“Do you believe in fate?” asked the girl abruptly, as he seated himself on the sand beside her.  “That’s a silly, schoolgirl thing to say, isn’t it?” she added.  “But I was thinking of this boat being there in the middle of the dry desert, just when we needed it most.”

“It had been there some time,” pointed out Banneker.  “And if we couldn’t have come this way, I’d have found some other.”

“I believe you would,” crowed Io softly.

“So, I don’t believe in fate; not the ready-made kind.  Things aren’t that easy.  If I did—­”

“If you did?” she prompted as he paused.

“I’d get back into the boat with you and throw away the oars.”

“I dare you!” she cried recklessly.

“We’d go whirling and spinning along,” he continued with dreams in his voice, “until dawn came, and then we’d go ashore and camp.”

“Where?”

“How should I know?  In the Enchanted Canyon where it enters the Mountains of Fulfillment....  They’re not on this map.”

“They’re not on any map.  More’s the pity.  And then?”

“Then we’d rest.  And after that we’d climb to the Plateau Beyond the Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there...”

“And there?”

“There we’d hear the Undying Voices singing.”

“Should we sing, too?”

“Of course.  ’For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above evil and the fear thereof.’”

“I don’t know what that is, but I hate the ‘upward toil’ part of it, and the ‘abstention’ even more.  We ought to be able to become demigods without all that, just because we wish it.  In a fairy-tale, anyway.  I don’t think you’re a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban.”

“You haven’t let me go on to the ‘live happy ever after’ part,” he complained.

“Ah, that’s the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always concealed in the gardens of dreams.  They don’t, Ban; people don’t live happy ever after.  I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point.  Just there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger—­she’s a horrid hag, Ban, but we’d all be dead or mad without her—­and points to the wriggling little snake.”

“In my garden,” said he, “she’d have shining wings and eyes that could look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a lover.  It would be worth all the toil and the privation.”

“Nobody ever made up a Paradise,” said the girl fretfully, “but what the Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with thorns and stings....  Look, Ban!  Here’s the moon come back to us....  And see what’s laughing at us and our dreams.”

On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.

“How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove their existence?” she said.  “And, look!  There’s the good spirit in front of that shining cloud.”