“Or wisdom—if I am mad. He believes in you. That is certain.”
“He has no beliefs. Have you known him long, and do not know that? With him there is nothing between knowledge and ignorance.”
“And he knows, of course, by experience what you can do and what you cannot do?”
“By very long experience, as I know him.”
“Neither your gifts nor his knowledge of them can change dreams to facts.”
Unorna smiled again.
“You can produce a dream—nothing more,” continued the Wanderer, drawn at last into argument. “I, too, know something of these things. The wisdom of the Egyptians is not wholly lost yet. You may possess some of it, as well as the undeveloped power which could put all their magic within your reach if you knew how to use it. Yet a dream is a dream.”
“Philosophers have disputed that,” answered Unorna. “I am no philosopher, but I can overthrow the results of all their disputations.”
“You can do this. If I resign my will into your keeping you can cause me to dream. You can call up vividly before me the remembered and unremembered sights of my life. You can make me see clearly the sights impressed upon your own memory. You might do that, and yet you could be showing me nothing which I do not see now before me—of those things which I care to see.”
“But suppose that you were wrong, and that I had no dream to show you, but a reality?”