Alraune and I were almost immediately friendly, of course, but why? Conundrum. I could have hated her (she would say the same, she would, yes), but I could not hate her. We wore one another as necklaces. We were halves, although different by nature and from different worlds. My world was a nearby world. Her world was a faraway world in both city and mind, because she came from a sort of wooden ship [as some houses are, wooden ships] in the middle of a sweeping green. No matter, we were eruption, saffron; we were to become the ancients together. We were of a madness. Yet that we would endure such voyage, that we would endure at all, we could not have guessed. Not from the coffer of the hive, which had its glistening hexhands all over.