“Beyond what?” he asked, the expression of “Other Places” deepening upon his face.
Her forehead wrinkled in a passing frown. “Beyond this earth,” she murmured, as though her closed eyes saw within. “Oh, oh, it hurts. The heat is awful ... the light ... the tremendous winds ... they blind, they tear me...!” And she stopped abruptly.
“Forget the pain,” he said; “it is already gone.” And instantly the tension of her face relaxed. She drew a sigh of deep relief. Before I could prevent it, my own voice sounded: “When we were nearer to the sun!”
She made no reply. He took my hand across the table and laid it on her own. “She cannot hear your voice,” he said, “unless you touch us. She is too far away. She does not even know that you are here beside me. You of To-day she has forgotten, and the you of that long ago she has not yet found.”
“You speak with someone—but with whom?” she asked at once, turning her head a little in my direction. Not waiting for his reply she at once went on: “Upon another planet, yes ... but oh, so long ago....” And again she paused.
“The one immediately before this present one?” asked Julius.
She shook her head gently. “Still further back than that ... the one before the last, when first we knew delight of life ... without these heavy, closing bodies. When the sun was nearer ... and we knew deity in the fiery heat and mighty winds ... and Nature was ... ourselves....” The voice wavered oddly, broke, and ceased upon a sigh. A thousand questions burned in me to ask. An amazing certainty of recognition and remembrance burst through my heart. But Julius spoke before my tongue found words.
“Search more closely,” he said with intense gravity. “The time and place we summoned Them is what we need—not where we first learned it, but where we practised it and failed. Confine your will to that. Forget the earlier planet. To help you, I set a barrier you cannot pass....”
“The scene of our actual evocation is what we must discover,” he whispered to me. “When that is found we shall be in touch with the actual Powers our worship used.”
“It was not there, in that other planet,” she murmured. “It was only there we first gained the Nature-wisdom. Thence—we brought it with us ... to another time and place ... later ... much nearer to To-day—to Earth.”