And Gerald shook his head. “You gentlemen have talked with gratifying candor. You have expressed yourself, with chaste simplicity, in very plain short sentences. You have reasoned powerfully. You imply that neither a wife nor a mistress, or even a harem, is able to dissuade a wise man from this journeying toward the goal of all the gods. I infer that, to the contrary, the domestic circumstances of no one of you were wholly satisfactory in the old time. Well, that is a situation still to be encountered more frequently than is desirable, even in Lichfield, and it is the reason that I too am on my way to Antan. I am stopping here just for the week-end. Yet I still do not know what in the world you gentlemen really desire.”
“For one, I desire nothing that is in this world,” replied Odysseus.
“Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question! What do you three expect to find in Antan? Because I can assure you that, after the impending changes to be made in the government and other civic affairs of Antan by the Lord of the Third Truth,—a deity, gentlemen, with several not uninteresting aspects, a deity with whom I may without boasting say that I have considerable influence,—why, then, the moment everything is in tolerable working order, it will be a real pleasure to afford you three gentlemen all possible courtesies.”
But the three mages did not seem impressed.
“I was wise,” said Solomon. “I knew all things save one thing. I did not know that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished. And that word no god knows until he has heard it spoken by the Master Philologist.”
“My desire,” said Merlin, “was for the maid Nimuë and for the love of my child mistress. When I had my desire it did not content me. So I now go into Antan to find, it may be, something which I can desire. But my father’s son does not go asking favors of any god.”
Then Gerald said: “Yet, you three mages who have traveled through the Marches of Antan wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find in the goal of all the gods some third truth?”
And it seemed to him that the faces of these myths had now become somewhat evasive and more wary.
But they said only, speaking severally: “A wise man knows that no truth is affected either by his beliefs or by his hopes.”—“A wise man accepts each truth as it is revealed to him.”—“A wise man will risk nothing upon the existence of any truth.”
“Still, gentlemen, these are enigmas! These sayings are not a plain answer to a plain question: and I do not quite understand these sayings.”