To-day the horizon was curiously hard, like the rim of a great jewel, and to-day in the south that pale indication of another island was more distinct.
There were days when the horizon was hot, the azure of sea dimming off into a luminous haze flowing up to the blue of the sky.
Lestrange, with his eyes fixed on the sea-line, seemed fallen into a dream. Then, slowly recovering himself, he rose from his half-recumbent position, climbed down the rock and began the descent of the hillside.
To reach the sward he had to pass through a bad patch where the ground was moist and where things grew with a luxuriance unknown on any other part of the island. Trees living, trees dead and rotting, unknown sappy plants and cables of liantasse, rope convolvulus and python lianas made this place difficult; the air was like the air of a conservatory and to lose oneself here would be easy, but it had never troubled him; his sense of direction was keen and the slight downhill trend of the ground was guide enough.
There was about this place the vague, uncanny something that clings to the rooms of an old deserted house. One felt oneself closed in, yet not alone.
Here, as on the other side of the island, there was a little stream, a thing scarcely a foot broad that passed chuckling, half hidden by ground leaves, and making on either side of it a zone of marsh. Lestrange was stepping across this stream when something clutched the side of his coat. It was as if a tiny hand had been put out to draw him back. It was only a thorn branch, a green tendril armed with thorns an inch long, curved like the claws of a cat.
He disentangled it and passed on, reaching the valley where the great stone blocks lay strewn about and where the idol of a thousand years ago lay amidst the ferns; the thing that had once been a god, omnipotent in the minds of a people long vanished.
Here, to rest himself, he sat down on a boulder and, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin in the cup of his hands, fell into a reverie.
The name he had given to this island came back to him as he sat there surrounded by those ruins, perhaps two thousand years old: “The Garden of God.”
Ages ago men with hearts and minds, men who loved their children and hated their enemies, had worshipped here—generations of them—and there lay their god, thrown down, and his impotence confessed in stone; and not only here. All across the world stretched the fireless altars and the broken figures of gods that had been, the graveyards of futile faiths—gardens of derision.