The Age of Magic by Ben Okri Page A

alongside the lake. The mountain loomed in the dark, unseen. Bright clusters of towns, rising tier upon tier, dazzled from the other side of the lake. To their right was the distant Klewenalp.
    As they walked they heard music. It seemed to come from the lake. Lao, thinking about the lake and the mountain, said:
    ‘A lake’s mystery depends upon her surroundings.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘If a lake is surrounded by forest…’
    ‘It takes on the quality of a fairy tale.’
    ‘But if it’s at the foot of a mountain…’
    ‘It becomes sublime.’
    They walked on in silence. They found, without knowing when, that they had turned off the road and wandered towards the town. The essence of pine was carried from the mountain on the swift wind. Elegant houses, of wood and stone, appeared dimly in the faint light. They had read that the mountains had given rise to legends of dragons and giants, ghosts and witches and even meerkats. Something of those legends scented the air as they wandered through the quiet streets, following their intuition.
    Everything they saw was wrapped in the mystery of first encounters. They stared at gardens and school buildings, at darkened restaurants and shop-windows and little parks. They knew they were not seeing what was there but only the strangeness and the general beauty of the new place. They had often talked about this in the past, in fact they had abbreviated it to a formula: to see something once you need to see it thrice . But they also felt that first seeing had something special about it and they tried to be attentive to the revelations and misunderstandings of first encounters, with books, people and places.
    They walked through the dream-like streets of the town, aware that they were idealising it. Quaint buildings, like dolls’ houses, were simplified by their gaze. A fairy tale mood accompanied them through the sleeping town. The night invested everything with a quality from another realm. The strangeness made them alert.
    They passed a dimly lit blue and yellow post office, wooden chalets and stone houses. A clock tower stood mute in the centre of a street. They couldn’t read the time on its face. The statue of a boy interrupted them. It seemed as if everything was stripped of its original intention and now stood in the dark, like signposts in a world of dreams.
    Lao was gliding through a world he knew before birth. Mistletoe was in a lucid dream. The wind was gentle, the air pure and lovely to breathe. Each breath felt like a purification.
    Things which we experience for the first time and which delight us are glimpses of Eden, Lao thought. The beauty of first encounters is so fleeting. The wise wait for time to recast its spell before returning to those encounters again.
    ‘We’re not coming back here for a long time, if ever,’ he said aloud.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I feel it.’
    ‘Then we should really take it in while we’re here.’
    ‘But can we?’
    ‘We can try.’
    ‘The first time will be the best, though,’ said Lao.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Mistletoe said. ‘There’s wisdom in repetition, in going to the same place often, seeing the same painting again and again, re-reading a much loved book.’
    ‘Most people would say repetition is boring.’
    ‘The young maybe.’
    ‘We’re young,’ Lao laughed briefly. ‘I think the first seeing, the first mis-reading is the truest.’
    ‘Why? You didn’t think so before. You used to say thrice is once.’
    ‘I still do. But I think something of our deeper selves lives in the magic of first encounters. We try later to recapture that first enchantment, but only rare experiences reawaken it.’
    ‘Maybe we’ll awaken the magic of this walk in a future journey.’
    ‘I suppose that’s what a classic is.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘A work that has the spring of eternal freshness within it. It manages to be new each time you encounter it.’
    ‘Yes,’ Mistletoe said. ‘But some time needs to pass for the