Stranger than many of the marvels of the book is the scene that follows. It is a contest of Will between Alwyn and Heliobas. The former, concentrating all the powers of his mind upon the effort, declares that Heliobas shall release his soul:
“He felt twice a man and more than half a God ... what—what was that dazzling something in the air that flashed and whirled and shone like glittering wheels of golden flame? His lips parted—he stretched out his hands in the uncertain manner of a blind man feeling his way. ‘Oh, God!—God!’ he muttered, as though stricken by some sudden amazement; then, with a smothered gasping cry he staggered and fell heavily forward on the floor—insensible!...”
The soul of the poet had by a superhuman access of will managed to break its bonds and escape elsewhere. “But whither? Into what vast realms of translucent light or drear shadow?” Unable to answer the question, the monk betakes himself to the monastery chapel, and prays in silence till the heavy night had passed and the storm “had slain itself with the sword of its own fury on the dark slopes of the Pass of Dariel.”
Theos for a time lies as one dead. Anon he awakes, seats himself at a table, and writes. Sometimes he murmurs “Ardath,” but he goes on writing for hours. Then Heliobas rejoins him. “I have been dreaming,” Theos says. The monk points to the written manuscript as proof that the dream has been productive, at any rate. Alwyn reads from the manuscript and recites:
“With thundering notes of song sublime
I cast my sins away from me,
On stairs of sound I mount—I climb!
The angels wait and pray for me!”
But that, he remembers, is a stanza he had heard somewhere when he was a boy. Why does he now think of it? “She has waited,—so she said,—these many thousand days!” And there was the key to the dream. There was a woman in it; and an angel.
Theos explains his dream to Heliobas, tells how he had seemed to fly into darkness, how in wild despair he cried “Oh, God, where art Thou?” and heard a great rushing sound as of a strong wind beaten through with wings, while a voice, grand and sweet as a golden trumpet blown suddenly in the silence of night, answered, “Here!—and Everywhere!” And then all was brightness, a slanting stream of opaline radiance cleft the gloom, and Alwyn was uplifted by an invisible strength. And then he hears some one call him by name, “Theos, my Beloved!” and a woman of entrancing beauty appears, crowned with white flowers, and robed in a garb that seems spun from midsummer moonbeams; ... a smiling maiden-sweetness in a paradise of glad sights and sounds.
And this being, bidding Alwyn return to his own star, further directs him to seek out the Field of Ardath, where she will meet him. And so they part.
Theos Alwyn awakens from his dream madly in love with this vision of loveliness, and determines, if a Field of Ardath there is, to go there and keep the appointment. Heliobas shows him where the Field of Ardath lies. It is mentioned in the Book of Esdras, in the Apocrypha, and is described as situated four miles west of the Babylonian ruins. Alwyn decides on journeying thither, first sending the poem he had written to his London friend, Francis Villiers, with the request that as “Nourhàlma; a Love Legend of the Past,” it shall be published in the usual way.