lewis never did raise a tower in the wilderness. his towers were in the air. a wish, with him, was seldom father to any deed. i think he expected the wish of itself to create; or if not, he was at least always angered when the nature of things proved to be against him. he would not have been unduly astonished, and would have been wildly grateful, if he had seen looming through the fog next morning a tower such as he desired. but except on paper he never did. as he drew it, the tower was tall and slender as the tallest and slenderest factory chimney, more like a pillar for st simeon stylites than a castle in spain. it would have been several times the height of the elms in the wilderness which he had furiously refused to take into his service. it was to be climbed within by a spiral staircase, each step apparently having its own little window. thus it was riddled by windows.

now, if this idea had come to philip he would have executed it. as it was, lewis’s drawing delighted him. he liked all those windows that made it look as if it were a dead stem rotting away. “but,” said he, “i know a house better than that, with a window for every day of the year. it would be just the thing for you, lewis, because it is built without hands, without bricks, stones, cement, or any expense whatever.... it was only a dream,” he continued, one day as he and i were going down the long street which took us almost straight out into our country. but he did not really think it no more than a dream. he had seen it many times, a large, shadowy house, with windows which he had never counted, but knew to be as many as the days of the year, no more, no less. the house itself was always dark, with lights in some of the windows, never, perhaps, in all.

the strange thing was that philip believed this house must actually exist. perhaps, i suggested, it was hidden among the trees of our woods, like several other houses. no: he dismissed this as fancy. his house was not a fancy. it lay somewhere in a great city, or at the verge of one. on his first visit he had[234] approached it by long wanderings through innumerable, unknown and deserted streets, following a trail of white pebbles like the children in the fairy tale. in all those streets he passed nobody and heard no sound; nor did this surprise him, in spite of the fact that he felt the houses to be thronged with people. suddenly out of the last narrow street he came as it were on a wall of darkness, like night itself. into this he was stepping forward when he saw just beneath and before him a broad, black river, crossed by a low bridge leading over to where, high up, a light beamed in the window of an invisible building. when he began to cross the bridge he could see that it was the greatest house he had ever beheld. it was a house that might be supposed to contain “many mansions.” “you could not make a house like that one out of this whole street,” said philip. “it stretched across the world, but it was a house.” on the other side of the river it seemed still equally far off. birds flying to and fro before it never rose up over it, nor did any come from the other side. philip hastened forward to reach the house. but the one light went out and he awoke.

philip used to look out for this house when he[235] was crossing the bridges in london. he scanned carefully the warehouses and factories rising out of the water, in long rows with uncounted windows, that made him wonder what went on behind them. with this material, he said, a magician could make a house like the one he was in search of. once, when he got home in the evening from london, he was confident that his house lay between waterloo bridge and hungerford bridge, but next time he was there he was dead against any such suggestion. a factory on the edge of a tract of suburb waste fulfilled his conditions for an hour at another time. he had been thrilled, too, by a photograph shown to him by mr stodham—of an ancient palace standing at the foot of a desolate mountain in the remote south.

when we were walking together towards the country philip used to look, as a matter of course, down every side street to right or left, as he always looked up dark alleys in london. nor was he content to look once down any one street, lest he should miss some transformation or transfiguration. as we began to get clear of london, and houses were fewer and all had long front gardens, and shops ceased, philip looked ahead now and then as well as from side to side. beyond the wide, level fields and the tall lombardy poplars bounding them, there was nothing, but there was room for the house. fog thickened early in the afternoon over our vacant territories, but we saw only the trees and a gypsy tent under a hedge.

next day philip came home feverish from school, and was put to bed in the middle of the pale sunny afternoon. he lay happily stretched out with his eyes fixed on a glass of water near the window. it flickered in the light.... he saw the black river gleaming as when a candle for the first time illuminates a lake in the bowels of a mountain. there was the house beyond the river. six or seven of its windows were lit up, one large one low down, the rest small, high up, and, except two of them, wide apart. now and then, at other windows here and there, lights appeared momentarily, like stars uncovered by rapid clouds.... a lofty central door slowly swung open. a tiny figure, as solitary as the first star in the sky, paused at the threshold, to be swallowed up a moment later in darkness. at the same moment philip awoke with a cry, knowing that the figure was himself.

after this philip was not so confident of discovering the house. yet he was more than[237] ever certain that it existed, that all the time of the intervals between his visits it was somewhere. i told him the story about irem dhat el’imad, the terrestrial paradise of sheddad the son of ad, king of the world, which aurelius had read to me. philip was pleased with the part where the geometricians and sages, labourers and artificers of the king search over all the earth, until they come to rivers and an illimitable plain, and choose it for the site of the palace which was three hundred years building. but he said that this story was not true. his own great house never disappeared, he said; it was he that disappeared. by this time he had become so familiar with the house that he probably passed hardly a day without a sight of it, sleeping or waking. he was familiar with its monotonous front, the many storeys of not quite regular diminishing windows. it always seemed to lie out beyond a tract of solitude, silence, and blackness; it was beyond the black river; it was at the edge of the earth. in none of his visits could he get round to the other side. several times again, as on that feverish afternoon, he saw himself entering through the lofty doorway, never emerging. what this self (for so he called it, touching his[238] breast) saw inside the door he never knew. that self which looked on could never reach the door, could not cross the space between it and the river, though it seemed of no formidable immensity. many times he set out to cross and go in at the other door after the other self, but could not. finally he used to imagine that if once he penetrated to the other side he would see another world.

once or twice philip and i found ourselves in streets which he thought were connected with his first journey, but he vainly tried to remember how. he even used to say that at a certain number—once it was 197—lived some one who could help. when another dream took him along the original route of streets he told me that they were now thronged with people going with or against him. they were still all about him as he emerged from the streets in sight of the house, where every window was blazing with lights as he had never seen it before. the crowd was making towards the light across the hitherto always desolate bridge. nevertheless, beyond the river, in the space before the house, he was alone as before. he resolved to cross the space. the great door ahead was empty; no other self at least had the privilege denied to him. he[239] stood still, looking not at the door, but at the windows and at the multitudes passing behind them. his eyes were fixed on the upper windows and on each face in turn that appeared. some faces he recognised without being able to give a name to one. they must have been people whom he had encountered in the street, and forgotten and never seen again until now. apparently not one of them saw him standing out there, in the darkness, looking up at them. he was separated from them as from the dead, or as a dead man might be from the living. the moment he lowered his head to look towards the door, the dream was over.

more than once afterwards, when lewis had ceased to think of his tower, philip saw the hundreds of windows burning in the night above the black river, and saw the stream of faces at the windows; but he gave up expecting to see the house by the light of our sun or moon. he had even a feeling that he would rather not discover it, that if he were to enter it and join those faces at the windows he might not return, never stand out in the dark again and look up at the house.