“Tell you what it is, Leonard; we shall have to give a public lecture—or perhaps a series—and invite as many at a time as the Town Hall of the place will contain. Pity we didn’t bring some magic lanterns and dissolving views to illustrate what we have to tell them. I would have done so if I had only known.”
They, in their turn, were not less full of curiosity and interest in all they saw around them. The statuary, and, above all, the pictures amazed them.
“It upsets all one’s notions of history and all that,” said Jack quietly to Leonard, “to find this sort of thing in the so-called ‘new’ world. We might be back in Ancient Greece.”
“Or Babylon, or Nineveh,” Elwood answered. “It’s like a dream—and, strange to say, I have dreamed much of it before. I keep thinking I shall wake up presently and find that this city, with all that it contains, has vanished.”
“I trust not,” said Ulama—to whom the last part of the sentence had been addressed—with a smile. “I should not like to think that I, myself, am but a dream. But, since you speak of having dreams of that which you find here, know that I have strange dreams also. All my life it has been thus with me. Of late they have been less frequent than of yore, and the memory of them is confused and indistinct; but I know that in them I have seen—aye, more than once—your face, and the face of him you call Monella.”
Elwood regarded the maiden in surprise, and she continued,
“Yes, it is true. Tell me, Zonella, have I not often described to thee those I had seen in my dreams; and did not some resemble these? As to face thou canst not know, but as to garb and other details?”
“’Tis true,” replied Zonella gravely.
But the matter-of-fact Templemore found it hard to credit this; visions and the like were nothing in his way.