d gone. The sense of the fulness of Space
made him as happy--happier I believe--with his legs dangling into
eternity, as sitting before his own study fire.

"I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizards
who made their spells by means of numbers and figures.

"He caught me up at once. 'Not numbers,' he said. "Number has no
place in Nature. It is an invention of the human mind to atone for a
bad memory. But figures are a different matter. All the mysteries of
the world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, if
they knew no more.'

"He had only one grievance. He complained that it was terribly lonely.
'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel the
prophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting
corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul. How could there
be? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no
place. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this. One
wouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of
chess. I asked him, but he didn't understand the question. I puzzled
over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely,
there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to
wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, I
was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as
if his nerves might be going bad.

"Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself. He had
discovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived in
this new world of his. You know how one dreams of triangular railway
platforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides and
not colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say
at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why
and wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories,
where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used
to go up to Cambridge for seances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him,
and I don't think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatans
that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed at
Mother's Meetings!"

From far up the Glen came the sound of the pony's hoofs. The stag had
been loaded up and the gillies were returning. Leithen looked at his
watch. "We'd better wait and see the beast," he said.

"... Well, not