Book Two

After these remarks, it seemed to me that I went travelling through the city of Athens–eager to search further–until suddenly I came upon the schools. Delighted to have arrived at such a noble university, eager for my mind profitably to drink in their erudition, I was pausing among scholars of the various learned faculties disputing and debating various questions together, ¹ when, just as I pricked up my ears to listen, my sight overcame my hearing. Lifting my eyes, I saw a great, feminine, bodiless shadow–a spiritual thing quite bizarre in nature–flying among them. Experience proved her to be preternatural; for this substance I saw was a single shadow, yet more than a hundred thousand million (indeed innumerable) parts–some large, others small, others smaller still–did she create from herself. These parts of the shadow then assembled in great crowds such as clouds or flocks of birds make in the sky, but there were more of them than all the birds who ever flew, so each was differentiated from the other by its color; for by all the colors that have ever existed and more were they set apart. There was one great mass of all the whites, others of all the reds, others blue, others the color of fire, others of water, and so on with all the hues. Just like birds of the same species, those of the same color remained together. They sometimes intermingled, but each always returned to its own color. Yet even though each color stayed together, some were successively tinted more deeply than others. One was thus a brighter red, another paler, another deeper, and so on with all the hues, so that hardly any were completely undifferentiated from the others. Like the colors of these shadows, the forms were [also] separated into groups; for no body, be it of 60human, strange beast, bird, sea monster, serpent, the highest celestial substances or of anything whatsoever that thought can present to the imagination–indeed anything that God might have ever created–was absent. ² There were so many strange things that no mind could conceive of it. But no giant serpent or harrowing beast–no mortal thing–terrified me as much as the horrible, black, disfigured, and hellish monsters, whose memory still fills me with horror.