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Barbara Who Came Back
by
Once he said as much to Barbara, who thought a while and answered him:
“Why should we be taken beyond all things? If seems scarcely reasonable. I know we have not much to go on, but did not the Christ speak of drinking the fruit of the vine ‘new with you in my Father’s kingdom’? Therefore surely there must be a growing plant that produces the fruit and a process directed by intelligence that turns it into wine. There must be husbandmen or farmers. There must be mansions or abiding places, also, for they are spoken of, and flowers and all things that are beautiful and useful; a new earth indeed, but not one so different to the old as to be utterly unfamiliar.”
Anthony said no more of the matter at this time, but it must have remained in his mind. At any rate, a month or two later when he woke up one morning he said to Barbara:
“Will you laugh very much if I tell you of a dream that came to me last night–if it was a dream, for I seemed to be still awake?”
“Why should I laugh at your dream?” she asked, kissing him. “I often think that there is as much truth in dreams as in anything else. Tell it to me.”
“I dreamed that I saw a mighty landscape which I knew was not of the earth. It came to me like a picture, and a great stillness brooded over it. At the back of this landscape stood a towering cliff of stern rock thousands of feet high. Set at intervals along the edge of the cliff were golden figures, mighty and immovable. Whether they were living guards or only statues I do not know, for I never came near to them. Here and there, miles apart, streams from the lands beyond poured over the edge of the cliff in huge cascades of foam that became raging torrents when they reached its lowest slopes. One of these rivers fed a lake which lay in a chasm on the slopes, and from either end of this lake poured two rivers which seemed to me about twenty miles apart, as we should judge. They ran through groves of cedars and large groups of forest trees not unlike to enormous oaks and pines, and yet not the same.
“One river, that to the right if I looked towards the lake, was very broad, so broad that after it reached the plain and flowed slowly, great ships could have sailed upon it. The other, that to the left, was smaller and more rapid, but it also wandered away across the plain till my sight could follow it no farther. I observed that the broad, right-hand river evidently inundated its banks in seasons of flood, much as the Nile does, and that all along those banks were fields filled with rich crops, of what sort I do not know. The plain itself, which I take it was a kind of delta, the gift of the great river, was limitless. It stretched on and on, broken only by forests, along the edges of which moved many animals.
“When first I saw this landscape it was suffused with a sweet and pearly light, that came not from sun or moon or stars, but from a luminous body in shape like a folded fan, of which the handle rested on the earth. By degrees this fan began to open; I suppose that it was the hour of dawn. Its ribs of gorgeous light spread themselves from one side of heaven to the other and were joined together by webs of a thousand colours, of such stuff as the rainbow, only a hundred times more beautiful. The reflection from these rainbow webs lay upon the earth, divided by and sometimes mingled with those from the bars of light, and made it glorious.
“All these things I saw from an eminence on which I stood that rose between the rivers at the head of the plain. At length, overcome by the splendour, drunk as it were with beauty, I turned to look behind me, and there, quite close, in the midst of stately gardens with terraces and trees and fountains and banks of flowers, I saw a house, and–now indeed you will laugh–for so far as I can recollect it, in general style it was not unlike our own; that is to say, its architecture seemed to be more or less Elizabethan. If one who was acquainted with Elizabethan buildings had gone to that land and built a house from memory, but with more beautiful materials, he might have produced such a one as I imagined in my dream.