It took them half an hour to recover their giraffu and saddle up again, but Hartford did not regret the delay.
Aboard the grotesque mount again, he groaned. To mask the misery of his unaccustomed pounding he paid scientific attention to the landscape, the gait of the camelopards, the leather of the saddles, and the posture and person of Takeko—this last by far the most effective of his analgesic thoughts.
They rode on an ancient piedmont, among the foothills of a worn-down mountain-range. The leather of their saddles and gambadoes was, by its pattern, obviously tanned camelopard-hide. Hartford was certain that this pattern would by the end of their journey be an indelible part of his own hide. The giraffu, remarkably swift and easy-moving over the rugged, heavily grown terrain, ambled, moving both legs on the same side together. And Takeko was lovely.
Hartford decided to essay his Kansan. He practiced his question: "Is Yamamura far from here?" mentally, moving his lips, until he was sure he'd mastered the phrasing. Then he addressed Old Kiwa. "Yamamura wa koko kara toi desu ka?"
Kiwa smiled, and rattled off an answer much too brisk for Hartford to catch. He pointed ahead and up. "He says we must go through the pass, under the Great Buddha," Takeko explained. "We have only an hour to go."
"Arigato," Hartford said, suppressing a moan. Another hour!
The pass Kiwa had spoken of loomed ahead. It was quite narrow, and walled on either side by the almost perpendicular flanks of mountains, shoulder to shoulder. Kiwa went first, for the cleft could only be negotiated in single file. Takeko followed her father, and Hartford took up the rear. In the ravine it was dark. The camelopards, sensing their mangers up ahead, paced more quickly. Suddenly the canyon was light, the walls spreading further apart here.
Far up on Hartford's right, seated on a shelf left from some ancient avalanche, was a gigantic figure cast of a coppery metal, green now against the granite wall. "Who is that?" Hartford called to Takeko.
"It is our Daibutsu," Takeko said. "It is the Amida Buddha, the Lord of Boundless Light."
"Do you worship him?"
Takeko smiled and shook her head. "We worship not any man, but a Way," she said. "Butsudo—the Way of the Buddha. We are nearly to the village now, Lee-san."
"I thank the Lord Buddha for that," Hartford said, bowing from his saddle toward the great bronze image.

Yamamura nestled in a fold of the high mountains. The fields that supported the village, its population now doubled by the refugees from Kansannamura, were tucked here and there on narrow ledges, watered by bamboo flumes that stole water from the mountain streams. The crop of greatest importance was the ubiquitous sunflower, supplier of bread and soap ash, of cloth and bath oil, birdseed and writing paper. Bamboo grew in clefts and shelves too slight for cultivation. This was the wood for tools, the water pipe, the house wattles and, in its youth, the salad of the people, the only wood eaten in its native state. There were also carrots, beets and tiny plum-trees, and the horseradish, daikon. Yamamura was a lovely place, Hartford decided.
It was twenty hours from the moment of his contamination that Hartford dismounted. He moved into the house Kiwa invited him to with as much tenderness as though he'd been carefully bastinadoed and flayed. He was, nonetheless, free of febrile symptoms. He had breathed Kansan air, had eaten its fish and drunk its water; he'd spoken with a Kansan native and had lain with his face in Kansan dust. He was still as healthy as any Axenite, never before in the saddle, would be after a five-hour ride.
Kiwa's wife and Takeko's mother was a little woman named Toyomi-san, dressed in brightly patterned garments a good deal more formal than her daughter's jacket and shorts. Toyomi-san spoke no Standard, but she made quite clear to Hartford his welcome. She led him into a large, steam-filled room, where she indicated he was first to wash himself then soak, then dry and dress in the clean clothing she'd laid out for his use.
The soaking water was very hot, and very welcome. Hartford sat in the copper-bottomed tub, his muscles hard and sore, until he felt the very marrow of his bones had cooked. He stepped from the tub then and dried gently, easy on his chafed back and legs.
"The oil will help," Takeko said, slipping a screen shut behind her. She had bathed and brushed her black hair free of the bamboo-thicket dust, and wore now a brilliant, silk kimono of the sort her mother was wearing.
Hartford held the towel at his waist.
"Excuse me," he said.
Takeko giggled. "Are you unique, Lee-san, that you must hide yourself? Lie down on the cot, and I will make you comfortable."
Wondering greatly at the folkways of Kansas, but determined to commit no gaffe that would imperil his relations with this girl, Hartford lay face down on the mat-covered cot. Takeko removed the tenugi towel with which he'd modestly draped himself and gently stroked sweet-scented sunflower-seed oil into his macerated skin. Using the radical border of her hands, which were remarkably strong, Takeko coaxed the muscles to relax with effleurage; and she further softened the clonic hardness with a kneading motion. "This is," she said, working her thumb-knuckles up his spinal-column as though telling the beads of his vertebrae, "one of the good things my ancestors brought from earth."
"Yoroshiku soro," Hartford grunted agreement. "It is good."

Half an hour later, his skin soothed with oil and his muscles suppled by Takeko's massage, Hartford joined the family for supper. The Kansans used paired sticks for eating. Hartford, who'd not yet b............