He chose, instead, to picture the beaming praise of family and friends when they learned of his brave journey.
The journey was long, the clock stood still. He stopped long enough to gather some fruit that grew along the path. It would serve as his lunch during this day of promise. With it under his arm he bounded along a dozen more steps, then stopped abruptly in his tracks.
He found himself atop a rocky knoll, overlooking the mighty sea!
He was so overpowered by the vista before him that his "Hurrah!" came out as a weak squeak. The ocean lay at the ready, its stilled waves awaiting his command to resume their tidal sweep. The breakers along the shoreline hung in varying stages of disarray, some having already exploded into towering white spray while others were poised in smooth orange curls waiting to start that action.
And there were new friends everywhere! Overhead, a flock of spora were frozen in a steep glide, preparatory to a beach landing. Purnie had heard of these playful creatures many times. Today, with his brothers in school, he would have the pets all to himself. Further down the beach was a pair of two-legged animals poised in mid-step, facing the spot where Purnie now stood. Some distance behind them were eight more, each of whom were motionless in a curious pose of interrupted animation. And down in the water, where the ocean ran itself into thin nothingness upon the sand, he saw standing here and there the comical tripons, those three-legged marine buffoons who made handsome careers of munching seaweed.
"Hi there!" Purnie called. When he got no reaction, he remembered that he himself was "dead" to the living world: he was still in a zone of time-stopping, on the inside looking out. For him, the world would continue to be a tableau of mannikins until he resumed time.
"Hi there!" he called again; but now his mental attitude was that he expected time to resume. It did! Immediately he was surrounded by activity. He heard the roar of the crashing orange breakers, he tasted the dew of acid that floated from the spray, and he saw his new friends continue the actions which he had stopped while back in the forest.
He knew, too, that at this moment, in the forest, the little brook picked up its flow where it had left off, the purple clouds resumed their leeward journey up the valley, and the bees continued their pollen-gathering without having missed a single stroke of their delicate wings. The brook, the clouds, and the insects had not been interrupted in the least; their respective tasks had been performed with continuing sureness. It was time itself that Purnie had stopped, not the world around him.
He scampered around the rockpile and down the sandy cliff to meet the tripons who, to him, had just come to life.