Ala seemed to sigh. "It is very horrible. Yet I think that we are wrong to consider it so, for it is Nature."
Will recovered himself. The realm of disease had withdrawn to a memory. Around him the blackness seemed purified. But ahead he could see—or thought he saw—that other endless realm where dwell what we call the dead. Questions flooded him. Eo was there? Could they not go and see him? Could he—this Entity which had once been Eo—could he not still speak to them from beyond the borders of death?
Thone said, "We will approach it if you wish."
Unnameable time; and then Will found that they were there, hovering; and a realm, a place—a something he knew not what—lay spread above them. Earnestly he groped for it. Not with his physical hands; but with his senses. His thought went there and back. He thought he saw shapes up there. Hovering, glowing shapes in a great light space. And with futile, childish imagination he endowed them with beautiful, ethereal qualities; transfigured them into glowing human shapes of beauty and peace. And thought he saw them; and that they might speak to him. Or that perhaps, because Thone might be more than human, they might communicate with Thone, and thence to him.
And then he laughed. It was all so childish!
Thone said, "Eo is there, in the darkness and the light. You can think of him. Your thought will go there. And it will come back to you, fraught with what qualities your imagination may lend it. But nothing else."
"No," said Will, "nothing else. I understand that now."
CHAPTER XV
THE BIRTH OF A THOUGHT
They turned away in the void—away from the dark-light mystery of the realm of death, and drove themselves back to the Big-City. The search for Brutar's encampment was at the moment futile; they knew they could not reach it. And though Bee had escaped with Eo, she did not know whether I escaped or not.