of that imprisoned want." I cried, "Oh, can you see that now, Your Royal Highness? Really? I'm so grateful, you can't have any idea. Why, I can hardly see straight." And that was a fact. A spirit of love and gratitude was moving and pressing and squeezing unbearably inside me. "You want to know what this experience means to me? Why talk about its being strange or illusion? I know it's no illusion when I can speak straight out and tell you what it has been to hear, _I__ _want, I want,__ going on and on. With this to lean on I don't have to worry about hallucinations. I know in my bones that what moves me so is the straight stuff. Before I left home I read in a magazine that there are flowers in the desert (that's the Great American Desert) that bloom maybe once in forty or fifty years. It all depends on the amount of rainfall. Now according to this article, you can take the seeds and put them in a bucket of water, but they won't germinate. No, sir, Your Highness, soaking in water won't do it. It has to be the rain coming through the soil. It has to wash over them for a certain number of days. And then for the first time in fifty or sixty years you see lilies and larkspurs and such. Roses. Wild peaches." I was very much choked up toward the end, and I said hoarsely, "The magazine was the _Scientific American__. I think I told you, Your Highness, my wife subscribes to it. Lily. She has a very lively and curious mi--" Mind was what I wished to say. To speak of Lily also moved me very greatly. "I understand you, Henderson," he said with gravity. "Well, we have a certain mutual comprehension or entente." "King, thanks," I said. "All right, we're beginning to get somewhere." "For a while I request you to reserve the thanks. I have to ask first for your patient confidence. Plus, at the very outset, I request you to believe that I did not leave the world and return to my Wariri with an aim of withdrawal." I might as well say at this place that he had a hunch about the lions; about the human mind; about the imagination, the intelligence, and the future of the human race. Because, you see, intelligence is free now (he said), and it can start anywhere or go anywhere. And it is possible that he lost his head, and that he was carried away by his ideas. This was because he was no mere dreamer but one of those dreamer-doers, a guy with a program. And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgment abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.
XVII
The king had said that he welcomed my visit because of the opportunity for conversation it gave him, and that was no lie. We talked and talked and talked, and I can't pretend that I completely understood him. I can only say I suspended judgment, listening carefully and bearing in mind how he had warned me that the truth might come in forms for which I was unprepared. So I will give you a rough summary of his point of view. He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings. And as he had been a zealous student and great reader he had held down the job of janitor in his school library up there in Syria, and sat after closing hours filling his head with out-of-the-way literature. He would say, for instance, "James, _Psychology,__ a very attractive book." He had studied his way through a load of such books. And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work cither way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh. The process as he saw it was utterly dynamic. Thinking of mind and flesh as I knew them, I said, "Are you really and truly sure it's like that, Your Highness?" Sure? He was better than sure. He was triumphantly sure. He reminded me very much of Lily in his convictions. It exalted them both to believe something and they had a tendency to make curious assertions. Dahfu also liked to talk about