3
And the darkness was light; the night dawned with light which beamed on every side. Calmly it beamed, the light, like one solitary planet, beaming with the soft radiance of purity, bright in a heaven of still, white, silver light, a heaven where they walked along milky ways of light and music; it beamed and sounded beneath their feet; it welled in seas of ether high above their heads and beamed and sounded there, high and clear. And they were alone in their heaven, in their infinite heaven, which was as space, endless beneath them and above and around them, with endless spaces of light and music, of light that was music. Their heaven lay eternal on every side with blissful vistas of white radiance, fading away in lustre and vanishing landscapes, like oases of flowers and plants beside waters of light, still and clear and hushed with peace. For its peace was the ether in which all desire is dissolved and becomes transparent and crystal; and their life was a limpid existence in unruffled peace; they walked on, in heavenly sympathy of fellowship, close together, hemmed in one narrow circle, a circle of radiance which embraced them both. Barely was there a recollection in them of the world which had died out in the glitter of their heaven; there was naught in them but the ecstasy of their love, which had become their soul, as if they no longer had any soul, as if they were only love; and, when they looked about them and into the light, they saw that their heaven, in which their happiness was the light, was nothing but their love, and they saw that the landscapes—the flowers and plants by waters of light—were nothing but their love and that the endless space, the eternities of light and space, of spaces full of light and music, stretching on every hand, beneath them and above and around them, that all this was nothing but their love, which had grown into heaven and happiness.
And now they came into the very midst, to the very sun-centre, the very goal which Cecile had once foreseen, concealed in the distance, in the irradiance of innate divinity. Up to the very goal they stepped; and on every side it shot its endless rays into each and every eternity, as if their love were becoming the centre of the universe...