1On the island of Lesbos, which lies close under the coast of Asia, there is a wide lagoon, shallow and warm, joined to the sea by a narrow mouth. In the days of this story a boy named Phokos dived there for sponges and sea urchins. He was eleven. His father had drowned owing money on the boat, and the boy had been sold with the nets to pay it. He belonged to a fish merchant, who fed him badly and worked him well.
2In his twelfth summer a stranger came to live by the lagoon. He was a man of about forty, from the north, with thin legs and small bright eyes and a slight lisp. He wore rings and dressed with care. He had studied twenty years in Athens, in the school of Plato, and when Plato died he had gone travelling. His name was Aristotle.
3The fishermen thought him mad, and liked him. He paid good money for bad fish. He wanted the odd ones: the cuttlefish with its ink, the fishing-frog that dangles a lure before its own mouth, the sea urchin with its five teeth. He asked questions by the hour. Where does this one lay its eggs? Have you seen it yourself, or were you told? He believed nothing until two men who did not know each other had said the same.
4Phokos could stay under water longer than any man on the lagoon. Before the month was out, the stranger had bought him from the fish merchant. The boy thought his luck had turned at last. Then he was handed a knife, and a basket of hens' eggs.
5There were twenty, all laid the same day and set under the same hens. His work was to open one each morning, with great care, and call the master. On the first day there was nothing but yolk. On the second, nothing. On the fourth morning Phokos cracked the shell and stopped breathing.
6In the yolk lay a speck of blood, no bigger than a pinhead. It was moving. It leapt and stilled, leapt and stilled.
7Aristotle knelt on the kitchen floor with his face a hand's width from the egg. He stayed so for a long time. "It is the heart," he said at last, softly, as a man speaks in a temple. "Before there is a wing or an eye or a bone, there is that. It beats before there is anything for it to beat for." He looked up at the boy, and his face was alight. "It was there in every egg since the first hen, Phokos. And how few have ever opened one to look."
8There was another day that Phokos kept all his life. He had brought up a smooth dogfish, a small shark, heavy with young. The master opened it on the rocks. Inside lay the pups, and each one was joined to its mother's body by a cord, as a calf is joined to a cow. A fish, made like a beast of the land. He wrote it down. Men doubted that page for two thousand years, until someone troubled to open another dogfish.
9A friend from the island, named Theophrastus, once asked whether it did not disgust a philosopher to spend his days in fish guts. Aristotle answered with a story. Some strangers once came to visit Heraclitus of Ephesus, and found the great man warming himself at the kitchen oven, and hung back in the doorway. He told them to come in and not be afraid; there were gods there too. "So it is with these," said Aristotle, and held up a sea urchin. "There is something to wonder at in every one of them."
10Phokos was thirteen when a letter came from the king of Macedon. The king had a son of that same age, and wanted the best mind in Greece to teach him.
11So the diver from Lesbos saw the prince Alexander: a fair-haired boy, not tall, quick as a hawk, who could not sit still. He loved the old poem of the war at Troy, and it is told that he slept with the master's copy of it under his pillow, beside a dagger. For three years, in a garden with stone seats and shady walks, Aristotle taught him: the poets, the nature of living things, how cities are governed, how a man should rule himself.
12Phokos carried the books, and watched. The prince asked wonderful questions. But the slave boy noticed, as servants do, that he asked them like a man taking the measure of a wall. He wished to know where the world ended. He wished to know it so that he could go there, and have it.
13Then the old king was murdered. Alexander was king at twenty. He crossed into Asia with forty thousand men, and the master's teaching days were over.
14Aristotle went back to Athens. He was fifty. In a grove called the Lyceum he opened a school of his own. He taught in the mornings as he walked up and down the covered walk. He gathered the laws of a hundred and fifty-eight cities, to compare them. He wrote on the stars and the weather, on the soul, on reasoning itself, on what it is to live well. He built up a library such as no private man had owned before. Phokos was its keeper. He was a grown man now, a slave still, and he knew where everything was.
15He copied, too. So it was that his own pen set down the first line of one of the master's books, and he stopped and read it over, for it was true of a boy on a lagoon:
16"All men by nature desire to know."
17But hear the other thing, for this book does not hide what its prophets got wrong. Phokos copied another work, on the governing of households and cities. In it the master had written that some people are slaves by nature: that they are made to be the tools of others, as an ox is, having enough reason to follow an order and not enough to rule themselves; and that for such people it is right and good to be owned.
18Phokos read that with the pen in his hand. He went on copying. He was a careful copyist. But that evening, when he brought the lamp, he did not go out again.
19"Master. May I ask something about today's pages?"
20"You may always ask."
21"Am I one? By nature?"
22Aristotle put down his cup. He was an honest man. He looked at the slave who had opened the eggs with him, who read his hand better than his own students did, who had twice caught errors in the count of the constitutions.
23"No," he said. "You are a slave by law. Your father owed money. That is another thing, and I have written that it is another thing."
24"How does one tell them apart?" said Phokos. "From outside? If I had never been handed the eggs, I would be mending nets, and I would look to you like an ox."
25The master did not answer. He was silent so long that Phokos grew afraid. At last he said only, "That is well asked." And it must be told truly: he did not strike the passage out. It stands in his book today. He had opened ten thousand creatures to see what was inside them, and had not thought to do as much for the people who carried his lamp. No prophet in this book saw the whole. But after that night the master looked at Phokos like a man with a question he has not finished.
26News came from the east, year after year. The pupil had taken Egypt, and marked out a city there at the mouth of the Nile and given it his own name. He had taken Babylon. He had gone on, past the edge of every map, over the snow mountains and down to the rivers of India.
27And then came news of another kind. The master's own kinsman, Callisthenes, whom he had brought up, had gone with the army to write its history. The king had begun to require that men bow to the ground before him, as before a god. Callisthenes would not. He was accused of plotting; he died a prisoner.
28Aristotle shut himself in the library for two days. When he came out he looked old. He said to Phokos, who had brought bread, "I taught that boy for three years how a man should govern himself. He has learned how to govern everything else." He did not speak of it again.
29When the master was sixty-one, Alexander died of a fever in Babylon, not yet thirty-three, lord of everything from Greece to the Indus. He had been taught by the wisest man alive, and the ways he had opened were roads for armies.
30When the news reached Athens, the city rose against the Macedonians. Aristotle was the dead king's teacher, and that was enough. A priest charged him with impiety, the same charge that had been brought against Socrates. It was for a poem he had once written in praise of a dead friend.
31"Socrates stayed," said Phokos. He was not sure why he said it.
32"Socrates was a citizen of Athens. He owed the city his obedience and he paid it. I am a foreigner here; I have never had a vote, and I owe them no corpse." And he said, in his dry way, that he would not let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy.
33They left that night. There was no time for more than could go on one cart. Theophrastus would keep the school and the library. Phokos loaded the notes on animals, thirty years of them, the eggs and the dogfish and the bees. He took the lamp from the library table. As the cart went out by the back gate, they heard shouting at the front one.
34The master had a house across the water at Chalcis, on the long island of Euboea, which had been his mother's. Beside that town runs a narrow strait, and the current in it does a thing found almost nowhere else. It runs hard to the north, and stops, and runs hard to the south, and turns again, many times in a day and a night, and no one could say why.
35Aristotle was ill by then, with a sickness in the stomach. But every day that he could walk, he went down to that strait and watched the water turn. He had Phokos count the changes and mark the hours. He tried the moon. He tried the wind. Nothing fitted.
36"I shall not find it," he said one evening. He did not say it sadly. "Write that down, Phokos, where the others will see it. Write what we counted, and that I did not find the cause. Someone will. It is no shame to leave a door standing open. The shame is to paint one on the wall and tell people they have gone through."
37He died that year, at sixty-two. The water was still turning.
38His will was read. It was a careful will, like everything he did. It said that none of the servants who had waited on him should be sold; that in due time they should have their freedom. Phokos was among them. He was thirty-four. He thought of an evening with a lamp, and a question the master had not finished. He thought: perhaps this was his answer. It was not the whole of one. But it was in his own hand.
39Phokos went back to Athens when the trouble had passed. He served Theophrastus in the library for twenty-five years, as a free man, for wages.
40One of those students was a man named Demetrius, from the harbour village of Phalerum. For ten years he governed Athens. Then the wind changed, and he had to run for his life. He came at last to Egypt.
41Now Egypt was ruled by a Macedonian named Ptolemy, who had been one of Alexander's generals. He had made his capital in the new city at the mouth of the Nile. And he had a thought as large as any conquest. He wished to gather in one house every book in the world.
42Demetrius told him where to begin. And Demetrius wrote to Athens, to the Lyceum: send copies. Send someone who knows them.
43Phokos was near sixty. But there was no one living who knew those scrolls as he did; half of them were in his hand. He packed a chest of cedar wood. On top, wrapped in wool, he laid a small clay lamp. A student had given it to the school long ago. It was said to have come from a jailer, and before that, from a room where an old man had talked for thirty days.
44The ship ran south nine days, past Crete, out of sight of all land. Phokos sat on the chest. A sailor asked him what was in it that he guarded so. "Fish guts," said Phokos. "And a hundred and fifty-eight cities. And a note about some water that no one understands."
45On the tenth morning the coast of Egypt came up, flat and pale, hardly higher than the sea. Then walls, white and new. Straight streets, laid out with a cord. Masts beyond counting. Workmen were raising a great hall near the palace, and beside it, covered walks, like the ones at home.
46It was the pupil's city. He had asked where the world ended so that he could own it. He had owned it for eleven years, and then it had been cut up among his generals. But here, in the one place that kept his name, they were building a house with open doors for every book there was.
47The sailors spoke of other news, as sailors do. Far to the east, where Alexander's march had ended, a new kingdom had risen along the Ganges, in the country where the Buddha and Mahavira had walked. Its king had a son. In time there would be a grandson.
48Phokos did not think about kings. He had seen where that went. He stood at the rail as the ship came in under the white walls, and he lit the lamp, though it was full day, to be sure the wick was sound.
49It caught at once. He cupped his hand around it. It was a small flame, and it had come a long way: from a pot of coals at a river in Asia, if he had known the tale; from an oven in Ephesus; from a prison in Athens. Or from nowhere. From wherever a flame comes when one person asks another a question and waits for the answer.
50He carried it down the plank into Alexandria.