"All destinies are strange."

"I am selfish enough to ask your help."

"I have none to give."

"No advice?"

"One inconsequential bit perhaps. To the east is a settlement called Almora. Trading caravans leave from there for the higher country—and across."

"Thank you."

"The goat is ready to be milked. Refresh yourself before you go...."

Now Almora was far behind. And far behind was the trading caravan and the men who took his money and left him to die many days later in the cold foothills. But he had not died.

And far behind were the more kindly natives of the colder, windier places who clothed and fed him, treating him as a mad child rather than a man. He left them and they shrugged and let him go. As though perhaps they had seen other mad ones go before him.

And he had gone on—higher and higher—driven by an ever-increasing fever in an ever thinner and more emaciated body. Until, it seemed, he could go no further. He lay for days in a small cave with the icy winds snarling at the entrance while he wrestled with two fevers—one in his spirit and one flaming through his flesh and his bones.

He called in his agony to the man with the golden eyes, but there was no response. An age passed; an age of semiconsciousness; another; then he slept.

When he awoke the physical fever was gone and the spiritual fever had changed to something else; something he had never before known. He lay for a long time, studying it, analyzing it.

Then he knew.

He knew and he smiled and got up and walked out of the cave, a pale wraith of a wasted man; little more than an apparition that appeared hardly able to stand. Yet he felt stronger and happier than ever before in his life. His happiness came from the knowledge that his new strength and understanding had not been given him; that he had earned it; that he had paid bit by bit with his suffering.

He told himself, I was not helped. Only guided. I could have died. No one 

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