It was a landscape alien to all Philip's notion, for he had lived
in circles that worshipped exact realism; and yet here again, strangely to
himself, he felt a reality greater than any achieved by the masters in
whose steps humbly he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the
representation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo came to
look at the picture they recognised their houses. The painter had painted
exactly what he saw but he had seen with the eyes of the spirit. There was
something unearthly in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soul
seen by a wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on a
green hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was surrounded by
massive walls and bastions to be stormed by no machines or engines of
man's invention, but by prayer and fasting, by contrite sighs and by
mortifications of the flesh. It was a stronghold of God. Those gray houses
were made of no stone known to masons, there was something terrifying in
their aspect, and you did not know what men might live in them. You might
walk through the streets and be unamazed to find them all deserted, and
yet not empty; for you felt a presence invisible and yet manifest to every
inner sense. It was a mystical city in which the imagination faltered like
one who steps out of the light into darkness; the soul walked naked to and
fro, knowing the unknowable, and conscious strangely of experience,
intimate but inexpressible, of the absolute.
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