The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That's the advantage of space. It's big enough to hold, practically anything, and so, eventually, it does. People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than, two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing. There's nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there's a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere. The reason for the story was a mix of many things. There was humanity's desire to do forbidden deeds merely because they were forbidden. There was its desire to find new horizons and kill the people who live beyond them. There were die mysterious scrolls. There was the cucumber. But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, quite soon, it would be all over. "Ah. well, life goes on," people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the universe that goes on. Just as die deceased was getting the hang of everything it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be