 The next story (the eighth), “The Mummer’s Tale,” abandons Gorgik almost entirely, to tell of the young smuggler's youth as an adolescent hustler on the Bridge of Lost Desire in Kolhari — and his relationship, over a twenty-year period that takes him from sixteen to thirty-six, with an actor in a traveling mummer's troupe.Here the doubling that works through all the tales is with a silent auditor to the mummer's story, a man whom we learn is a teacher, a philosopher, a lover and supporter of the arts (a democratic minded prince, who has given up his title to pursue his intellectual work), and who has known the narrator over the same period, and has been his friend over the same twenty years — but has never met with or known till now the mummer's petty criminal friend.As the mummer recounts to this “Master” the young thief's bout with madness and his subsequent descent into crime, the parallels that the mummer, however inadvertently, suggests between the two (philosopher and criminal), by the story's end, would seem to have distressed the Master greatly — perhaps in the way that they reveal the extent of — and complexity to — the ways in which desire propels even the most high-minded and intellectual pursuits.