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Once again, people were everywhere, people filled with light, andof distinct anthropomorphic shape; they had arms, legs, beamingfaces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of anyseemingly great importance, and the people were moving, travelingpaths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing,clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and inevery direction saw these multitudes of beings, wrapped inconversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of themembracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters and groups ofthem continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was themystery. This was not chaos. This was not confusion. This was not adin. It seemed the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by finalI mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, amarvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understandingshared by all who participated in it, as they hurried or movedlanguidly (or even in some cases sat about doing very little), amongsthills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas andinto buildings which seemed to grow one out of another like nostructure on earth I'd ever seen.
Nowhere did I see anything specifically domestic such as a house,or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures were infinitelylarger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors andstaircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yetornament covered everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures were sovaried that any one of them might have absorbed me forever.
I cannot convey the sense of simultaneous observation that I felt. Ihave to speak now in sequence. I have to take various parts of thislimitless and brilliant environment, in order to shed my own falliblelight on the whole.
There were archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, greatfields, forests, streams. One area flowed into another, and throughthem all I was traveling, with Memnoch beside me, securely holdingme in a solid grip. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to somespectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant treereaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have my body turnedback around by him as if I were being kept to a tightrope from whichI might fatally fall.
I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with theemotions. I clung to hum and tried to see over his shoulder andaround him, and spun in his grip like an infant, turning to lock eyeswith this or that person who happened to glance at me, or to look fora steady moment as the groups and the parliaments andcongregations shifted and moved.
We were in a vast hall suddenly. "God, if David could see this!" Icried; the books and scrolls were endless, and there seemed nothingillogical or confusing in the manner in which all these documents layopen and ready to be examined.
"Don't look, because you won't remember it," Memnoch said.
He snatched at my hand as if I were a toddler. I had tried to catchhold of a scroll that was filled with an absolutely astonishingexplanation of something to do with atoms and photons and neutrinos. Buthe was right. The knowledge was gone immediately, and the unfoldinggarden surrounded us as I lost my balance and fell against him.
I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection;flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the worldmight become! I don't know any other way to describe how wellrealized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The colorsthemselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsuresuddenly that our spectrum was even involved.
I mean, I don't think our spectrum of color was the limit! I thinkthere was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, agift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visiblechemically on earth.
The waves of laughter, of singing, of conversation, became soloud as to overwhelm my other senses; I felt blinded by soundsuddenly; and yet the light was laying bare every precious detail.
"Sapphirine!" I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenishblue of the great leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro,and Memnoch smiled and nodded as if in approval, reaching again tostop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab some of themagnificence I saw.
"But I can't hurt it if I touch, can I?" It seemed unthinkable suddenlythat anyone could bruise anything here, from the walls ofquartz and crystal with their ever-rising spires and belfries, to thesweet, soft vines twining upwards in the branches of trees drippingwith magnificent fruits and flowers. "No, no, I wouldn't want to hurtit!" I said.
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