Pygmalions Spectacles | Page 3

half-translucent stuff, luminous as
starbeams; a thin band of silver bound glowing black hair about her
forehead, and other garment or ornament she had none. Her tiny white
feet were bare to the mossy forest floor as she stood no more than a
pace from him, staring dark-eyed. The thin music sounded 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