When we get inside, you must be strong. You must realize that you are in your earthbound body, unusual as it is, and your senses will be overwhelmed. You will not be able to endure what you see as you would were you dead or an angel or a fiend, as my assistants.
There's no time to argue. They pass swiftly across the bridge; giant gates opening before them. They can't see the summit of the walls.
The sound swells and envelops them, and indeed it is like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it's canorous, as though all those who laugh also sing canticles in full voice at the same time.
What he sees, however, overwhelms as much as the sound.
This is very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most profoundly magnificent place he's ever beheld. Language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes can see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Once again, people are everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct anthropomorphic shape; they have arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people are moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
All around him, and in every direction are multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters or groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order is the mystery. This is not chaos. This is not confusion. This is not a din. It seems the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by final I mean it seems a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding shared by all who participate in it, as they hurry or move languidly (or even in some cases doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas and into buildings which seem to grow one out of another like no structure on earth he's ever seen.
Nowhere does he see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures are infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yet ornament covers everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures are so varied that any one of them might have absorbed the eye forever.
it's impossible to convey the sense of simultaneous observation felt in sequence.
There are archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams. One area flows into another, and through them all he travels, with Azrael beside him, securely holding him in a solid grip. Again and again, his eyes are drawn to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have his body turned back around by Azrael as if he were being kept to a tightrope from which he might fatally fall.
They're in a vast hall suddenly. The books and scrolls are endless, and there seems nothing illogical or confusing in the manner in which all these documents lay open and ready to be examined. ]
no subject
[ ♬ ambient tour - chance thomas
There's no time to argue. They pass swiftly across the bridge; giant gates opening before them. They can't see the summit of the walls.
The sound swells and envelops them, and indeed it is like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it's canorous, as though all those who laugh also sing canticles in full voice at the same time.
What he sees, however, overwhelms as much as the sound.
This is very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most profoundly magnificent place he's ever beheld. Language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes can see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Once again, people are everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct anthropomorphic shape; they have arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people are moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
All around him, and in every direction are multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters or groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order is the mystery. This is not chaos. This is not confusion. This is not a din. It seems the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by final I mean it seems a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding shared by all who participate in it, as they hurry or move languidly (or even in some cases doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas and into buildings which seem to grow one out of another like no structure on earth he's ever seen.
Nowhere does he see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures are infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yet ornament covers everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures are so varied that any one of them might have absorbed the eye forever.
it's impossible to convey the sense of simultaneous observation felt in sequence.
There are archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams. One area flows into another, and through them all he travels, with Azrael beside him, securely holding him in a solid grip. Again and again, his eyes are drawn to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have his body turned back around by Azrael as if he were being kept to a tightrope from which he might fatally fall.
They're in a vast hall suddenly. The books and scrolls are endless, and there seems nothing illogical or confusing in the manner in which all these documents lay open and ready to be examined. ]