They have many very large leaves. Some have fruit. The temperature is almost always pleasant, because there are always winds coming in off the water. --And any time you want, you can climb up on something high and start looking off in all directions. You will always find a dark place where it is raining, somewhere. Anything seen through the rainwall is misty and distorted, sort of like the far shores of fairyland. Also, there are mirages. You see islands in the sky, with trees growing upside down. One of the natives told me that that's where they go when they die. They think that their ancestors are up there looking down at them--staring into the seas, watching. --If you like that stone, you can have it."

"Oh yes, Mr. H! Thank you!"

She clutched the stone and rubbed it with her hand. She polished it on the front of her hospital gown.

"How are you feeling today?" he asked.

"Better," she said. "A lot better."

He studied the small face, dark eyes beneath dark bangs, freckles sprinkled everywhere. There was more color to it than there had been a day and a half earlier when she had received the treatment. Her breathing was no longer labored. She was now able to sit up, propped with pillows, and could speak for fairly lengthy periods of time. Her fever was down and her blood pressure was almost normal. She was displaying curiosity and recovering the animation one would expect in a child her age. He considered the treatment a success. He no longer thought of the nine graves in the forest, or the others that lay farther behind him.

"... I'd like to see Claana someday," she was saying, "with its blue sun and all those moons ..."

"Perhaps you will," he told her, guessing far ahead, however, and seeing her with some local boy, a housewife in Italbar for all the days of her now recovered life, with perhaps only an orange stone to remind her of the dreams of childhood. Well, it could be worse, he decided, remembering that evening in tile hills above the city. A town like Italbar might be a pleasant place to end one's wanderings .