Page:The Great Secret.djvu/156

140 The garden in front of them filled the entire bed of the valley from where they now stood, and had been designed during many ages of peace and security to produce shadow and repose. Down its countless festooned avenues figures of young men and maidens moved, easy and graceful, thinly-clad, as were the natives of ancient Greece. Philip was not astonished to see snowy cattle and sheep browsing or lying in lazy content on the green banks of the streams, also goats on the heights, nor the doves hovering in mid-air, neither did those floating gauze-like figures who rose at will and swam across the space surprise him; such a landscape required these wonders to be complete.

"These gardens lead to and surround the city where I was born," said Hesperia. "We will walk through them and come to the principal gate. It is all as it was during my lifetime. We were a great nation and had many places like this, for the earth was then enjoying a long millennium of peace. Men had learned to live simply and without crime, war was unknown, also want and poverty. We had no great men nor women amongst us, no kings—at least, none as you understand them. We had reached to the perfection of invention, art and science. Indeed we did not know death, for our friends never left us. We saw their bodies perish through natural decay; but they were only absent for a short time, and then they returned in their first youth to help us in the burning of their worn-out garments."

"You had books and histories then?" asked Philip.

"Yes, my friend. I will show you one of our libraries, with our picture and statue galleries. The history of the world had been written and printed then as far back as we knew it, which reached many more