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accent—no, not of those Russian sectarians in Mexico after all … It was not his accent, or his voice, or his face, or his garb that was so remarkable, although together they were remarkable enough. Rather it was his ineffable composure, a certain extraordinary aura of … grandeur? No, no! What was the word?
    Righteousness , that was it. Not self-righteousness, but righteousness … unswerving rectitude … acceptance with God … It blazed from his eyes. That was it! How very, very remarkable were the eyes of that old man …
    Much later, recalling the dreamlike journey, Ellery came to believe that in his half-hallucinated state, while reflecting on the eyes of the old man, his own eyes had failed to see the fork in the road of which Otto Schmidt had spoken. Certainly he had not borne right, as Schmidt had instructed him. He must have borne left instead.
    He was to remember how, floating between reflection and exhaustion, he realized that the road he was traveling had definitely stopped skirting the desert and had crept into it. Joshua trees thrust their spiky limbs every which way, as if groping blindly for something; the frail scent of sand verbena kept touching his nostrils …
    … until it was replaced gently and slowly and, thus, imperceptibly, until all at once the verbena scent was gone, blocked out by something stronger, heavier, more recently familiar …
    … the smoke of sagebrush burning.
    Again.
    He frowned, blinked, noticed—consciously for the first time—how the road had changed. The graded dirt had given way to ungraded dirt, then to sand. Before he could think this out, he noticed that it was little more than a weedy trail embraced by two narrow ruts. He did not even then think: I am on the wrong road, and I had better turn around now while there is still enough light. He thought: It must be a very old automobile that uses this road, perhaps a Model T … And then: No, no automobile uses this road, because there is not a trace of oil on the weeds running down the middle of it.
    With that, Ellery stopped the car and looked around. There was nothing but desert on all sides—creosote bushes, the grayish humps of burro-weed, the thorny crowns of yuccas, rocks, boulders, sand. He had stopped the car providentially. The road came to an end just ahead of him, on a rise. What was on the other side he preferred not to dwell on. Perhaps a sheer drop—a cliff.
    The light was beginning to pale, and Ellery hastily stood up in the car and craned.
    He saw at once that the rise was part of the rim of a low circular hill—a hill with a valley inside; or so it seemed in the failing light. A valley like the bottom of a shallow bowl, hence not really a valley at all, but a basin. Geological niceties, however, were far from his thoughts. As valley it first came into his tired mind; as valley it was to remain there.
    While he stood in the rising heat of the motor, gazing at the rim of hill, a figure suddenly rose from the crest to become fixed in silhouette between the lemon-yellow sky and the hill beyond, already deepening from pink to rose-red … while he watched, to purple. Hooded robe from which emerged gaunt profile and jutting beard, long staff in one hand, and in the other … It was, it had to be, it could be no other than the old man of the wagon at the End-of-the-World Store.
    For a timeless interval Ellery stood there, in the Duesenberg, half convinced that he was the victim of a desert mirage, or that the appearance of this archetype of all father-figures was related in some way to his recent withdrawal from awareness of the world, characterized by the senseless repetition of his father’s name on the studio typewriter … He saw the curiously thin-looking figure on the hill—as sharp against the sky as if there were no thickness to him at all—raise something to his lips.
    A trumpet?
    In the silence (literally breathless for him, for he was holding his breath) Ellery heard, or fancied he heard, an