At length he said, “If thou art really what thou sayest, show me what thou canst do; build me a palace.”
The old man lifted his pipe in both his trembling hands, and began to blow.
It was a strange instrument, for it not only produced the shriller sounds of the lute, and the piercing notes of the trumpet, but resounded with the hollow booming of great organ pipes, and amongst all came ever and again a sharp and sonorous clang as of some metal instrument resounding when it was struck.
And then the king was as one who enjoys the delights of thought. For in thought, delicate shades, impalpable nuances are ever passing. It is as the blended strains of an invisible orchestra, but more subtle far, that come and go in unexpected metres, and overwhelm you with their beauty when all seemed silent. And lo, as the strains sound, outside—palpable, large as the firmament, or real as the smallest thing you can take up and know it is there—outside stands some existence revealed—to be known and returned to for ever.
So the king, listening to this music, felt that something was rising behind him. And turning, beheld course after course of a great building. Almost as soon as he had looked it had risen completed, finished to the last embossure on the windows, the tracery on the highest pinnacles. All had happened while the old man was blowing on his pipe, and when he ceased all was perfect.
And yet the appearance was very strange, for a finished and seemingly habitable building rose out of waste unreclaimed soil, strewn with rocks and barren. No dwellings were near the palace to wait on it, no roads led to it or away from it.
“There should be houses around it, and roadways,” said the king; “make them, and fields sown with corn, and all that is necessary for a state.”
Blowing on his pipe in regular recurrent cadences, the old man called up houses close together, than scattered singly along roads which stretched away into the distance, to be seen every here and there perfectly clearly where they ascended a rising ground. And near at hand could be distinguished fields of grain and pasture land.
Yet as the king turned to walk towards the new scene, the old man laughed. “All this is a dream,” he cried; “so much I can do, but not at once.” And breathing peals of music from his pipe, he said, “This can be, but is not yet.”
“What,” asked the king, “is all a delusion?” and as he asked everything sank down. There was no palace, no houses or fields, only the steep precipice-locked valley, whither the king had ridden; and his horse cowering behind him.