Free A Garden of Trees by Nicholas Mosley

“The tide has gone over it. I will say what you want me to say. But there are still some things that are beautiful.”
    Annabelle stepped up the small wooden railing that separated us from the grass, and as she swung herself over she became for a moment like a dancer on her toes. “Beginnings are never beautiful,” she said.
    â€œWhat you want,” I said, “is a place that has died many years ago, a place in which there is no movement and no meaning except that which exists in a fossil or a stone.”
    â€œAnd is there such a place?” Peter said.
    â€œI believe so.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œI have lived in one. I have left it. It is an island in the south. There is nothing living except the cactus and the crabs, and the people are only shadows on the faces of the rocks.”
    â€œAnd you left it?” Peter said; “Why?”
    â€œBecause it was too old,” I said. “It was too old and too dead and too dry. Our world may be ageing, but a grave like that is uncanny. It is too close to the sun. The sun is not the God of life—that is nonsense. The sun is the God of eternity. One cannot live under a sky so old.”
    â€œRain is the God of life,” Marius said, “rain and dampness and softness and dew.”
    â€œOf which there was none. Have you ever lived in a place in which the only softness is rotten? You find it strange. You become frightened of touching things in case your finger goes through.”
    â€œYou need not touch things,” Peter said. “You need only look. You cannot touch beauty, it must always be apart from you. And it must be hard so that it will remain apart from you and you may not be tempted to stroke it.”
    â€œThat is the old beauty,” Marius said, “the beauty that is dead.”
    â€œThen I want it!” Peter said.
    â€œThe new beauty,” Marius said, “is the sound of a swan’s wing and the beginning of fear.”
    â€œLook!” Annabelle said. “Look! There is a shooting star!” Some million miles beyond her pointing finger a star shed out its light some million years ago and vanished.
    â€œThere are always shooting stars,” Peter said. “Whenever you look into the sky you see one. That is why people think them so exceptional.”
    We walked around the square with our collars turned up around our ears while Annabelle, in front of us, swung her coat down from her naked shoulder and swept it about on the ground at her feet sending little swirls of leaves wandering wearily into the darkness.
    After a silence Peter said, “Tell me more about your island.”
    â€œThe only things living,” I said, “are in the sea. Beneath the water blue and gold fish swim among the coral, and you cannot touch them. The island itself is like a sphinx in the desert, and the natives who come there come only by day and by night it is silent.”
    â€œAnd do they speak?” Peter said.
    â€œThey shout and they laugh,” I said, “but I do not remember them as speaking.”
    â€œOh Marius,” Peter said, “let us go to where they only shout and laugh and where the land is like a sphinx in the sea!”
    â€œWe could not shout,” Marius said. “And I think that to live on a sphinx would be sacrilege.”
    â€œBut you love sacrilege!” Peter said. “To you sacrilege is so beautiful!”
    Marius frowned and said nothing.
    â€œYou could be a sphinx,” Peter said.
    We stopped beside the statue. “One cannot live in eternity,” Marius said. “One can only live in memory of it. I know this island. It is we who are too old for it.”
    â€œOlder than the sphinx?”
    â€œOlder than palm trees in the desert. Once the world was a garden and we sat by water and now it is no longer.”
    â€œIt is a desert?”
    â€œExcept by imagination.”
    â€œWe could find new springs.”
    â€œThe same