Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān

"Alive, son of Awake" — a philosophical novel about a boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island who reasons his way from anatomy to astronomy to the divine, unaided, and then crosses to an inhabited island and discovers that what he found cannot be told to people who need it told in stories.

The cave's deepest variation. Same ending, opposite beginning: no chains, no liberator, no shadows — and the returning knower is still not believed. Whatever is wrong in Plato's story, it is apparently not the chains.