He stopped. He himself was afraid, and he did not know why. He must master it and go on. He must master it and go on. Go on..... Resistance was thick around him, his body's weakness, till he felt that in standing still he walked against a current of water. He hardened, and went forward. The passage began to open again, growing wider. Several more of the branching ways, through a mesh of stone, and a straight, subtly rising tunnel lay before him. Far off in the distance he heard, unmistakably, a steady throbbing, echoing like a fall of water---the deep, rapid pulsing of a heart. He pushed on, harder, though the pulsing of yellow light grew stronger, pushing back on him, darkening to gold, an airless wind urging him back. The passage seemed endless, and still it went on, with no indication..... Ahead of him, the tunnel opened out, almost beyond the edge of sight. He continued. Farther. He had reached it: the horn's spout. Over the lip, and in..... * The beginnings of the chamber greeted him like an opened book, lying on its bindings, leaning downward. The rock of that flattened wedge, angling slowly away from him, was ribbed and strangely symmetrical---smooth porous gray, but bathed in a strong golden light, inexplicably tinged dark crimson where it met a rise of stone. He was only vaguely aware that beyond this antechamber the ceiling warped high and huge, above a valley that dwarfed even the place of his birth. For here, as nowhere else beneath the surface of his world there were shadows, lengthening toward him to either side of the shallow, widening staircase. And for all the desperate haste of his journey, Simin could not yet go forward. He stood looking down at the two pillared sentinels in awe, the vast spherical expanse beyond. He little thought that he himself, standing before the rim of the long tunnel he had just traversed, his upper body and underside wreathed in red, formed an equally stunning and unlikely visage of life against the Void. Assimilation. Two stone sentinels stood in perfect symmetry, like Roman statues, atop the angling walls that rose to either side of the stairway's end. The sunken plain lay beyond. Whether these silent watchers had been carved by Nature or intelligence it was impossible to say: perhaps meant to connote angry, reptilian merman rising out of the stone, perhaps roughly shaped bodies whose accidental carving held no meaning at all. Here all boundary between the spiritual and the meaningless faded. They stood silent, faces outward, guarding the plain below. He descended slowly until he stood between them, on the ripple of stone looking down. The plain lay before him like a massive wrinkled dish, bone-white and barren. He breathed deeply several times, not knowing why. His objective was a clear as the tolling of a bell.