Daybreak found him well into the desert, where no sane man travels much after sunrise, but he trudged on for as long as he could bear to, and then found a rock on a north-facing slope with a thin strip of shade from which he could watch back the way he had come. By now the slave-master’s sandals were falling apart. It was difficult to sleep for anxiety, heat, thirst and discomfort, so he spent part of the day taking the ruined sandals apart and using the pieces to adjust and reinforce the next pair.
He walked all that night, hurrying, because even with the stars to guide him and the memorised list of landmarks from the manual, he knew he might finish the stage only in the rough vicinity of the water hole, and then would need daylight to find it. As dawn broke he came to three separate sets of animal tracks converging in the same direction. He walked on until he came to harder ground and turned aside in the direction that the animal prints had taken, along a line that should intersect with them. Ten minutes later he was kneeling by a scummy pool in a hollow.
First he poured a libation to Mercury, then drank sparingly and filled his waterskin. He drank again, twice, before heading off, still aside from his route and still on hard ground, and didn’t start searching for shade until he was well clear of the pool.
This time he slept well. In the late afternoon he woke and returned to the pool, where he tied a large loop with a slipknot into his toughest cord, laid it out along the water’s edge, and led the loose end up to the rim of the hollow, and hid. In the evening small animals came to the pool to drink, but they were very quick and wary, and seemed able to smell where he had been. They sniffed around the noose and went elsewhere.
He had two long nights’ journey to the next water, so couldn’t afford to watch too long. In the late dusk he filled his skin with what he could carry, and his stomach also, and set out. By next morning his sandals were again in ruins, so he spent some of the day cobbling a last pair together, and set out again in the dusk. His food was by now almost gone, so while he trudged on he tried to devise more effective animal traps in his mind.
This place, he hoped, would be easier to find. There was a sort of notch in a range of hills, the outlines clearly described. His way led through the notch, on the left flank of which water oozed down a rock. It turned out to be exactly so. He praised Mercury, and poured a second libation for the soul of the long-dead traveller who had written the manual. The water was sweet and clean, but the only sign that any animals came there was a scattering of bird droppings. He saw no nests and heard no cries. Nevertheless he tried laying out nooses for them, but none came all day.
He moved on that evening, knowing that if he didn’t find food at the next water place, or sooner—it was another two nights’ journey—he wasn’t going to make it through the desert. It amused his sardonic turn of mind to think that this was the supposedly demon-guarded pool. It had been made by men, ages before, and had what was apparently a small temple beside it. The demon might be the statue of some forgotten god. Perhaps the priests who had served it had demanded a human sacrifice, which would help to explain the sudden little absurdity in the otherwise reasonable and accurate route details. Well, if it didn’t provide him with something to eat, he thought, the demon would get its payment of a life.
He reached the water on the verge of delirium. By the second midnight his shoes had fallen apart. His feet were already blistered, and now slowed him to a hobble. He was weak for lack of food. If the last section of his route hadn’t lain along a valley, delaying the apparent sunrise, he would never have made it. Even so, by the time he found the place the landscape was wavering before his eyes, what had begun as a plea to Mercury would end up in fragments of nursery rhyme, and the pitiless sun had become one enduring blow against his flank and shoulder, to send him reeling, then lie among the rocks, and die.
The valley floor dipped suddenly. He stood at the rim of a shallow slope and gazed down. There was the pool, a stone-rimmed circle with steps leading to the water. Beside it, exactly as described, stood a little roofless temple, a flagged paving from which rose a dozen squat, barbaric pillars. No demon, of course, but, confirming his conjecture, the headless image of some large winged quadruped—ludicrous anatomy—that had fallen opposite the steps, lay between the temple and the pool.
Cautious as ever, despite his desperate need, he crawled down the slope rather than risk a fall, and on down the steps to drink. The lowest steps were in the shade, so having drunk as much as was safe, and poured his libation, he turned and sat with his bleeding feet in the water. From down here he could see nothing but the excellent masonry of the wall, vast blocks fitted so well that there was nowhere he could have driven a knife between them. Above that the unornamented rim of the pool. Above that the intense harsh blueness of the sky. And, between the rim and the sky, a single large eye, watching him.
A single eye, because the thing was watching him sideways, bird-fashion, though the eye was much too large for that of any bird—indeed of any creature that he knew. He could now see the beginnings of the curve of an immense, hooked beak, and a fringe of small feathers, though the scalp seemed bald. Surely, even half-delirious, he would have noticed that head on the fallen statue. No, the thing had seemed headless, but clearly a mammal, with the only plumage on the wing, the rest of the body the same colour as the sandstone desert rocks, from which he had assumed it to be carved. The head must have been tucked away out of sight, bird-fashion again.
He was startled, but not for the moment terrified, in fact not much more than wary. When the creature rose and came for him, then would be the time for terror. But the only move it made was to lay its head back down somewhere out of sight. The movement didn’t look like that of a hunter, withdrawing for a stealthy approach, more like that of an exhausted animal, momentarily interested in the arrival of another creature, but then deciding that the intruder was no threat and returning to its rest.
Varro drank again and half filled his skin, just in case, then rose and climbed the steps, watching over his shoulder as the creature came into view. It was indeed huge, not as big as an elephant, but half again the size of any ox he had ever seen. Apart from the scalp, the neck was feathered as far as the shoulders, and the body beyond that furred, both a rusty yellow-brown, the colour of the desert. A vast wing, desert coloured too but barred light and dark, lay along its flank.
It seemed to have lost interest in him and made no move as on wincing feet he crept round the pool and climbed the temple steps and turned. Seeing it from above he recognised at once what the thing was. The dark tuft at the end of the almost naked tail was the giveaway. A gryphon. The body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Ridiculous. Anatomically impossible. There, in front of him.
Delirium? How does a man prove to himself that he isn’t mad, when the very proof may be merely part of the madness? His feet, so much more conscious of their soreness now that they had been cosseted a little? In a futile attempt to validate the proof Varro sat down on the steps and inspected them. Something had carved a half-inch gash into the ball of his left foot. Further back, what had begun as a blister was now raw flesh. There was a matching, but larger, sore on his right foot, as well as a dozen minor cracks and abrasions either side. Well bandaged, and with good shoes, they might be fit to walk on in a week. Academic. He would be dead of starvation well before that.