Islands

The Wodaabe man with a stripe painted down the centre of his face stood by his friend looking extraordinarily slender, elegant, and smooth.

At the same moment a tortoise stood on a rock in the Galapagos Islands looking extraordinarily squat, blunt, and knobbly.

Nature, sensing that the co-existence of extreme opposites created something like a vacuum of meaning, sent a vision of the Wodaabe to the tortoise, and a vision of the tortoise to the Wodaabe. But the tortoise had never seen a Wodaabe before, and the Wodaabe had never seen a Galapagos tortoise, so each one saw the other translated into a physical language they could understand. The tortoise saw a tall, thin female tortoise with a stripe marked on her beak, and the Wodaabe man saw a warty Wodaabe woman under a basket. They spent the rest of their lives searching for this being, which, they felt, was the only thing that would make them whole.