This, then, was my first sight of gods—not counting myself of course—though I did not know it. It had been so frightening, so abrupt and surprising, that for the first time I began to look around me with purpose, to try to understand what had just happened. In later eras there would have been humans to tell me what I was, who might have recognized me as soon as they encountered me, as indeed the first humans I encountered did. But there were no humans yet.
