He dreamed of throcken dancing in the moonlight.
He began to think of Daria as his companion, although she didn't speak much, and when she did, Tim didn't always understand why (or what in Na'ar she was talking about). Once it was a series of numbers. Once she told him she would be "off-line" because she was "searching for satellite" and suggested he stop. He did, and for half an hour the plate seemed completely dead--no lights, no voice. Just when he'd begun to believe she really had died, the green light came back on, the little stick reappeared, and Daria announce, "I have reestablished satellite link."
"Wish you joy of it, " Tim replied.
Several times, she offered to calculate a detour. This Tim continued to decline. And once, near the end of the second day after leaving the Fagonard, she recited a bit of verse:
See the Eagle's brilliant eye,
And wings on which he holds the sky!
He spies the land and spies the sea
And even spies a child like me.
If he lived to be a hundred (which, given his current mad errand, Tim doubted was in the cards), he thought he would never forget the things he saw on the three days he and Daria trudged ever upward in continuing heat. The path, once vague, became a clear lane, one that for several wheels was bordered by crumbling rock walls. Once, for a space of almost an hour, the corridor in the sky above that lane was filled with thousands of huge red birds flying south, as if in migration. But surely, Tim thought, they must come to rest in the Endless Forest. For no birds like that had ever been seen above the village of Tree. Once four blue deer less than two feet high crossed the path ahead of him, seeming to take no notice of the thunderstruck boy who stood staring at these mutie dwarfs. And once they came to a field filled with giant yellow mushrooms standing four feet high, with caps the size of umbrellas.
"Are they good to eat, Daria?" Tim asked, for he was reaching the end of the goods in the hamper. "Does thee know?" "No, traveler," Daria replied. "They are poison. If you even brush their dust on your skin, you will die of seizures. I advise extreme caution." This was advice Tim took, even holding his breath until he was past that deadly grove filled with treacherous, sunshiny death. Near the end of the third day, he emerged on the edge of a narrow chasm that fell away for a thousand feet or more. He could not see the bottom, for it was filled with a drift of white flowers. They were so thick that he at first mistook them for a cloud that had fallen eo earth. The smell that wafted up to him was fantastically sweet. A rock bridge spanned this...
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