Yet even there, even at those altitudes, man had still clung to his
symmetry, still claimed that these mountains were houses; in orderly
rows the thousand windows stood watching each other precisely, all
orderly, all alike, lest any should guess by day that there might be
mystery here. So they stood in the daylight. The sun set, still they
were orderly, as scientific and regular as the labour of only man and
the bees. The mists darken at evening. And first the Woolworth
Building goes away, sheer home and away from any allegiance to man, to
take his place among mountains; for I saw him stand with the lower
slopes invisible in the gloaming, while only his pinnacles showed up
in the clearer sky. Thus only mountains stand.
Still all the windows of the other buildings stood in their regular
rows--all side by side in silence, not yet changed, as though waiting
one furtive moment to step from the schemes of man, to slip back to
mystery and romance again as cats do when they steal on velvet feet
away from familiar hearths in the dark of the moon.
Night fell, and the moment came. Someone lit a window, far up another
shone with its orange glow. Window by window, and yet not nearly all.
Surely if modern man with his clever schemes held any sway here still
he would have turned one switch and lit them all together; but we are
back with the older man of whom far songs tell, he whose spirit is kin
to strange romances and mountains. One by one the windows shine from
the precipices; some twinkle, some are dark; man's orderly schemes
have gone, and we are amongst vast heights lit by inscrutable beacons.
I have seen such cities before, and I have told of them in _The Book
of Wonder_.
Here in New York a poet met a welcome.
** BEYOND THE FIELDS WE KNOW **
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Beyond the fields we know, in the Lands of Dream, lies the Valley of
the Yann where the mighty river of that name, rising in the Hills of
Hap, idleing its way by massive dream-evoking amethyst cliffs,
orchid-laden forests, and ancient mysterious cities, comes to the Gates
of Yann and passes to the sea.
Some years since a poet visiting that land voyaged down the Yann on a
trading bark named the _Bird of the River_ and returning safe to
Ireland, set down in a tale that is called _Idle Days on the Yann_,
the wonders of that voyage. Now the tale being one of marvellous
beauty, found its way into a volume we call _A Dreamer's Tales_ where
it may be found to this day with other wondrous tales of that same
poet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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