Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit." They walked up
and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of those queer old
hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot countries.
How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and red,
or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it
up at all."
Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend
had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless
a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was
asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly
suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels.
How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could
not conceive. Both (in themselves) were unpleasant.
"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon abruptly,
"even if they've forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to remember
because they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols
in black, red, or green easy to remember because they had been hard
to guess.
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