Scene 19

That night he dreamed of Kong. The Master, dressed in a long red robe, stood in a distant meadow and was in the throes of explaining to a shining black horse a highly complicated concept with his index finger held aloft. The horse, meanwhile, was chewing at the edges of a book, out of which a leaf would drift now and then to the floor. The leaves were crinkled and withered, and no sooner had they touched the earth, like beetles than they went crawling into the shrubs.

A while later, Maille saw himself seated with three other men in a deserted spectator-gallery around a horse racetrack – holding in his hands the book with Kong's analects that he had snatched from the hands of Hing's agent at the Wall.

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