We sit in the niches in the sloping wall, or on the stony floor of the Garden. “Whenever you are troubled,” the old man says, “send your thoughts here. You can travel out of your body—you know this, don’t you?” The children look intent; they have passed no judgment. “This is astral travel: send your thoughts here, to the Enchanted Garden, where there is always peace.”

We sit a moment longer; the bird shifts his weight, cocks his head, lets loose again.

And now it’s up the path, through a thicket of creosote and mesquite, and suddenly here’s something we haven’t seen: a building shaped like a circus tent, only it’s made of scraps of wood, bits and pieces of old signs and sheet metal. Inside are a double row of bleachers facing the dust floor, and a wall of pictures—photographs of fairies perched on the fingertips of Edwardian girls, snippets of old paper dolls, every sort of thing that must for the Mountain Gnome mean childhood, some timeless and strangely antique realm of innocent wonder. I understand that he’s made every bit of this privacy himself; this is an act of preservation, of recapitulation, generous and oddly self-enclosed at once; his work is beautiful and peculiar, which is the only genuine kind of beauty, because it is the only personal kind: idiosyncratic, hard-won, like no other. Here he will perform for us the Magic Show. And it is magic: a wooden Tinker Bell slides down a wire and pops in a burst of light and smoke. Many silk scarves appear from ears and pockets, are cut and rejoined, tied in knots, then suddenly extended to amazing lengths. A snake emerges from a hat, a long, dull black snake which the children who want to—Antonio first among them—are allowed to touch. When the Gnome opens a little wooden door—where did it come from?—a pair of white doves burst out explosively, and Antonio grabs my hand and leans forward, just like that statuette of Snow White, breathless, completely absorbed in the show.

When it’s over we clap and clap, and the Mountain Gnome bows solemnly, then leads us back to the bus. From somewhere-or-other he produces a stack of cards, and as each child files by he places a hand on the girl or boy’s shoulder, with a tenderness that has a certain ecclesiastical air about it, a gesture of blessing. He gives each of us a card, a white business card in the center of which is stitched with red thread a single scarlet sequin. Underneath the bit of shine, the text reads: THE KEY TO THE FAIRY TREASURE HOUSE OF HAPPINESS, HIGH HIGH UP IN THE VALLEY OF THE MOON.