must have been really so.
Up to ten years ago, in fact, I used frequently to dream that there were
others. I would see them walk in the streets like ghosts, and be
troubled, and start awake: but never now could such a thing, I think,
occur to me in sleep: for the wildness of the circumstance would
certainly strike my consciousness, and immediately I should know that
the dream was a dream. For now, at least, I am sole, I am lord. The
golden walls of this palace which I have built look down, enamoured of
their reflection, into a lake of the choicest, purplest wine.

Not that I made it of wine because wine is rare; nor the walls of gold
because gold is rare: that would have been too childish: but because I
would match for beauty a human work with the works of those Others: and
because it happens, by some persistent freak of the earth, that
precisely things most rare and costly are generally the most beautiful.

The vision of glorious loveliness which is this palace now risen before
my eyes cannot be described by pen and paper, though there _may_ be
words in the lexicons of language which, if I sought for them with
inspired wit for sixteen years, as I have built for sixteen years, might
as vividly express my thought on paper, as the stones-of-gold, so
grouped and built, express it to the eye: but, failing such labours and
skill, I suppose I could not give, if there were another man, and I
tried to give, the faintest conception of its celestial charm.

It is a structure positively as clear as the sun, and as fair as the
moon--the sole great human work in the making of which no restraining
thought of cost has played a part: one of its steps alone being of more
cost than all the temples, mosques and besestins, the palaces, pagodas
and cathedrals, built between the ages of the Nimrods and the Napoleons.

The house itself is very small--only 40 ft. long, by 35 broad, by 27
high: yet the structure as a whole is sufficiently enormous, high
uplifted: the rest of the bulk being occupied by the platform, on which
the house stands, each side of this measuring at its base 480 ft., its
height from top to bottom 130 ft, and its top 48 ft. square, the
elevation of the steps being just nearly 30 degrees, and the top reached
from each of the four points of the compass by 183 low long steps, very
massively overlaid with smooth molten gold--not forming a continuous
flight, but broken into threes and fives, sixes and nines, with landings
b