“Have you never wished to go beyond the wall?” he asked her.

“Yes, often!” she said, fingering the golden serpent thoughtfully.  “But that could not be unless I put out the lamp.  Sometimes I get tired of this world,—­it has changed since I first came to it.”

“Is it less beautiful?”

“It is smaller than it used to be,” said Gnulemah, pensively.  “Once the house was so high, it seemed to touch heaven;—­see how it has dwindled since then!  And so with other things that are on earth.  The stars and the sun and clouds, they have not changed!”

“That is a consolation, is it not?” observed Balder, between a smile and a sigh.  Gnulemah was not the first to charge upon the world the alterations in the individual; nor the first, either, to find comfort in the constancy of Heaven.

She went on, won to further confidence by her listener’s sympathy,—­

“I used to hope the wall would one day become so low that I might pass over it.  But it has ceased to change, and is still too high.  Shall I ever see the other side?”

“It can be broken down if need be.  But you might go far before finding a world so fair as this.  Perhaps it would be better to stand on the cliff, and only look forth across the river.”

“I cannot stay always here,” returned Gnulemah, shaking her turbaned head, with its gleaming bandeau and rattling pendants.  “But no wall is between me and the sky; the flame of my lamp goes upward, and why should not Gnulemah?”

“A friend is the only world one does not tire of,” he replied after a pause.  “You have lacked companions.”

Gnulemah glanced down at the hoopoe, who forthwith warbled aloud and fluttered up to her shoulder.  The bird was her companion, and so, likewise, were the plants and flowers.  Gnulemah could converse with them in their own language.  Nature was her friend and confidant, and intimately communed with her.

All this was conveyed to Balder’s apprehension, not by words, but by some subtile expressiveness of eye and gesture.  Gnulemah could give voiceless utterances in a manner pregnant and felicitous almost beyond belief.

“I meet also a beautiful maiden in the looking-glass,” she added; “her face and motion are always the same as my own.  But though she seems to speak, her voice never reaches me; and she smiles, but only when I smile; and mourns only when I mourn.  We can never reach each other; but there is more in her than in my birds and flowers.”

“She is the shadow of yourself; no reality, Gnulemah.”

“Are we shadows of each other, then? is she weary of her world, as I of mine? shall we both escape to some other,—­or only pass each into the other’s, and be separated as before?”

Balder, like wise men before him, was at some loss how to bring his wisdom to bear here.  He could not in one sentence explain the complicated phenomena in question.  Fortunately, however, Gnulemah (who had apparently not yet learned to appeal from her own to another’s judgment) seemed hardly to expect a solution to problems upon which she had expended much private thought.