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By Root 1442 0

but we will be more interested in whether or not he will find Jelena, and we will urge him on. He will return to the moment of her conception, on page 354 and will determine that it was Doris who was in fact her mother, so the Dorisites were right all along, and Vernon, who is a Jelenist, will cease being one and become a Dorisite, and being a Dorisite he will search all the harder for Jelena, tracing her page by page through this book; he will shed a tear over her lonely childhood and he will curse himself for having ignored her when they were growing up, and he will ask for permission to change page 400 so that when on her wedding day she asks him if he will marry her when she grows up he will be able to answer that he will, but we will not be able to grant him that permission, for what will have been done will have been done, so he will go on, turning the page, and when he turns to page 401 he will find her standing at the edge of Leapin Rock, and then he will begin running, running as hard as he has ever run, until he reaches page 419, and reaches Leapin Rock again. She will see him and say, “Don’t come near me, Vernon. I’m going to jump and you can’t stop me. If you come near me, I’m going to jump.”

“If you jump,” he will tell her, “I will jump too.”

“You will?” she will say.

He will nod.

“What reason would you have to jump?” she will want to know. “I’ve got all kinds of reasons. Mark has taken the boys and left me, and you won’t ever marry me.”

He will ask our permission to tell her that he will marry her, but we will be constrained to point out that he has firmly declared that he will never marry.

“Aint a feller got a right to change his mind?” he will ask us.

“You mean you will?” she will say.

“I wasn’t exactly talkin to you, Jelena,” he will say.

Her face will fall. But then he will say, “We could live together, couldn’t we? We don’t have to git married.” And her face will light up again, and she will move away from the precipice and embrace him, and they will make desperate love right there on top of Leapin Rock. Leapin Rock is a hard rock, but they will not seem to notice.

Walking down from the mountain, hand in hand, she will ask him, “How did you know I was up there?”

“It’s a long, long story, Jelena,” he will reply, but he will begin to tell it to her, and when he reaches the third line of page 420 she will remark, “Isn’t this wonderful?” and then she will suggest, “Vernon, let’s run away. You’ve got loads of money, haven’t you? Let’s run away, and go clear around the world, so that we can find out how much we want to stay in Stay More.”

The adventures of Vernon and Jelena in their trip around the world will perhaps furnish material for another volume, but we might notice here that Vernon will find, in an old basement bookstore in Rome, an ancient volume, whose Latin title will translate roughly as The Archaic Architecture of Arcadia; it will be expensive, but he will have, as Jelena will have observed, loads of money, and he will purchase it.

When they will have returned to Stay More after their trip around the world, he will study and learn Latin for the purpose of being able to decipher it; then he will read the volume, which will be about the architecture of a mountain village in ancient Arcadia. The author of the volume will have been a Roman writing at the time of the Decline of the Roman Empire, writing out of nostalgia because of the contrast between his life and the life of ancient Arcadia. Vernon will be amazed to discover that the book, although ostensibly architectural, will actually be about the lives of six generations of a peasant family named Anqualdou, the first of whom, Iakobus, despite being a peasant, will become provincial eparch of Arkhadia, and the last of whom, Vernealos, who will be the last of his line because the woman he will love will not be able to bear children, will discover an ancient Persian manuscript which will trace this whole process back further to a Mesopotamian cylinder cycle and thence to a sheaf of Egyptian papyruses, and on back to the beginning of language.