I started away too late - too late to plan another route, too late to arrive on time, too late to phone ahead with my apologies, to cancel reservations, to rearrange particular meetings in light of changed circumstances. As a result, when I got there, there were no orderly lines as I had imagined (some swaying slightly, and holding well-composed bunches of flowers in their hands). There was just the sunset, enormous as the plain on which I found myself, while, in the distance, a crowd of people black against the sky seemed about to crest the last of the hills dividing the skyline from the harbour. But, apocalyptic as things looked, there was nothing left to understand, for understanding too had been carried away by those who preceded me, and whose feet had responded with timely zeal to the promise of this occasion. Now everything simply meant without meaning, an enigma whose solution was already known to be a mere run of dots, even if it remained a mystery all the same. Without thinking I walked from where I was standing to another point a few yards away; but the already uncertain memory of having moved was the only thing that changed in the world. With no place left for meaning, the sunset and sky, horizon and hills finally blended into a shape, and then the darkness of something less than a shape.

Then the last of the crowd had disappeared over the hill; I heard the long note of the ship’s horn, and for a moment I could taste the salt of the ocean, the rusty paint of the ship on which the crowd had alighted, and the empty, tranquil, lapping space of the harbour. Then I was lifted up from behind. I turned round, and snuggled into the tall, long-limbed, brightly coloured woman who was passing through with some friends, all as equally tall as she was, and with clothes as absurdly colourful and out of place.

"It's Anaphora," she said.

"I like you," I retorted with deliberate childishness. "You're warm and you smell nice."

She paid little attention; I did not need to compliment her, and she wasn't listening, anyway. She carried me aloft, still gossiping with her friends, and I wondered - though I also knew it shouldn’t concern me - whether they could really reach the end of this plain before all of us grew old and died; I wondered who they were and where they were going, since the last boat had departed, and there was nowhere to go. I even wondered if, beyond this spirited show of amiability, deep down they too had a conscience about such things.