An old wound tells the truth the disguise conceals: the shape lets a scar name a man his rags and his years have hidden. The record's fullest witness is Homer's.

In the Odyssey (an archaic Greek epic of about the eighth century BCE), Ulysses comes home to Ithaca as a ragged stranger, and his aged nurse Euryclea kneels to wash his feet. As she takes the leg in her hands "she at once knew the scar" — the mark left long before "when he was hunting on Mt. Parnassus" with his grandfather Autolycus, "the most accomplished thief and perjurer" in the whole world, where a boar "ripping him above the knee" had cut a "gash that tore deep though it did not reach the bone." She "recognised it and dropped the foot at once"; the leg "fell into the bath, which rang out and was overturned". She catches him by the beard — "My dear child," she says, sure now he is "Ulysses himself" — and he seizes her throat and bids her "hold your tongue," lest the recognition arrive too soon.

The record's far witness is Chinese. In Myths & Legends of China (a compilation published 1922), the princess Miao Shan — she who will become Kuan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy) — gives up her own flesh to cure her sick father: to compound the healing ointment a disguised priest-doctor requires "the hand and eye of a living person," and Miao Shan bids the envoys "take a knife" and "gouge out her left eye" and sever her hand. When the severed hand is carried to the palace, the Queen "uttered a great cry, for she recognized" her daughter "by a black scar which was on it." The same device — a mark the flesh cannot forge — undoes a saint's anonymity as surely as it undoes a king's.

Both scars are read by touch and sight at the humblest station, a footbath and a plate, by the women closest to the body. What is it in a scar that the record trusts further than a face or a name?