And enter by the dormer window on the east side.

I bowed willingly to these fantasies, although the stairs continued to the sixth floor. The “ledge” was a narrow edge of the wall, the “chimney” a dark recess that needed only to be shut by the construction of an adjacent building to be called a court, the “slope of schist” an old slate roof, and the “gendarmes” some mitered and helmeted chimneys. I entered through the dormer window and found myself standing before the man himself. Fairly tall, thin and vigorous, with a large black moustache and rather crinkly hair, he had the serenity of a caged panther lying in wait; he looked at me with calm, dark eyes and extended his hand.

“You see what I must do to earn my daily bread,” he said to me. “I would have liked to welcome you to better quarters …”

“I thought you worked at the perfume company.”

“Not only. I also work for a manufacturer of household appliances, a gear company, a laboratory for insecticide products, and a photography business. In all of them I am involved in attempting inventions thought to be impossible. Until now I’ve managed, but since they say I can’t do anything but invent absurdities, they don’t pay me much. So, I give climbing lessons to wealthy young men who are tired of bridge and crossword puzzles. Make yourself comfortable and get acquainted with my garret.”

It was in fact several attic rooms with the partitions knocked out to form a low-ceilinged workshop, lit and ventilated at one end by a vast glass window. Under the window was squeezed the typical materials of a physics-chemistry lab, and a pebble path wound through the studio, imitating the worst sort of mule track, lined with small trees and shrubs in pots or planters, grass plants, small conifers, dwarf palms, and rhododendrons. Along the path, stuck to the windows and hanging from the ceiling, so that free space was used to the maximum, hundreds of small placards were displayed. Each one bore a drawing, a photograph, or an inscription, and all of them together constituted a veritable encyclopedia of what we call “human knowledge.” A diagram of a plant cell, Mendelieff’s periodic table, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross section of the human heart, Lorentz’s formulas of transformation, every planet and its characteristics, a series of fossilized horses, Mayan hieroglyphs, economic and demographic statistics, musical phrases, representatives of the major plant and animal families, crystal samples, the plan of the Great Pyramid, encephalograms, logical formulas, charts of all the sounds employed in all languages, geographical maps, genealogies—everything, in short, that might fill the brain of a Pico della Mirandola of the twentieth century.

Here and there stood jars, aquariums, and cages containing extravagant fauna. But my host did not let me linger to look at his holothurians, his calamary, his waterspiders, his termites, his anteaters, and his axolotls … He led me onto the path where the two of us could just stand shoulder to shoulder, and invited me to take a stroll around the laboratory. Thanks to a small cross draught and the odors of the dwarf conifers, one had the impression of climbing the hairpin turns of an endless mountain trail.

“You understand,” Pierre Sogol said to me, “we have such grave matters to decide, with repercussions in all the smallest corners of our lives, yours and mine, that we can’t pull something out of nothing without at least getting to know each other. Today we can walk together, talk, eat, be quiet together. Later, I think we shall have opportunities to act together, to suffer together—and all of this is necessary in order to ‘get acquainted,’ as they say.”

Naturally, we talked about the mountains. He had explored all the highest known ranges on the planet, and I felt that with each of us at the end of a good rope we might that very day have launched on the maddest mountaineering adventures. Then the conversation jumped, slipped, and veered, and I understood the use he was making of those bits of cardboard that spread before us the knowledge of our century. All of us have a fairly extensive collection of such figures and inscriptions in our head; and we have the illusion that we are “thinking” the loftiest scientific and philosophic thoughts when, by chance, several of these cards are grouped in a way that is somewhat unusual but not excessively so. This can be the effect of air currents or simply by constant agitation, like the Brownian movement that agitates particles suspended in a liquid. Here, all this material was visibly outside of us; we could not confuse it with ourselves. Like a garland strung from nails, we suspended our conversation from these little images, and each of us saw the mechanisms of the other’s mind and of his own with equal clarity.

In this man’s way of thinking, and in his whole appearance, there was a singular mixture of vigorous maturity and childlike freshness. But above all, just as I was aware of his nervous and restless legs, I was aware of his thought like a force as palpable as heat, light, or wind. This force seemed to be an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external facts and for establishing new connections between what seemed to be utterly disparate ideas. I heard him—I’d be prepared to say I even saw him—treat human history as a problem in descriptive geometry, then, a minute later, speak of the properties of numbers as if he were dealing with zoological species. The fusion and division of living cells became a particular case of logical reasoning, and language derived its laws from celestial mechanics.

I could hardly reply to him, and soon felt dizzy. He perceived this, and then began to tell me about his past life.

“While still young,” he said, “I had known almost every pleasure and discomfort, all the happiness and all the suffering that can befall man as a social animal. Useless to give you the details: the repertory of possible events in human destinies is rather limited, and they are nearly always the same stories. I will tell you only that one day I found myself alone, all alone, fully convinced that I had completed one cycle of existence.