"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated look—as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.
"They have been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has been determined and arranged by the artists."
"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"
"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had never been before."
"It must have been a terrific labor."
"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a determinist here."
We said no more until our arrival in Richmond.
It is not my purpose to detail here all that happened during the time I spent on that world. Most of it had to do with Selda, and our daily expeditions about the world. This is not, after all, a love story, but the account of a very strange experience; and, too, none of it was real.
During my last week, a series of strange moods and happenings complicated my life. One day, after a visit to the sea with Selda, we were walking back to our plane across the sand. Without any warning, surrounded by the brilliant morning sunlight and the miles of sea and beach, I struck my knee against something hard and immovable, and, flinging out my hand to catch myself from falling, I clung to a hard surface like an iron railing. For a moment I was stunned and confused. The sunlight seemed to fade, and there was a vague hint of darkness all about me, with black walls looming up on all sides. It was as though I stood in two worlds at once, transfixed between night and day. Then the darkness went away, the sunlight brightened. I looked around, and found Selda watching me curiously, a little alarmed.
"What happened, Baret?" she asked, puzzled. I shook my head in bewilderment.