*****
You've hiked through Snake Canyon once before while visiting your Uncle Howard at Red Creek Ranch, but you never noticed any cave entrance.  It looks as though a recent rock slide has uncovered it.

Though the late afternoon sun is striking the opening of the cave, the interior remains in total darkness.  You step inside a few feet, trying to get an idea of how big it is.  As your eyes become used to the dark, you see what looks like a tunnel ahead, dimly lit by some kind of phosphorescent material on its walls.  The tunnel walls are smooth, as if they were shaped by running water.  After twenty feet or so, the tunnel curves.  You wonder where it leads.  You venture in a bit further, but you feel nervous being alone in such a strange place.  You turn and hurry out.

A thunderstorm may be coming, judging by how dark it looks outside.  Suddenly you realize the sun has long since set, and the landscape is lit only by the pale light of the full moon.  You must have fallen asleep and woken up hours later.  But then you remember something even more strange.  Just last evening, the moon was only a slim crescent in the sky.

You wonder how long you've been in the cave.  You are not hungry.  You don't feel you have been sleeping.  you wonder whether to try to walk back home by moonlight or whether to wait for dawn, rather than risk losing your footing on the steep and rocky trail.

[If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.]

You wait until morning, but, as the rosy wisps of dawn begin to light the eastern sky, a chill and forbidding wind begins to blow.

[If you brave the freezing wind to see more of the world about you, turn to page 16.]

You resolutely trudge along a rocky ridge.  It has been cleared of whirling snow by the fierce wind, which bites and blows against your body.

The world seems transformed, and much for the worse.  You must find a house or a cabin -- people who can help you -- or you will die.

As you ponder your fate, you stumble and fall, plunging into a deep crevasse.  You black out and later awaken, still shivering, but in a warmer place at least.  By the dim amber light, you can see that somehow you have fallen back into one of the chambers in the Cave of Time.  A passageway leads to the right, another to the left.  Does one lead to the future and one to the past?

[If you enter the right-hand passageway, turn to page 25.]

You walk along the right-hand passageway for a long distance, praying that you can find a tunnel that will lead to your own time.  You choose one of the many tunnels you see and follow it.  Instead of rising to the surface, you enter a brightly-lighted chamber, in the center of which is bearded, old man seated in a chair.

"Welcome," he says, as if he has been expecting you.

"Thank you," you reply. "Can you help me find my way back to my own time?"

The old man smiles.  "First of all," he says, "tell me why you want to return to your own time instead of another time."

[If you say, "Who are you?" turn to page 45.]

"I am a philosopher," the old man says, "who, when asked to choose a time, instead chose timelessness, so that, although nothing would ever happen in my life, I would have all the time in the world to think about it."

"Are you happy with your decision?"

"No, because philosophy is nothing outside of time.  Take the tunnel to your right.  Return to your own time, and let your life be your philosophy."

The End