_Argo IV_ eased up to the wharf, where Elis and Arek handled her like a toy, making her fast with ropes of a fabric as good as linen. Wright was there with them, and Tejron, and Pakriaa and Nisana, who were inseparable. "Too far," said Wright, and handed Paul the field glasses. "Just smoke." Elis grumbled, "What's up there to burn? No vegetation. Rock." The smoke seemed to be thinning. "How long since our last trip over?" "Eight days, Paul," Tejron recalled. "My impatient eldest wanted to see if he could handle Betsy's oars, remember?" "He could, too." Paul remembered. "Sears-Danik pulled his weight, my lady. Yes, that was the last time. And we saw nothing unusual." Only Nisana thought to ask, "Good voyage today, Paul?" "Fine, darling. You should have come." Wright was carefully calm. "I'll go over, with Paul, Elis--and--" "And me," said Dorothy, not smiling. "Well.... Okay, Dope." Pakriaa's thin wrinkled face turned to him. "Nisana and I? Miniaan--she would remember the Vestoian dialect--but she is at the city. It would need an hour to send for her, and then it would be getting dark." "Yes, come with us...." The site of Jensen City was not where Wright and Paul had originally dreamed of it but two miles south, where the radiance of Sears Lake hung in the hills. A gap in the west admitted ocean winds; the outlet of the lake ran for a mile to the edge of a red stone cliff and tumbled over in a waterfall five hundred feet high. There would one day be houses along that mile of river. Already, near the waterfall, there was a temple of red and black stone devoted to quiet without ritual, thought of sometimes as a memorial to Sears and to the other dead, more often simply as a place to go for the satisfactions of silence. It had no name; Paul hoped it would never have one. Miniaan of Vestoia was an eager citizen. The old wound had left one side of her head cruelly scarred; from the other side she was beautiful, by Charin as well as pygmy standards. Younger than Pakriaa, she was the mother of four, by Kajana--the archer whom Mijok had once carried on his shield, who would never walk again nor live a day without pain, and who was more cheerful as a permanent habit of mind than any of the other pygmy survivors of that war. The fifty-four pygmy children of Jensen City were all fathered by Abara and Kajana--a fact which caused old Abara to draw dead-pan comparisons between himself and Mister Johnson and to grow darkly desperate when Kajana wistfully asked him to explain why it was a joke....