Never in all my life had I put my thoughts into words like this; and he--a stranger.
There fell a silence between us. The natural quietude of the garden was softly settling down and down like infinitesimal grains of sand in a pool of water. It had forgotten that humans were harbouring in its solitude. And still he maintained that his words were not untrue, that he knew mankind better than I, that to fall into their ways and follow their opinions and strivings was to deafen my ears, and seal up my eyes, and lose my very self. "The Self everywhere," he said.
And he told me, whether in time or space I know not, of a country whose people were of my stature and slenderness. This was a land, he said, walled in by enormous, ice-capped mountains couching the furnace of the rising sun, and yet set at the ocean's edge. Its sand-dunes ring like dulcimers in the heat. Its valleys of swift rivers were of a green so pale and vivid and so flower-encrusted that an English--even a Kentish--spring is but a coarse and rustic prettiness by comparison. Vine and orange and trees of outlandish names gave their fruits there; yet there also willows swept the winds, and palms spiked the blue with their fans, and the cactus flourished with the tamarisk. Geese, of dark green and snow, were on its inland waters, and a bird clocked the hours of the night, and the conformation of its stars would be strange to my eyes. And such was the lowliness and simplicity of this people's habitations that the most powerful sea-glass, turned upon and searching their secret haunts from a ship becalmed on the ocean, would spy out nothing--nothing there, only world wilderness of snow-dazzling mountain-top and green valley, ravine, and condor, and what might just be Nature's small ingenuities--mounds and traceries. Yet within all was quiet loveliness, feet light as goldfinches', silks fine as gossamer, voices as of a watery beading of silence. And their life being all happiness they have no name for their God. And it seems--according to Mr Anon's account of it--that such was the ancient history of the world, that Man was so once, but had swollen to his present shape, of which he had lost the true spring and mastery, and had sunk deeper and deeper into a kind of oblivion of the mind, suffocating his past, and now all but insane with pride in his own monstrosities.