All that happened to him, he considered, happened inside his skull. Nothing which happened in the big universe affected him in the least except as it roused certain forces lodged in his skull. His life consisted of one chemical change after another, haphazardly provoked in some three pounds of fibrous matter tucked inside his skull. And so, people’s heads took on a new interest; how was one to guess what was going on in those queer round boxes, inset with eyes, as people so glibly called certain restive and glinting things that moved in partial independence of their setting, and seemed to have an individual vitality—those queer round boxes whence vegetation sprouted as from the soil of a planet? Perhaps—he mused—perhaps in reality all heads were like isolated planets, with impassable space between each and its nearest neighbor. You read in the newspapers every once in a while that, because of one or another inexplicable phenomenon, Mars was supposed to be attempting to communicate with the earth; and perhaps it was in just such blurred and unsatisfactory fashion that what happened in one human head was signaled to another, on those rare occasions when the signal was despatched in entire good faith. Yes, a perpetual isolation, for all the fretful and vain strivings of humanity against such loneliness, was probably a perdurable law in all other men’s lives, precisely as it had been in his own life until the coming of Ettarre. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VI In Pursuit of a Whisper NIGHTLY he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s mundivigant king; and among them even those three persons who had most potently influenced human life.