Chapter XXIII.

I confess that my conversation with Aph-Lin, and the extreme coolness with which he stated his inability to control the dangerous caprice of his daughter, and treated the idea of the reduction into a cinder to which her amorous flame might expose my too seductive person, took away the pleasure I should otherwise have had in the contemplation of my host’s country-seat, and the astonishing perfection of the machinery by which his farming operations were conducted.  The house differed in appearance from the massive and sombre building which Aph-Lin inhabited in the city, and which seemed akin to the rocks out of which the city itself had been hewn into shape.  The walls of the country-seat were composed by trees placed a few feet apart from each other, the interstices being filled in with the transparent metallic substance which serves the purpose of glass among the Ana.  These trees were all in flower, and the effect was very pleasing, if not in the best taste.  We were received at the porch by life-like automata, who conducted us into a chamber, the like to which I never saw before, but have often on summer days dreamily imagined.  It was a bower—­half room, half garden.  The walls were one mass of climbing flowers.  The open spaces, which we call windows, and in which, here, the metallic surfaces were slided back, commanded various views; some, of the wide landscape with its lakes and rocks; some, of small limited expanses answering to our conservatories, filled with tiers of flowers.  Along the sides of the room were flower-beds, interspersed with cushions for repose.  In the centre of the floor was a cistern and a fountain of that liquid light which I have presumed to be naphtha.  It was luminous and of a roseate hue; it sufficed without lamps to light up the room with a subdued radiance.  All around the fountain was carpeted with a soft deep lichen, not green (I have never seen that colour in the vegetation of this country), but a quiet brown, on which the eye reposes with the same sense of relief as that with which in the upper world it reposes on green.  In the outlets upon flowers (which I have compared to our conservatories) there were singing birds innumerable, which, while we remained in the room, sang in those harmonies of tune to which they are, in these parts, so wonderfully trained.  The roof was open.  The whole scene had charms for every sense—­music form the birds, fragrance from the flowers, and varied beauty to the eye at every aspect.  About all was a voluptuous repose.  What a place, methought, for a honeymoon, if a Gy bride were a little less formidably armed not only with the rights of woman, but with the powers of man!  But when one thinks of a Gy, so learned, so tall, so stately, so much above the standard of the creature we call woman as was Zee, no! even if I had felt no fear of being reduced to a cinder, it is not of her I should have dreamed in that bower so constructed for dreams of poetic love.