Opening his eyes, he now looked and was able to see the two pointed peaks at the crest of the ridge. “Twin Breasts” they had once been called, and the sight of them made him think of Em, and even further back, of his own mother. The earth and Em and the mother all mingled in his dying mind, and he felt glad to return.
“But, no,” he thought, after a moment, “I must die as I have lived—by the light of my own mind, by what light it gives me. Those hills, though they may take the shape of breasts, they are not like Em or like my mother. They will receive me—they will receive my body—but they will not love me. They do not care. And also I am one who has studied the ways of the earth, and I know that the hills themselves, though men call them eternal—they too are changing always.”
Yet as a weary and dying old man, he needed something toward which he could look and from which he could expect no change. He was cold now around the waist, and his fingers were numb. His sight was fading.
He fixed his eyes on the distant hills. He had tried very hard. He had struggled. He had looked to the past and to the future. What did it matter? What had he accomplished?
Now certainly it made no difference. He would rest, and he would return to the hills. And they—in comparison at least with the passing of man’s generations—remained without changing. And if the shape of the hills was like the shape of a woman’s breasts, perhaps that too was not without its meaning and comfort.
Then, though his sight was now very dim, he looked again at the young men. “They will commit me to the earth,” he thought. “Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live.
