That night I slipped off alone under a moon as livid and cold as the eye of a blind man, wrapped in a borrowed wolfskin, spurning or spurned by Asteria, as I had been for weeks. I walked until I came upon a vast, barren plain covered with low plant growth. I had no fear of the darkness, that glowering sky of the Homeric epics, for there was no greater night than the darkness I felt inside me. As I walked, my chest constricted with a long-suppressed shudder, and I breathed deeply, taking in the redolent night air. Of all the scents most capable of eliciting emotion and memory-the smoke of a wood fire, a woman's sleep-warm body under a blanket, chalk on a child's tablet-there is perhaps none so simultaneously comforting and threatening as the scent of the moon. The scent of the moon. I ask the reader to reflect, to turn inward and carefully, slowly, inhale the still night air: one cannot help but notice that the night's scent is different by moonlight. The moon comforts in the light that it sheds on the darkness, yet threatens by emphasizing that very darkness and the mystery that still remains in the shadows beyond the moon's reach. Even a blind man unable to perceive light is confident in noting that the moon is shining, and will feel simultaneously both an inner comfort and a sense of foreboding at this knowledge. It is really only a question of breathing.

I strode through the frigid night for many hours, immersed in my thoughts, my rage at the needless losses of the crossing, and at my own, personal loss of Asteria, for she had remained as cold and distant to me as a flickering star since our encounter on the cliffs weeks before. Finally, in a state of exhaustion of both body and mind, I threw myself face foremost into the fragrant leaves, the asphodel of Xenophon's dream. Lying as if dead, I let my spirit wander through my former life, the hours spent sitting quietly in my mother's lap, Aedon's ethereal singing, the pride I saw reflected in his father's face as he heard Xenophon's praises touted by the other nobles of the city, his fury when informed of his son's departure.

The grandeur, the warmth and gaiety, the exuberance of my past, the exhilaration of life in Athens, the guileless joy of youth, were overwhelming in their contrast to my current state, and it was only with great effort that I forced my mind elsewhere. It is a weakness in a man to let his thoughts slip thus into needless melancholy, yet I did not have the strength to move from my position, nor even to open my eyes. My body was exhausted, it is true, but even under the harshest of circumstances, during times when I have been near death, I have always been able to move my physical being. This, however, was different, something I had never experienced-a complete emotional exhaustion, a draining of my very will to live, a crushing of the spirit so complete that my body, hardened and lean as it was from the months of campaigning, was completely immobilized.

After a long while I found the will to turn onto my back and open my eyes, and I gazed in wonder at the clear and frozen night sky. On the vast, treeless plain on which I lay, with the vault of the heavens stretching from horizon to horizon, the light from the millions of stars was overwhelming. When I moved my head to the side I saw the stars' light reflected again in a billion bedazzling drops of frozen dew that had formed on the blades of grass and flower leaves, eliminating the horizon line that gives people their bearings and balance, their sense of proportion and of their very place on earth, leaving me floating in the ether. I felt as though surrounded by infinite specks of light on all sides, supporting me from below and suffocating me from above, quivering and flashing, throbbing closer and closer in rhythm with the beating of my heart, while the ancient Syracusan chorus from my childhood welled up from the very depths of my bowels, irrepressible, threatening to burst out at any minute and completely stifling my thoughts and my existence. I felt as if I were drugged, or mad, for the lights around and above and below me were spinning and pressing me down, as if into the vortex of Charybdis, while the unintelligible chorus inside swelled to a deafening roar. I would go insane if I did not put a stop to this, and mustering all the strength left in me, or given to me in my desperation by a passing god who took pity on me, I sat up and screamed with all my life, a frantic, throaty, stentorian bellow, which after seconds left me gasping and hoarse.

As my cry died away, the maddening terror of the inner music stopped instantly and the fragrant night air rushed furiously back into my lungs. The stars returned to their normal places, and the sparks of frost fell back into formation, lined up neatly along the horizon and no longer threatening to break rank. I sat as if paralyzed, gazing around at the plain, as if in the Land of Dreams where the burnt-out wraiths of mortals dwell. I listened to the silence in wonder, as intently as I had listened to the impending rush of madness, daring it to return, forcing my will to face it and defy it, even trying unsuccessfully to bring again to mind the hellish harmonies that had filled my being so completely a moment earlier. My soul had returned to me, and was again firmly attached to those murky recesses in a man's body where it lurks, like a bat roosting in the darkness, eyes glittering in watchfulness.

Strangely, sitting there in the vast silence, a soft sound became evident: so soft I thought I had not heard it, and yet so near that the hair bristled at the back of my neck. I froze, and listened more closely: again it came, the same almost imperceptible rubbing sound, the slightest scraping, not inches from where I sat. I lay silently on my side and placed my face close to the ground, at the point from which I thought the sound had come. It stopped for what seemed a lifetime, as if its maker were considering what meaning to ascribe to this large-headed being that had placed its shaggy, sweat-drenched body so close to it. Slowly emerging beneath my eyes, softly reflected in the glittering blackness, I could make out the translucent gleam of an earthworm, carefully, blindly feeling its way out of the tiny hole it had spent its life digging. The minuscule particles of dirt it shoved aside as it slowly moved made the softest of scraping sounds to my overly sensitized ears, and as a comrade worm emerged from its own hole a few inches away, I heard yet another soft scraping sound, made by the tiny cap of dirt being pushed away from the top of its hole.

To this day, I am not sure what effect this stealthy consideration of a microcosm had on my spirit; for after my soul's wandering to its past, and the almost fatal crushing of my being by the revolving heavens and earth, this tiny dose of the most tactile reality-a vibrant, gleaming earthworm pulsing with life, pushing a speck of dirt from its hole into the starlight-seemed to be the antidote to my precariously balanced sense of proportion. I watched the worm almost without stirring for the rest of the night, slowly regaining my strength as my spirit rested and my mind emptied itself of all its fears of the past day and worries for tomorrow. I observed the worm and thought of nothing but how it busied itself with pushing insignificant quantities of dirt to and from its hole in its search for a dead thing for nourishment, and I took pleasure in this, as if it were a secret, known by no other being in the world-just myself and the worm.

As I watched, I marveled at the fact that even this insignificant creature, toiling anonymously, Sisyphus-like in its dark confines, was somehow able to make a small difference in the world; and it occurred to me that this tiny worm, rather than being a confirmation of death and decay and futility, was actually an affirmation of the persistence and stubbornness of life.