"The young gentleman?" she asked, seemingly astonished, but hurried off while Plinio showed his friend to the guest room. He began eagerly describing what preparations he had made for Knecht's arrival, and how he imagined the tutoring of young Tito would work out. Everything had been arranged as Knecht wished it, he said; Tito's mother, after some initial reluctance, had also grasped the reasons for these wishes and assented to them. The family owned a vacation cottage in the mountains, called Belpunt, pleasantly situated on a lake. There Knecht would live with his pupil for the time being. An elderly servant would keep house for them; she had already left several days ago to put the place in order. Of course they could stay there only for a short time, at most till the onset of winter; but such isolation would certainly be beneficial, especially for the initial period. Fortunately, Tito loved the mountains and Belpunt, so the boy made no difficulties about going there. He was even looking forward to the project. At this point Designori remembered that he had an album of photos of the house and its environs. He drew Knecht along into his study, searched eagerly for the album, and when he had found it began showing his guest the house and describing the big farm kitchen-living room, the tile stove, the arbors, the lake shore, the waterfall.
   "Does it seem nice to you?" he asked insistently. "Will you feel comfortable there?"
   "Why not?" Knecht said calmly. "But I wonder where Tito is. It's been quite some time since he was sent for."
   They chatted for a while longer. Then they heard footsteps outside. The door opened, but neither Tito nor the maid dispatched for him entered. It was Tito's mother, Madame Designori. Knecht rose to greet her. She extended her hand, smiling with a somewhat artificial friendliness; he could see beneath this polite smile an expression of anxiety and vexation. She barely managed a few words of welcome and then turned to her husband and impetuously burst out with what was troubling her.
   "It's really so awkward," she exclaimed. "Imagine, the boy has vanished and is nowhere to be found."
   "Oh well, I imagine he has gone out," Plinio said soothingly. "He'll be along."
   "Unfortunately that isn't likely," his wife said. "He's been gone all day. I noticed his absence early this morning."
   "And why am I only now being told about it?"
   "Because I naturally expected him back any minute and saw no reason to trouble you needlessly. At first I took it for granted that he had simply gone for a walk. When he didn't return by noon I began to worry. You were not lunching with us today or I would have spoken to you. Even then, I tried to persuade myself that it was simply carelessness on his part to make me wait so long. But it seems it wasn't that."
   "Permit me a question," Knecht said. "The young man knew I would be arriving soon, didn't he, and about your plans for him and me?"
   "Of course, Magister. And he seemed to be agreeable to those plans -- or at least he preferred having you as his teacher to being sent back to some school."
   "Oh well," Knecht said, "then there is nothing to worry about. Your son is used to a great deal of freedom, Signora, especially of late. It's understandable that the prospect of a tutor and disciplinarian should be rather dreadful to him. And so he's made off at just the moment he was to be turned over to his new teacher -- probably less with the hope of actually escaping his fate than with the thought that he'll lose nothing by postponement. Besides, he probably wanted to play a trick on his parents and the schoolmaster they've found for him, and so show his defiance to the whole world of grown-ups and teachers."
   Designori was glad that Knecht took the incident so lightly. He himself was full of anxiety; with his intense love for his son, he imagined all sorts of dangers. Perhaps, he thought, the boy had run away in all earnest; perhaps he even intended to do himself some harm. It seemed as if they were going to pay for all their faults of omission and commission in the boy's upbringing, just when they were hoping to remedy things.
   Against Knecht's advice, he insisted that something must be done; he could not take this latest crisis passively, and worked himself up to a pitch of impatience and nervous agitation which his friend found deplorable. It was therefore decided to send messages to the homes of a few of Tito's friends, where he sometimes stayed overnight. Knecht was relieved when Madame Designori left to attend to this, and he had Plinio to himself for a while.
   "Plinio," he said, "you look as if your son had just been carried dead into the house. He is no longer a small child and is not likely to have been run over or to have eaten deadly nightshade. So get a grip on yourself, my dear fellow. Since the boy isn't here, permit me for a moment to teach you something in his stead. I have been observing you and find that you're not in the best of form. The moment an athlete receives an unexpected blow or pressure, his muscles react of their own accord by making the necessary movements, stretching or contracting automatically and so helping him master the situation. You too, my pupil Plinio, the moment you received the blow -- or what you exaggeratedly thought a blow -- should have applied the first defensive measure against psychic assaults and resorted to slow, carefully controlled breathing. Instead you breathed like an actor when he seeks to represent extreme emotion. You are not sufficiently armored; you people in the world seem to be singularly exposed to suffering and cares. There is something helpless and touching about your state; though often, when real suffering is involved and there is meaning to such pangs, it is also magnificent. But for everyday life these protective measures are most valuable and should not be ignored. I will make sure that your son will be better armed when he needs such equipment. And now, Plinio, be so kind as to do a few exercises with me, so that I can see whether you have really forgotten it all."
   With the breathing exercises, which he guided by strictly rhythmical commands, he was able to distract Plinio from his self-induced agonies until he was willing to listen to rational arguments and dismantle the structure of alarm and anxiety he had so lavishly built. They went up to Tito's room, where Knecht looked benignly around at the confusion of boyish possessions. He picked up a book lying on the night-table, saw a slip of paper jutting from it, and found it was a note from the vanished boy. Laughing, he handed the paper to Designori, whose expression immediately brightened. Tito had written that he was leaving at daybreak and going to the mountains alone, where he would wait at Belpunt for his new teacher. He hoped, the message said, that his parents would not mind his having this last little jaunt before his freedom was once more awfully restricted; his spirits sank when he thought of having to make this pleasant little journey accompanied by his teacher, a prisoner under supervision.
   "Quite understandable," Knecht commented. "I'll leave for Belpunt tomorrow and will probably find the boy already there. But now you'd better go to your wife and tell her the news."
   For the rest of the day the atmosphere in the house was happy and relaxed. That evening, on Plinio's insistence, Knecht summarized the events of the past several days, and in particular described his two conversations with Master Alexander. On that evening he also scribbled some curious lines of verse on a scrap of paper which is today in the possession of Tito Designori. That came about in the following way.
   Before dinner his host had left him alone for an hour. Knecht saw a bookcase full of old books which aroused his curiosity. Idle reading was another pleasure which he had unlearned and almost forgotten in years of abstinence. This moment now reminded him intensely of his student years: to stand before a shelf of unknown books, reach out at random, and choose one or another volume whose gilt or author's name, format or the color of the binding, appealed to him. With pleasure he glanced over the titles on the spines and saw that the shelf consisted entirely of nineteenth- and twentieth-century belles-lettres. Finally he picked out a faded cloth-bound volume whose title, Wisdom of the Brahmans, tempted him. Standing for a while, then seated, he leafed through the book, which contained many hundreds of didactic poems. It was a curious composite of learned loquacity and real wisdom, of philistinism and genuine poetry. This strange and touching book held, it seemed to him, a good deal of important esoteric philosophy, but this was almost lost in the heavyhanded treatment. The best poems were by no means the ones in which the poet tried hard to give form to a theory or a truth, but the ones in which the poet's temperament, his capacity for love, his sincerity, humanitarianism, and deep respectability, found expression. As Knecht delved into the book, with mixed feelings of esteem and amusement, he was struck by a stanza which he absorbed with satisfaction and assent. Reading it, he nodded smilingly, as if it had been specially sent to him for this day in his life. It went:

      Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
      If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
      A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting;
      A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.

   He opened the drawer of the desk, found a sheet of paper, and copied out the stanza. Later he showed it to Plinio, and commented: "I liked these lines. There is something special about them; they are so dry and at the same time so deeply felt. And they so well suit me and my momentary situation and mood. Although I am not a gardener and don't intend to devote my days to the cultivation of an exotic plant, I am a teacher, and am on the way to my task, to the child I mean to teach. How I am looking forward to it! As for the author of these lines, the poet Rückert, I would suppose he possessed all three of these noble passions: that of gardener, teacher, and writer. I suppose the third ranked highest with him; he shapes the stanza so that it receives the maximum stress, and dotes so on the object of his passion that he becomes positively tender and calls it not a book, but a booklet. How touching that is."
   Plinio laughed. "Who knows," he observed, "whether the diminutive is not just a rhymester's trick because he needed a two-syllable instead of a one-syllable word there."

   "Let us not underestimate him," Knecht replied. "A man who wrote tens of thousands of lines of verse in his lifetime would not be driven into a corner by shabby metrical necessity. No, just listen to it, how loving it sounds, and at the same time just a little sheepish: a booklet we are writing. Perhaps it isn't only his affection that transforms the book into a booklet. Perhaps he also meant it apologetically. Probably this poet was so devoted to his writing that now and again he felt his own passion for making books as a kind of vice. In that case the word booklet would have not only the sense of an endearment, but also a propitiating, disarming connotation, as when a gambler invites someone to a 'little game' or a drinker asks for 'just a drop.' Well, these are speculations. In any case, I find myself in full agreement and sympathy with the poet about the child he wishes to teach and the booklet he wants to write. Because I am not only familiar with the passion for teaching; I'm also rather inclined to do a little scribbling too. And now that I have liberated myself from officialdom, I am much drawn to the idea of using my leisure and good spirits one of these days to write a book -- or rather, a booklet, a little thing for friends and those who share my views."
   "What about?" Designori asked with curiosity.
   "Oh, anything, the subject would not matter. It would only be a pretext for me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of leisure. The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the solemn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have learned. I don't suppose the way this poet Friedrich Rückert mixes instruction and thinking, information and casual talk, would be my way, and yet something about it appeals strongly to me; it is personal and yet not arbitrary, playful and yet submits to strict rules of form. I like that. Well, for the present I shall not enter upon the joys and problems of writing little books; I have to keep my mind on other tasks. But some time later, I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in mind."
   Next morning Knecht set out for Belpunt. Designori had wanted to accompany him, but Knecht had firmly vetoed the idea, and when the father attempted to press it, had almost snapped at him. "The boy will have enough to do coming to terms with this nuisance of a new teacher," he said curtly. "To foist his father on him at the same time would scarcely help things."
   As he rode through the brisk September morning in the car Plinio had hired for him, his good humor of yesterday returned. He chatted frequently with the chauffeur, asking him to stop or drive slowly every so often when the landscape looked particularly attractive, and several times he played his little flute. It was a beautiful and exciting ride from the lowlands in which the capital lay toward the foothills and on into the high mountains. The journey also led from fading summer deeper into autumn. About noon the last great climb began, over sweeping serpentines, through thinning evergreen forest, past foaming mountain streams roaring between cliffs, over bridges and by solitary, massive walled farmhouses with tiny windows, into a stony, ever rougher and more austere world of mountains, amid whose bleakness and sobriety the flowering meadows bloomed like tiny paradises with doubled loveliness.
   The small cottage they reached at last was tucked away near a mountain lake, among gray cliffs with which it scarcely contrasted. The traveler was at once aware of the austerity, even the gloom, of this kind of building, which so accorded with the ruggedness of the mountains. But then a cheerful smile lighted his face, for in the open door of the house he saw a figure standing, a young man in a colorful jacket and shorts. It could only be his pupil Tito, and although he had not really been seriously concerned about the fugitive, he nevertheless breathed a grateful sigh of relief. If Tito were here and welcoming his teacher on the threshold, all was well; that disposed of a good many possible complications he had been considering during the ride.
   The boy came forward to meet him, smiling, friendly, and a little embarrassed. While helping Knecht out of the car, he said: "I didn't mean to be horrid, letting you travel alone." And before Knecht had a chance to reply, he added trustfully: "I think you understood my feeling. Otherwise you would have brought my father with you. I've already let him know that I arrived safely."
   Laughing, Knecht shook hands with the boy. He was guided into the house, where the servant welcomed him and promised that supper would soon be ready. Yielding to an unwonted need, he lay down for a little while before the meal, and only then realized that he was curiously tired, in fact exhausted, from the lovely automobile trip. During the evening, moreover, as he chatted with his pupil and looked at Tito's collections of mountain flowers and butterflies, his fatigue increased. He even felt something akin to giddiness, a kind of emptiness in the head that he had never experienced before, and an annoying weakness and irregularity of his heartbeat. But he continued to sit with Tito until their agreed bedtime, and took pains not to show any sign that he was not feeling well. Tito was somewhat surprised that the Magister said not a word about the beginning of school, schedules, report cards, and similar matters. In fact, when he ventured to capitalize on this good mood and proposed a long walk for the morning, to acquaint his teacher with his new surroundings, the proposal was readily accepted.
   "I am looking forward to the walk," Knecht added, "and want to ask you a favor right now. While looking at your plant collection I could see that you know far more about mountain plants than I do. One of the purposes of our being together is, among other things, that we exchange knowledge and reach a balance with each other. Let us begin by your checking over my meager understanding of botany and helping me go further in this field."
   By the time they bade each other good night, Tito was in excellent spirits and had made some good resolutions. Once again he had found this Magister Knecht very much to his liking. Without using fancy language and going on about scholarship, virtue, the aristocracy of intellect, and so on, as his schoolteachers were prone to do, this serene, friendly man had something in his manner and his speech that imposed an obligation and brought out your good, chivalric, higher aspirations and forces. It could be fun, and sometimes you felt it as a badge of honor, to deceive and outwit the ordinary schoolmaster, but in the presence of this man such notions never even occurred to you. He was -- why, what exactly was he like? Tito reflected on this, trying to determine what it was about this stranger that was so likeable and at the same time so impressive. He decided that it was the man's nobility, his innate aristocratic quality. This was what drew him to Knecht, this above all. He was a nobleman, although no one knew his family and his father might have been a shoemaker. He was nobler and more aristocratic than most of the people Tito knew, more aristocratic than Tito's own father. The boy, who highly prized the patrician instincts and traditions of his house and could not forgive his father for having broken with them, was for the first time encountering intellectual aristocracy, cultivated nobility. Knecht was an example of that power which under favorable conditions can sometimes work miracles, overleaping a long succession of ancestors and within a single human life transforming a plebeian child into a member of the highest nobility. In the proud and fiery boy's heart there stirred an inkling that to belong to this kind of nobility, and to serve it, might be a duty and honor for him; that here perhaps, embodied in this teacher who for all his gentleness and friendliness was a nobleman through and through, the meaning of his own life was drawing near to him, that his own goals were being set.
   Knecht, after being shown to his room, did not lie down at once, although he craved rest. The evening had cost him a great effort. He had found it difficult to comport himself so that nothing in his expression, posture, or voice would reveal his peculiar fatigue or depression or illness to the young man, who was undoubtedly observing him closely. Still, he seemed to have succeeded. But now he had to meet and master this vacuity, this nausea, this alarming giddiness, this deathly tiredness which was at the same time restiveness. He could master it only if he recognized its cause. This was not hard to find, although it took him some time. The reason for his indisposition, he decided, was simply the journey which had taken him in so short a time from the lowlands to an altitude of close to seven thousand feet. Except for a few outings in his early youth, he was unaccustomed to such heights and had not reacted well to the rapid ascent. Probably this disability would last another day or two. If it did not disappear by then, he would have to return home with Tito and the housekeeper, in which case Plinio's plan for a stay in lovely Belpunt would come to nothing. That would be a pity, but no great misfortune.
   After these reflections, he went to bed, and since sleep refused to come, spent the night partly in reviewing his travels since his departure from Waldzell, partly trying to quiet his heartbeat and his exacerbated nerves. He also thought a good deal about his pupil, with pleasure, but without making any plans. It seemed to him wiser to tame this noble but refractory colt by kindness and slow domestication; nothing must be hasty or forced in this case. He thought that he would gradually bring the boy to an awareness of his gifts and powers, and at the same time nourish in him that noble curiosity, that aristocratic dissatisfaction from which springs love for the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The task was a rewarding one, and his pupil was not just any talented young man whom he had to awaken and train. As the only son of a wealthy and influential patrician he was also a future leader, one of the social and political shapers of the country and the nation, destined to command and to be imitated. Castalia had failed the Designori family; it had not educated Tito's father thoroughly enough, had not made him strong enough for his difficult position poised between the world and culture. As a result, gifted and charming young Plinio had become an unhappy man with a life out of balance and ill managed. As a further result, his only son was endangered in his turn and had been drawn into his father's difficulties. Here was something to heal and make good; here was a debt to be paid. It seemed meaningful, and gladdened him, that this task should fall to him of all persons, to him the disobedient and seemingly apostate Castalian.
   In the morning, when he sensed the house awakening, he rose. Finding a dressing gown laid ready beside his bed, he put it on, and stepped out through the rear door that Tito had shown him the night before into the arcade that connected the house with the bath hut by the lake.
   Before him the little lake lay motionless, gray-green. Further off was a steep cliff, its sharp, jagged crest still in shadow, rearing sheer and cold into the thin, greenish, cool morning sky. But he could sense that the sun had already risen behind this crest; tiny splinters of its light glittered here and there on corners of rock. In a few minutes the sun would appear over the crenellations of the mountain and flood lake and valley below with light. In a mood of earnest attentiveness, Knecht studied the scene, whose stillness, gravity, and beauty he felt as unfamiliar and nevertheless of deep concern and instructiveness to him. Now, even more strongly than during yesterday's ride, he felt the ponderousness, the coolness and dignified strangeness of this mountain world, which does not meet men halfway, does not invite them, scarcely tolerates them. And it seemed to him strange and significant that his first step into the freedom of life in the world should have led him to this very place, to this silent and cold grandeur.

   Tito appeared, in bathing trunks. He shook hands with the Magister and pointing to the cliffs opposite said: "You've come at just the right moment; the sun will be rising in a minute. Oh, it's glorious up here."
   Knecht gave him a friendly nod. He had learned long ago that Tito was an early riser, a runner, wrestler, and hiker, if only from protest against his father's casual, unsoldierly, comfort-loving ways. For the same reason he refused to drink wine. These leanings occasionally led him into a pose of being an anti-intellectual child of nature -- the Designoris seemed to have this bent for exaggeration. But Knecht welcomed it all, and was determined to share his interest in sports as a means for winning over and taming the temperamental young man. It would be only one means among several, and not at all the most important; music, for example, would lead them much further. Of course he had no thought of matching the young man in physical feats, let alone surpassing him. But harmless participation would suffice to show the boy that his tutor was neither a coward nor a mere bookworm.
   Tito looked eagerly toward the dark crest of the mountain, behind which the sky pulsed in the morning light. Now a fragment of the rocky ridge flashed violently like a glowing metal beginning to melt. The crest blurred and seemed suddenly lower, as if it were melting down, and from the fiery gap the dazzling sun appeared. Simultaneously, the ground, the house, and their shore of the lake were illuminated, and the two, standing in the strong radiance, instantly felt the delightful warmth of this light. The boy, filled with the solemn beauty of the moment and the glorious sensation of his youth and strength, stretched his limbs with rhythmic arm movements, which his whole body soon took up, celebrating the break of day in an enthusiastic dance and expressing his deep oneness with the surging, radiant elements. His steps flew in joyous homage toward the victorious sun and reverently retreated from it; his outspread arms embraced mountain, lake, and sky; kneeling, he seemed to pay tribute to the earth mother, and extending his hands, to the waters of the lake; he offered himself, his youth, his freedom, his burning sense of his own life, like a festive sacrifice to the powers. The sunlight gleamed on his tanned shoulders; his eyes were half-closed to the dazzle; his young face stared masklike with an expression of inspired, almost fanatical gravity.
   The Magister, too, was overpowered by the solemn spectacle of dawn breaking in this silent, rocky solitude. But he was even more fascinated by the human spectacle taking place before his eyes, this ceremonial dance performed by his pupil to welcome the morning and the sun. The dance elevated this moody, immature youth, conferring upon him a priestly solemnity, suddenly in a single moment irradiating and revealing to the onlooker his deepest and noblest tendencies, gifts, and destinies just as the appearance of the sun opened and illuminated this cold, gloomy mountain dale. In this moment the young man seemed to him stronger and more impressive than he had hitherto thought, but also harder, more inaccessible, more remote from culture, more pagan. This ceremonial and sacrificial dance under the sign of Pan meant more than young Plinio's speeches and versemaking ever had; it raised the boy several stages higher, but also made him seem more alien, more elusive, less obedient to any summons.
   The boy himself was in the grip of his impulse, without knowing what was happening to him. He was not performing a dance he already knew, a dance he had practiced before. This was no familiar rite of celebrating sun and morning that he had long ago invented. Only later would he realize that his dance and his transported state in general were only partly caused by the mountain air, the sun, the dawn, his sense of freedom. They were also a response to the change awaiting him, the new chapter in his young life that had come in the friendly and awe-inspiring form of the Magister. In that morning hour many elements conspired in the soul of young Tito to shape his destiny and distinguish this hour above a thousand others as a high, a festive, a consecrated time. Without knowing what he was doing, asking no questions, he obeyed the command of this ecstatic moment, danced his worship, prayed to the sun, professed with devout movements and gestures his joy, his faith in life, his piety and reverence, both proudly and submissively offered up in the dance his devout soul as a sacrifice to the sun and the gods, and no less to the man he admired and feared, the sage and musician, the Master of the magic Game who had come to him from mysterious realms, his future teacher and friend.
   All this, like the torrent of light from the sunrise, lasted only a few minutes. Stirred to the core, Knecht watched the wonderful show, in which his pupil before his eyes, changed and revealed himself, presenting himself in a new light, alien and entirely his equal. Both of them stood on the walk between house and hut, bathed in the radiance from the east and deeply shaken by their experience. Tito, having barely completed the last step of his dance, awoke from his ecstasy and stood still, like an animal surprised in solitary play, aware that he was not alone, that not only had he experienced and performed something unusual, but that he had also had a spectator. His first thought was how to extricate himself from the situation, which struck him now as somehow dangerous and shaming. He had to act vigorously, and smash the magic of these strange moments, which had totally absorbed and overwhelmed him.
   His face, but a moment before an ageless, stern mask, assumed a childish and rather foolish expression, like that of a person awakened too abruptly from a deep sleep. His knees swayed slightly; he looked into his teacher's face with vapid astonishment, and in sudden haste, as though something very important had just occurred to him, something he had neglected, he stretched out his right arm and pointed toward the opposite shore of the lake, which along with half the lake's waters still lay in the great, rapidly contracting shadow of the cliff whose top had already been conquered by the brilliance of the dawn.
   "If we swim very fast," he called out with boyish impetuosity, "we can just reach the other shore before the sun."
   The words were barely uttered, the challenge to a swimming race with the sun barely issued, when Tito with a tremendous leap plunged headfirst into the lake, as if in his high spirits or his shyness he could not get away fast enough and obliterate all memory of the preceding ritual by intensified activity. The water splashed up and closed around him. A few moments later his head, shoulders, and arms reappeared and remained visible on the blue-green surface, swiftly moving away.
   Knecht had not, when he came out, had in mind to bathe or swim. Both air and water were much too cool, and after his night of semi-illness, swimming would probably do him little good. But now, in the beautiful sunlight, stirred by the scene he had just witnessed, and with his pupil urging him into the water in this comradely fashion, he found the venture less deterring. Above all he feared that the promise born in this morning hour would be blasted if he disappointed the boy by opposing cool, adult rationality to this invitation to a test of strength. It was true that his feeling of weakness and uncertainty, incurred by the rapid ascent into the mountains, warned him to be careful; but perhaps this indisposition could be soonest routed by forcing matters and meeting it head-on. The summons was stronger than the warning, his will stronger than his instinct. He quickly shed the light dressing gown, took a deep breath, and threw himself into the water at the same spot where his pupil had dived.
   The lake, fed by glacial waters so that even in the warmest days of summer one had to be inured to it, received him with an icy cold, slashing in its enmity. He had steeled himself for a thorough chilling, but not for this fierce cold which seemed to surround him with leaping flames and after a moment of fiery burning began to penetrate rapidly into him. After the dive he had risen quickly to the surface, caught sight of Tito swimming far ahead of him, felt bitterly assailed by this icy, wild, hostile element, but still believed he could lessen the distance, that he was engaging in the swimming race, was fighting for the boy's respect and comradeship, for his soul -- when he was already fighting with Death, who had thrown him and was now holding him in a wrestler's grip. Fighting with all his strength, Knecht held him off as long as his heart continued to beat.
   The young swimmer had looked back frequently and seen with satisfaction that the Magister had followed him into the water. Now he peered once again, no longer saw him, and became uneasy. He looked and called, then turned and swam rapidly back. He could not find him. Swimming and diving, he searched for the lost swimmer until his strength too began to give out in the bitter cold. Staggering, breathless, he reached land at last, saw the dressing gown lying on the shore, and picking it up began mechanically rubbing his body and limbs until the numbed skin warmed again. Stunned, he sat down in the sunlight and stared into the water, whose cool blue-green now blinked at him strangely empty, alien, and evil. He felt overpowered by perplexity and deep sorrow, for with the waning of his physical weakness, awareness and the terror of what had happened returned to him.
   Oh! he thought in grief and horror, now I am guilty of his death. And only now, when there was no longer need to save his pride or offer resistance, he felt, in shock and sorrow, how dear this man had already become to him. And since in spite of all rational objections he felt responsible for the Master's death, there came over him, with a premonitory shudder of awe, a sense that this guilt would utterly change him and his life, and would demand much greater things of him than he had ever before demanded of himself.

JOSEPH
KNECHT'S
POSTHUMOUS
WRITINGS





THE  POEMS
OF  KNECHT'S
STUDENT  YEARS





Lament

No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.





A Compromise

The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions
Beside the good old pair we'll always cherish,
How could a man live safely without tensions?
How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist
Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,
And life in depth is so inimical,
The third dimension is dispensable.

But Secretly We Thirst. . .

Graceful as dancer's arabesque and bow,
Our lives appear serene and without stress,
A gentle dance around pure nothingness
To which we sacrifice the here and now.

Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,
So finely tuned, with many artful turns,
But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns
Longing for blood, barbarity, and night.

Freely our life revolves, and every breath
Is free as air; we live so playfully,
But secretly we crave reality:
Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.





Alphabets

From time to time we take our pen in hand
And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.
Their meaning is at everyone's command;
It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came
And found a page, a furrowed runic field,
And curiously studied lines and frame:
How strange would be the world that they revealed.
A magic gallery of oddities.
He would see A and B as man and beast,
As moving tongues or arms or legs or eyes,
Now slow, now rushing, all constraint released,
Like prints of ravens' feet upon the snow.
He'd hop about with them, fly to and fro,
And see a thousand worlds of might-have-been
Hidden within the black and frozen symbols,
Beneath the ornate strokes, the thick and thin.
He'd see the way love burns and anguish trembles,
He'd wonder, laugh, shake with fear and weep
Because beyond this cipher's cross-barred keep
He'd see the world in all its aimless passion,
Diminished, dwarfed, and spellbound in the symbols,
And rigorously marching prisoner-fashion.
He'd think: each sign all others so resembles
That love of life and death, or lust and anguish,
Are simply twins whom no one can distinguish. . .
Until at last the savage with a sound
Of mortal terror lights and stirs a fire,
Chants and beats his brow against the ground
And consecrates the writing to his pyre.
Perhaps before his consciousness is drowned
In slumber there will come to him some sense
Of how this world of magic fraudulence,
This horror utterly behind endurance,
Has vanished as if it had never been.
He'll sigh, and smile, and feel all right again.





On Reading an Old Philosopher

These noble thoughts beguiled us yesterday;
We savored them like choicest vintage wines.
But now they sour, meanings seep away,
Much like a page of music from whose vines

The clefs and sharps are carelessly erased:
Take from a house the center of gravity,
It sways and falls apart, all sense debased,
Cacophony what had been harmony.

So too a face we saw as old and wise,
Loved and respected, can wrinkle, craze,
As, ripe for death, the mind deserts the eyes,
Leaving a pitiful, empty, shriveled maze.

So too can ecstasy stir every sense
And barely felt can quickly turn to gall,
As if there dwelt within us cognizance
That everything must wither, die, and fall.

Yet still above this vale of endless dying
Man's spirit, struggling incorruptibly,
Painfully raises beacons, death defying,
And wins, by longing, immortality.





The Last Glass Bead Game Player

The colored beads, his playthings, in his hand,
He sits head bent; around him lies a land
Laid waste by war and ravaged by disease.
Growing on rubble, ivy hums with bees;
A weary peace with muted psalmody
Sounds in a world of aged tranquility.
The old man tallies up his colored beads;
He fits a blue one here, a white one there,
Makes sure a large one, or a small, precedes,
And shapes his Game ring with devoted care.
Time was he had won greatness in the Game,
Had mastered many tongues and many arts,
Had known the world, traveled in foreign parts --
From pole to pole, no limits to his fame.
Around him pupils, colleagues always pressed.
Now he is old, worn-out; his life is lees.
Disciples come no longer to be blessed,
Nor masters to invite an argument.
All, all are gone, and the temples, libraries,
And schools of Castalia are no more. At rest
Amid the ruins, the glass beads in his hand,
Those hieroglyphs once so significant
That now are only colored bits of glass,
He lets them roll until their force is spent
And silently they vanish in the sand.





A Toccata by Bach

Frozen silence. . . Darkness prevails on darkness.
One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds
Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,
Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,
Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,
A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness.

That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation
Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation
Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.
All changes where the seeds of light descend,
Order arises, magnificence is heard
In praise of life, of victory to light's great end.

The mighty urge glides on, to move
Its power into all creatures' being,
Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing:
Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,
World towering on world in arching victory throng
With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.

Translated by Alex Page

A Dream

Guest at a monastery in the hills,
I stepped, when all the monks had gone to pray,
Into a book-lined room. Along the walls,
Glittering in the light of fading day,
I saw a multitude of vellum spines
With marvelous inscriptions. Eagerly,
Impelled by rapturous curiosity,
I picked the nearest book, and read the lines:
The Squaring of the Circle -- Final Stage.
I thought: I'll take this and read every page!
A quarto volume, leather tooled in gold,
Gave promise of a story still untold:
How Adam also ate of the other tree. . .
The other tree? Which one? The tree of life?
Is Adam then immortal? Now I could see
No chance had brought me to this library.
I spied the back and edges of a folio
Aglow with all the colors of the rainbow,
Its hand-painted title stating a decree:
The interrelationships of hues and sound:
Proof that for every color may be found
In music a proper corresponding key.
Choirs of colors sparkled before my eyes
And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.
To all the questions that had driven me
All answers now could be given me.
Here I could quench my thirst to understand,
For here all knowledge stood at my command.
There was provision here for every need:
A title full of promise on each book
Responded to my every rapid look.
Here there was fruit to satisfy the greed
Of any student's timid aspirations,
Of any master's bold investigations.
Here was the inner meaning, here the key,
To poetry, to wisdom, and to science.
Magic and erudition in alliance
Opened the door to every mystery.
These books provided pledges of all power
To him who came here at this magic hour.

A lectern stood near by; with hands that shook
I placed upon it one enticing book,
Deciphered at a glance the picture writing,
As in a dream we find ourselves reciting
A poem or lesson we have never learned.
At once I soared aloft to starry spaces
Of the soul, and with the zodiac turned,
Where all the revelations of all races,
Whatever intuition has divined,
Millennial experience of all nations,
Harmoniously met in new relations,
Old insights with new symbols recombined,
So that in minutes or in hours as I read
I traced once more the whole path of mankind,
And all that men have ever done and said
Disclosed its inner meaning to my mind.
I read, and saw those hieroglyphic forms
Couple and part, and coalesce in swarms,
Dance for a while together, separate,
Once more in newer patterns integrate,
A kaleidoscope of endless metaphors --
And each some vaster, fresher sense explores.

Bedazzled by these sights, I looked away
From the book to give my eyes a moment's rest,
And saw that I was not the only guest.
An old man stood before that grand array
Of tomes. Perhaps he was the archivist.
I saw that he was earnestly intent
Upon some task, and I could not resist
A strange conviction that I had to know
The manner of his work, and what it meant.
I watched the old man, with frail hand and slow,
Remove a volume and inspect what stood
Written upon its back, then saw him blow
With pallid lips upon the title -- could
A title possibly be more alluring
Or offer greater promise of enduring
Delight? But now his finger wiped across
The spine. I saw it silently erase
The name, and watched with fearful sense of loss
As he inscribed another in its place
And then moved on to smilingly efface
One more, but only a newer title to emboss.
For a long while I looked at him bemused,
Then turned, since reason totally refused
To understand the meaning of his actions,
Back to my book -- I'd seen but a few lines --
And found I could no longer read the signs
Or even see the rows of images.
The world of symbols I had barely entered
That had stirred me to such transports of bliss,
In which a universe of meaning centered,
Seemed to dissolve and rush away, careen
And reel and shake in feverish contractions,
And fade out, leaving nothing to be seen
But empty parchment with a hoary sheen.
I felt a hand upon me, felt it slide
Over my shoulder. The old man stood beside
My lectern, and I shuddered while
He took my book and with a subtle smile
Brushed his finger lightly to elide
The former title, then began to write
New promises and problems, novel inquiries,
New formulas for ancient mysteries.
Without a word, he plied his magic style.
Then, with my book, he disappeared from sight.

Worship

In the beginning was the rule of sacred kings
Who hallowed field, grain, plow, who handed down
The law of sacrifices, set the bounds
To mortal men forever hungering

For the Invisible Ones' just ordinance
That holds the sun and moon in perfect balance
And whose forms in their eternal radiance
Feel no suffering, nor know death's ambience.

Long ago the sons of the gods, the sacred line,
Passed, and mankind remained alone,
Embroiled in pleasure and pain, cut off from being,
Condemned to change unhallowed, unconfined.

But intimations of the true life never died,
And it is for us, in this time of harm
To keep, in metaphor and symbol and in psalm,
Reminders of that former sacred reverence.

Perhaps some day the darkness will be banned,
Perhaps some day the times will turn about,
The sun will once more rule us as our god
And take the sacrifices from our hands.





Soap Bubbles

From years of study and of contemplation
An old man brews a work of clarity,
A gay and involuted dissertation
Discoursing on sweet wisdom playfully.

An eager student bent on storming heights
Has delved in archives and in libraries,
But adds the touch of genius when he writes
A first book full of deepest subtleties.

A boy, with bowl and straw, sits and blows,
Filling with breath the bubbles from the bowl.
Each praises like a hymn, and each one glows;
Into the filmy beads he blows his soul.

Old man, student, boy, all these three
Out of the Maya-foam of the universe
Create illusions. None is better or worse.
But in each of them the Light of Eternity
Sees its reflection, and burns more joyfully.





After Dipping Into the Summa Contra Gentiles

To truth, it seems to us, life once was nearer,
The world ordered, intelligences clearer,
Wisdom and knowledge were not yet divided.
They lived far more serenely, many-sided,
Those ancients of whom Plato, the Chinese,
Relate their incandescent verities.
Whenever we entered the temple of Aquinas,
The graceful Summa contra Gentiles,
A new world greeted us, sweet, mature,
A world of truth clarified and pure.
There all seemed lucid, Nature charged with Mind,
Man moving from God to Him, as He designed.
The Law, in one great formulary bound,
Forming a whole, a still unbroken round.
But we who belong to his posterity
Seem condemned to doubt and irony,
To journeys in the wilderness, to strife,
Obsessions, and longings for a better life.

But if our children's children undergo
Such sufferings as ours, they will bestow
Praise upon us as blessed and as wise.
We will appear transfigured in their eyes,
For out of our lives' harsh cacophonies
They will hear only fading harmonies,
The legends of an anguish often told,
The echoes of contentions long grown cold.
And those of us who trust ourselves the least,
Who doubt and question most, these, it may be,
Will make their mark upon eternity,
And youth will turn to them as to a feast.
The time may come when a man who confessed
His self-doubts will be ranked among the blessed
Who never suffered anguish or knew fear,
Whose times were times of glory and good cheer,
Who lived like children, simple happy lives.

For in us too is part of that Eternal Mind
Which through the aeons calls to brothers of its kind:
Both you and I will pass, but it survives.

Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.

Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.





The Glass Bead Game

We re-enact with reverent attention
The universal chord, the masters' harmony,
Evoking in unsullied communion
Minds and times of highest sanctity.

We draw upon the iconography
Whose mystery is able to contain
The boundlessness, the storm of all existence,
Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein.

The pattern sings like crystal constellations,
And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,
And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,
Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.

THE
THREE
LIVES





ONE
THE RAINMAKER

   IT WAS MANY thousands of years ago, when women ruled. In tribe and family, mothers and grandmothers were revered and obeyed. Much more was made of the birth of a girl than of a boy.
   There was an ancestress in the village, a hundred or more years ago, whom everyone revered and feared as if she were a queen, although in the memory of man she had seldom lifted a finger or spoken a word. Many a day she sat by the entrance to her hut, a retinue of ministering kinsfolk around her, and the women of the village came to pay their respects, to tell her their affairs, to show her their children and ask her blessing on them. The pregnant women came to ask her to touch their bellies and name the expected child. Sometimes the tribal mother would give the touch, sometimes she only nodded or shook her head, or else remained motionless. She rarely said anything; she was merely there, sitting and ruling, sitting with her yellowish-white hair falling in thin strands around her leathery, farsighted eagle's face, sitting and receiving veneration, presents, requests, news, reports, accusations, sitting and known to all as the mother of seven daughters, and the grandmother and ancestor of many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, sitting and holding in those wrinkled features and back of that brown forehead the wisdom, the tradition, the law, the morality, and the honor of the village.
   It was a spring evening, overcast, the darkness falling early. The ancient herself was not sitting in front of the mud hut. In her stead was her daughter, almost as white-haired and stately and not much younger. She sat and rested. Her seat was the threshold, a flat field stone, covered with a skin in cold weather. At a little distance from her a few children, women, and boys squatted in a semicircle in the sand or grass. They squatted here every evening that it was not raining or too cold, for they wanted to hear the ancient's daughter tell stories or sing spells. Formerly, the ancient herself had done this, but now that she was too old and no longer communicative, her daughter took her place. Just as she had learned all the stories and spells from the old woman, so she also had her voice, her figure, the quiet dignity of her bearing, her movements, and her language. The younger listeners knew her much better than her mother and by now scarcely realized that she sat here in another's place passing on the tales and wisdom of the tribe. The wellspring of knowledge flowed from her lips on these evenings. She preserved the tribe's treasure under her white hair. Behind her gently furrowed old brow dwelt the memory and the mind of the village. Anyone who knew any spells or stories had learned them from her. Aside from her and the ancient, there was only one other guardian of knowledge in the tribe, but he remained hidden most of the time: a mysterious and extremely silent man: the Rainmaker, or as he was also called, the Weathermaker.
   Crouching among the listeners was also the boy Knecht, and beside him a little girl named Ada. He was fond of this girl, often played with her and protected her, not out of love, for he knew nothing of that as yet, was still too much a child, but because she was the Rainmaker's daughter. Knecht adored the Rainmaker; next to the ancient and her daughter he admired no one so strongly as the Rainmaker. But the others were women. You could venerate and fear them, but you could not conceive the thought, could not possibly cherish the wish to become what they were. The Rainmaker was a rather unapproachable man; it was not easy for a boy to stay near him. That had to be managed in roundabout ways, and one of these roundabout ways to the Rainmaker was Knecht's concern for his child. As often as possible he went to the Rainmaker's somewhat isolated hut to fetch her. Then he would sit with her listening to the old woman's tales, and later take her home. He had done this today, and now he was squatting beside her in the dark group, listening.
   Today the old woman was telling about the Witches' Village:
   "Sometimes there is a wicked woman in a village who wishes harm to everyone. Usually these women conceive no children. Sometimes one of these women is so wicked that the village will no longer let her stay. Then the villagers go to her hut at night, her husband is fettered, and the woman is beaten with switches and driven far out into the woods and swamps. She is cursed with a curse and left there. Soon the husband's fetters are removed and if he is not too old, he can take himself another wife. But if the expelled woman does not die, she wanders about in the woods and swamps, learns the language of animals, and when she has roamed long enough, sooner or later she finds her way to a small village that is called the Witches' Village. There all the wicked women who have been driven from their villages have come together and made a village of their own. There they live, do their wickedness, and make magic. But especially, because they have no children of their own, they like to coax children from the proper villages, and when a child is lost in the woods and never seen again, it may not have drowned in the swamp or been eaten by a wolf, but led astray by a witch and taken to the Witches' Village. In the days when I was still little and my grandmother was the eldest in the village, a girl once went to pick bilberries with the others, and while she was picking she grew tired and fell asleep. She was small, the ferns hid her from sight, and the other children moved on and did not notice until they were back in the village and it was already evening. Then they saw that the girl was no longer with them. The young men were sent out; they searched and called in the woods until night fell, and then they came back and had not found her. But the little girl, after she had slept enough, went on and on in the woods. And the more frightened she became, the faster she ran, but she no longer had any idea where she was and only ran farther away from the village, deeper and deeper into wild country. Around her neck, on a strip of bast, she wore a boar's tooth that her father had given her. He had brought it back from the hunt, and with a stone tool bored a hole through the tooth so that the bast could be drawn through it, and before that he had boiled the tooth three times in boar's blood and sung good spells, and anyone who wore such a tooth was protected against many kinds of magic. Now a woman appeared from among the trees. She was a witch. She put on a kindly face and said: 'Greetings, pretty child, have you lost your way? Come along with me, I'll take you home.' The child went along. But she remembered what her mother and father had told her, that she should never let a stranger see the boar's tooth, and so while she walked she slipped the tooth off the strip of bast and tucked it into her belt without being noticed. The woman walked for hours with the girl; it was already night when they reached the village, but it was not our village, it was the Witches' Village. There the girl was locked up in a dark stable, but the witch went to sleep in her hut. In the morning the witch said: 'Don't you have a boar's tooth with you?" The child said no, she had had one, but she had lost it in the woods, and she showed her necklace with the tooth missing from it. Then the witch took a clay pot filled with earth, and three plants were growing in the earth. The child looked at the plants and asked what they were. The witch pointed to the first plant and said: 'That is your mother's life.' Then she pointed to the second and said: 'That is your father's life.' Then she pointed to the third plant: 'And that is your own life. As long as the plants are green and growing, you are all alive and well. If one withers, then the one whose life it is falls sick. If one is pulled out, as I am going to pull one out now, then the one whose life it is will surely die.' She took hold of the plant that meant the father's life and began tugging at it, and when she had pulled it out a little so that a piece of the white root could be seen, the plant gave a deep sigh. . ."
   At these words the little girl beside Knecht sprang to her feet as if she had been bitten by a snake, screamed, and ran headlong away. She had been sitting for a long time fighting back the terror caused by the story, until she could no longer endure it. One old woman laughed. Other listeners were almost as frightened as the little girl, but they controlled themselves and remained seated. But Knecht, startled out of his trance of fear, also sprang up and ran after the girl. The old woman went on with her story.
   The Rainmaker had his hut close by the village pond, and Knecht looked for the runaway in this direction. He searched and tried to lure her out of hiding with coaxing, reassuring hums, and singsongs and clucks, using the voice that women use to call chickens, sweet, long drawn-out notes, intent on enchantment. "Ada," he called and sang. "Ada, little Ada, come here, Ada, here I am, Knecht." He sang again and again, and before he had heard a sound from her or caught a glimpse of her he suddenly felt her small soft hand force its way into his. She had been standing by the path, pressed against the wall of a hut, and been waiting for him since hearing his first call. With a sigh of relief she moved close to him; he seemed to her as tall and strong as a man.
   "Were you frightened?" he asked. "You shouldn't be, no one will hurt you, everyone likes Ada. Come, we'll go home." She was still trembling and sobbing a little, but was already calmer, and went gratefully and trustfully along with him.
   Dim red light filtered through the doorway of the hut. Inside, the Rainmaker sat stooped by the hearth. Yellow and red light gleamed through his flowing hair. The hearth-fire was lit and he was boiling something in two small pots. Before entering with Ada, Knecht watched curiously from outside for a few moments. He could see at once that whatever was being boiled was not food; that was done in different pots, and besides it was already much too late to prepare a meal. But the Rainmaker had already heard him. "Who is standing at the door?" he called out. "Step forward, come in! Is it you, Ada?" He placed lids on his pots, raked glowing embers up against them, and turned around.
   Knecht was still peering at the mysterious little pots; he felt curiosity, awe, and a sense of oppression all at once, as he always did whenever he entered this hut. He came here as often as he could, made up all sorts of pretexts for coming, but once he was here he always felt this half-thrilling, half-warning sensation of slight uneasiness, of eager curiosity and pleasure warring with fear. The old man knew that Knecht had long been trailing after him, turning up as he did at odd moments and unlikely places. The boy was pursuing him like a hunter following a spoor, and mutely offering his services and his company.
   Turu, the Rainmaker, looked at him with his bright hawk's eyes. "What are you doing here?" he asked coolly. "This is no time of day for visits to strange huts, my boy."

   "I've brought Ada home, Master Turu. She was listening to the Mother tell stories about witches and all of a sudden she was so frightened she screamed, so I walked her home."
   The Rainmaker turned to his daughter. "You're too timid, Ada. Sensible little girls need not fear witches. You're a sensible little girl, aren't you?"
   "Yes, but the witches know all sorts of wicked tricks, and if you don't have a boar's tooth. . ."
   "I see, you'd like to have a boar's tooth. All right. But I know something even better, a special root I'll give you. We'll look for it in the autumn. It protects sensible girls from all kinds of magic and even makes them prettier."
   Ada smiled happily; she was already reassured, now that the smell of the hut and the familiar firelight surrounded her. Shyly, Knecht asked: "Couldn't I help look for the root? If you would only describe the plant to me. . ."
   Turu's eyes narrowed. "A good many little boys would like to know that," he said, but his voice did not sound angry, only slightly mocking. "There's time for that. Perhaps in the autumn."
   Knecht slipped away and went to the youth house where he slept. He had no parents; he was an orphan; for that reason, too, he was entranced by Ada and her hut.
   Turu the Rainmaker was not fond of words. He did not like to hear himself or others talking. Many tribesmen thought him peculiar, and some sullen. But he was neither. He knew what was going on around him, or at any rate knew more than anyone would have expected in a man seemingly so solitary, absent-minded and full of learning. Among other things he knew quite well that this somewhat bothersome but handsome and evidently clever boy was running after him and observing him. He had noticed this as soon as it began, for it had been going on a year or longer now. He knew, too, exactly what it meant. It meant a great deal for the boy's future, and also meant a great deal for him, the Rainmaker. It meant that this boy had fallen in love with rainmaking and was longing to learn the art. Every so often there would be such boys in the village, and they would begin to hang about him, much as this boy was doing. Some could easily be discouraged and frightened away, others not; and he had taken on two of them as his disciples and apprentices. Both had married into other villages far away and were the rainmakers or simples gatherers there. Since then, Turu had been alone, and if he ever again took another apprentice, it would be to train him as his own successor. That was how it had always been; that was how it ought to be, and it could be no other way. A gifted boy always had to turn up and attach himself to the man whom he saw as the master of his craft. Knecht was talented; he had what was needed, and he also had several signs to commend him: above all the look in his eyes, at once piercing and dreamy; the reserve and quiet in his manner; and in the expression of his face and the carriage of his head something questing, scenting, and alert, an attentiveness to noises and smells. There was something of the hawk and something of the hunter about him. Surely this boy could become a weathermaker, perhaps a magician also. He could be taught. But there was no hurry; the boy was still too young, and there was no reason to show him that he had been recognized. Apprenticeship must not be made too easy for him; he must go the whole way himself. If he could be intimidated, deterred, shaken off, discouraged, he would be no great loss. Let him wait and serve; let him creep around and pay court.
   Knecht sauntered through the gathering night, under a cloudy sky with two or three stars. He made his way into the village, content and happily excited. This village knew nothing of the luxuries, beauties, and refinements which we today take for granted and which even the poorest among us regard as indispensable. The village had no culture and no arts. Its only buildings were the crooked mud huts. It knew nothing of iron and steel tools. Even wheat and wine were unknown. Inventions such as candles or lamps would have seemed dazzling wonders to these people. But Knecht's life and the world of his imagination were no poorer on that account. The world surrounded him like a picture book full of inexhaustible mysteries. Every day he conquered another little piece of it, from the animal and plant life to the starry sky; and between mute, mysterious nature and the breathing soul in his solitary, nervous boyish frame there dwelt all the kinship and all the tension, anxiety, curiosity, and craving for understanding of which the human soul is capable. Although there was no written knowledge in his world, no history, no books, no alphabets, and although everything that lay more than three or four hours' walk beyond his village was totally unknown and unreachable, he nevertheless lived fully and completely in his village, in the things that were his. The village, home, the community of the tribe under the guidance of the mothers gave him everything that nation and state can give to man: a soil filled with thousands of roots among whose intricate network he himself was a fiber, sharing in the life of all.
   Contentedly, he sauntered along. The night wind whispered in the trees. Branches creaked. There were smells of moist earth, of reeds and mud, of the smoke of wood still partly green, an oily and sweetish smell that meant home more than any other; and finally, as he approached the youth hut, there was its smell, the smell of boys, of young men's bodies. Noiselessly, he ducked under the reed mat, into the warm, breathing darkness. He settled into the straw and thought about the story of the witches, the boar's tooth, Ada, the Rainmaker and his little pots in the fire, until he fell asleep.
   Turu only grudgingly yielded to the boy's importunity; he did not make it easy for him. But the youth was always on his trail. Something drew him to the old man, though he himself often did not know what it was. Sometimes, when the Rainmaker was off somewhere in a remote spot in the woods, swamp, or heath, setting a trap, sniffing the spoor of an animal, digging a root, or collecting seeds, he would suddenly feel the boy's eyes upon him. Invisible, making no sound, Knecht had been following him for hours, watching his every move. Sometimes the Rainmaker would pretend not to notice; sometimes he growled and ungraciously ordered the boy to make himself scarce. But sometimes he would beckon him and let him stay for the day, would assign him tasks, show him one thing and another, give him advice, set tests for him, tell him the names of plants, order him to draw water or kindle fires. For each of these procedures he knew special tricks, knacks, secrets, and formulas which must, he impressed this on the boy, be kept strictly secret. And finally, when Knecht was somewhat older, he took him from the youth house into his own hut, thus acknowledging the boy as his apprentice. By that act Knecht was distinguished before all the people. He was no longer one boy among others, he was the Rainmaker's apprentice, and that meant that if he bore up and amounted to something, he would be the next Rainmaker.
   From the moment the old man took Knecht into his hut, the barriers between them dropped -- not the barrier of veneration and obedience, but of distrust and constraint. Turu had submitted; he had allowed Knecht to conquer him by tenacious courtship. Now he wanted nothing more than to make a good Rainmaker and successor of the boy. In this course of instruction there were no concepts, doctrines, methods, script, figures, and only very few words. The Master trained Knecht's senses far more than his intellect. A great heritage of tradition and experience, the sum total of man's knowledge of nature at that era, had to be administered, employed, and even more, passed on. A vast and dense system of experiences, observations, instincts, and habits of investigation was slowly and hazily laid bare to the boy. Scarcely any of it was put into concepts; virtually all of it had to be grasped, learned, tested with the senses. The basis and heart of this science was knowledge of the moon, of its phases and effects as it waxed and waned, peopled by the souls of the dead whom it sent forth into new births in order to make room for the newly dead.
   Like that evening when he had escorted the frightened Ada to her father's hearth, another time was deeply etched on Knecht's memory. This was a time when the Master woke him two hours after midnight and went out with him in deep darkness to show him the last rising of a vanishing crescent moon. The Master in motionless silence, the boy somewhat tremulous, shivering from lack of sleep, they waited a long time on a ledge of rock in the midst of the forested hills, watching the spot indicated by the Master, until the thin, gently curving line of the moon appeared in the very position and shape he had described beforehand. Fearful and fascinated, Knecht stared at the slowly rising heavenly body. Gently it floated between dark banks of clouds in an island of clear sky.
   "Soon it will change its shape and wax again; then will come the time to sow the buckwheat," the Rainmaker said, counting out the days on his fingers. Then he lapsed into silence again. Knecht crouched as if he were alone on the rock gleaming with dew. He trembled with cold. From the depths of the forest came the long-drawn call of an owl. The old man pondered for a long while. Then he rose, placed his hand on Knecht's hair, and said softly, as if awakening from a dream: "When I die, my spirit will fly into the moon. By then you will be a man and need a wife. My daughter Ada will be your wife. When she has a son by you, my spirit will return and dwell in your son, and you will call him Turu, as I am called Turu."
   The apprentice heard all this in astonishment. He did not dare say a word. The thin silvery sickle rose and was already half devoured by the clouds. A strange tremor passed through the young man, an intimation of many links and associations, repetitions and crosscurrents among things and events. He felt strangely poised both as spectator and participant against this alien night sky where the thin, sharp crescent, precisely predicted by the Master, had appeared above endless woods and hills. How wonderful the Master seemed, and veiled in a thousand secrets -- he who could think of his own death, whose spirit would live in the moon and return from the moon back into a person who would be Knecht's son and bear the former Master's name. The future, the fate before him, seemed strangely torn asunder, in places transparent as the cloudy sky; and the fact that anyone could know it, define it, and speak of it seemed to throw open a view into incalculable spaces, full of wonders and yet also full of orderliness. For a moment it seemed to him that the mind could grasp everything, know everything, hear the secrets of everything -- the soft, sure course of the planets above, the life of man and animals, their bonds and hostilities, meetings and struggles, everything great and small along with the death locked within each living being. He saw or felt all this as a whole in a first shudder of premonition, and himself fitted into it, included within it as a part of the orderliness, governed by laws accessible to the mind. This first inkling of the great mysteries, their dignity and death as well as their knowability, came to the young man in the coolness of the forest as night moved toward morning and he crouched on the rock above the multitude of whispering treetops. It came to him, touched him like a ghostly hand. He could not speak of it, not then and never in his whole life, but he could not help thinking of it many times. In all his further learning and experiencing, the intensity of this hour was present in his mind. 'Think of it," it reminded him, "think that all this exists, that there are rays and currents between the moon and you and Turu and Ada, that there is death and the land of the souls and a returning therefrom and that in your heart there is an answer to all the things and sights of the world, that everything concerns you, that you ought to know as much about everything as it is possible for man to know."