minutes, these hours, these weeks can never be few.

Rodriguez and Morano had been travelling about six or seven minutes,
but it seems idle to say so.

And then the Sun began to fill the whole sky in front of them. And in
another minute, if minutes had any meaning, they were heading for a
boundless region of flame that, left and right, was everywhere, and now
towered above them, and went below them into a flaming abyss.

And now Morano spoke to Rodriguez. He thought towards him, and
Rodriguez was aware of his thinking: it is thus that spirits
communicate.

"Master," he said, "when it was all spring in Spain, years ago when I
was thin and young, twenty years gone at least; and the butterflies
were come, and song was everywhere; there came a maid bare-footed over
a stream, walking through flowers, and all to pluck the anemones." How
fair she seemed even now, how bright that far spring day. Morano told
Rodriguez not with his blundering lips: they were closed and resting
deeply millions of miles away: he told him as spirits tell. And in that
clear communication Rodriguez saw all that shone in Morano's memory,
the grace of the young girl's ankles, the thrill of Spring, the
anemones larger and brighter than anemones ever were, the hawks still
in clear sky; earth happy and heaven blue, and the dreams of youth
between. You would not have said, had you seen Morano's coarse fat
body, asleep in a chair in the Professor's room, that his spirit
treasured such delicate, nymph-like, pastoral memories as now shone
clear to Rodriguez. No words the blunt man had ever been able to utter
had ever hinted that he sometimes thought like a dream of pictures by
Watteau. And now in that awful space before the power of the terrible
Sun, spirit communed with spirit, and Rodriguez saw the beauty of that
far day, framed all about the beauty of one young girl, just as it had
been for years in Morano's memory. How shall I tell with words what
spirit sang wordless to spirit? We poets may compete with each other in
words; but when spirits give up the purest gold of their store, that
has shone far down the road of their earthly journey, cheering tired
hearts and guiding mortal feet, our words shall barely interpret.

Love, coming long ago over flowers in Spain, found Morano; words did
not tell the story, words cannot tell it; as a lake reflects a cloud in
the blue of heaven, so Rodriguez understood and felt and knew this
memory out of the days of M