Kamanita wondered much, and inquired how it was that the news of his coming had already been spread abroad all over Sukhavati.
“Oh! when a lotus opens itself, all the other lotus flowers in the ponds of Paradise are moved, and every being is conscious that another has somewhere among us awakened to bliss.”
“But how could ye know that just I happened to be the newcomer?”
The figures floating around him smiled charmingly.
“Thou are not yet fully awake. Thou dost look at us as though thou sawest dream-figures and wert afraid that they might suddenly disappear, and that rude reality might again surround thee.”
Kamanita shook his head.
“I don’t quite understand. What are dream-figures?”
“Ye forget,” said one white-robed figure, “that he has assuredly not yet been to the Coral Tree.”
“No, I have not yet been there. But I have already heard of it. My neighbour in the pond mentioned it; the tree is said to be such a wondrous one. What is there about it?”
But they all smiled mysteriously, looking at one another, and shaking their heads.
“I would like so much to go there at once. Will no one show me the way?”
“Thou wilt find the way thyself when the time has come.”
Kamanita drew his hand over his forehead.
“There is yet another wonderful thing here of which he spoke. … Yes, the heavenly Gunga … by it our pond is fed. Is that so with yours also?”
The white-robed figure pointed to the clear little river that wound round about the foot of the hill and so, by easy turnings, onward to the pond.
“That is our source of supply. Countless such arteries intersect these fields, and that which thou hast seen is a similar one even if somewhat larger. But the heavenly Gunga itself surrounds the whole of Sukhavati.”
“Hast thou seen it also?”
The white-robed one shook her head.
“Is it not possible to go there, then?”
“Oh, it is possible,” they all answered, “but no one of us has been there. Besides, why should we go? It cannot be more beautiful anywhere than here. Several of the others, to be sure, have been there, but they have never flown thither again.”
“Why not?”
His white-robed visitor pointed towards the pond—
“Dost thou see the red figure there, almost at the other bank? He was there once, though it is long, long ago. Shall we ask him whether he has flown again since then to the shores of the Gunga?”
“Never again,” at once came the answer from him of the red robe.
“And why not?”
“Fly thither thyself and bring back the answer.”
“Shall we? Together with thee I may venture to do it.”
“I should like to go—but not now.”
Forth from a neighbouring grove there floated a train of happy figures, wound a chain about the meadow shrubbery, and, while they extended the chain, the figure at the end, a light blue one, seized the hand of the white robe. She stretched out her other hand invitingly to Kamanita.
He thanked her smilingly, but gently shook his head.
“I would prefer to be a spectator still.”
“Yes, better rest and awake. For the present, farewell.” And gently led away by the light blue, she floated thence in the airy roundelay.
The others also, with a kind and cheerful greeting, moved away, that he might have quiet in which to collect himself.
XXIV
The Coral Tree
Kamanita followed them long with his eyes and wandered. And then he wondered at his wonder.
“How does it happen that everything here seems so strange to me? If I belong to this place, why does not everything appear perfectly natural? But every new thing I see is a puzzle and fills me with astonishment. For example, this odour that now floats past me so suddenly? How absolutely different it is from all other flower scents here—much fuller and more powerful, attracting and disquieting at the same time. Where can it come from? But where do I myself come from? It seems to me as though I had been, but a short time ago, a mere nothing. Or did I have an existence? Only not here? If so, where? And how have I come here?”
While he revolved these questions in his mind his body had risen up, without his perceiving it, from the meadow, and he was already floating onward—though not in a direction taken by any of the others. He made his way upwards towards a depression in the crest of the hill. As he passed over it he was greeted by a yet more powerful breath of that new and strange perfume.
Kamanita, however, flew onward.
Beyond the hill the neighbourhood lost something of its charm. The show of flowers was scantier, the shrubbery darker, the groves more deer, the rocks more forbidding and higher. Herds of gazelles grazed there, but only in a few solitary instances was one of the Blest to be seen.
The valley became narrower and ended in a cleft, and here the perfume grew yet stronger. Ever more rapid became his flight, ever more naked, steeper, and higher did the rocky walls close around him till an opening was no longer to be seen.
Then the ravine made a couple of sharp turns and opened suddenly.
Round about Kamanita extended a deep, pit-like valley shut in by towering malachite rocks which seemed to reach the heavens. In the midst of the valley stood the wonder-tree. Trunk and branches were of smooth, red coral, slightly more yellow the red of the crisp foliage, amid which blossoms of a deep crimson glowed and burned.
Over the pinnacles of the rocks and the summit of the tree rose the deep blue sky in which not a single cloud was to be seen. Nor did the music of the genii penetrate in any appreciable degree to this spot—what still trembled in the air seemed to be but a memory of melodies heard in the long past.
There were but three colours to be seen in the valley; the ultramarine blue of the heavens, the malachite green of the rocks, the coral red of the tree.
