A quick head-count

[Since today’s entry is so brief, I linked its obligatory image to a libretto for another travelogue that I once published; so anyone who is desirous of further scholarly studies can look at that.]

(Cont.)

Now, after the Auspicious Hour had thus been clinched, and so many Seeds of Promise had been immaculately planted, the first thing that the wild man with the goat eyes desired was to take another census. So, just as he did in the beginning with Moses and Bryan, at this point in their adventure, the Volcano instructed Moses and Satyajit, the firstborn robo-butler of Bryan, to number the workforce. “Since the amount of time that we have been on tour has far surpassed the average human lifespan,” the wild man said, “I want to know how many people are in our nation.” Therefore, they tallied up the populace.

And here are some of the new totals that they came up with: Forty-three thousand. Twenty-two thousand. Forty-seven thousand. Sixty-four thousand. A solemn recount even yielded the number six hundred and one thousand, seven hundred thirty.

Again, perhaps the true sum is whatever all these figures add up to, for it could be that each of them represents only a subdivision among the armies that made up the multitudes. There is no way to be certain, since it is traditional to avoid recording any more specific information about such tallies: they’re all just numerals, groundless and drifting like the people they typify.

So, anyway, those were the figures that Moses and Satyajit the android manservant arrived at, when they numbered the individuals who remained of the workforce that escaped the Empire: those people who ended up living in the wilderness of the sticks, out on the edge of the desert plains. (This is the area of the Great Basin shrub-steppe, just outside of Las Vegas.)

But among these masses there was not a soul who survived from the original laborers whom Moses and Bryan numbered, when they performed their initial census of the workforce, after first setting foot in the wild land of Sinai. For the Volcano had determined that an entire generation of humans should experience nothing in life beyond this one ordeal: his infamous Road Trip. And there was not left a soul alive from those earliest multitudes, besides Mr. Graeber and Yeshua the Zealot.