Chapter VIII: The Realm of New Dimensions

The shadows of our world were vanished. The Borderland, with its darkness, its drab empty slope, was gone. A new world lay spread about me; new companions. And I was conscious of a new entity--a new Robert Manse, who was myself.

I remember now that my first thought was surprise that I should be able to visualize things of strangeness. But now I know that once over the Borderland my _mind_ itself had changed, yet retaining of its old self just enough, so that I might be conscious of the strangeness. In a grey half-light of luminosity seemingly inherent to everything, I found myself standing upon a hillside, gazing down an empty slope of greyness. Was it land? I can only say that it seemed solid beneath me; solid, quivering with a tiny tremble; vibrating, and within itself vaguely luminous.

Overhead was darkness. Yet hardly that, for the same luminosity was there; and I felt that I was gazing, not through emptiness but rather through some tenuous fluid illimitable to my vision, with things there to see, as yet--for me--unseeable.

The slope before me was empty. But shapes were materializing; it was as though I had come out of the darkness, with eyes not yet accustomed to the light. I fancied I saw water in the distance. A white lake; but when I stared, it seemed more like a grey rolling cloud. Was it liquid?...

The mind receives a multitude of impressions in an instant. I was conscious of myself. My body was an entity wholly vague--yet there seemed a tingling in it; a _weight_ to it, for I was standing upright. Will and Bee--and the girl Ala--were beside me. I saw them now in their old familiar form, but with a queer sense of _flatness_ to them. Flat; unnatural of outline; not grotesque, merely strange, unreal. Almost indescribable; and though distinctly it was not a two-dimensional aspect, I think that _flatness_ best describes it. A something about them which was lacking; or perhaps a something added--I do not know.

And inherent to this whole realm as soon I was to see it, was this same queer flatness. Things without _depth_; yet to view them sidewise, the depth was there, with the flatness still persisting.

And I saw color; nameless colors which I might call blue, or red, or green and the words would have no meaning. Men, women--houses, or at least habitations; the words are all I can command, but they are grotesquely meaningless. It was all so incomparably strange; and paradoxically, the strangest of it all was the fashion in which my mind began to accept it. I could think of Ala as nothing but a girl. A frightened, likable girl--with thoughts and feelings similar to my own. This realm was real--a new country; with friends, enemies--a struggle going on within it in which I must play a part. The whole seen and thought of in terms of my own world. And I realized that I--to these others of this other realm--must have seemed a stranger, but not so very strange. Thought of by them in their own terms--each of us upon a common ground, an equality of material state, to visualize the other in terms of ourselves.