The Day Boy and the Night Girl | Page 5

of the lamp going out?
There was the lamp -- dead indeed, and so changed that she would
never have taken it for a lamp, but for the shape! No, it was not the
lamp anymore now it was dead, for all that made it a lamp was gone,
namely, the bright shining of it. Then it must be the shine, the light, that
had gone out! That must be what Falca meant -- and it must be

somewhere in the other place in the wall. She started afresh after it, and
groped her way to the curtain.
Now, she had never in her life tried to get out, and did not know how;
but instinctively she began to move her hands about over one of the
walls behind the curtain, half expecting them to go into it, as she
supposed Watho and Falca did. But the wall repelled her with
inexorable hardness, and she turned to the one opposite. In so doing,
she set her foot upon an ivory die, and as it met sharply the same spot
the broken alabaster had already hurt, she fell forward with her
outstretched hands against the wall. Something gave way, and she
tumbled out of the cavern.
IX. Out
BUT alas! out was very much like in, for the same enemy, the darkness,
was here also. The next moment, however, came a great gladness -- a
firefly, which had wandered in from the garden. She saw the tiny spark
in the distance. With slow pulsing ebb and throb of light, it came
pushing itself through the air, drawing nearer and nearer, with that
motion which more resembles swimming than flying, and the light
seemed the source of its own motion.
"My lamp! my lamp!" cried Nycteris. "It is the shiningness of my lamp,
which the cruel darkness drove out. My good lamp has been waiting for
me here all the time! It knew I would come after it, and waited to take
me with it."
She followed the firefly, which, like herself, was seeking the way out.
If it did not know the way, it was yet light; and, because all light is one,
any light may serve to guide to more light. If she was mistaken in
thinking it the spirit of her lamp, it was of the same spirit as her lamp
and had wings. The gold-green jet-boat, driven by light, went throbbing
before her through a long narrow passage. Suddenly it rose higher, and
the same moment Nycteris fell upon an ascending stair. She had never
seen a stair before, and found going-up a curious sensation. Just as she
reached what seemed the top, the firefly ceased to shine, and so
disappeared. She was in utter darkness once more. But when we are

following the light, even its extinction is a guide. If the firefly had gone
on shining, Nycteris would have seen the stair turn and would have
gone up to Watho's bedroom; whereas now, feeling straight before her,
she came to a latched door, which after a good deal of trying she
managed to open -- and stood in a maze of wondering perplexity, awe,
and delight. What was it? Was it outside of her, or something taking
place in her head? Before her was a very long and very narrow passage,
broken up she could not tell how, and spreading out above and on all
sides to an infinite height and breadth and distance -- as if space itself
were growing out of a trough. It was brighter than her rooms had ever
been -- brighter than if six alabaster lamps had been burning in them.
There was a quantity of strange streaking and mottling about it, very
different from the shapes on her walls. She was in a dream of pleasant
perplexity, of delightful bewilderment. She could not tell whether she
was upon her feet or drifting about like the firefly, driven by the pulses
of an inward bliss. But she knew little as yet of her inheritance.
Unconsciously, she took one step forward from the threshold, and the
girl who had been from her very birth a troglodyte stood in the
ravishing glory of a southern night, lit by a perfect moon -- not the
moon of our northern clime, but a moon like silver glowing in a furnace
-- a moon one could see to be a globe -- not far off, a mere flat disk on
the face of the blue, but hanging down halfway, and looking as if one
could see all around it by a mere bending of the neck.
"It is my lamp," she said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked
and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy from the
beginning.
"No, it is