It was a gravely weakened man, drenched in sweat, shaking with the effort of each step, doing something that his body was barely able to do, out of sheer refusal to be carried into the most important moment of his own rescue.

And that, I think, was the whole point of it, and the reason it moved me so.

He could easily have let them come up to him, could have received them lying down, could have been wheeled into the library.

He chose instead to stand, and to walk, and to descend under his own power, because he had spent weeks being a helpless body that things were done to, and he was determined that the man who faced what came next would be a man on his own two feet.

It was not vanity.