1 We knew not where we were going.
2 We climbed paths where the wild goat dared not follow.
3 We found the marks of your feet across the plain where no men walk.
4 At forty, they are sent to the Home of the Useless, where the Old Ones live.
5 We knelt, and we crawled forward, our hand groping along the iron line to see where it would lead.
6 When the shadows gathered among the trees, we stopped in a hollow between the roots, where we shall sleep tonight.
7 We walked through empty passages and into the great hall where the World Council of Scholars sat in solemn meeting.
8 When we were five years old, we were sent to the Home of the Students, where there are ten wards, for our ten years of learning.
9 For the Council of Vocations knows in its great wisdom where you are needed by your brother men, better than you can know it in your unworthy little minds.
10 We remember the Home of the Infants where we lived till we were five years old, together with all the children of the City who had been born in the same year.
11 And the fire which is called the Dawn of the Great Rebirth, was the Script Fire where all the scripts of the Evil Ones were burned, and with them all the words of the Evil Ones.
12 The shadow on the sundial marks off a half-hour while we dress and eat our breakfast in the dining hall, where there are five long tables with twenty clay plates and twenty clay cups on each table.
13 And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.