Twenty-four hours have passed since then and everything seems to have settled in me, yet it is most difficult for me to find words for even an approximate description.... It is as though a bomb had exploded in my head.... Open mouths, wings, shouts, leaves, words, stones, all these one after another in a heap....
I remember my first thought was: “Fast—back!” For it was clear to me that while I was waiting there in the corridors, they somehow had blasted and destroyed the Green Wall, and from behind it everything rushed in and splashed over our city which until then had been kept clean of that lower world. I must have said something of this sort to I-330. She laughed.
“No, we have simply come out beyond the Green Wall.”
Then I opened my eyes, and close to me, actually,
I saw those very things which until then not a single living Number had ever seen otherwise than depreciated a thousand times, dimmed and hazy through the cloudy glass of the Wall.
The Sun,—it was no longer our light, evenly diffused over the mirror surface of the pavements; it seemed an accumulation of living fragments, of incessantly oscillating, dizzy spots which blinded the eyes. And the trees! Like candles rising into the very sky, or like spiders which squatted upon the earth, supported by their clumsy paws, or like mute green fountains. And all this was moving, jumping, rustling. Under my feet some strange little ball was crawling.... I stood as though rooted to the ground. I was unable to take a step because under my foot there was not an even plane, but (imagine!), something disgustingly soft, yielding, living, springy, green!...
I was dazed; I was strangled,—yes, strangled; it is the best word to express my state. I stood holding fast with both hands to a swinging branch.
“It is nothing. It is all right. It is natural,—for the first time. It will pass. Courage!”
At I-330’s side bouncing dizzily on a green net,—someone’s thinnest profile, cut out of paper. No, not “someone’s.” I recognized him. I remembered. It was the doctor. I understood everything very clearly. I realized that they both caught me beneath the arms and laughingly