The question slipped from us near the deltas of the estuary; that seed fell on fertile ground, and what grew was the city of Puerto Alcan - a tangle of spires against the harbour. A. reflected that if he had been there an instant before then he should have heard the question, as an inexorable consequence of which this city had arisen in answer. His arrival there, however, was not just too late. It was too late even to comprehend what that city itself understood by lateness, so that, in the mysterious darkness of that city's definition, he neither knew whether it was possible to arrive more completely, or even if he had really arrived at all. Forced to give explanations to satisfy himself, he reasoned thus: that for just so many occasions as history throws forth its limbed and living creations, so that productive womb must make up the numbers with anti-creations - grotesque stillbirths whose life is only their particular kind of death. Again, just as some days of creation are filled with promise, glowing and making hard and satisfying forms which memory can contain, so there must be an equal number of dark days which radiate not brightness but opacity, and which close in upon themselves so that no memory could ever contain them. Perhaps Puerto Alcan was the content of brightness contained by the form of darkness - the once necessary but increasingly arbitrary response to some unrecoverable question.

"Could that question ever come back as an answer? Could I ask what the question was, and be given it in return?"

But he could not see far enough through the dim streets, filled with sea-mist. He could not even be sure that he felt the ground beneath his feet. The words, anyway, had ceased even to make sense in his own mind.