The day of which I want to tell you, that day when my friend Traiben first lit the fire of Pilgrimage in my twelve-year-old mind, was the day of the departure of that year’s Pilgrims. You know what great pomp and splendor that involves. The ceremony of the Procession and Departure has not changed since ancient times. The clans of every House that make up our village gather; the sacred things of the tribe are brought forth, the batons and scrolls and talismans; the Book of the Wall is recited, every last verse of it, which requires weeks and weeks of unceasing effort; and finally the forty successful candidates emerge from the Pilgrim Lodge to show themselves before the village and take their leave. It is a profound moment, for we will never see most of them again—everyone understands that—and those who do return will come back transformed beyond all knowing of them. That has ever been the way.

To me in that innocent time it was all just a grand festival, nothing more. For many days, now, people from the outlying districts of the village had been arriving at our House, which lay closer to the Wall than any other in Jespodar: we were the House of the Wall, the House of Houses. Thousands had come, thousands of thousands, so that the whole unthinkable swarm of festival-goers was crammed elbow to elbow all the time, packed so close together that often we found ourselves changing shape involuntarily, just from the heat and congestion of it all, and we had to struggle to get back to the forms that we preferred.

Wherever you looked, our Housegrounds overflowed with mobs of people. They were everywhere and they got into everything: they trampled our lovely powdervines, they crushed and flattened our handsome daggerfern bushes, they stripped the gambellos of all their ripe, heavy blue fruits.