A fourth told of a quite different palace that was designed by the apostle Thomas; and was builded of Sethym wood and sardius and imperishable ebony and ivory and onyx; and was enwrought with the horns of reptiles. Before this palace stood a mirror to which you ascended upon a stairway of porphyry and serpentine: armed warriors guarded it night and day, for in this mirror you beheld all that was taking place in every province and region subject to the master of this palace: and within this palace you lived among all manner of pleasures and delights. And yet another spoke of an untroubled and great-hearted people ruled by one that had not the appearance of a human being. Some said the real name of this ruler was Aradia: others boasted of large reason to believe the lord of the hidden city of Mommur in everything male. This monarch retained among mankind many secret worshippers, marked with the sign of their service: these worshippers had privileges: and in the eye of each one of them, when you looked closely, you would find the small likeness of a horse. Then also men had been to Blath Annis, and to the Strembölglings, and to a secret country among mountains wherein the lost tribes of Israel awaited the coming of Anti-Christ, when a fox would liberate them; and to the pleasant uplands of Ladaria, about which rolled perpetually, with terrible reverberations, a river not of water but of great stones; and to bright Audela, to which the very brave might enter through a gateway of fire, and no man could enter except in that way. Whereas yet other travellers had journeyed beyond Mistorak and the dreadful trumpets and thunder-blasts of the Vale of the Devil's Head, and had so won to the happy Isle of Bragman-- "But they came back," I suggested, at this point. Yes, all had perforce returned to man's colorless workaday life, to the tediousness of over-familiar things, and to the ever-nearing shadow of death. Yet here and there, and now and then, some men had managed to enter into quite other ways of living. Men had in journeying toward death contrived--sometimes by chance, more frequently by the aid of magic,--for a while to elude the laws of ordinary human life, and for a while to divert themselves-- "In alcoves," I suggested. "Yes, if you like," said Harrowby,--"in alcoves in which the laws of human polity and of material nature, as we know them, had not any jurisdiction. The point is that these tales were obviously not invented by liars with the intention of deceiving their hearers. For these tales, encountered in every part of the world, have never made the tiniest concession to plausibility: instead of wooing, they summons faith with the abruptness of a sheriff; and have assumed from the first that all our best-thought-of theories about the universe are comparable, let us say, to the knowledge which a fly in a dining-car possesses as to the management of railways."