I read the new section carefully. Whoever had written it had been strongly under the influence of the pragmatic philosophers, though the style was somewhat inspirational: a combination of a guide to popularity crossed with the Koran. A whole system of ideal behavior was sketched broadly for the devout, so broadly as to be fairly useless though the commentary and the interpretive analysis of such lines as: “Property really belongs to the world though individuals may have temporary liens on certain sections,” must be already prodigious. I was well into the metaphysics of the Cavites when there was a knock on my door. It was Butler, looking red and uncomfortable from the heat, a spotted red bandana tied, for some inscrutable reason, about his head in place of a hat. “Hope you don’t mind my barging in like this but I finished a visit with the mayor earlier than I thought.” He crumpled, on invitation, into a chair opposite me. He sighed gloomily. “This is going to be tough, tougher than I ever imagined back home.” “I told you it would be. The Moslems are very obstinate.” “I’ll say! and the old devil of a mayor practically told me point-blank that if he caught me proselyting he’d send me back to Cairo. Imagine the nerve!” “Well, it _is_ their country,” I said, reasonably, experiencing my first real hope: might the Cavites not get themselves expelled from Islam? I knew the mayor of Luxor, a genial merchant who still enjoyed the obsolete title of Pasha. The possibilities of a daring plot occurred to me. All I needed was another year or two by which time nature would have done its work in any case and the conquest of humanity by the Cavites could then continue its progress without my bitter presence. I looked at Butler speculatively. He was such a fool. I could, I was sure, undo him, for a time at least; unless of course he was, as I first expected, an agent come to finish me in fact as absolutely as I have been finished in effect by those revisionists who have taken my place among the Cavites, arranging history.... I’d experienced, briefly, while studying Butler’s copy of the Testament, the unnerving sense of having never lived, of having dreamed the past entire. “Maybe it is their country but we got the truth, and like Paul Himmell said: 'A truth known to only half the world is but half a truth.’” “Did he say that?” “Of course he did. Don’t you....” he paused. His eye taking in at last the book in my hand. His expression softened somewhat, like a parent in anger noticing suddenly an endearing resemblance to himself in the offending child. “But I forget how isolated you’ve been up here. If I’ve interrupted your studies, I’ll go away.” “Oh no. I was finished when you came. I’ve been studying for several hours which is too long for an old man.”