THE
THE SIXTH CHRONICLE
HOW HE SANG TO HIS MANDOLIN AND WHAT CAME OF HIS SINGING
They walked back slowly in silence up the street down which they
had ridden. Earth darkened, the moon grew brighter: and Rodriguez
gazing at the pale golden disk began to wonder who dwelt in the
lunar valleys; and what message, if folk were there, they had for
our peoples; and in what language such message could ever be, and
how it could fare across that limpid remoteness that wafted light
on to the coasts of Earth and lapped in silence on the lunar
shores. And as he wondered he thought of his mandolin.
"Morano," he said, "buy bacon."
Morano's eyes brightened: they were forty-five miles from the
hills on which he had last tasted bacon. He selected his house
with a glance, and then he was gone. And Rodriguez reflected too
late that he had forgotten to tell Morano where he should find
him, and this with night coming on in a strange village. Scarcely,
Rodriguez reflected, he knew where he was going himself. Yet if
old tunes lurking in its hollows, echoing though imperceptibly
from long-faded evenings, gave the mandolin any knowledge of human
affairs that other inanimate things cannot possess, the mandolin
knew.
Let us in fancy call up the shade of Morano from that far
generation. Let us ask him where Rodriguez is going. Those blue
eyes, dim with the distance over which our fancy has called them,
look in our eyes with wonder.
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