I did not awaken with a start, but opened my eyes, and lay very
comfortably looking at a line of extraordinarily scarlet poppies that
glowed against a glowing sky. It was the sky of a magnificent sunrise,
and an archipelago of gold-beached purple islands floated in a sea of
golden green. The poppies too, swan-necked buds, blazing corollas,
translucent stout seed-vessels, stoutly upheld, had a luminous quality,
seemed wrought only from some more solid kind of light.
I stared unwonderingly at these things for a time, and then there rose
upon my consciousness, intermingling with these, the bristling golden
green heads of growing barley.
A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again
in my mind. Everything was very still.
Everything was as still as death.
I felt very light, full of the sense of physical well-being. I
perceived I was lying on my side in a little trampled space in a weedy,
flowering barley field, that was in some inexplicable way saturated
with light and beauty. I sat up, and remained for a long time filled
with the delight and charm of the delicate little convolvulus that
twined among the barley stems, the pimpernel that laced the ground
below.
Then that question returned. What was this place? How had I come to be
sleeping here?