“Well, you’d better talk to him about it.”
“Talk to him? Shall I see Kant?”
“Look at him, Elizabeth. Now he’s coming alive— Of course you’ll see him when you get into your own place—state, I mean. You’d better get up and come along with me and Elizabeth. We’ll show you round.”
“Now he’s coming alive—”
He rose, they steadied him, and he made his way between them through the grey immensity, over a half-seen yet perfectly solid tract of something that he thought of, absurdly, as condensed space. As yet there were no objects in sight but the figures of Elizabeth and Jeffreson; the half-seen, yet tangible floor he went on seemed to create itself out of nothing, under his feet, as the desire to walk arose in him. And as yet he had felt no interest or curiosity; but as he went on he was aware of a desire to see things that became more and more urgent. He would see. He must see. He felt that before him and around him there were endless things to be seen. His mind strained forwards towards vision.
And then, suddenly, he saw.
He saw a landscape more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. It was, Jeffreson informed him, very like the umbrella pine country between Florence and Siena. As they came out of it on a great, curving road they had their faces towards the celestial west. To the south the land fell away in great red cliffs to a shining, blue sea. Like, Jeffreson said, the Riviera, the Estérel. West and north the landscape rolled in green hill after green hill, pine-tufted, to a sweeping rampart of deep blue; such a rampart, such blue as Mr. Spalding had seen from the heights above Sidmouth, looking towards Dartmoor. Only this country had a grace, a harmony of line and colour that gave it an absolute beauty; and over it there lay a serene, unearthly radiance.
Before them, on a hill, was an exquisite little white, golden and rose-red town.
“You may or may not believe me,” said Jeffreson, “but the beauty of all this is that I made it. I mean Elizabeth and I made it between us.”