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than three or four people ever having met at any one time.
    As I said, the names of the islanders were often subject to change. These changes of name made the electoral process still more complicated as it was often less than clear who was being spoken about. One could say that many of the names were introduced in error, though of course it was possible to find in the tangle of echoes an element of truth which would serve to distort the error, and in any case the islanders considered error a sound reason for the existence of the things it begot. As a consequence of such errors, after some time people began to speak of a candidate for the post of king as of a person who did not really exist. Not even this did the islanders find alarming.
    Naturally people nominated as candidates took part in the conversations; to greater and lesser extents they expressed resistance to the idea. I do not believe that any islander was too keen on the prospect of entering kingly office. All this was spread by means of knocks, tale-telling and indirect reports, which distorted both purposely and unwittingly what really happened and what was really said. But the islanders understood this distortion not as a malfunction of the electoral mechanism, but as something which was part and parcel of the royal election process. If the changing flow of names in conversation played its part in the appointment of a king, so too did chance and fate. And an argument founded in a slip of the tongue had a power equal to that invested in a discussion of character and achievement.
    It cannot be said that this series of conversations had any kind of end. But there were moments when the process reached a phase where the powers effective on it were temporarily in balance. Many of the various strands outlined within it came together in a single person, and for a short time the pressure applied by the persuaders and the resistance put up by the subjects of persuasion, fuelled by fatigue, argument, error and slips of the tongue, cancelled each other out.
    If a king were to be enthroned, the phase at which a fragile balance obtained needed to be exploited; if the opportunity were missed—not an uncommon occurrence—the knots would begin to work themselves loose, before tangling themselves up in confusion, forming once again many centres. And it would be necessary to wait for a new balance to emerge, for the tips of the star-shaped scales, with their many arms and pans, to meet once more, however briefly, and indicate a name. The islander who gained the impression that it was he who stood at the centre of this temporary balance of forces, took himself off to the royal palace in the lower town, where he performed the king’s office until new conversations formed in him the impression that his government had ended.
    Reports of or conjecture on the ascension of a new ruler were also broadcast as a network of echoes, knocks and confusing mirror images, and thus it could happen that conversations on the election remained ongoing several weeks after a new ruler had been installed in the royal palace; conversely, the impression could establish itself that the election had reached its conclusion—while the conversation petered out, the royal palace remained unoccupied. It is no wonder that in these circumstances the islanders were never quite sure at any given time who their king was, or, indeed, whether the island had a king. And as the kings themselves never made much show of being kings (I believe they were always slightly embarrassed by it), and as generally speaking their stays in the royal palace were interspersed with stays elsewhere (some kings visited but once a week), it might happen that an islander had no idea that the king was someone close to him, perhaps even a family member. Indeed, it might be the case that a wife did not know that her husband had been ruler of the island for several years.
    The islanders were supported in such ignorance by the fact that they