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Ihave a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contin-gent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any storyreally begin? There is always context, always an encompassinglygreater epic, always something before the described events, unlesswe are to start every story with, ‘BANG! Expand! Sssss . . .’,then itemise the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly,no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things . . .
Nevertheless, I have a story to tell you. My own direct partin it was vanishingly small and I have not thought even to intro-duce myself with anything as presumptuous as a proper name.Nevertheless, I was there, at the very beginning of one of thosebeginnings.
From the air, I am told, the Autumn House looks like a giantgrey and pink snowflake lying half-embedded within thesefolded green slopes. It lies on the long, shallow escarpmentwhich forms the southern limit of the Northern TropicalUplands. On the northern side of the house are spread thevarious formal and rustic gardens which it is both my duty andmy pleasure to tend. A little further up the escarpment rest theextensive ruins of a fallen temple, believed to have been aconstruction of a species called the Rehlide. (6ar., either severelyabated or extinct, depending on which authority one choosesto give credence to. In any event, long gone from these parts.) The temple’s great white columns once towered a hundred metres or so into our thin airs but now lie sprawled upon andinterred within the ground, vast straked and fluted tubes of solid stone half buried in the peaty soils of the unimproved land around us. The furthest-fallen ends of the columns – which musthave toppled slowly but most impressively in our half-standard gravity – punched great long crater-like ditches out of the earth,creating long double embankments with bulbously roundedtips. Over the many millennia since their sudden creation thesetall ramparts have been slowly worn down both by erosion andour world’s many small ground-quakes so that the earth hasslumped back to refill the wide ditches where the column endslie, until all that is visible is a succession of gentle waves in the land’s surface, like a series of small, splayed valleys from whoseupper limits the unburied lengths of the columns appear like the pale exposed bones of this little planet-moon.
