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.