“Did I not see you dispel those spouts of lightning?  No common man could have done that.”

“Who knows what any man can do?  This man can do one thing, that man can do another.  But what all men can do is their duty; and to open their eyes to this, I must go to Sant, and if necessary lay down my life.  Will you not still accompany me?”

“Yes,” said Tydomin, “I will follow you to the end.  It is all the more essential, because I keep on displeasing you with my remarks, and that means I have not yet learned my lesson properly.”

“Do not be humble, for humility is only self-judgment, and while we are thinking of self, we must be neglecting some action we could be planning or shaping in our mind.”

Tydomin continued to be uneasy and preoccupied.

“Why was Maskull not in the picture?” she asked.

“You dwell on this foreboding because you imagine it is tragical.  There is nothing tragical in death, Tydomin, nor in life.  There is only right and wrong.  What arises from right or wrong action does not matter.  We are not gods, constructing a world, but simple men and women, doing our immediate duty.  We may die in Sant—­so you have seen it; but the truth will go on living.”

“Spadevil, why do you choose Sant to start your work in?” asked Maskull.  “These men with fixed ideas seem to me the least likely of any to follow a new light.”

“Where a bad tree thrives, a good tree will flourish.  But where no tree at all can be found, nothing will grow.”

“I understand you,” said Maskull.  “Here perhaps we are going to martyrdom, but elsewhere we should resemble men preaching to cattle.”

Shortly before sunset they arrived at the extremity of the upland plain, above which towered the black cliffs of the Sant Levels.  A dizzy, artificially constructed staircase, of more than a thousand steps of varying depth, twisting and forking in order to conform to the angles of the precipices, led to the world overhead.  In the place where they stood they were sheltered from the cutting winds.  Branchspell, radiantly shining at last, but on the point of sinking, filled the cloudy sky with violent, lurid colors, some of the combinations of which were new to Maskull.  The circle of the horizon was so gigantic, that had he been suddenly carried back to Earth, he would by comparison have fancied himself to be moving beneath the dome of some little, closed-in cathedral.  He realised that he was on a foreign planet.  But he was not stirred or uplifted by the knowledge; he was conscious only of moral ideas.  Looking backward, he saw the plain, which for several miles past had been without vegetation, stretching back away to Disscourn.  So regular had been the ascent, and so great was the distance, that the huge pyramid looked nothing more than a slight swelling on the face of the earth.

Spadevil stopped, and gazed over the landscape in silence.  In the evening sunlight his form looked more dense, dark, and real than ever before.  His features were set hard in grimness.