The real heroes, and heroines, are those who deal heroically with the everyday cares of life, though God knows they’ve been multiplied enormously. It… - Philip José Farmer

First, humiliation, then humility, he would have said. And then comes humanity as a matter of course.

You know, Doc and … as if they were brothers … coloring … black hair and gray eyes and a darker skin, but Doc has …” They talked on, rambling much. I got the impression that these two octogenarians had known each other intimately for a long long time. They had been through much with each other, and they were very fond of each other. The abuses and insults they loosed at each other were good-natured, indeed, their second natures. And as I listened — read, rather — I understood that they were here on The Last Great Adventure. There had been three other men who had shared their exploits and dangers in the past. But these were dead now. The two old men expected to die soon, but they had insisted on coming to Africa with Caliban, and he had reluctantly agreed.

The world took a shape which he could grasp, though he could not comprehend it. Above him, on both sides, below him, as far as he could see, bodies floated. They were arranged in vertical and horizontal rows. The up-and-down ranks were separated by red rods, slender as broomsticks, one of which was twelve inches from the feet of the sleepers and the other twelve inches from their heads. Each body was spaced about six feet from the body above and below and on each side.
The rods came up from an abyss without bottom and soared into an abyss without ceiling. That grayness into which the rods and the bodies, up and down, right and left, disappeared was neither the sky nor the earth. There was nothing in the distance except the lackluster of infinity.