Pygmalions Spectacles | Page 3

again; she smiled.
Dan summoned stumbling thoughts. Was this being also--illusion? Had she no more reality than the loveliness of the forest? He opened his lips to speak, but a strained excited voice sounded in his ears. "Who are you?" Had he spoken? The voice had come as if from another, like the sound of one's words in fever.
The girl smiled again. "English!" she said in queer soft tones. "I can speak a little English." She spoke slowly, carefully. "I learned it from"--she hesitated--"my mother's father, whom they call the Grey Weaver."
Again came the voice in Dan's ears. "Who are you?"
"I am called Galatea," she said. "I came to find you."
"To find me?" echoed the voice that was Dan's.
"Leucon, who is called the Grey Weaver, told me," she explained smiling. "He said you will stay with us until the second noon from this." She cast a quick slanting glance at the pale sun now full above the clearing, then stepped closer. "What are you called?"
"Dan," he muttered. His voice sounded oddly different.
"What a strange name!" said the girl. She stretched out her bare arm. "Come," she smiled.
Dan touched her extended hand, feeling without any surprise the living warmth of her fingers. He had forgotten the paradoxes of illusion; this was no longer illusion to him, but reality itself. It seemed to him that he followed her, walking over the shadowed turf that gave with springy crunch beneath his tread, though Galatea left hardly an imprint. He glanced down, noting that he himself wore a silver garment, and that his feet were bare; with the glance he felt a feathery breeze on his body and a sense of mossy earth on his feet.
"Galatea," said his voice. "Galatea, what place is this? What language do you speak?"
She glanced back laughing. "Why, this is Paracosma, of course, and this is our language."
"Paracosma," muttered Dan. "Para--cosma!" A fragment of Greek that had survived somehow from a Sophomore course a decade in the past came strangely back to him. Paracosma! Land-beyond-the-world!
Galatea cast a smiling glance at him. "Does the real world seem strange," she queried, "after that shadow land of yours?"
"Shadow land?" echoed Dan, bewildered. "This is shadow, not my world."
The girl's smile turned quizzical. "Poof!" she retorted with an impudently lovely pout. "And I suppose, then, that I am the phantom instead of you!" She laughed. "Do I seem ghostlike?"
Dan made no reply; he was puzzling over unanswerable questions as he trod behind the lithe figure of his guide. The aisle between the unearthly trees widened, and the giants were fewer. It seemed a mile, perhaps, before a sound of tinkling water obscured that other strange music; they emerged on the bank of a little river, swift and crystalline, that rippled and gurgled its way from glowing pool to flashing rapids, sparkling under the pale sun. Galatea bent over the brink and cupped her hands, raising a few mouthfuls of water to her lips; Dan followed her example, finding the liquid stinging cold.
"How do we cross?" he asked.
"You can wade up there,"--the dryad who led him gestured to a sun-lit shallows above a tiny falls--"but I always cross here." She poised herself for a moment on the green bank, then dove like a silver arrow into the pool. Dan followed; the water stung his body like champagne, but a stroke or two carried him across to where Galatea had already emerged with a glistening of creamy bare limbs. Her garment clung tight as a metal sheath to her wet body; he felt a breath-taking thrill at the sight of her. And then, miraculously, the silver cloth was dry, the droplets rolled off as if from oiled silk, and they moved briskly on.
The incredible forest had ended with the river; they walked over a meadow studded with little, many-hued, star-shaped flowers, whose fronds underfoot were soft as a lawn. Yet still the sweet pipings followed them, now loud, now whisper-soft, in a tenuous web of melody.
"Galatea!" said Dan suddenly. "Where is the music coming from?"
She looked back amazed. "You silly one!" she laughed. "From the flowers, of course. See!" she plucked a purple star and held it to his ear; true enough, a faint and plaintive melody hummed out of the blossom. She tossed it in his startled face and skipped on.
A little copse appeared ahead, not of the gigantic forest trees, but of lesser growths, bearing flowers and fruits of iridescent colors, and a tiny brook bubbled through. And there stood the objective of their journey--a building of white, marble-like stone, single-storied and vine covered, with broad glassless windows. They trod upon a path of bright pebbles to the arched entrance, and here, on an intricate stone bench, sat a grey-bearded patriarchal individual. Galatea addressed him in a liquid language that reminded Dan of the