I had come to the cataract at an hour I could not name, for the inhabitants of the preserve reckon time by a calendar my tutor had declined to teach me — a matter, he said, of local conventions unbecoming to a student. Thus I knew only that it was not yet morning. The emitters overhead were still set to what I had learned to call the third watch, and the false stars in the gap-sky, which are positioned, I was given to understand, to reproduce the stars of Earth as seen from a latitude I was told once and have forgotten, burned in their accustomed figures.

The falls were audible before they were visible. I had been told that the water descends in a curve, and that the curve is caused by the cylinder’s rotation; I had accepted this as I had accepted other things. But the descent, as it now began to take light from the brightening face of the opposite section, was not a curve so much as a slow, continuous gesture, as of a hand drawing a scimitar at a remove of great distance. Water came down and did not fall straight. One could have said the water chose to go west, if one did not understand that choice was not in it.

A woman was there already. She sat on a stone above the basin and did not turn. Her coat was of a cloth I did not know, and damp. I did not disturb her. It seemed to me that she was performing an observance whose nature was known to her and to the place, and that my presence was tolerated only in the way that a bird’s is tolerated: as part of the general condition of morning, and not as a guest.

The emitter-light reached us. The birds were already above.