The tightrope walkers were spectacular. And the way they moved – it was not so much that they were walking as gliding along. It was easy to believe that if one approached close enough one would discover that in fact their feet were not touching the rope at all, but were miraculously suspended above it.

Only when one fateful day they stumbled half way through the final act and fell thirty feet to their deaths, did people even believe that they were properly subject to gravity. Indeed, it was not until after the cheers and horrays of the crowd had died down that the reality dawned on spectators, for, so great was the repute of the walkers in the art of tightrope walking, and so gracefully did they tumble into the dirt-bestrewn pit – as though they had rehearsed this moment many times over beforehand – that people at first misinterpreted their error as a deliberate extravagance and gleefully took it to be part of the evening’s entertainment.

Eventually the horrified screams and shouts of the observant few rose audibly over the applause, stunning the stalls into silence. Now people were craning to see the disaster unfold, how the older walker, who was lying curled in the shallow sand, had cracked open his skull and was already dead, while the younger, who was still twitching intermittently, was positioned with limbs so spectacularly at odds that he seemed to have broken every bone in his body. Women all across the hall were fainting in horror – even the men, whose faces were unemotional, had grown suddenly pale in the dim light.

All the same, there was a distinct atmosphere of delight, which emanated from the crowd as a whole. One could not determine whom amongst them was pleased, but without registering it consciously one could feel that people were pleased; more pleased in fact, than they had been during the entire performance. Indeed, in the whole course of their professional lives, even with all the skill and agility that was gifted to them by nature, pleasurable to watch though such things undoubtedly are, the walkers could not have granted such a generality of pleasure to as many people as they did with their spectacular deaths.