This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Tameo.

The wanderings of the old prospector had taken them all over the paranagate valley to the

green ribbon pulled up from the desert floor by the Tonopah, and up and over and up and

over the mountains, barely tall enough to qualify. Never tall enough to break the heat

of the Nevada desert. There were silver in those mountains, but the prospector never

found any of it. He was just one of the lost men who had come west after the Civil War,

who went to that wild and lonely place streaming of metal but only got rocks. In one day he

wandered into the storefront office of a newspaper with a bag full.

As the brief article in the daily territorial enterprise recounted, this prospector in his

wanderings had some years before come upon some strange stones. They were nearly perfectly

around, odd to find anywhere, especially so far from sea. The Tonopah river was only

a river intermittently. Each stone was about the size of a sheld walnut. But if you held

one in your palm, rolled it around a bit, it was much heavier than you would have guessed.

The prospector had found them scattered about a desolate patch of desert. Though scattered

wasn't quite right, because the stones were wherever he would find them there in the

shimmering heat, in some indentation in the flatland, some depression left by pooling

water that stopped pooling there long ago. They were clustered, like eggs and anest. As

they were drawn together by some mysterious force, and then the reporter saw that force

in action. Watched how the stones, when spread out into the table, strewn across the floor,

rolled back together again under some invisible power. The reporter and the prospector did

experiments and found that, even though some individual stones may have been more

powerfully attractive than others, if you place one anywhere within about five feet, it

...