His sense of inner direction led him only to an immediate destination, a sort of staging ground, after which it seemed to desert him, even though this place was not what had been promised. Here restless crowds seethed, their individual wanderings by turns directionless and meandering, or drawn into clusters surrounding certain personages who were hailed as guides. The point supposedly was to move on from this dusty plain in the foothills, but it was not apparent that this was taking place for any but a possibly tiny and vanishing fraction of those who kept arriving. One part of them, after gathering a certain facility with the various discourses that were endlessly repeated here and there, moving from group to group and conversing with the affected and the disaffected, would slowly turn around and head back in the direction from where they had come, generally without an overt admission that they had given up. The rest seemed to stay there forever, turning up again and again in one congregation or other, sometimes as follower and sometimes, more rarely as guide. He made friendships, was drawn into shifting alliances - for this one, against that one, and back again - retailing the endless stories that eddied through parts of the crowd and gave them, as they did so, the fleeting quality of a village. After a long time spent in the feeling that he differed from the rest in 'not really belonging here', he came to understand that a fatal ambivalence in his original intention had made this his true destination. Slowly and painstakingly he began to unpick the knot of his confusion.