snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of
the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it
was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by
another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the
last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there
were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. His money and
lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but
preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by
those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to
himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about
him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile
to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like
others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of
myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes
sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he
sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the
nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the
stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we
think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are
dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night
with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in
the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch
down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes
that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we
know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder
which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming
of the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy,
where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to
die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night,
through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and
along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eaten
away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered
whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets
were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side broken or ifimily
staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward
some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion
like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.
Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward
the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and the
abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing
emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unit by the
crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice
and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless,
undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed
dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the
worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the
city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of
sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain near the shore.
