“You are there now, only the blinkers are over your eyes again. And as to time—there is no such thing as time. There is only eternity. If I count in the way we measure when we wear our blinkers you had the sight for twenty-four hours. It was last night when it began. Now it is to-night. I have slept, have eaten, have walked to the village and written many letters and all the time you sat here. Time is really nothing but a dream—a necessity in the world of the Three Dimensions. As soon as you break the shell—it is nothing.”
Again I cannot describe the tumult of feeling in me, mingled with a passionate longing for something of my own lost and ravished from me. I had a sense of unutterable weakness and shame. He read my thought like speech and answered:
“But you threw it from yourself. You were frightened, forlorn, and you caught at the Rules and concentrated, and being power they acted as you wished, and transported you back into the blindness of the daily life that walls us in from the Lovely, the Utterly Desirable.”
“You mean,” I said slowly, “that one can ruin oneself as easily as save. And that I should not have come back at my own will?”
“Exactly. One must always go on. To come back is highly dangerous. If you had had patience and had concentrated upon what is called ‘extension’ you would have climbed the mountain and on the other side——”
“What? What?” I cried, for he paused.
“We call it the Shining Country. You would have—liked it! Also you would have met the One who Waits.”
I repeated in bewilderment;
“The One who Waits? But who?”
“I cannot tell. Different people probably for everyone. It might have been my great-great-grandfather for all I know. He is often in his garden. But it is the right one always. Don’t think I blame you though for using your scrap of power in a fright. That often happens at first. What man has mastered jujutsu at the first throw? Still, he may be badly hurt, and you are hurt and will pay for it. Later on, beware that you never use power to bring you back to the place you have left it. A man pays for that to the last farthing.”