So the king, listening to this music, felt that something was rising behind him. And turning, beheld course after course of a great building. Almost as soon as he had looked it had risen completed, finished to the last embossure on the windows, the tracery on the highest pinnacles. All had happened while the old man was blowing on his pipe, and when he ceased all was perfect.
And yet the appearance was very strange, for a finished and seemingly habitable building rose out of waste unreclaimed soil, strewn with rocks and barren. No dwellings were near the palace to wait on it, no roads led to it or away from it.
“There should be houses around it, and roadways,” said the king; “make them, and fields sown with corn, and all that is necessary for a state.”
Blowing on his pipe in regular recurrent cadences, the old man called up houses close together, than scattered singly along roads which stretched away into the distance, to be seen every here and there perfectly clearly where they ascended a rising ground. And near at hand could be distinguished fields of grain and pasture land.
Yet as the king turned to walk towards the new scene, the old man laughed. “All this is a dream,” he cried; “so much I can do, but not at once.” And breathing peals of music from his pipe, he said, “This can be, but is not yet.”
“What,” asked the king, “is all a delusion?” and as he asked everything sank down. There was no palace, no houses or fields, only the steep precipice-locked valley, whither the king had ridden; and his horse cowering behind him.
Then the king cried, “Thou art some moonstruck hermit, leading out a life of folly alone. Get thee to the village thou knowest, and bring me help.”
But the old man answered him saying, “Great king, I am bound to obey thee, and all the creative might of my being I lay at thy feet; and lo, in the midst of this valley I make for thee beings such as I can produce. And all that thou hast seen is as nothing to what I can do for thee. The depths of the starry heavens have no limit, nor what I do for thee. Hast thou ever in thy life looked into the deep still ocean, and lost thy sight in the unseen depths? Even so thou wilt find no end in what I will give thee. Hast thou ever in thy life sought the depths of thy love’s blue eyes, and found therein a world which stretched on endlessly? Even so I bring all to thy feet. Now that all the gladness of the world has departed from thee, behold, I am a more willing servant than ever thou hast had.”