t! Incredible, unearthly,
beautiful! Smooth boles ascended inconceivably toward a brightening sky,
trees bizarre as the forests of the Carboniferous age. Infinitely
overhead swayed misty fronds, and the verdure showed brown and green in
the heights. And there were birds--at least, curiously lovely pipings
and twitterings were all about him though he saw no creatures--thin
elfin whistlings like fairy bugles sounded softly.

He sat frozen, entranced. A louder fragment of melody drifted down to
him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding
metal, now soft as remembered music. For a moment he forgot the chair
whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about him, old
Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the midst of that
lovely glade. "Eden!" he muttered, and the swelling music of unseen
voices answered.

Some measure of reason returned. "Illusion!" he told himself. Clever
optical devices, not reality. He groped for the chair's arm, found it,
and clung to it; he scraped his feet and found again an inconsistency.
To his eyes the ground was mossy verdure; to his touch it was merely a
thin hotel carpet.

The elfin buglings sounded gently. A faint, deliciously sweet perfume
breathed against him; he glanced up to watch the opening of a great
crimson blossom on the nearest tree, and a tiny reddish sun edged into
the circle of sky above him. The fairy orchestra swelled louder in its
light, and the notes sent a thrill of wistfulness through him. Illusion?
If it were, it made reality almost unbearable; he wanted to believe that
somewhere--somewhere this side of dreams, there actually existed this
region of loveliness. An outpost of Paradise? Perhaps.

And then--far through the softening mists, he caught a movement that was
not the swaying of verdure, a shimmer of silver more solid than mist.
Something approached. He watched the figure as it moved, now visible,
now hidden by trees; very soon he perceived that it was human, but it
was almost upon him before he realized that it was a girl.

She wore a robe of silvery, 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