Arrayed in harmonious splendours, they floated, next morning, in a crowd of fragile and fantastic boats of red, yellow and black, through lanes of flushed lotuses towards the Rock. Servants paddled them. Here and there an unknown white bird with crimson beak walked sedately on the carpet of leaves, or a green-headed duck dabbled with his bill among the stalks of the water-lilies. The Rock itself, at the distance of half a mile, covered with foliage and flowers, looked as if some lake-dragon, rising from the fathomless bottom, had thrust up the carpet of lilies with his back and fallen asleep on the water. “It’s black and mysterious down there, among the stalks of the lilies,” whispered Lychnis. “One would like to be a fish and swim down among oozy roots. It must be wonderful to be a fish and nose about in a reed-world. But aren’t they pure, the lotuses? Like the flushing thoughts that sometimes come up from our black insides.” “It is remarkable,” observed Quentin from under his canopy, “that a creature with so much in the way of tripes should throw off the dewy cobwebs of imaginations that one so often has.” “Illusions,” said Blackwood. “It’s lovely floating on water,” said Ruby. “I’m ready to live any number of lives like this, Mr. Blackwood.” He firmly shut his ascetic lips, and his eyelids too (notes Ambrose), shutting them down on the bright summer-morning picture of Lychnis, full length and slender in her floating casket of coral. “You’re not frightened, Ruby?” queried her friend across the separating leaf-carpet. She shook her head. But perhaps Lychnis herself was just a little dubious when they came within a hundred yards of the sun-beaten Rock and closely saw its dragon-spine ridge, its burden of pine and fig-tree, and its steep side, with little exquisite summer-houses pat to the colour and design of contour and foliage. And they were all a little silent when, rounding the head of the island, they entered its shadow and paddled under its towering wall. This was on the side of the Lake away from their Pavilion; they were cut off, so to speak, from what they knew. But the island seemed civilized and friendly enough. The wall of rock, coming up sheer out of the depths of the Lake (one could see great carp and wondrous fish nosing in crannies many feet below), was alive, a wrinkled meditation in stone. Reeds fringed it here and there, foliage hung in cascades from the summit, an arbour or a garden seat stood by some perilous path, under pine, rhododendron or orange-tree. Then, coming to a sheltered bight between two flying and fantastic buttresses of rock, they saw a flight of steps, gleaming and twisting up the cliff like a devil in anguish, and at the foot of the steps, by the water’s edge, the Dragon itself waited courteously on a marble quay to receive them.