From ship to ship, from ocean to ocean, from land to land, waiting for ballast, tides, charters, and crews, wandering through jungles, loafing in water-side bars, rubbing shoulders with beach-combers, drinking tea with muslin-frocked ladies, inspecting temples and volcanoes, museums and graveyards, ambling through bazaars, riding donkeys and elephants, tossing pennies to naked beggar-boys from fragile jinrickshas, patronizingly interested in the monuments of bygone dynasties, abnormally condescending to lemon-squashes and mangoes, exploring, sampling, summing up—the cheek of it all!
For five years Paul had watched the world expand. New civilizations revealed themselves; swarms of aliens paraded for him, while he stored his mind with impressions. Then, days or weeks later, as his ship headed for the sea, the civilization last under inspection would dwindle into a grey shore-line, and only his own mind be left to bear witness that it even existed. The more he saw of the globe, the more he felt its unreality and his own incontrovertible existence in time and space. The one stable phenomenon in the universe was his ego, and that had merely the stability of a moon-drawn, wind-agitated ocean.
In the long periods of isolation he had read hundreds of books and spent hours in meditation. Year by year, he saw himself changing from a boy whom he intimately
