THE REALM OF NEW DIMENSIONS
The shadows of our world were vanished. The Borderland, with its
darkness, its drab empty slope, was gone. A new world lay spread about
me; new companions. And I was conscious of a new entity--a new Robert
Manse, who was myself.
I remember now that my first thought was surprise that I should be
able to visualize things of strangeness. But now I know that once over
the Borderland my _mind_ itself had changed, yet retaining of its old
self just enough, so that I might be conscious of the strangeness. In
a grey half-light of luminosity seemingly inherent to everything, I
found myself standing upon a hillside, gazing down an empty slope of
greyness. Was it land? I can only say that it seemed solid beneath
me; solid, quivering with a tiny tremble; vibrating, and within itself
vaguely luminous.
Overhead was darkness. Yet hardly that, for the same luminosity was
there; and I felt that I was gazing, not through emptiness but rather
through some tenuous fluid illimitable to my vision, with things there
to see, as yet--for me--unseeable.
The slope before me was empty. But shapes were materializing; it was
as though I had come out of the darkness, with eyes not yet accustomed
to the light. I fancied I saw water in the distance. A white lake;
but when I stared, it seemed more like a grey rolling cloud. Was it
liquid?...
The mind receives a multitude of impressions in an instant. I was
conscious of myself. My body was an entity wholly vague--yet there
seemed a tingling in it; a _weight_ to it, for I was standing upright.
Will and Bee--and the girl Ala--were beside me. I saw them now in their
old familiar form, but with a queer sense of _flatness_ to them. Flat;
unnatural of outline; not grotesque, merely strange, unreal. Almost
indescribable; and though distinctly it was not a two-dimensional
aspect, I think that _flatness_ best describes it. A something about
them which was lacking; or perhaps a something added--I do not know.
And inherent to this whole realm as soon I was to see it, was this same
queer flatness. Things without _depth_; yet to view them sidewise, the
depth was there, with the flatness still persisting.
And I saw color; nameless colors which I might call blue, or red,
or green and the words would have no meaning. Men, women--houses,
or at least habitations; the words are all I can command, but they
are grotesquely meaningless. It was all so incomparably strange; and
paradoxically, the strangest of it all was the fashion in which my
mind began to accept it. I could think of Ala as nothing but a girl. A
frightened, likable girl--with thoughts and feelings similar to my own.
This realm was real--a new country; with friends, enemies--a struggle
going on within it in which I must play a part. The whole seen and
thought of in terms of my own world. And I realized that I--to these
others of this other realm--must have seemed a stranger, but not so
very strange. Thought of by them in their own terms--each of us upon a
common ground, an equality of material state, to visualize the other in
terms of ourselves.