Many curious traditions were handed down amongst them. There were some which proceeded from the time when the king had walked and talked with the children he called into activity. There were others proceeding from times when there had appeared amongst them one to whom the king had given some of his rays, so that that person had the power of making the pain less in actions for others, and of giving them motives to act, and of rousing them thus to an active state. And all these traditions they told to the exiled student. Now their own belief was this. They thought that there was a power over them, and in this they recognized the king; but how it was that this power prompted them they did not know. Yet they connected him in some way with pleasure and pain. They thought it pained him when they had pleasure, but not in the way in which was really the case. They thought simply that it was pain to him to see them taking pleasure. They thought, moreover, that he would, if they displeased him much, take away all their pleasure and leave them nothing but pain. Now the student saw clearly some errors, some contradictions in their belief. For instance, he knew that beings only followed pleasure, and directly pleasure was equalled by pain, sank into apathy, and then gradually vanished away. Hence he knew there need be no apprehension of the power’s acting as they thought. But the thing they said, that their taking pleasure pained this power, struck him. He did not approve the results in their life, for it was in consequence very gloomily framed, though with a good deal of unconscious cheeriness. But he knew as a scientific fact that there was a constant diminution of feeling; and since he also knew that beings in the valley did nothing except it was more pleasant, he concluded that although pleasure and pain might both be disappearing, still pain must be disappearing to a greater extent. Now since the feeling did not become nothing, but passed away out of the perception of the inhabitants, it followed that it must pass to some being. It did not disappear as feeling, but passed away from the sensation of the inhabitants. Is there a being, then, he asked himself—the power of whom these simple folks tell—who bears the difference of pain, and so makes existence pleasant to us? And is that the meaning of what they say that our pleasure pains him? Is it just the truth read backwards—the truth, namely, that by his taking pain we have pleasures, which they have had handed down to them as this—that our taking pleasure pains him. When he had thought thus far he remembered one of his books in which the ancient beliefs of the valley were discussed. It happened to be one of the books which he had brought into his exile with him. He took it down, and in the evening set himself to search through it. And in a footnote towards the end of the book he read: