“Please your majesty,” said the Shadows, “this is our church—the Church of the Shadows.”
And so saying, the king’s bodyguard set down the litter upon a rock, and plunged into the multitudes below. They soon returned, however, and bore the king down into the middle of the lake. All the Shadows came crowding round him, respectfully but fearlessly; and sure never such a grotesque assembly revealed itself before to mortal eyes. The king had seen all kind of gnomes, goblins, and kobolds at his coronation; but they were quite rectilinear figures compared with the insane lawlessness of form in which the Shadows rejoiced; and the wildest gambols of the former were orderly dances of ceremony beside the apparently aimless and wilful contortions of figure, and metamorphoses of shape, in which the latter indulged. They retained, however, all the time, to the surprise of the king, an identity, each of his own type, inexplicably perceptible through every change. Indeed this preservation of the primary idea of each form was more wonderful than the bewildering and ridiculous alterations to which the form itself was every moment subjected.
“What are you?” said the king, leaning on his elbow, and looking around him.
“The Shadows, your majesty,” answered several voices at once.
“What Shadows?”
“The human Shadows. The Shadows of men, and women, and their children.”
“Are you not the shadows of chairs and tables, and pokers and tongs, just as well?”