They left the hut, and walked beside the stream into the main valley.
They passed an occasional distracted figure, who paid them no heed. Painters were numerous: one of them, burly and covered with paint, had ostentatiously affixed his canvas to a rock wall, and was facing away from all the beauties of the scenery: with furious strokes he was nearing the completion of his vivid abstraction. One sat cross-legged, quite self-contained, and with a few strokes of the brush, black on white, achieved a bird that seemed almost ready to fly from the paper. Another was painting a meltingly beautiful portrait of his mistress, with flowers in her hair.
"When we get back, I'll show you a real picture," the old poet said. "It's called Vasuki. He's the king of the snakes, according to the Hindus. I don't know much about the man who did it, except that he's got the most wonderful eyes I ever saw. I tried to do him justice in a sonnet once, but I failed. He just appeared one day, and then disappeared one day, and that's all anyone seems to know. Two of our best young painters went out to look for him over a year ago, and they haven't returned."
There were musical concerts, operas and plays. There were potters at their wheels, and sculptors with their chisels and their clay. Every art seemed represented.
"In that hut over there," said the poet, "lives one of the greatest musical geniuses the world has ever known. Better even than Beethoven, I think. Maybe you'll have a chance to meet him, if he turns sociable while you're here. I trust you'll be here for a long time. Maybe you'll stay for good? You seem to have the mark in your forehead."
He stayed for several months. He luxuriated in the splendor and the beauty of this dedicated life. Great artistry of sound and word, color and form, filled him: but never to overflowing, and never, fully, to satisfaction. He grew weary of the continual reaching out, the perpetual feeding upon dreams. He shared the raptures and the torments of the artists, he felt powerfully and saw deeply, more than ever before: but something was lacking. The occasional flashes of insight were not enough, and the labor, the aspiration, was heart-breaking. What he sought was still beyond, beyond art itself, beyond all possible creation. And yet, it must be attainable.
He aspired to poetry, he tried to give a voice to his aspiration and his need. But it was not in him. And what if it had been? Why should he write verses to complain that he was not Lit with the Sun? He thought briefly of the Twentieth Century poetry that he had read, the poetry of the Dark Ages, and shuddered at the thought of adding to that store. He would never attempt expression again, until he knew something to express. But when the time came, perhaps it would flow from him in such a golden stream as he remembered from the great masters. Perhaps the poet had not read too mistakenly the sign in his forehead.
He noticed that some of the artists, and those he considered the profoundest and the surest, were not permanent residents here. They came and went, with a light as of far peaks in their eyes. Like the painter of Vasuki, which was truly a marvelous picture, instinct with a spirit that made most other productions seem like mere daubs of paint. He felt that that man knew something, and that he did not learn it here, that he did not learn it as a painter at all. There must be other places, or another place, in which art and the artists were mature. He had had enough of this unquiet, the greatest ecstasies of which obviously fell below the peace and the assurance that called to him. He was weary of this perpetual straining with materials and methods inadequate to the task.