He, at any rate, was not inventing; nor ever knew an instant's doubt. He simply told me what had happened. The discrepancies--the omissions in his written account especially--were simply due, I feel, to the fact that his skill in words was not equal to the depth and brilliance of the emotions that he experienced. But the fact remains: he did experience them. His fairy tale convinced.
His faith had made him whole--one with the Earth. The sense of disunion between his outer and his inner self was gone.
And now, as these two began their journey together into the wilder region of these stupendous mountains, O'Malley says he realized clearly that the change he had dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" simply would mean the complete and final transfer of his consciousness from the "without" to the "within." It would involve the loss only of what constituted him a person among the external activities of the world today. He would lose his life to find it. The deeper self thus quickened by the stranger must finally assert its authority over the rest. To join these Urwelt beings and share their eternal life of beauty close to the Earth herself, he must shift the center. Only thus could he enter the state before the "Fall"--that ancient Garden of the World-Soul, walled-in so close behind his daily life--and know deliverance from the discontent of modern conditions that so distressed him.
To do this temporarily, perhaps, had long been possible to him--in dream, in reverie, in those imaginative trances when he almost seemed to leave his body altogether; but to achieve it permanently was something more than any such passing disablement of the normal self. It involved, he now saw clearly, that which he had already witnessed in the boy: the final release of his Double in so-called death.
Thus, as they made their way northwards, nominally toward the mighty Elbruz and the borders of Swanetia, the Irishman knew in his heart that they in reality came nearer to the Garden long desired, and to those lofty Gates of horn and ivory that hitherto he had never found--because he feared to let himself go. Often he had camped beneath the walls, had smelt the flowers, heard the songs, and even caught glimpses of the life that moved so gorgeously within. But the Gates themselves had never shone for him, even against the sky of dream, because his vision had been clouded by alarm. They swung, it had seemed to him before, in only one direction--for those who enter: he had always hesitated, lost his way, returned.... And many, like him, make the same mistake. Once in, there need be no return, for in reality the walls spread outwards and--enclose the entire world.