In a dream he saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kumani, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the youngest of his family, and felt alone among the indifferent billions of Earth, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and possessions were nearly gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by many to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kumani was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kumani sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride white horses in shining tack, along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the marbled gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kumani came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he was born; the small wooden house once painted white, and then green, and where he had hoped to stay forever. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the yard, down the hill, past the great acacias of the boulevard, and along the long canal to the village. The village seemed strangely old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kumani wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side were either broken or opaque with dirt. Kumani had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw a planet, glistening radiantly blue far, far below, with a background of stars in open space, and a shining black moon nearby.
Kumani had awakened the very moment he beheld the planet, yet he knew from his brief glance that it was none other than Elnara, in the Spiral arm of Ngolandra beyond the Milky Way Galaxy, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipped away from his nurse and let the cool sea-breeze coming in through the window, lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the playroom in the hospital. He had protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him room, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city after thirty weary years.
But three nights afterward Kumani came again to Elnara. As before, he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the open fields of Elnara, and saw the tiny boats riding at anchor in the blue lake, and watched the Su'udra trees of Mount Ngloko-ko swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Spiral arm of Ngolandra and the splendid planet of Elnara.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kumani, over the bubbling Narmada on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the simple stone walls discolored, nor the delicate tufts of Dunasi upon them withered. And Kumani saw that he need not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the gatherers in the fields were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the village, past the gigantic twin Gungdara trees and over the step-stoned creek of Dooraya, the gatherers and Moom-riding children greeted him as if he had never been away; and it was the same at the home of his good friend Doorah, where she told him that there is no death in Elnara, but only perpetual youth. Then Kumani walked through the smooth-worn dirt path, lined on both sides with Su'udra trees to the lakeside well, where gathered the townspeople at their rest, and others from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright lake where the ripples sparkled beneath a blue sun, and where rode lightly tiny boats from near and far places all around the lake. And he gazed also upon Mount Ngloko-ko rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes turquoise with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.
More than ever Kumani wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so many wondrous tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same grassy hummock by the shore he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbor, and raising the mainsail, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenerian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kumani could see strange lands and rivers and towns of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbor of Thoomdar, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city’s carved towers came into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kumani awakened in his bedroom.
For many months after that Kumani sought the marvelous city of Elnara and its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Ngolandra, beyond the Milky Way. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carved-stone bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Elnara in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of that land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night Kumani walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent, blackened-iron city that spread away from the sludge-fouled river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ngolandra had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of that city, and the stagnation of the long-congealed river of ancient petrochemicals, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since that land's last, nameless King came home from his conquests to find only the wake of Nature's departure.
So Kumani sought fruitlessly for the marvelous world of Elnara and its galleys that sail to Thoomdar in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from a monster not to be described, which wears a brown paper bag over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone cave on the cold desert plateau of Thurk. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying magical potions in order to increase his periods of sleep. The Sandman's magic sand helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-colored gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kumani merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kumani was now very anxious to return to blue-shining Elnara, and increased his use of magic potions; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy no more. Then one summer day he wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met a group of his friends from Elnara to bring him there forever.
Smiling, laughing children were there, astride mooms of all sizes and colors, and the children wore brightly colored play clothes. So numerous were they, that Kumani almost mistook them for the whole village, but Doorah told him they were sent in his honor; since it was he who had created Ngolandra in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kumani a huge, red and silver Shlaan (They look very much like a cross between a Dragon and a starfish.) to ride and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the Roads of Paradise and onward toward the region where Kumani was born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villages as Lincoln or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw Native Americans riding on horseback. When it grew dark they traveled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kumani had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied and bowed as the Elnarans rode or walked down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream. Kumani had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent draperies. The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendor, and invisible voices sang exultantly as they leaped over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscation. Endlessly down the Elnarans floated, their mooms and Kumani's Shlaan treading the sky as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapors spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the world of Elnara, and the sea-coast within it, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the brightly painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.
And Kumani reigned thereafter over Ngolandra and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Elnara and in the cloud-fashioned Thoomdar. He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride white horses in shining tack, along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the marbled gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kumani came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he was born; the small wooden house once painted white, and then green, and where he had hoped to stay forever. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the yard, down the hill, past the great acacias of the boulevard, and along the long canal to the village. The village seemed strangely old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kumani wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side were either broken or opaque with dirt. Kumani had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw a planet, glistening radiantly blue far, far below, with a background of stars in open space, and a shining black moon nearby.
Kumani had awakened the very moment he beheld the planet, yet he knew from his brief glance that it was none other than Elnara, in the Spiral arm of Ngolandra beyond the Milky Way Galaxy, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipped away from his nurse and let the cool sea-breeze coming in through the window, lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the playroom in the hospital. He had protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him room, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city after thirty weary years.
But three nights afterward Kumani came again to Elnara. As before, he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the open fields of Elnara, and saw the tiny boats riding at anchor in the blue lake, and watched the Su'udra trees of Mount Ngloko-ko swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Spiral arm of Ngolandra and the splendid planet of Elnara.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kumani, over the bubbling Narmada on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the simple stone walls discolored, nor the delicate tufts of Dunasi upon them withered. And Kumani saw that he need not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the gatherers in the fields were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the village, past the gigantic twin Gungdara trees and over the step-stoned creek of Dooraya, the gatherers and Moom-riding children greeted him as if he had never been away; and it was the same at the home of his good friend Doorah, where she told him that there is no death in Elnara, but only perpetual youth. Then Kumani walked through the smooth-worn dirt path, lined on both sides with Su'udra trees to the lakeside well, where gathered the townspeople at their rest, and others from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright lake where the ripples sparkled beneath a blue sun, and where rode lightly tiny boats from near and far places all around the lake. And he gazed also upon Mount Ngloko-ko rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes turquoise with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.
More than ever Kumani wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so many wondrous tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same grassy hummock by the shore he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbor, and raising the mainsail, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenerian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kumani could see strange lands and rivers and towns of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbor of Thoomdar, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city’s carved towers came into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kumani awakened in his bedroom.
For many months after that Kumani sought the marvelous city of Elnara and its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Ngolandra, beyond the Milky Way. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carved-stone bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Elnara in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of that land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night Kumani walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent, blackened-iron city that spread away from the sludge-fouled river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ngolandra had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of that city, and the stagnation of the long-congealed river of ancient petrochemicals, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since that land's last, nameless King came home from his conquests to find only the wake of Nature's departure.
So Kumani sought fruitlessly for the marvelous world of Elnara and its galleys that sail to Thoomdar in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from a monster not to be described, which wears a brown paper bag over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone cave on the cold desert plateau of Thurk. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying magical potions in order to increase his periods of sleep. The Sandman's magic sand helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-colored gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kumani merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kumani was now very anxious to return to blue-shining Elnara, and increased his use of magic potions; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy no more. Then one summer day he wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met a group of his friends from Elnara to bring him there forever.
Smiling, laughing children were there, astride mooms of all sizes and colors, and the children wore brightly colored play clothes. So numerous were they, that Kumani almost mistook them for the whole village, but Doorah told him they were sent in his honor; since it was he who had created Ngolandra in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kumani a huge, red and silver Shlaan (They look very much like a cross between a Dragon and a starfish.) to ride and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the Roads of Paradise and onward toward the region where Kumani was born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villages as Lincoln or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw Native Americans riding on horseback. When it grew dark they traveled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kumani had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied and bowed as the Elnarans rode or walked down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream. Kumani had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent draperies. The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendor, and invisible voices sang exultantly as they leaped over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscation. Endlessly down the Elnarans floated, their mooms and Kumani's Shlaan treading the sky as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapors spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the world of Elnara, and the sea-coast within it, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the brightly painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.
And Kumani reigned thereafter over Ngolandra and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Elnara and in the cloud-fashioned Thoomdar. He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever.
