Now the trees were thinner again, and of a changing character. They appeared to be a larger variety of those which we had encountered during the previous night. Light and graceful they rose around us, with a crown of spreading boughs from which long ribbon-leaves fell thickly. These leaves were many yards in length, of the width of a finger, and of an almost incredible lightness. The air was quiet, but not with the unreasonable stillness of the area of that forbidding will, and when a light wind moved, the leaves were lifted like a woman’s hair, and blown aside, so that the straight slim trunks showed nakedly between them. Always these light leaves murmured with a stealthy whispering sound, so like to speech that I had a feeling that there were words which I almost heard, which I should catch if I should listen more carefully. I began to imagine that they were urgent to warn or threaten. I turned to my companion’s mind to break the spell they were casting, and found her receiving it with a like pleasure to that with which she bathed in the cold springs of the lake-floor. Her mind paused reluctantly from its enjoyment to answer me when I queried in wonder how she should find a delight which approached to ecstasy in such a way, when I had understood that the sounds of speech, and (I supposed) all noise, were a barbarism that repelled her. She answered, “You confuse things the most opposite. Is the beauty of bird or beast increased if it be torn open? The sea is full of sound, and like the wind it has many voices, which it contains within itself, as the air contains them. These voices are as the very basis of life to every sea-born thing. Even a dead shell cannot forget them. The unending murmur of these leaves soothes me with delight, while it arouses longing to return to the ocean-depths where there is neither noise nor stillness. Do you not hear that it is at once monotonous and many-toned, as all sound should be? Would not even such as you are shrink to violate it with the intolerable noises of the speech you practise?” I did not answer, for her mind left me as it ceased its protest, and we went forward in silence, soothed to drowsiness of thought by this monotony of multitudinous sounds, till the trees ceased, and I was suddenly conscious that my companion was left behind, and that her thought was urgent to call me. Thoughts that pass from mind to mind are swifter than speech, a thousand times, and more luminous. So it was that we had mutually realised in a moment that which would have been beyond the ready apprehension of human intercourse. She stood back because she was confronted by a wall of blackness, where I saw sunlight, and a level lawn. It was not darkness that she saw, as that of night, but a blackness as of a curtain, gross and palpable.