gardens, towers, and spires of a very quaint and extraordinary style of architecture.
****
"Then it became night. I was walking in the midst of a vast garden. Around me were a thousand forms of dense vegetation—or what looked like vegetation—but of a sort utterly different to anything we have on earth. Our earthly words are only formed to express earthly ideas, but for these scenes of another world they are quite inadequate. One wants another language for another world of ideas. So everything around me, in earth's words, would be nameless, and, except by a long account, indescribable. Yet it seemed as if both the animal and vegetable kingdoms were there—things very different from the productions of the earth, but still not utterly of another order of being.
"The plants were various, graceful, and beautiful. Birds in thousands were fluttering in the air, some as huge as the fabled 'Roc' of Arabian fable, some small and brilliant in colour as our humming-birds. But what caught my attention most was the crowds of winged semi-human figures, like Aleriel, who moved amidst the gardens. Like everything around in this brilliant world, they were beautifully
