That night much of a strange nature, called "Sunrise", came to him, and strange names, faces, and disciplines were vaguely lodged within him. He awoke with a most definite feeling of readiness, and with his breakfast he knew, beyond doubt, that "When the disciple is ready, the Master appears."
When he had finished eating, he left the library, and walked in thought. How dismal everything was! Nobody knowing, or caring about anything really important; nobody seeing anything. And certainly they did not see him: but he saw them very clearly. And how much was there, still to be seen, all around him? And what was it, what did it mean? He had to get out, he had to find an answer.
He pushed the nearest button, and slid into the suave black Car that noiselessly approached. He had never seen a black Car before. He wondered if his eyes were still playing tricks upon him, if he would ever see anything aright. Then he dismissed it from his mind.
"Take me out of the City", he said.
There was a slight hesitation; then they were moving, slowly and quietly, in a northeasterly direction.
It was a long ride, past all the familiar features of the City, multiplied many fold. At length the Car shuddered slightly, and the virtue seemed to go out of it in a gentle rush: it stopped, utterly still, and the silent door slid open with an eloquent finality. He got out, and the Car seemed to hasten away as from an undesired doom.
But his weird was upon him; he thought so, in the transfixing old terms; and he turned and beheld an open field, with mountains in the distance. And it came to him that he had ridden this way before, and seen nothing but City all around him. He thought then of enigmatic things that he had heard and read in the library: of how certain Tibetans rendered themselves invisible, or at least passed unseen, by shielding their thought waves—by giving out no handle for perception to grasp. So had this landscape hidden itself, it seemed: shielded itself from desecration.
Or perhaps there were beings, perhaps there was existence, that gave continual indication, bristled with handles, as it were: but handles that could not be grasped or made use of by an organism insufficiently developed. It seemed more of a truism, the more he thought of it.
But it did not seem to matter, on this bright new day. He dismissed the question and stepped forward, into the yielding grass.