to break that never quite did. Starships from Elsewhere were landing as the moon drew closer to the earth; powerful mages hidden till now in Tibet were about to announce themselves the true governors of the planet; scientists had fallen through self-made gaps in the fabric of space and time and the matter was being hushed up: Pierce would hear, with a shiver of wonder, news that if true would transform the whole account of time and life forevermore-and in the next moment, laughing with relief, would recognize in the news an old story, a story that had been old at the turn of the last millennium, had perhaps been one of those told around the old original campfire where stories had first been heard in the world.

And from where then had come his shiver of wonder?

He shivered; he opened the window to the night, and rested his elbows on the sill. He put his long chin in the cup of his hands, and stood thus looking out, like a gargoyle.

Did the world have a plot? Did it, after all? He had not ever believed himself to have one, no not even in those days when he had lived within stories; but did the world?

They out there believed it did. His students, hungering for stories as a man deprived of sleep hungers to dream. For sure Julie would look at the same street corner at the same time of day for another five-dollar bill; at the same phase of the moon, perhaps, the same five-dollar-yielding turn of the wheel. Julie believed that Gypsies could tell fortunes.

Did the world have a plot? Had it only seemed to lack one because he had forgotten his own?

On a crystal May morning, after everyone else seemed to have departed, he and Julie sat opposite each other at the scarred kitchen table, ready to go: between them now stood a tall glass of water and, in a saucer, two blue-stained cubes of sugar which their upstairs neighbor-gentle-eyed, hirsute-had acquired for them, tickets to Elsewhere. In after years he would sometimes wonder if at that moment he did not pass out through a sort of side door of existence, abandoning forever the main course his life would otherwise have taken; but it didn't matter, for there was to be no going back through to find out, no going back along the unrolling path that soon came to be beneath their feet. Not seemed-to-come-to-be: it was no metaphor, or if it was a metaphor it was one that was so intensely so that the tenor and the vehicle of it, not identical, might just as well have been. In fact it became evident sometime during that endless morning that truth itself was a metaphor, no not even a metaphor, only a direction, a direction toward the most revelatory metaphor of all, never ever to be reached. Life is a journey; it is only one journey; there is along it only one road, one dark wood, one hill, one river to cross, one city to come to; one dawn, one evening. Each is only encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost, and found again. And at the same time-Pierce standing gasping in the winds of Time felt it with the shocked conviction of a Bruno discovering Copernicus, of the first man in history to perceive it-the universe extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant.

Oh I see, he said, Oh I see, I get it , listening to the falling into place, one by one, of infinite tumblers that were tiny enough to fit inside the turnings of his own minute chemistries. He learned that day where heaven is, and where hell, and where the seven-story mountain; and he laughed aloud to know the simple truth. He learned the answers to a hundred other questions, and then forgot them, and then forgot the questions too: but for some years after-not often but now and then-he would receive, like a wave that reaches far up a dry shingle and then recedes, a dash of that day's understanding: and for a moment taste its certainty like salt.

Six.

Those were the days when Pierce became a popular teacher at Barnabas; then that he came to seem to his students to have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him something in the learning. The stack of books bought, borrowed, and stolen grew tall beside his street-salvaged plush armchair; the exotic goods he plundered there he came freighted with into class, there were not enough minutes in an hour or hours in a semester to unload them all.

Meanwhile the great parade wound on, turning in on itself, darkened by waste and penury; the ones who came irregularly to sit on Pierce's classroom floor and listen to his stories had ever less acquaintance with Western Civilization, they seemed to be beings who had come from far places, who were headed for other far places unimaginable to him, and to be only resting before him momentarily, exhausted and dusty.

Still Pierce worked at his account; while far away in the Midwest, Rosie Rasmussen and her Mike set up housekeeping in a gray Vetville beyond a huge and restless university, and while Spofford sat silent and tense in a Harlem hospital rec room with six others who could not forget a certain far-off beach at dawn, a certain green hill, Pierce read on: he read Barr and he read Vico and he read the Steganography of Lois Rose; he read the stories of Grimm and Frobenius, and the Stories of the Flowers and the High History of the Holy Graal and the History of the Royal Society , by Sprat; he read George Santayana (no, no) and Giorgio di Santillana (yes! yes!) and a dozen texts he might have read at Noate and never had; he read The Golden Bough and The Golden Legend and The Golden Ass of Apuleius. While uptown the fledgling Sphinx, a schoolchild still, went through Effie's pills looking for something she might take, while Beau Brachman on a Colorado mountaintop awaited starships from Elsewhere to appear and touch down, Pierce stood on his rooftop with an illustrated Hyginus in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and discerned for the first time the moon rise into the polluted sky in a sign, the sign of Pisces, two fishes bow-tied at the tail.

One question, Barr had said; one question leads to another, and that one to another, and that one to others, and so on, unfinishably, a life's work. Pierce learned where the four corners of the earth are, for they are not the four points of the compass; he learned why there are nine choirs of angels and not ten or eight, and where Jamshyd's seven-ring'd cup that was lost can every night be found. He didn't learn why people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes, but he learned why there are twenty-four hours in a day, and twelve signs of the zodiac, and twelve Apostles too. It began to seem that there is not any numbered thing in the human story that has its number by chance; if any band of heroes, or measurements of a ship, or days of a march, or hills a city was built on, did not add up to a satisfying figure, then time and ingenuity and dreaming would eventually wear away or build up the facts, until it too acquired one of the small set of whole numbers and regular geometrical figures which inhabit the human breast, the combination of the safe.

He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing , they all meant in the same way . In fact perhaps Meaning was purely an ingredient of certain items which the world put forth and not of others, perhaps it arose just in the way flavor arises out of a conjunction of spices and herbs and long cooking and a sensitive palate, and yet is not reducible to any of those things; was a name only for the nameless conjunction, the slight clutch in his throat, the hum in his ears, Oh I see, I get it .

Whatever it was, he had acquired a taste for it. To the matched set of Barr's speculations and the weirdly compelling tales out of his childhood and the little life of Bruno, still unread, were added books on celestial mechanics and the workings of the senses and the insides of the atom; on the history of Christian iconography and witchcraft and on the learning processes of children. A lane had opened up within these books, a path glimpsed within their bibliographies, and Pierce, though darkling at times, bored and repelled sometimes, was led on, from footnote to text, from glossy paperback filled with notions to shabby leatherback filled only with print, pausing only to gather courage to go on, to shade his eyes and see, if he could see, what pioneers had been before him along this way, if any had; and picking up as he went the oddest facts and bright bits of this and that.

And then, all unexpectedly, he took a turning he recognized; on a certain day he topped a certain sudden hill and, astonished, raised his eyes to a view he was familiar with, the frontiers of a country he knew.

A country he knew; a country he had once known a lot about, though he hadn't thought of it in years. A country on whose frontiers he had at one time seemed often to stand, through long summer evenings when the false geography of Kentucky's northern hills, to which he had been unaccountably exiled, would melt, and that more real country come to be, not a long walk away; the country to which he truly belonged.

Spring had come, the new world's first, and summer was returning the nomads to the streets-until it was stolen, Pierce had watched on his TV the masses of them, the children's crusade strung out through the streets of cities, or pressing up against the obdurate front of some public building; watched them ridden over as by a car of Kali wreathed in skulls and tear-gas smoke.

Little Barnabas, in spite of or perhaps because of its trimming, had been marched over as by an Oriental migration or Iberian transhumance, almost without resistance, and now Pierce was spending the hottest day of summer session locked in his office while the children laughed and sang and painted the halls, clamoring for peace. He listened for the sounds of breaking glass and sirens and ate Saltine crackers, a box of which he had found in a desk drawer; he read Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages , which he thought he had been assigned to read once at Noate, had even once passed a test on, but did not remember having actually read: The people force their way in at daybreak into the great Hall where the feast was to take place, "some to look on, others to regale themselves, others to pilfer or to steal victuals or other things." The members of Parlement and of the University, the provost of the merchants and the aldermen, after having succeeded with great difficulty in entering the hall, find the tables assigned to them occupied by all sorts of artisans. An attempt is made to remove them, "but when they had succeeded in driving away one or two, six or eight sat down on the other side." There it was, sirens, both the moaning kind and the imperative Klaxon. The kids within began to break the windows, and the kids without, barricading the steps, cheered exultantly, defiantly: Pierce could hear them, though he could see nothing through the blind window of his office, which faced onto an airshaft.

He flipped the pages of the little book.

. . . many an expelled prince, roaming from court to court, without means, but full of projects and still decked with the splendour of the marvellous East whence he had fled-the king of Armenia, the king of Cyprus, before long the emperor of Constantinople. It is not surprising that the people of Paris should have believed in the tale of the Gipsies, who presented themselves in 1427, "a duke and a count and ten men, all on horseback," while others, to the number 120, had to stay outside the town. They came from Egypt, they said; the Pope had ordered them, by way of penance for their apostasy, to wander about for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; there had been 1,200 of them, but their king, their queen, and all the others had died on the way; as a mitigation, the Pope had ordered that every bishop and abbot was to give them ten pounds tournois. The people of Paris came in great numbers to see them, and have their fortunes told by women who eased them of their money "by magic arts or in other ways." Louder just for an instant than the clamor of the New Age around him, Pierce felt the sensation of an answer, so suddenly that it took him a moment to think just what question it was the answer to. He searched the passage again: They came from Egypt, they said Oh. Oh yes: oh yes of course. Egypt.

A simple answer; Barr had said it was. A simple answer, one he had even sort of known in fact, only he hadn't known this one essential piece of information, but now he had it, now he knew.

How do you like that.

Egypt: but the country they had brought their magic arts from would probably not have been Egypt, would it, no it would not have been, not in the story Pierce had once known. It would have been a country like Egypt, a country near Egypt perhaps, but not Egypt at all.

How do you like that: now how do you like that.

The pages of the little book fluttered closed in Pierce's hands; the high-pitched chanting of the students was being drowned out by insistent bullhorn commands. Then there came a mingled groan and wail of horror, and the thud thud of tear-gas canisters fired. Pierce was to be liberated.

Elsewhere, ahold of a simple answer, before the bitter fumes reached his hall, Pierce only sat and stared, thinking: Now how do you like that.

Pierce had been an only child, nine years old, when his mother had left his father forever in Brooklyn (for reasons which became obvious to Pierce over the years but which had not been clear to him then at all) and brought him to Kentucky to live with her brother Sam, whose wife had died, and Sam's four children, in a ramshackle compound aloof above the single brief street of a mining town. Sam was a doctor down in town, at a little Catholic mission hospital which treated the miners' lungs, and couched their child-brides, and wormed their children. Sam's own children-and that would include Pierce-didn't attend the squalid local school; they were given lessons at home in the morning by the priest's sister and housekeeper, Miss Martha.

Not Joe Boyd, though, Sam's oldest son. When Pierce came to live there, Joe Boyd was already too old to be compelled to go to school with Miss Martha any longer, too old and mean to be compelled to do anything at all he chose not to do. He was a fox-faced boy who rolled the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirts above the lean muscles of his arms; he was supposed to be taking a course of reading with Sam, but he was coming to love only cars. He frightened Pierce.

And Hildy, the year after Pierce arrived, left Miss Martha's tutelage too, to go attend Queen of the Angels School in the mountains above Pikeville, five days a week, gruel for breakfast and patched sheets and litanies. The fact that years later she became a nun herself, of the tart, disparaging, at bottom selfless and brave kind, never kept Hildy from relishing and retelling the horrors of that red brick mansion.

So classes from then on were for Pierce, and quiet, private Roberta called Bird, and then Warren the baby, a shapeless lump to Pierce when he arrived, who only later grew a stolid, intelligent character.

They sang for Miss Martha, recited for Miss Martha, they listened to Miss Martha remember their sainted mother Opal Boyd, they fled Miss Martha at noon into games Miss Martha would never hear of, and could not have imagined. Pierce's mother, Winnie, when she came, tried to get them all together to teach them French in the afternoons a couple of days a week, but they soon wore her down and out.

From noon to morning, from May to October, they were free.

Such was the family Pierce was to make his way in; in their isolation they were like some antique family of gentry, in the specialness of their circumstances like foreigners living within a pale. It was only the Oliphant children who were taught by the priest's sister; only the Oliphants (as far as Pierce knew) who every month received from the state library in far-off, bluegrass-green Lexington, a box of books. Opal, Sam's wife (herself once a schoolteacher, and formerly her children's indulgent tutor, they cherished her memory fiercely), had found out this was possible to do, to request that boxes of the state's books be sent to this bookless fastness, and Winnie continued it: every month the read books were packed up and shipped back, and on receipt another box would be sent, more or less filling the vague requests on the Oliphants' list (Mother West-wind, more horse stories, "something about masonry," anything of Trollope's) and picked up at the post office, and opened in excitement and disappointment mixed, Christmas every month. Pierce remembering his confusion and contempt before this bizarre system-bizarre to a child who had had the vast, the virtually illimitable reaches of the Brooklyn Public to wander in, his father went every two weeks and Pierce had always gone with him and could have any book he pointed at-Pierce remembering those battered library boxes wondered if perhaps it had been they, those librarians or whoever they were who had filled them, who by sending him some book full of antiquated notions and quaint orthography had first suggested to him the existence of that shadow country, that far old country that was sort of Egypt but not Egypt, no not Egypt at all, a country with a different history, whose name was spelled too with a small but crucial difference: it was not Egypt but AEgypt.

On an impossible city night, too hot to sleep, too hot and loud with sirens and music and the parade endlessly passing, Pierce stood at his window with a handmade cigarette between his fingers, and that country once again seemingly before him, still there in the past: AEgypt.

Why do we believe Gypsies can tell fortunes? Because they came not really from Egypt, but from AEgypt, the country where all magic arts were known. And still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had. Pierce laughed aloud to think of it.

And why were they wandering the earth, and why do they still wander? Because AEgypt has Fallen. It exists no longer. Whatever country occupies its geography now, AEgypt is gone, has been gone since the last of its cities, in the farthest East, failed and fell. Then its wise men and women went forth carrying with them their knowledge, to remember their country and yet never speak of it, to take on the dress and habits of the countries they went out into, to have adventures, to heal (for they were great doctors), and to pass on their secrets, so that they would not be lost.

And so these Gypsies ('Gyptians! Sure, the same word) were probably not really from there, only pretending to be, for those who were really from there were vowed to silence and secrecy.

Which is why it had been so hard for Pierce to discover them, hidden in history, in the upside-down adventures they had got themselves involved in down the centuries since then. Seen from the outside, dressed in mufti so to speak in the dense pages of the encyclopedia, in Miss Martha's history textbook, they blended into the background, their stories could be misread; seen from the outside, they didn't seem to be mages, or sworn knights of AEgypt.

Seen from the outside, neither had he and his cousins seemed to be: in old snapshots they were just scruffy kids in a degraded landscape, eastern Kentucky, coal trains chugging endlessly past their mountaintop, their mountaintop not different from any other mountaintop, not obviously quartered and labeled by secret geometries. Of course not. You had to be inside to know; you had to be told. And they too were sworn to secrecy.

The Invisible College.

Why, Pierce wondered, if they were all alone there and never out of one another's company, had they always been making up clubs, associations, brotherhoods, pledging their faith to one another? When he had first come from Brooklyn to live among them he had had to wait long for initiation into Joe Boyd's Retriever's Club; Joe Boyd, the eldest of his cousins, its permanent president. The Invisible College was Pierce's own invention, to counter that exclusion; wittily, with careful vengeance, he had not excluded Joe Boyd from membership, but instead had elected him president-his presidency, his membership, the very existence of the Invisible College however being kept a secret from him, a secret to which all the other Invisibles (all the kids but Joe) were pledged forever.

His own invention? No, the Invisibles had always been; Pierce had only learned, from hints in books, of their immemorial existence; they were knights older than Arthur's; Arthur's had in fact, perhaps, probably, been only a chapter of theirs, as all the wise and good and brave were in some sense chapters.

Who else through the ages had been members? It was difficult to know for sure, but Pierce when asked by his cousins seemed able to decide, from a certain response he himself (general secretary after all to his own chapter) had to them. Gene Autry, almost certainly, knew much that his moon face concealed.

Sherlock Holmes and Sir Flinders Petrie. Ike? He thought not, though considering the question raised a problem he had never been able to solve with certainty: it was possible, of course, to be of that College without anyone else knowing it, without the fact ever coming to light, not for centuries; but was it possible to be one of the Invisibles without ever knowing it yourself ? His cleverness about Joe Boyd's membership seemed to prove (especially to Hildy, legalistic and logical of mind and somewhat skeptical about Pierce's College anyway) that it was.

Well, perhaps it was. It wasn't for him to decide, as it might have been if he had in fact made it all up; but he had not, he had only entered into it, as into an empire, and was himself as surprised to find out its shape and its stories as his cousins were: it wasn't make-believe but History. Once the initial discovery had been made-that there was this country, had once been this country, which was somehow the country where the pyramids were and where the Sphinx was but not exactly that country-then it was a matter of decoding what further facts came to his attention, to discover whether they descended from de Mille's Technicolor country of pharaohs and suntanned slaves and Jews, or from the other shadow country: AEgypt: the country of those wise knights, country of forest and mountain and seacoast and a city full of temples where an endless story began.

An endless story: a story that continued in him and in his cousins, a story that continued in Pierce's discovering it and elaborating it in the meetings of the Invisible College at night after they were all supposed to be asleep, arguing questions which that story raised, questions his cousins put to him in the dark. Would they still be in this story even when they were grown up? Of course they would; it was a story about grownups. Would they ever go to AEgypt themselves, and how? They might, if the story ever came to an end. For in the end of the story (as Pierce heard it or imagined it) all the exiles would return, to the city in the farthest East, gathering there from every clime and time, coming upon each other in surprise-You! Not you , too!-and reconstituted at last, to tell over the story of their adventures. And why not they, then, he and his cousins, and maybe Sam and Aunt Winnie, Pierce's mother, and yes Axel his father too, going by boat or train or plane secretly to "Adocentyn," Pierce said aloud.

Looking out his slum window he felt a funny gust, like wind in his hair. He hadn't heard the name of that city spoken for years, years. When he went away to St. Guinefort's the game had come to a sudden end.

There were no more stories. He had outgrown them, put them away, his younger cousins dared not ask him-newly serious in a school tie and a crew cut-to continue it. Did they ever think of it now, he wondered. Adocentyn.

Now how by the way had he come up with such a name? Where had he stolen it from, what book had yielded it up for him to adopt into his imaginary country? It sounded to his grown-up ear as totally invented as a name could be, as outlandish as a name heard in a dream, a name that, in the dream, means something it doesn't mean at all when you wake.

He wondered if he could find out where he had got it. If some index to some book (what book?) might yield it up. If there were other stories like the Gypsies, stories that he would discover had also proceeded from his own shadow-Egypt, AEgypt. There might be. Must be: after all, he had got the stories he had told from somewhere. From History, he had told his cousins; since the time he had stopped thinking about it all, he had begun to assume that he had simply made it all up out of his own big head, but perhaps he hadn't. That is, for sure his AEgypt was imaginary; only perhaps it hadn't been he who had invented it.

If he could return there, and find out; somehow turn back that way, and return.

"Pierce?" Julie's voice, from within the dark bedroom where the fan whirred. "You still up?"

"Yup."

"Watcha doing?"

"Thinking."

Not that it would be easy to find again; no, it was just the sort of country that, once left, is not easy to return to. The effort seemed immense and futile, as though it weren't he but the world itself in its socket that would have to be turned against the thread.

"It's the dope," Julie said sleepily. "Come to bed."

Adocentyn, Pierce thought. O AEgypt.

A breeze was rising now at last, as dawn approached, a wind from the sea; Pierce inhaled its brackish coolness gratefully. He would turn back: go on by turning back. Perhaps, like Hansel, he had dropped crumbs along the way he had come; perhaps those crumbs had not all been eaten.

Set out, then, Pierce thought. Set out.

His cigarette had burned down to a brown fragment, and he pitched it into the street, a brief meteor. On the fire escapes of the building opposite him, people had made up beds, hung with colored cloths and lit with candles. Down the street, a fire hydrant was open, and gushed into the gutter, washing out beer cans, condoms, matchbooks, newssheets. Wind chimes, camel bells, dogs barking, a tambourine idly shaken. The sweltering caravanserai all awake.

If he thought there was no story in history, just one damned thing after another, Barr had said, it was only because he had ceased to recognize himself. He had ceased to recognize himself. And yet every story that he had once been inside of lay still inside him, larger inside smaller, dream inside waking, all there to be recovered, just as a dream is recovered when you wake, from its latest moments backward to its earlier.

He began by looking into Egypt: poking into the ruins, lugging home from the Brooklyn Public big folios, sniffing at indexes, settling down to browse. In none of them was what he was looking for. The topic was vast, of course, and Egyptology took up long shelves at the library, having its own Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms: antique multivolume studies from whose ancient silt poked up etched plates, and then newer mythographical analyses clinker-built and obdurate as pyramids, and lastly decadent popular works chock-full of color photos-in none of them was the country he sought. He felt like someone who had set out for the Memphis of crocodiles and moonlit temples and wound up in Tennessee.

Why do we believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes? Because we thought once they were Egyptians, even though they aren't, and it was natural to suppose they would inherit, in whatever faint degree, the occult wisdom which everybody knows the Egyptians possessed. And why on our dollar bills do we put Egypt's pyramid, surmounted by its mystic eye? Because from ancient Egypt issues the secret language of spiritual freedom, illumination, knowledge, the geometries by which can be cast the New Order of the Ages.

But it isn't so! These real Egyptians Pierce was reading about had been the most hard-headed, materialistic, literal-minded bureaucrats of the spirit he had ever encountered. So far from being able to imagine spiritual freedom, spiritual journeys, they had concocted the disgusting procedures of embalming because of their certainty that only the physical body, preserved like a fruitcake in its box, could withstand the dissolutions of death. The more Pierce grappled with their mythologies, oppressive in their endless elaboration, the more he came to understand that they meant exactly what they said: these tedious stories weren't allegories of consciousness to be interpreted by the wise, though even Plato had thought that to be so; they weren't magic emblems, they weren't art, they were science. The Egyptians just thought the world worked this way, operated by these characters, acting out this grotesque dream.

Pierce concluded that the ideal condition, for an ancient Egyptian, was to be dead; short of that, to be immobile, asleep and dreaming.

None of it was what Pierce had meant, not at all. He just about decided that he must have made it all up, for the noble history he had known could not have been suggested by this stuff; just about decided.

Then, along another road, unfrocked, in trouble, fleeing, Giordano Bruno appeared, like the White Rabbit-or rather reappeared, for Fellowes Kraft's little book had risen to the top of the stack like a thought to the tip of Pierce's tongue; and Pierce went where it pointed-which was not toward Egypt at all but back toward where Pierce had started out from, the Renaissance; not Pharaoh's age but Shakespeare's, whose near contemporary Bruno was. And by and by, astonished and wondering, he found himself once again at frontiers he recognized.

Oh I remember. I see. Now how do you like that . . .