In dust and charred bark, ground and wetted into ink, upon a half-uprooted paving-stone in the gardens of the Sagittarian Embassy.
In Sagittarian script, painted with an artist's flair but a foreigner's inaccuracy:
I asked them where the travellers rested at noon, and I was answered, 'Their noonday resting-place is where the shih and the ban trees diffuse a sweet scent.'
Below, in Colonial:
The good in us lives in that place in each heart where the sighs of longing pine for love absented. I let loose my sigh of longing into this land of dust and stone, that it may be consecrated to you who lie somewhere sleeping in this dust, you who rest somewhere on this stone, you for whom this sigh of longing pines, you who were the best in me.
And, larger, at the bottom, the numeral:
14