"So where do the judges come in?"

"The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he's guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed."

"And if they're never satisfactory?"

"In the long run," said Dr. Robert, "they always are."

There was a silence.

"Did you ever do any rock climbing?" Vijaya suddenly asked.

Will laughed. "How do you think I came by my game leg?"

"That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?"

"Enough," said Will, "to convince me that I wasn't much good at it."

Vijaya glanced at Murugan. "What about you, while you were in Switzerland?"

The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. "You can't do any of those things," he muttered, "if you have a tendency to TB."

"What a pity!" said Vijaya. "It would have been so good for you."

Will asked, "Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?"

"Climbing's an integral part of the school curriculum."

"For everybody?"

"A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People-that's about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls. We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb."

The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.

"That's the High Altitude Station," he said. "Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won't set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude-including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of."

"Is this the place we're bound for?" Will asked.

"No, we're going higher." Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the clouds. "Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It's one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!" A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.

They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.

"Entering the last, worst lap," said Vijaya. "Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel."

He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.

10

Cautiously maneuvering his immobilized leg, Will climbed out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple-a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple's richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.

"Built about fifty years before the Norman Conquest," said Dr. Robert.

"And looks," Will commented, "as though it hadn't been built by anybody-as though it had grown out of the rock.

Grown like the bud of an agave, on the point of rocketing up into a twelve-foot stalk and an explosion of flowers."

Vijaya touched his arm. "Look," he said. "A party of Ele-mentaries coming down."

Will turned towards the mountain and saw a young man in nailed boots and climbing clothes working his way down a chimney in the face of the precipice. At a place where the chimney offered a convenient resting place he halted and, throwing back his head, gave utterance to a loud Alpine yodel. Fifty feet above him a boy came out from behind a buttress of rock, lowered himself from the ledge on which he was standing and started down the chimney.

"Does it tempt you?" Vijaya asked, turning to Murugan.

Heavily overacting the part of the bored, sophisticated adult who has something better to do than watch the children at play, Murugan shrugged his shoulders. "Not in the slightest." He moved away and, sitting down on the weatherworn carving of a lion, pulled a gaudily bound American magazine out of his pocket and started to read.

"What's the literature?" Vijaya asked.

"Science Fiction." There was a ring of defiance in Murugan's voice.

Dr. Robert laughed. "Anything to escape from Fact."

Pretending not to have heard him, Murugan turned a page and went on reading.

"He's pretty good," said Vijaya, who had been watching the young climber's progress. "They have an experienced man at each end of the rope," he added. "You can't see the number-one man. He's behind that buttress in a parallel chimney thirty or forty feet higher up. There's a permanent iron spike up there, where you can belay the rope. The whole party could fall, and they'd be perfectly safe."

Spread-eagled between footholds in either wall of the narrow chimney, the leader kept shouting up instructions and encouragement. Then, as the boy approached, he yielded his place, climbed down another twenty feet and, halting, yodeled again. Booted and trousered, a tall girl with her hair in pigtails appeared from behind the buttress and lowered herself into the chimney.

"Excellent!" said Vijaya approvingly as he watched her.

Meanwhile, from a low building at the foot of the cliff-the tropical version, evidently, of an Alpine hut-a group of young people had come out to see what was happening. They belonged, Will was told, to three other parties of climbers who had taken their Postelementary Test earlier in the day.

"Does the best team win a prize?" Will asked.

"Nobody wins anything," Vijaya answered. "This isn't a competition. It's more like an ordeal."

"An ordeal," Dr. Robert explained, "which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they'll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence. But after the ordeal comes the revelation. In a few minutes these boys and girls will be given their first experience of the moksha-medicinc. They'll all take it together, and there'll be a religious ceremony in the temple."

"Something like the Confirmation Service?"

"Except that this is more than just a piece of theological rigmarole. Thanks to the moksha-medicinc, it includes an actual experience of the real thing."