“This world is not made of bread and honey,” cried Wolf, the worm, to the skull of his father, “nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.”

But the skull answered him in haste and spoke roughly to him. “What you have found out today, worm of my folly, I had outgrown when I was in the Sixth at Ramsgard and was seduced by Western Minor in the Headmaster’s garden. To turn the world again into mist and vapour is easy and weak. To keep it alive, to keep it real, to hold it at arm’s length, is the way of gods and demons.”

And Wolf, hearing this, lifted up his worm’s-voice within that mocker and cried out upon its lewd clay-cold cunning.

“There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky.”