The shadows of our world were vanished. The Borderland, with its darkness, its drab empty slope, was gone. A new world lay spread about me; new companions. And I was conscious of a new entity—a new Robert Manse, who was myself.
I remember now that my first thought was surprise that I should be able to visualize things of strangeness. But now I know that once over the Borderland my mind itself had changed, yet retaining of its old self just enough, so that I might be conscious of the strangeness. In a grey half-light of luminosity seemingly inherent to everything, I found myself standing upon a hillside, gazing down an empty slope of greyness. Was it land? I can only say that it seemed solid beneath me; solid, quivering with a tiny tremble; vibrating, and within itself vaguely luminous.
Overhead was darkness. Yet hardly that, for the same luminosity was there; and I felt that I was gazing, not through emptiness but rather through some tenuous fluid illimitable to my vision, with things there to see, as yet—for me—unseeable.
The slope before me was empty. But shapes were materializing; it was as though I had come out of the darkness, with eyes not yet accustomed to the light. I fancied I saw water in the distance. A white lake; but when I stared, it seemed more like a grey rolling cloud. Was it liquid?...
The mind receives a multitude of impressions in an instant. I was conscious of myself. My body was an entity wholly vague—yet there seemed a tingling in it; a weight to it, for I was standing upright. Will and Bee—and the girl Ala—were beside me. I saw them now in their old familiar form, but with a queer sense of flatness to them. Flat; unnatural of outline; not grotesque, merely strange, unreal. Almost indescribable; and though distinctly it was not a two-dimensional aspect, I think that flatness best describes it. A something about them which was lacking; or perhaps a something added—I do not know.
And inherent to this whole realm as soon I was to see it, was this same queer flatness. Things without depth; yet to view them sidewise, the depth was there, with the flatness still persisting.
And I saw color; nameless colors which I might call blue, or red, or green and the words would have no meaning. Men, women—houses, or at least habitations; the words are all I can command, but they are grotesquely meaningless. It was all so incomparably strange; and paradoxically, the strangest of it all was the fashion in which my mind began to accept it. I could think of Ala as nothing but a girl. A frightened, likable girl—with thoughts and feelings similar to my own. This realm was real—a new country; with friends, enemies—a struggle going on within it in which I must play a part. The whole seen and thought of in terms of my own world. And I realized that I—to these others of this other realm—must have seemed a stranger, but not so very strange. Thought of by them in their own terms—each of us upon a common ground, an equality of material state, to visualize the other in terms of ourselves.
CHAPTER IX
THE ATTACK ON THE MEETING HOUSE
Ala was saying, "At last—it is so good to be back." For her the struggle was wholly past; she was smiling, relieved, and upon her face there was solicitude for us. "You are not injured? At rest—now?"