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to the rocky outcroppings that overlooked the sea from the heights; there, at the edge of the precipice facing seaweed patches, he observed how the placid water exposed itself to the last bounty of the evening like a viridian and porphyry mirror, gathering shards of light and harboring them like a maternal womb before occluding them gradually. After the muffled rasping of waves, moving to and fro far below, after the fleeting pianissimo, the whispers of love, the fluttering of wings, the splashing; in sum, after the enunciations of mysterious beings living only for the twilight hour filled quiet interstices between dusk and nightfall, he was summoned by vast invitations with scalloped edges and colorful spectra, by the articulations of thousands of life forms dormant in who knows which mother-of-pearl shell, fish scale, rock hollow, moonbeam, or starlight. Where were they inviting him? Had Mümtaz known, maybe he would have rushed to the occasion. For the sound of the sea is mightier than the sough of love and desire. In darkness, the roar of water spoke in tongues of Thanatos.
    With a telltale tremor that showed he was ready to accept the roaring invitation, Mümtaz sought out friendly visions of his as-of-yet incipient life in this black mirror; he sought out the chinar under which his father made his eternal repose, as well as the blithe childhood hours that he’d abandoned abruptly and the black-eyed village girl at the inn, a deep inoculation into his innocent skin; and when he realized this was only a blank mirror, he stood and tried to escape the gigantic shadows of the boulders as if from a nightmare – staggering and stumbling at each stride.
    The boulders might very well come alive as he passed them, it seemed, or a hand might verge on reaching out to grab hold of him, or somebody might toss his mantle over his head.
    The crowded rockscape made him shudder even in broad daylight. Rather than being a living part of nature, the stones resembled life-forms that had frozen still in the midst of some unspecified cataclysm. But truly horrifying was their appearance during the arrest of his imagination. At such moments they would be ousted from life, eternally alien to him and rejecting him. They seemed to declare, “We are removed from life. Outside of life ... That all-nourishing, life-giving sap has withdrawn from us. Even death is not as barren as we.” Verily, next to these rocky outcroppings how vibrant was a lump of clay, clay that he so loved to play with as a boy and would always love. Its soft, malleable existence might take any form or surrender to any will, or any idea. Yet these solid fragments of stone were forever removed from life; the wind might blow, the rain might fall; atom by atom they’d erode, deep lines and furrows would appear on their colossal bodies, but none of it could rid them of the state in which they were formed by the hands of some primordial apocalypse. Inasmuch as they had no apparent inquiry to make on life’s trajectory, they were crude and coarse symbols issuing from infinite time, posing all questions at once.
    Occasionally a bat would dart from where he’d stepped, and in the distance another winged beast would call to its fledglings. Once free of the rockscape, he felt relieved. On the flat macadam road he slowed his pace and affirmed his resolve: I won’t be coming back here again! But tastes of the unfathomable are seductive, and the next evening he was back again, or at the seaside, or simply crouched on a boulder beside the road. For the sake of experiencing this titillation alone, he even made excuses to take leave of his friends before nightfall.
    The day came when his companions took him to Güvercinlik, to a grotto between Hastaneüstü and Konyaaltı quite some distance from the city. They rambled along the coast for a while, then turned in to the boulders, and finally went underground through a tunnel. Shuffling and crawling on hands and knees in pitch-darkness