"
On far the most important day of his life he went as usual to town by
the early train to sell plausible articles to customers, while the
spiritual Shap roamed off to fanciful lands. As he walked from the
station, dreamy but wide awake, it suddenly struck him that the real
Shap was not the one walking to Business in black and ugly clothes,
but he who roamed along a jungle's edge near the ramparts of an old
and Eastern city that rose up sheer from the sand, and against which
the desert lapped with one eternal wave. He used to fancy the name of
that city was Larkar. "After all, the fancy is as real as the body,"
he said with perfect logic. It was a dangerous theory.
For that other life that he led he realized, as in Business, the
importance and value of method. He did not let his fancy roam too far
until it perfectly knew its first surroundings. Particularly he
avoided the jungle--he was not afraid to meet a tiger there (after all
it was not real), but stranger things might crouch there. Slowly he
built up Larkar: rampart by rampart, towers for archers, gateway of
brass, and all. And then one day he argued, and quite rightly, that
all the silk-clad people in its streets, their camels, their wares
that come from Inkustahn, the city itself, were all the things of his
will--and then he made himself King.
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