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peer round yellow eyes. It shows no sign of wanting to fly away but just sits there with smooth, unruffled plumage, even its eyes unmoving, not at all ready to start out, settling down to a long rest after a long journey. But something happens inside the beholder on the ground: what seems at first to be a tic or grimace turns out to be a laugh, a quiet laugh that spreads over his whole face. He hasn’t laughed like that since he was a baby. He breaks into a slow run, which doesn’t even make the falcon in its nest turn its head.
    Running, the gambler turns around from time to time and looks at his surroundings. Barely a moment seems to have passed and already he sees the first sign of human life, a slip of paper that scouts have stuck on a bramblebush. On it is written in a childlike hand: “Follow this sign.” He turns in a different direction and a moment later sees another slip with the same words, this one in the vicinity of some houses, woven into the wire mesh of a trash container. He heads back into the thicket and in the next moment comes across a group of men and women in track suits, doing knee bends at the knee-bend station of a fitness course. Again the gambler runs off and a moment later, in a parklike cemetery on the edge of the city, a funeral procession crosses his path. Bells start ringing, the procession circles around a mausoleum, and he joins it, welcomed with a nod by a stranger. At the graveside he takes his leave of the stranger and runs out of the cemetery. In the bustling inner city, he keeps up a steady pace. Just once, on a short open stretch,
he stops for no reason, so abruptly that several dice fall to the sidewalk. He stops their roll, gathers them up, and disappears around the corner. He seems to have doubled back. And, indeed, the vapor trails in the sky are moving in a different direction, a cigarette butt is rolling in another, a young music student is walking in another with her instrument case, and a toy motorcar, controlled by an invisible hand, is careering across the asphalt in still another. The runner looks back over his shoulder and cries out: “Follow me!”
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    The train in the middle of the city, two steps from the department store, also seems like a toy. There isn’t any station, the tracks it is standing on merge with a marketplace right after the last car, and this enhances the toylike impression. But the train is crowded, and more and more people—unlike streetcar passengers, loaded with baggage —come running and get in. Like certain international expresses, it is made up of sections of different trains. The locomotive is far ahead of the platform. The unusual length of the train, and still more the excitement and bewilderment of the passengers, who cannot be seasoned travelers, give it for a moment the air of a special train, reserved for a group of emigrants or pilgrims from all over the country.
    It is still high noon; the noonday, springtime light shines most brilliantly on the rounded tops of the cars. A signal rings out—not a train whistle, more like the tooting of an ocean liner, so long-drawn-out that a child on the platform treats himself to a kind of radio play by rhythmically stopping and unstopping his ears. But, surprisingly at
the departure of so long a train, few people have come to say goodbye, and hardly anyone is looking out the open windows. Consequently, the gambler has no need to twine his way through a crowd as he runs past the market stalls; he is able to head straight for the compartment, which is reached not through a corridor but directly from outside. The door is thrown open for him even before he gets there, and closes after him like that of a funicular cabin once it is loaded to capacity.
    Yet a number of seats are still vacant after he has sat down. There are only three other persons, who, though thrown together at random, seem to acquiesce in the arrangement. With the gambler the group is complete. The