Landscape with figures

How it begins

WE take this flower-filled and graceful story of a summer visit to a valley of the Far East from the diaries and minutes of Ambrose Herbert. It grows from his leaves like an image of some choice, cultivated flower, some Asiatic lake-lily; there is, indeed, a delicate lily-smell, a faint water-smell, that teases the sense with a hint of queer landscapes, alien, impenetrable faces, in an unreal world of paradoxical dreams. Yet they visited the real heart of that image, these seven men who called themselves, in a vein of humour, the Seven Sages, and it appears that they scarcely held their own, when it came to philosophy, with the uncompromising practitioners of wisdom they found there.