Cudyk was fifty-six. When he had been fifty-five, he had thought of himself as a man in his middle years, still strong, still able. Now he was old. The same thing had happened to Seu: he had recovered from his first shock when the news had come about Rack, and for more than three weeks now he had moved about the Quarter, as quiet and as competent as before; but there was a difference. His swift, furtive humor was gone except for rare flashes; his voice and his step were heavy. It was the same with all of them, all the old settlers. Cudyk had met Burgess on the street the day before, for the first time in several weeks, and had been genuinely shocked. The man's hair was white, his skin papery, his gait stumbling. Even Exarkos showed the change. More and more of his grey, woolly hair was vanishing. The umber crescents under his eyes were a deeper shade, almost black. The Quarter's graveyard was five acres of ground, surrounded by trees, on the outskirts of the City; there the dead reclined in a more ample space than the living enjoyed. The Niori had allotted the ground, though the outline of the City was thereby disfigured, and had contributed slabs of a synthetic stone which carved easily when it was fresh, later hardening until it would resist any edged tool. The plot was ill tended, but the standing stones, translucent pearl or rose, had a certain beauty. To the Niori, the purpose of the graveyard was only that; they were not equipped to understand mankind's morbid clinging to its own carrion. Cudyk had gone to Chong's funeral, presided over by Lee Yuk, the asthmatic little Buddhist priest; and the image of those ranked headstones, neatly separated into the Orthodox, the Protestants, the Buddhists, the Taoists and the unbelievers, had returned to him many times since. It was another sign of the change that was taking place in him: the images which formerly had dominated his mind had been pictographs of abstractions--the great globe of infinity, the tiny spark that was creative intellect. Now they were the pale headstone and the dark curtain of death. He had felt nothing, standing over Chong's grave and watching the sod fall. What is there to say about a man when he is dead? The priest's words were false, as all such words are false; they had no relevance; the man was dead. Nothing was left of him now but the dissolving molecules of his flesh, and the fragmentary, ego-distorted memories he had planted in the minds of others. He was a name written in water. It was not Chong who obsessed Cudyk, nor the many other half-remembered men and women whose names were clumsily carved on those stones. It was the cemetery as a symbol: the fascination of the yawning void.