The hero does not climb to heaven; a cloud comes down and carries him. In the Greek mythographic handbook known as The Library (a compilation of the 1st–2nd century CE), Heracles, poisoned and in agony, builds a pyre on Mount Oeta, mounts it, and orders it lit. As the fire takes him, "a cloud passed under" the hero and "wafted him up" with a peal of thunder, so that he leaves the burning wood not as ash but as a god; thereafter "he obtained immortality". The English editor and folklorist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), whose annotated edition carries this text, adds in a note that "The ascension of Hercules to heaven in a clond" — the misprint is the served page's own — is told the same way by later writers who copy the account. The cloud is the vehicle: the vertical distance to the sky is closed downward, from above, not by the man's own effort.

A compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922 makes the same ascent almost a habit of the holy. The princess-saint Miao Shan, having reached perfection, is "borne on the clouds of Heaven" through the universe, and after a life of self-sacrifice "she mounted a cloud and disappeared" into space. The most theatrical instance is a healer who is secretly a Buddha: his cure complete, he waves his sleeve, "a cloud descended from Heaven", and "seating himself upon it he disappeared in the sky", dropping behind him a written note. The onlookers cry that "This priest is the Living Buddha". Where the Greek cloud lifts a dying man into godhood, the Chinese cloud is the ordinary road home for those who already belong above. Thompson filed the shape simply as ascent to the sky on a cloud; a Jewish authority is named on our shelf but waits unread.

Why should the same sky that must be climbed by ladder elsewhere here simply reach down and take its own?