His walk was at first aimless but confident. There was the new lake. He mapped and memorised its fringes, holding in one hand the capsule, caressing its fat lacquered pen shape. He went back by the same route he had taken to get to the cliff, wading, where necessary, across the cuneiform notches the last, briefer, still violent storm had chiselled into the shore’s contour, short-lived rivulets returning the water to the ocean from so many fountain mouths, a sound of glass hitting glass from all those pebbles running back into the ocean across each other. Some stones would remain; some would make little stones of themselves when breaking others. They were a shoal of fish, stonefish, a form of notation soon to be bleached by the sun and then covered by sand. He would never know their story, the stone story, but he would make guesses to entertain himself. Time being finite, and the time within that time, during which he was strongest, had so little for him that was worth recording. Evening came. He got to his boat, again, and checked the ropes holding it. The rotting, many-layered masses of algae had been cleaned away by the last storm; the air was now once more fresh – most traces of the morning's violence had been wiped off the landscape. He climbed on board and looked through his provisions, opening an old can of food and eating it. Water and dirt ebbed back and forth in the engine room. The rain must have found some leak; he looked for the leak while chewing and swallowing, but he did not find it. Maybe, he thought, the water had come in a different way. Here, upriver, every concavity had over time collected debris, mostly wooden planking with nails and undone hair, as he saw it, mostly remains of ropes, the wigs of the headless, thoughts, no one to think them, mock algae, white and red, hemp and plastic, blue and sharp. The refuse of ships, fake fish, oddities from very deep places – it all came together here, where the reeds were an auditorium, a space where all this gathered, alive and listening; just put imagination into the task of looking around you, and that’s what happens. Pieces of scrap metal become people coming together on a marketplace. How irreparably things get smashed, creatures also, and how randomly recombined. Most of these chimaeras, though, don't get to live. To the accompanying complaints of river birds and their noisy myriad young, he often waded in and inspected. He had powerful arms, and objects that had been spewed out by the sea were woven into some moss carpet in one of the many gut bulges of the river. This was a habit of his: looking into rubble. Then he would go in among the fat warblers and their still featherless chicks, and their crying, worthless to him because they could not fight back, and take eggs and crush them into his mouth, or swallow a few of the chicks with their thin bones and skulls the way Ulysses' men were a dessert to the Cyclops. There were places where he could wash himself and drink of the water of some tributary stream at the same time. Sometimes he burped up air that stank, containing the fear of small birds and animals devoured by him. He would never go hungry here by the river. [...]