For the first time in his mortal days this great diurnal spectacle seemed to his mind half-fantastic; as if this were not the real sun, the sun he had known all his life, that was descending; nor the earth he had known all his life that was thus hiding it from his eyes. “If I do give up Christie for Gerda,” he thought, “it will simply mean that the one unique experience destined for me out of all others by the eternal gods, has been deliberately thrown away.”