Angel's Egg
sleeping dreams? There was no weight of symbolism from my littered past, no discoverable connection with any of yesterday's commonplaces, indeed no actual involvement of my personality at all. I saw. I was moving vision, though without eyes or other flesh. And while my mind saw, it also knew where my flesh was, seated at the kitchen table. If anyone had entered the kitchen, if there had been a noise of alarm out in the henhouse, I should have known it.

There was a valley such as I have not seen, and never will, on Earth. I have seen many beautiful places on this planet—some of them were even tranquil. Once I took a slow steamer to New Zealand and had the Pacific as a play-thing for many days. I can hardly say how I knew this was not Earth. The grass of the valley was a familiar green. A river below me was a blue and silver thread under sunlight. There were trees much like pine and maple, and maybe that is what they were. But it was not Earth. I was aware of mountains heaped to strange heights on either side of the valley—snow, rose, amber, gold. The amber tint was unlike any mountain color I have noticed in this world at mid-day.

Or I may have known it was not Earth, simply because her mind—dwelling within some unimaginable brain smaller than the tip of my little finger—told me so.

I watched two inhabitants of that world come flying, to rest in the field of sunny grass where my bodiless vision had brought me. Adult forms, such as my angel would surely be when she had her growth, except that both of these were male and one of them was dark-skinned. The latter was also old, with a thousand-wrinkled face, knowing and full of tranquillity; the other was flushed and lively with youth. Both were beautiful. The down of the brown-skinned old one was reddish-tawny; the other's was ivory with hints of orange. Their wings were true membranes, with more variety of subtle iridescence than I have seen even in the wings of a dragonfly; I could not say that any color was dominant, for each motion brought a ripple of change.

These two sat at their ease on the grass. I realized that they were talking to each other, though their lips did not move in speech more than once or twice. They would nod, smile, now and then illustrate something with twinkling hands.

A huge rabbit lolloped past them. I knew—thanks to my own angel's efforts, I supposed—that this animal was of the same size as our common wild ones. Later a blue-green snake three times the size of the angels came flowing through the grass. The old one reached out to stroke its head carelessly, and I think he did it without 
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