“They’re not on any map. More’s the pity. And then?”
“Then we’d rest. And after that we’d climb to the Plateau Beyond the Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there...”
“And there?”
“There we’d hear the Undying Voices singing.”
“Should we sing, too?”
“Of course. ‘For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above evil and the fear thereof.’”
“I don’t know what that is, but I hate the ‘upward toil’ part of it, and the ‘abstention’ even more. We ought to be able to become demigods without all that, just because we wish it. In a fairy-tale, anyway. I don’t think you’re a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban.”
“You haven’t let me go on to the ‘live happy ever after’ part,” he complained.
“Ah, that’s the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always concealed in the gardens of dreams. They don’t, Ban; people don’t live happy ever after. I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point. Just there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger—she’s a horrid hag, Ban, but we’d all be dead or mad without her—and points to the wriggling little snake.”
“In my garden,” said he, “she’d have shining wings and eyes that could look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation.”