In the morning we found Tuck's doll, where it had been dropped beside the trail.  It was in, plain view, not more than six feet off the path.  How we'd missed it before was hard to understand.  I tried to pinpoint the place, wondering if this were in the area where we had hunted for him.  Nut there was no landmark that stood out in my mind.

I had not really had a chance to take a good look at it before.  The only time I had really seen it had been that night when we had been penned inside the red-stone edifice at the outskirts of the city.  Now I did have a chance to look at it, to absorb the full impact of the sorrow that lay on that rudely carven face.  Either, I thought, the one who carved it had been a primitive who, by sheer chance, had fashioned the sorrow in it, or a skilled craftsman who with a few simple strokes, evoked the hopelessness and anguish of an intellectual being facing the riddle of the universe and overwhelmed by it.

The face was not entirely humanoid, but human enough so that one could equate it with humanity - a human face twisted out of shape by some great truth that it had learned - surely no truth that it had sought, but rather one that had been thrust upon it.

Having picked it up, I tried to throw it away, but could not throw it away.  It had put roots into me and would not let me go.  It haunted me and would not forego its haunting.  I stood with one hand clutching it and tried to toss it to one side, but my fingers would not loosen their grip nor my arm make a throwing motion.

That had been the way it had been with Tuck, I thought, except that Tuck had been a willing captive of it, finding in it some attraction and significance that I did not find.  Perhaps because it said to him a thing he found inside himself.  Because, perhaps, he saw within it a condition from which he was seeking to escape.  A madonna, Sara had said, and it could have been, but I saw no madonna in it.

So I went marching down the trail, like Tuck, hanging onto that damn thing, raging at myself - not so much for being unable to let go of it, as for the fact that it made me, after a fashion, a blood brother of the vanished Tuck.  Sore at I should be even in the slightest way like him, for if ever had been a man I had despised it had been Tuck.

We moved across the great blue plateau and behind us the purple mountains lost detail and resolved into a purple cloud.  I wondered if Knight's fascination with blueness, as revealed in those first few paragraphs of his manuscript, might not be an echo of this blue land which he had crossed to reach the mountains and the valley, leaving Roscoe at the gate, with Roscoe later blundering down the trail to finally reach the city where, in his stupidity, he'd become a captive of the gnome.