He ran, thinking he could hide behind one of the gold curtains, but his outstretched arms never found it. He ran on and on until at last he felt sure that he was no longer in the throne room. He was about to stop and rest then when he saw a faint light—so faint a light that for a long time he was afraid it might be no more than a trick of his eyes, like the lights he saw when he ground his hands against them. This is my dream, he thought, and I can make the light to be whatever I want it to be. All right, it will be sunlight, and when I get out into it, it will be Nitty and Mr. Parker and me camped someplace—a pretty place next to a creek of cold water—and I’ll be able to see.
The light grew brighter and brighter; it was gold colored, like sunlight.
Then Little Tib saw trees, and he began to run. He was actually running among the trees before he realized that they were not real trees, and that the light he had seen came from them—the sky overhead was a vault of cold stone. He stopped, then. The trunks and branches of the trees were silver; the leaves were gold; the grass under his feet was not grass but a carpet of green gems, and birds with real rubies in their breasts twittered and flew among the trees—but they were not real birds, only toys. There was no Nitty and no Mr. Parker and no water.
Little Tib was about to cry when he noticed the fruit. It hung under the leaves, and was gold, as they were, but for fruit that did not look so unnatural. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Little Tib wondered if he could pull them from the trees, and the first he touched fell into his hands. It was not heavy enough to be solid. After a moment he saw that it unscrewed in the center. He sat down on the grass (which had become real grass in some way, or perhaps a carpet or a bedspread) and opened it. There was a meal inside, but all the food was too hot to eat. He looked and looked, hoping for a salad that would be wet and cool, but there was nothing but hot meat and gravy, and smoking hot cornmeal muffins, and boiled greens so hot and dry he did not even try to put them in his mouth.
At last he found a small cup with a lid on it. It held hot tea—tea so hot it seemed to blister his lips—but he managed to drink a little of it. He put down the cup and stood up to go on through the forest of gold and silver trees, and perhaps find a better place. But all the trees had vanished, and he was in the dark again. My eyes are gone, he thought. I’m waking up. Then he saw a circle of light ahead and heard the pounding; and he knew that it was not marbles dropped on a floor he heard, but the noise of hundreds and hundreds of picks, digging gold in the mines of the gnomes.
The light grew larger—but dimmed at the same time, as a star-shaped shadow grew in it. Then it was not a star at all, but a gnome coming after him. And then it was a whole army of gnomes, one behind the other, with their arms sticking out at every angle, so that it looked like one gnome with a hundred arms, all reaching for him.
Then he woke, and everything was dark.
He sat up. “You’re awake now,” Nitty said.
“Yes.”
“How you feel?”
Little Tib did not answer. He was trying to find out where he was. It was a bed. There was a pillow behind him, and there were clean, starched sheets. He remembered what the doctor had said about the hospital, and asked, “Am I in the hospital?”
“No, we’re in a motel. How do you feel?”
“All right, I guess.”
“You remember about dancing out there on the air?”
“I thought I dreamed it.”
“Well, I thought I dreamed it too—but you were really out there. Everybody saw it, everybody who was around there when you did it. And then when we got you to come in close enough that we could grab hold of you and pull you in, Dr. Prithivi got you to come back to his bus.”
“I remember that,” Little Tib said.
“And he explained about his work and all that, and he took up a collection for it and you went to sleep. You were running that fever again, and Mr. Parker and me couldn’t wake you up much.”
“I had a dream,” Little Tib said, and then he told Nitty all about his dream.
“When you thought you were drinking that tea, that was me giving you your medicine, is what I think. Only it wasn’t hot tea; it was ice water. And that wasn’t a dream you had; it was a nightmare.”
“I thought it was kind of nice,” Little Tib said. “The king was right there, and you could talk to him and explain what had happened.” His hands found a little table next to the bed. There was a lamp on it. He knew he could not see when the bulb lit, but he made the switch go click with his fingers anyway. “How did we get here?” he asked.
“Well, after the collection, when everybody had left, that Dr. Prithivi was hot to talk to you. But me and Mr. Parker said you were with us and we wouldn’t let him unless you had a place to sleep. We told him how you were sick, and all that. So he transferred some money to Mr. Parker’s account, and we rented this room. He says he always sleeps in his bus to look after that Deva.”
“Is that where he is now?”
“No, he’s downtown talking to the people. Probably I should have told you, but it’s the day after you did that, now. You slept a whole day full, and a little more.”
“Where’s Mr. Parker?”
“He’s looking around.”
“He wants to see if that latch on that window is still broken, doesn’t he? And if I’m really little enough to get between those bars.”
“That’s one thing, yes.”
“It was nice of you to stay with me.”
“I’m supposed to tell Dr. Prithivi when you’re awake. That was part of our deal.”
“Would you have stayed anyway?” Little Tib was climbing out of bed. He had never been in a motel before, though he did not want to say so, and he was eager to explore this one.
“Somebody would have had to stay with you.” Little Tib could hear the faint whistles of the numbers on the telephone.
Later, when Dr. Prithivi came, he made Little Tib sit in a big chair with puffy arms. Little Tib told him about the dancing and how it had felt.
“You can see a bit, I think. You are not entirely blind.”
Little Tib said, “No,” and Nitty said, “The doctor in Howard told us he didn’t have any retinas. How is anybody going to see if they don’t have retinas?”
“Ah, I understand, then. Someone told you, I think, about my bus—the pictures I have made on the sides of it. Yes, that must be it. Did they tell you?”
“Tell me about what?” Little Tib asked.
Talking to Nitty, Dr. Prithivi said, “You have described the paintings on the side of my bus to this child?”
“No,” Nitty said. “I looked at them when I got in, but I never talked about them.”
“Yes, indeed, I did not think so. It was not likely, I think, that you had seen it before I stopped for you on the road, and you were in my presence after that. Nevertheless, there is a picture on the left side of my bus that is a picture of a man with a lion’s head. It is Vishnu destroying the demon Hiranyakasipu. Is it not interesting that this boy, arriving in a vehicle with such a picture, should be led to dance on air by a lion-headed figure? It was Vishnu also who circled the universe in two strides; this is a kind of dancing on air, perhaps.”
“Uh-huh,” Nitty said. “But George here couldn’t have seen that picture.”
“But perhaps the picture saw him—that is the point you are missing. Still, the lion has many significations. Among the Jews, it is the emblem of the tribe of Judah. For this reason the Emperor of Ethiopia is styled Lion of Judah. Also the son-in-law of Mohammed, whose name I cannot recall now when I need it, was styled Lion of God. Christianity too is very rich in lions. You noticed perhaps that I asked the boy particularly if the lion he saw had wings. I did that because a winged lion is the badge of Saint Mark. But a lion without wings indicates the Christ—this is because of the old belief that the cubs of the lion are dead at birth, and are licked to life afterward by the lioness. In the writings of Sir C. S. Lewis a lion is used in that way, and in the prayers revealed to Saint Bridget of Sweden the Christ is styled ‘Strong Lion, immortal and invincible King.’ ”