Incident Along Fantasy Way 
                            Treasure

Across the world-lines
From realms of logic
And of magic
And of madness
They gathered the treasures of the universe,
And in a place of solitude
Where cold dry winds howl over once-mighty mountains
They dug a labyrinth of stone
Surrounded by a maze of magic
And filled it with centuries of plunder.
Now and again they would come,
Bringing or taking
Or checking
Or just admiring.
Then they stopped coming.

For a hundred centuries
All was as they left it.
The stronghold saw no challengers
Beyond the small creatures of the wild.

Now against any strong magic
The will of an insect or a bird or a snake
Is as a single grain of sand.
But sand in the wind
Can conquer even mountains.

Gradually the defenses forgot
Who was owner, who intruder.
And certain sorceries
Designed to protect
Began to guide evolution.

The first steps were small:
Things took shelter in the caverns,
Burrowed into piles of diamonds,
Nested in golden vases.

Next, treasure-based metabolism:
Lizards with golden scales
Whose eggs looked like pearls.
Then other changes, step by step toward a future
Where the treasure-dwelling creatures
Will be treasure themselves
And, once discovered,
Will scamper through all the palaces of man
To the ends of the universe.

                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        written 0140 hr  3/22/75
                                        entered 1700 hr  4/11/92