When Adrian Veidt is seventeen, he puts books aside. He leaves to find the real Alexander, not the one in a textbook, to roam the middle east like a pagan wanderer and grow his hair long, he takes little with him. Nothing his parents' money has touched, because he must make this voyage standing on his own feet; he's willing to work any job he's given rather than feel parasitic, an extra appendage of the family. (And wouldn't you, if you knew where the money came from already, your father's guilt and your mother's numb disinterest.) He hesitates before packing Lang's Iliad away, thinking achingly sentimental thoughts of Aristotlean annotations, but the risk that he might lose it is too great.

Adrian has the company of other travelers, an odd fraternity; he has the hospitality of strangers, who afford more kindness to a soft-spoken sunburned American with cropped blond hair and wide green eyes. He has the uncanny ability to make friends, if not to have them or keep them. Most of all he has his own will, that drives him across oceans to strange lands. He will beg and borrow, even steal, to make this trip (as soon as he has established himself as a man of business he meticulously retraces his steps to pay back what he's taken) and while it would be nice to have a permanent travelling partner, someone whose wits might complement his own, no such person exists. Or if he does, Adrian's never met him.

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When Adrian Veidt is a grown man (fully-grown, and well-preserved at an age most men would already look past their prime) he owns many books. But he's a busy man, and can't afford to read for pleasure, not that the written word affords him much of it in the first place. The words fly by, each one registering like a raindrop in a storm unless he's very deliberate about his reading, and it isn't that his reading comprehension has suffered, but that there's no puzzle in putting it all together. Even as a child the obstacle was mostly in his mind, and he knows better than to approach something so ordinary with that kind of reverence. Books are written by men, after all. There's a coffee-table in one of his many residences with an exhibit of books on it; most are, even by his own standards, pretentious, Old Norse Eddas and very modern poetry. But the green-covered book is a permanent fixture there, with its soft endpapers and its title embossed in bronze on a darker green rectangular field. (He did return the Dreibergs' copy, eventually, he wasn't a negligent child. He keeps the ferns under glass somewhere.) Most people know better than to touch it-- ostensibly educational as they are, these books are for show only-- but from time to time one of his guests will pick it up and earn one of Adrian's more genuine smiles.