106

Draycott

That landscape’s rich array and the path through a forest where Fortune now led the way, were beautiful beyond telling, far past my powers of human speech to describe. As if transported, I walked without stopping – no slope was too steep or hillside too high. The further I wandered into that wood the finer the fields and fruit trees seemed, the spices and hedgerows, meadows where streams ran steeply down in threads of gold, till I reached the curving shore of a river – a river of, Lord! such shining adornment.

What blazed most brightly were the banks, arrayed with beryl, a channel of light where echoing water circled and swirled, an eddying flood that seemed almost like words. The stream-bed also was bright with stones that glowed with the glint of sunlight through glass or the streaming of stars from deep in the sky in winter, when men of this world are asleep. Every pebble that lay in the lap of that pool was an emerald or sapphire, a storehouse of jewels, so the length of the river seemed lit from within adorned with such glitter and glistening.