Upon a pinched and forgotten stretch of land along a low, monotonous plain lived an ordinary man. He lived by himself, sweated for himself and, day by day, ate the dry bread which was the reward of his solitary labors. He plowed and sowed and harvested as his forefathers had before him. He knew little else. Neighbors lived on every side of his farm but he had little to do with them. Conversation between him and them had shriveled like a forgotten sunflower to a bare glance-in-passing. Sometimes the people who lived nearby held gatherings of one sort or another - marriages, baptisms, funerals - but the man never went, though he often listened for strains of melody upon the wind. He neither helped nor was helped. Other people might as well have been inhabitants of a distant planet, a faraway star or perhaps a dream, for all they meant to him.

His land, hard-worked to a slack brown dust, yielded its meager crop reluctantly. The sun and its turning seasons came and went, keeping a piteous aloofness, while the wind, the ever-present wind, used the man and his huddle of gray shacks as a pennywhistle.

The days held no surprises for the man. He handled the same pails and the same fence gates for years on end. He moved, head bent, from chore to chore, like the scrawny cattle he herded. He wore his ruts deep.

Sometimes a fresh event cut across his path - the tracks of a cat, a thunderhead - and when one did, he would gape at it and ponder it and turn the event over in his mind till he wore its fresh-cut edges to the comforting and familiar roundness of a stone in a stream.

He trudged doggedly through his days, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that existence - his existence - might have some purpose. Yet within him, vaguely felt, a long and distant hunger roiled.

It had increased with the years; he sensed that. But whence its origin, or by what means it could be satisfied, were questions without answers. When the hunger asserted itself he fought it down and threw his energies into something else, distracting himself for as long as he could. Thus he went on. Thus he survived.

Still, the relentless struggle wore him down utterly, as utterly as the wind had scoured the land. His was a grinding, joyless wrestling with time. His bones creaked even as he sat. He had aged. He cursed life. The gray, half-light characteristic of the hour before the dawn was emblematic of his existence. He slipped from one gray state to another, unwittingly. When the sun lifted its face he knew it was time to open his lids; when the stars unraveled and swung across the blackened sky, he knew the time had come to close them. Sleep brought no rest and waking no zest.

Then one day came a horseman.

The man surprised himself by asking the stranger to eat with him. He offered him a bed to sleep on and hay for his mount. The stranger, spent from a long journey, gladly accepted the man's offer of hospitality.

Over empty supper plates the man found himself telling the stranger the story of his life. The stranger listened deeply and, moved by compassion for what he had heard, told his host of another place, a far-off place where life, he averred, had another quality.