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where the hand of man sets its imprint a strangeness vanishes, a uniqueness is lost, an otherness is made the deadly same.’
    So saying he drew a line across the map with decisiveness and was engaged by the Librarian in a short conversation before making his way to the market-place to find bearers to carry his few necessities. Then he recurled his beard, gathered his tatters about him and taking up his leather pouch of manuscripts set off on his last journey.
    On the tribulations which beset him there is no need to dwell. At the end of the time it took to write four sonnets and an epithalamium he pushed his way through a clump of stinging millefoils and limped into the clearing. And in that instant he recognised his home.
    *
    Time passed, and the Poet moved through intensities of vision. At dawn he would rise to watch the night’s distillates tremble their dewdrops along the edges of leaves as the first rays of the sun pierced the upper branches. Nearby there ran a shallow stream whose laterite bed was home to sly brown elvers and translucent prawns which a quick eye and a defter hand might net. Across this each dawn shimmered the first gauzy dragonflies like scattered dream-residues, which would vanish as the heat hardened into broad day. At noon he ate a simple meal of fruit and rinsed his mouth in the crystal runnel before retiring to his hut, doubtless to write. At dusk a light breeze would spring up and lemon-censers spill their fragrance on the air which with the aromatic popping of peppernut husks would bring the Poetforth, stretching the cramps of creativity and yawning in the cool of the evening.
    And thus in simple splendour he passed his days. Sometimes he was a little lonely. ‘But’, he told himself, ‘I have my Art, and all Art demands sacrifice. If I have renounced companionship, I still live in a world of Beauty and Love,’ since the love he lavished on his poems was indeed that of a parent for its child. Nevertheless, at dusk sometimes a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some shy and gentle faun – might be glimpsed flitting from the undergrowth to the rude hut wherein the Poet glowed and burned and gave off sparks in his solitude.
    Now, there was a Headman whose village lay some way off in the forest and in whose bailiwick the Poet was living. Sometimes when the sun was high and smothered the clearing with its heat this man would trudge through, now carrying a great bundle of wood on his head, now with merely a bow and a knife but with his body streaked with sweat and the bright blood drawn by cruel whipthorn. Often the Poet would be so entranced by his Art that, lost in inward vision beneath the emerald tent of a clump of sagathy plantains, his eyes were blind to the Headman’s weary progress past his hut. But at another time he would spring up and bid the Headman rest awhile.
    ‘I fear,’ he would apologise on such occasions, ‘that I have little enough to offer your body by way of refreshment, so simply do I live. But your mind – ah! that I can refresh. I have just this moment made the most exquisite ballad, and there should be a fragment of ode lying around somewhere from last night.’
    Then he would read to the Headman in a strange and beautiful voice. And it was as if his words were so attuned to the Nature from which it seemed he had drawn them that the very leaves shivered and the twigs like silver tuning-forks responded to his pitch until the whole glade rang softly at his words. Even the insects’ mechanical clamour grew hushed. Shard and carapace ceased their husking; mandibles in mid-munch froze; locust heads with many-faceted eyes swivelled to where this music came.
    The Headman sat as if enraptured. ‘Oh, you have spoken truly’, he would say in a soft voice when the last hum had died away. ‘You have once more spoken the Truth, my great and good Friend.’
    And the forest exhaled its long-pent decaying breath, the jewelled birds dared try again their own small