She looked at me with her dark and lustrous eyes wide open in sheer wonderment.
"What is a boat?" she asked.
Her ignorance I found was not assumed. The making of a boat had been prohibited so long by the beings of the first class that now even the recollection of it had passed from the workers. They regarded the sea with terror. It was the grey liquid wall of their prison-house. To touch it was to die. They bathed in the forest pools, and never in the sea. The fish that they ate were fresh-water fish only. Their masters had told them numberless strange lies about the sea.
"Dream," I said, "there is one thing which I cannot understand. You live in daily terror of these people whom you miscall gods. You are fairly well treated, but you are not free. You live as slaves. Why do you tell me, then, that you want every hour and every minute of life?"
She dipped a bare foot in the water below her, passing it slowly to and fro.
"There is always love," she said pensively.
CHAPTER VIII
"What do you know of love?" I asked.
She shrugged her pretty shoulders. "Almost nothing, except of the lesser loves—the love of children, the squirrels in the forest."