No More Learning

There's a waterfall in it three hundred feet high, just like a sliver of
green jade laced with silver; and millions of wild bees live up in the
rocks; and you can hear the fat cocoanuts falling from the palms; and
you order an ivory-white servant to sling you a long yellow hammock with
tassels on it like ripe maize, and you put up your feet and hear the
bees hum and the water fall till you go to sleep. "

"Can one work there? "

"Certainly. One must do something always. You hang your canvas up in a
palm tree and let the parrots criticise. When the scuffle you heave a
ripe custard-apple at them, and it bursts in a lather of cream. There
are hundreds of places. Come and see them. "

"I don't quite like that place. It sounds lazy. Tell me another. "

"What do you think of a big, red, dead city built of red sandstone,
with raw green aloes growing between the stones, lying out neglected on
honey-coloured sands? There are forty dead kings there, Maisie, each in
a gorgeous tomb finer than all the others. You look at the palaces and
streets and shops and tanks, and think that men must live there,
till you find a wee gray squirrel rubbing its nose all alone in the
market-place, and a jewelled peacock struts out of a carved doorway and
spreads its tail against a marble screen as fine pierced as point-lace.
Then a monkey--a little black monkey--walks through the main square to
get a drink from a tank forty feet deep.
He slides down the creepers to
the water's edge, and a friend holds him by the tail, in case he should
fall in. "

"Is that all true? "

"I have been there and seen. Then evening comes, and the lights change
till it's just as though you stood in the heart of a king-opal. A little
before sundown, as punctually as clockwork, a big bristly wild boar,
with all his family following, trots through the city gate, churning the
foam on his tusks. You climb on the shoulder of a blind black stone god
and watch that pig choose himself a palace for the night and stump in
wagging his tail. Then the night-wind gets up, and the sands move, and
you hear the desert outside the city singing, 'Now I lay me down to
sleep,' and everything is dark till the moon rises. Maisie, darling,
come with me and see what the world is really like. It's very lovely,
and it's very horrible,--but I won't let you see anything horrid,--and
it doesn't care your life or mine for pictures or anything else except
doing its own work and making love. Come, and I'll show you how to brew
sangaree, and sling a hammock, and--oh, thousands of things, and you'll
see for yourself what colour means, and we'll find out together what
love means, and then, maybe, we shall be allowed to do some good work.
Come away! "

"Why? " said Maisie.

"How can you do anything until you have seen everything, or as much as
you can? And besides, darling, I love you. Come along with me.