the higher the litter climbed, the nearer the daylight seemed. And then suddenly the walls leveled off, opening up a view of a vast white expanse. This was the summit, for the Mountain of Destiny culminated not, like most other mountains, in a single peak, but in this high plateau, which was as large as a whole country.
               But then, surprisingly enough, a smaller, odd-looking mountain arose in the midst of the plateau. It was rather tall and narrow, something like the Ivory Tower, but glittering blue. It consisted of innumerable strangely shaped stone teeth, which jutted into the sky like great inverted icicles. And about halfway up the mountain three such teeth supported an egg the size of a house.
               Behind the egg large blue columns resembling the pipes of an enormous organ rose in a semicircle. The great egg had a circular opening, which might have been a door or a window. And in that opening a face appeared. The face was looking straight at the litter.
               The Childlike Empress opened her eyes.

Translated by Ralph Manheim.


MORE LITERARY GENIUS
When I can’t fit the “Literary Genius” segment onto one page, we all benefit—I get to share more of my favorite literature, and you become more cultured. Following is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a classic piece of literature for Christian apologists (those Christians who wish to defend their faith). In it, Chesterton embarks on an intellectual quest that paints Christianity as an answer to the needs of humanity, rather than an esoteric doctrine to be followed in blind faith.
               Another of Chesterton’s works, The Everlasting Man, is credited with converting C.S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity.

FROM ORTHODOXY
by G.K. Chesterton

Chapter VI – The Paradoxes of Christianity

LET US FOLLOW for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
               He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

The full text of Orthodoxy is available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog.