My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange surroundings. I wondered where the beings were who had built this wondrous palace, and were now doubtless playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream? And had I never been shot into the sea with Noola? It seemed as if my inmost thoughts were at once communicated to my watchers; for from some direction, out of some niche or doorway I had not noticed, moved softly a figure, that, in its muscular breadth, large head, and springy gait, reminded me of Noola. Upon the face a smile shone out of unfathomed depths of thought and sympathy, and yet the lips were close as if to forbid speech. It was enough to rest and gaze at the beautiful expression of the face with its intensity of love and pity in the eyes. But the features had not that symmetry of outline which we call beauty in Europe; and the form was not “divinely tall.” The whole of the attraction lay in the upraying of the soul into the face. It was like gazing into the limpid waters of a lake; I tried to give speech to my emotions, but the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that commanded silence, then waved over me, and, as I looked, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. I knew not how long I had been unconscious; for when I woke I seemed to be a new man; every faculty tingled with energy; health glowed through my tissues; I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to recess; I climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains, shaking the sweet perfumes from them as they swung in the air; I ran from transparency to transparency with the delight of a child, and gazed through each at the ever-varying landscapes that stretched outwards to the sea. Music, distant and entrancing, floated around me in the air, with variations and cooling bars of silence, so that it made a subtle ether circumambient rather than a definite impression on the senses. Under such conditions what could not I do in life? I remembered the old weariness and despair that used to cling around me like a shirt of Nessus even in the morning when I was refreshed with sleep, and the clogging humours that used to retard my most generous or most energetic action. In my former life I had moved in a clammy viscous medium that dragged back my most eager faculties. Now I was built of air, and stirred lightly as air. What was it that had accomplished this strange transformation? I had not felt so in the other islands of the archipelago or even on its seas. I had not been so exhilarated at my first awaking. How had this great change come about? Or was it but momentary, to pass away like other intoxications and leave exhaustion and ache? I began to be puzzled and to feel the return of the thought that it was perhaps only a dream after all. How was I to test the matter?