A golden landscape was projected on land and sea.  A central aisle of waters, paved by the golden rays of a lyric sun high overhead, was embellished on either side by the marmoreal splendours of stately palaces.  An ilex inclined its graceful head to its liquid image; men moved the blocks that made famous in the mouth of the world Queen Dido’s Carthage.  Clouds of pearl-coloured smoke encircled the enchanting picture.  And the galleys came and went in this symphonic, glittering spectacle.

“Turner would have died of envy,” said Gerald aloud.  There was a remarkable vibration of life, not as he had seen it in mechanical bioscopes, but the vivid life of earth and sunshine.

The scenes that succeeded were many:  episodes from profane and sacred histories; simulacra of the great saints.  A war between giants and pygmies was shown with all its accompanying horrors.  The firmament dripped crimson.  The four cryptic creatures of Ezekiel’s vision came out of the north, a great cloud of “infolding fire” and the colour was amber.  A cyclopean and dazzling staircase thronged by moving angelic shapes, harping mute harps, stretched from sea to sky, melting into the milky way like the tail of a starry serpent.  Followed the opening of the dread prophetic seals; but, after an angel had descended from heaven, his face as the sun and at his feet pillars of fire, the people, prostrate like stalks of corn beaten by a tempest, worshipped in fear.  These things were supernatural.  The heavens were displaying the glory of God.

Not knowing whether the signs in the skies might be construed as blasphemous, and lost in fathomless admiration for the marvellous power of the wizard, Gerald sought to get closer to Karospina and Mila.  But wedged in by uniformed men, and the darkness thick as an Egyptian plague, he despairingly awaited the apotheosis.  His eyes were sated by the miracles of harmonies—­noiseless harmonies.  It was a new art, and one for the peoples of the earth.  Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, and modulated.  And the human eye, adapting itself to the new synthesis of arabesque and rhythm, evoked order and symbolism from these novel chords of colour.  There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters and sparkling shields, and finally the whole mass would reunite and evaporate into brilliant violet auroras or seven-tailed, vermilion-coloured comets.  There were gleaming rainbows of unknown tints—­strange scales of chromatic pigments; “a fiery snow without wind;” and once a sun, twice the size of our own, fell into the ocean; and Gerald could have sworn that he felt a wave of heated air as if from a furnace; that he heard a seething sound, as if white-hot metal had come in contact with icy water.  Consumed by anxiety for Mila’s safety, he wished that these soundless girandoles, this apocalypse of architectural fire and weaving flame, would end.