In France he had puzzled the meaning of the great stone monuments men had thrown up to the sky, and always as he wandered, he felt a stranger to their exultation. They were poems in a strange language, of which he could barely touch a meaning -- enough to make his being ache with the desire for the fullness he sensed there. Brittany, that stone-gray mystery through which he traveled for thirty days, sleeping in the barns of farmers or alongside roads, had worked some subtle change in him, he knew, and it was in Brittany that he had met Pierre.

Pierre had no hands; they had been severed at the wrists. With leather cups fitted in his handlebars, he steered his bicycle. He and Warren had traveled together for four days. They visited the shipyards at Brest and Pierre had to sign the register, vouching for the integrity of the visiting foreigner. He took the pen in his stumps and began to write.

``Wait! Wait!'' cried the guard who ran from the hut to shout to other men standing about outside. They crowded the small room and peered over one another's shoulders to watch the handless man write his name in the book.

``C'est formidable,'' they exclaimed.

``Mais, oui. C'est merveilleux.''

And then the questions came, eager, interested questions, and many compliments on his having overcome his infirmity.

``Doesn't it ever bother you,'' Warren had asked, ``to have people always asking you about your hands?''