Wilderness

And thou tookest up the instrument, and calledst unto the house of the company, that a man might hear thee, and answer the trouble that was upon thee; and there answered thee a voice that was no man.

And the voice said, Thy call is important unto us. And it said, Press thou one for this thing, and two for that, and three for the other. And thou pressedst; and it led thee into a further place, where were more sayings, and more numbers; and thou pressedst again; and it led thee further in.

And the voice brought thee about by the way of the wilderness. For thou soughtest one thing only, a living voice that might hear thy particular trouble and have mercy upon it; and the voice led thee from menu unto menu, and from holding unto holding, and laid music upon thee, and brake in upon the music every little while to say again, Thy call is important unto us; thy waiting is not forgotten.

And thou wanderedst in that wilderness a long season. The promised voice was ever before thee, and never reached. And when thou hadst come nigh, and heard at last the ringing that goeth before a man, and thy heart rose up — then wast thou cut off, and the line went dead in thine ear, and thou wast set down again at the beginning, at the main menu, in the mouth of the wilderness, to wander it anew from the first number.

For thy trouble was of a kind the menu knew not, that answered to none of the numbers offered, and could be told to no one but a man; and the man was in the promised land, beyond the wilderness, and the wilderness had no end that thou couldest find. So the generation of thy patience died in thee, there in the sand, within sound of the land it never entered. And the music played on. And the voice said again, Thy call is important unto us. And thou heldest on, and heldest on, and wast not brought over.

It may be so. It may not.