He might easily have brought more trees into being and covered the bare places with red beauty, but his sojourn along the coast had awakened in him a taste for variety, and he was beginning to see wrongness in all of the trees’ being of the same kind. More perfect would have been a world in which trees of diverse kinds grew on the hills and in the valleys. On an impulse he flew up one rocky vale that carried a tributary of unusual size. Such a great stream, he reckoned, must spring from a correspondingly great place. He followed it uphill for a time until he came to a place of immense rocks protruding from the ground, which he knew to be mountains. On their slopes he made new sorts of trees that were forever green, a darker green than that of the trees in the park. As he flew low over this new forest to inspect it, a new sensation came to him: this forest had a fragrance that spoke to him, somehow, of such forests in the place he had abided before he had died. He breathed it in deep, and knew that his face, still unseen, had affordances for drawing in the wind and smelling what it was made of.

After a few turns around those mountains he followed the great tributary back down to the main channel of the river and doubled back along the course that would lead him up through the red forest to the top of his hill. This too had a fragrance now, less strong than that of the dark green forests in the mountains, but nonetheless pleasing.

He alit in the park to find all little different from how it had been when he had departed, save that many more leaves had fallen to the ground, and some had become dry and begun to scuttle about in the wind. In many of these he sensed the inchoate tangles of rude perception that he identified as souls. Walking up and down the street, strolling in the park, and ranging through the forest in the next few days he counted perhaps ten times ten of them. Their presence no longer troubled him as it had at first. Yet he felt that the time had arrived for him to make some place into which they could not go, so that, when he so chose, he could be alone as he had been used to during the first eons since he had died.