Lychnis lifted her head and glanced round at Ambrose. “Among all those plants? I’m not afraid, but isn’t it rather impossible?” “I’ll dive in and save you,” said Quentin. “I don’t like you under water,” she replied—“a spread-out monster with a dim, waving beard. Besides, I’ve no costume.” “That is not a thing that matters—” began Yuan. “Of course not,” put in Quentin, with immense approval. The Chinese gentleman continued: “What I mean is, that we go as we are. It is not a miracle.” The scattered orchids stood up, mystified, and undulated in a gay chain along the paths on the side of the cliffs. Presently Yuan halted at a place where glassy-green steps led down into deep waters between reed-clumps. “A good place for pike, no doubt,” remarked Ambrose. “You are a fisherman, then?” Yuan suddenly enveloped him, as it were, in an all-seeing gaze, which, while extremely polite, was also extremely inexorable. “I fish, and meditate, and compose my thoughts.” Ambrose returned his gaze with a polite stare which, so Lychnis told him, was beautifully inflexible. “Then we will fish and meditate together.” “With the greatest pleasure.” The two men bowed, and Yuan led the way down the glassy-green steps. They found themselves entering a roomy, inclined tunnel of some substance so transparent that they seemed to be entering a partition of the water. One by one they stepped down, taking a last glance, when their eyes came to its level, across the many-leaved surface of the Lake. In a few minutes they were walking in the depths of a forest of stalks where strange creatures loomed. It was very silent, very dim, very still, under that ceiling of flat leaves, or under an open sky of lake-water. Sometimes a flight of small, ghostly fish darted invisibly through the stalk-forest, or suddenly wheeling their sides in a light-beam became a thousand rainbows. Sometimes a beetle-creature struggled up skywards through the water, swimming as if faint for heaven. Or swans swam overhead like June clouds, or thrust their snaky necks down between lilies. A cormorant, breaking the limit of the water into a shiver of crystal, passed them in silent white pursuit of a hurrying fish. And in one region of the brownish-greenish water-universe a solemn carp, opening and shutting his mouth like a machine, took part with myriads of his kind in a mazy, rhythmical, interminable, involuted and apparently purposeful dance. “Just like human beings,” observed Quentin. “Why do they do that?” asked Lychnis. She and Ruby were walking on either side of Yuan; Fulke was following with despairful, scowling face. “Are they happy?” “They obey their nature,” said Yuan. “According to the doctrine of Hsiao, they are Sages.” “They cannot be Sages,” she put in, “because they have never been conscious. To be a Sage means to have abandoned human consciousness and to have adopted the demeanour of a fish or a vegetable.”