The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind, although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. The gods of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although they might not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain was more easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easily convinced after repeated explorations that no gods lived there after all. Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site of heaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man explored the earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat until at last the whole idea was patently ridiculous? Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet--to what may man now turn in rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled the deep human need of these expressions? The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island. As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught a flash of something moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown, bare skin. He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he had suspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight. His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join in the climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from all others. And sympathetic and compassionate though he might be, the confusion in Louie's mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had his earlier attempts to comfort Louie met success. Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear his mind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie's tortured mind intended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Even a boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for that would be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodily attack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable. He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it swept upward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was not difficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clear spaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to his bare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt no physical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from the branches scraping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind into trivialities. Nor tortured theories such as had plagued him in trying to reason out the new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality. Instead, there was a sense of well being, anticipated completeness, a merging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, and appreciation.