The young scholar kept one hand on the cliff face. As rough as it was, he needed it to steady him as he walked. "Walk" was far from the most appropriate word; he would have been able to think of a better one in the city, but there, miles and months away, language thinned.
He kicked a pebble. It took looking down and concentrating on the laws of cause and effect for him to reach that conclusion. He managed it in the end, and to follow the pebble's path as well, and when he raised his eyes, at last he saw it. The library, that legendary library, that he risked everything to find. For him, "everything" did not amount to much, but that would change. The library was real.
At the entrance a guardian stood and had stood for incalculable ages. The scholar worried his plans would be frustrated at the end by some activity on the part of the great statue, twenty feet tall and as vividly painted as if its creator had finished the piece that morning.
"Inside," the guardian intoned, "is all the knowledge of significance in this world. Enter and learn, visitor." Unmoving, it gave that message again and again in response to the scholar's alternating withdrawals and advances. His old spirit of curiosity was returning, and it pushed him over the threshold.
What books, what scrolls, what histories and treatises filled the shelves tall and wide within that library? None. The place was bare, its rows unfilled. Not a single item of scholarly purpose did he see.
In the middle, however, was a platform, and on that platform a stand, and the stand held up a sword in its life-sparing scabbard. The scholar took the sword in hand. He drew it. He understood then; he knew at last what mattered.
Finis
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