AWAKENING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 29, 4 February 1933, Page 16 (Supplement)

AWAKENING.

(Winning entry by Ruth Park. 120, Symonds Street, Auckland; ago 15.) Testa, who had never seen the light, or the pale wonder of the siars, drifted slowly past the borderline which separated the darkness of her waking hours from the darkness of sleep. Sleep for her was always a black wilderness of terror, peopled by the unknown beings created by her fancy, spectral, malignant and unutterably dreadful—dreaminhabitants of the world she had never seen. To-night, as she drifted silently into the shadow land, Testa felt her old dread of sleep and the dreams which were its outcome, and wished that she might dream as others do, of colour and the wonderful, mysterious light which was so beautiful and so unattainable. Her thoughts wandered into incoherency and she fell asleep. Out of the black mist of her blindness she came, and into the magical world of light. F!ar above her she could see the blue-veiled mountains, hidden behind the shifting, changing wraiths of clojid. Above her was the vast blue floor of the sky, an illimitable mosaic of star-patterned darkness, in which hung a silvery globe, swinging round the earth cm its far-flung orbit. Testa clasped her hands in the ecstasy of sight and raised an enraptured face to the vast blue dome which was the floor of heaven. "Sight! Sight!" she breathed. "It is but a dream," said her sleeping mind. "Dream! Dream!" echoed the wind. "Dreams! Dreams!" said the voice of the sleepy bird who sang in the bushes. But Testa did not hear. In her ears was only the elusive echoes of faint faraway music—music born of the night, one with the stars and the wind. She climbed the road s which led ever upwards towards the mountain-tops, climbed it on feet which never stumbled and which seemed strangely light. Up above the clouds she climbed, and still went onwards, while all the while the moon sank lower and the stars paled into nothingness. The great blue peak stood aloof and silently majestic ; clothed in that lonely grandeur which belongs _ alone to lofty crags ijnd the mist-veiled heads of ancient mountains. Testa stood still when she reached the topmost pinnacle and gazed in rapture at the east. The sky was bright with the coming of the dawn, and in the heart of its radiance she could see 'a city—a city of light, with walls of Lyacinthine glow, builded from the mist of the rainbow. She could see the rosetipped minarets, the golden spires and flashing opaline towers which hovered upon the horizon like dream castles or fata Morgana. Towards its gates there stretched a shining road which Testa knew she must travel. "The world of humans cannot- be so beautiful, she said. "It is only a dream. Oil, that I might never wake!" .Lhcn in lier ears there sounded a voice, sweeter by far than the voice of the streams, more beautiful than the star-paved skies of the evening. ou have travelled a long road, through pain and darkness, Aut yo" have found that at its end lies the 1 eternal city, that is the haV6n of all men. The dream is ended and this— is the awakening.