It was a surfeit of perfection that drove the soul-painter Therion Nismile from the crystalline cities of Castle Mount to the dark forests of the western continent. All his life he had lived amid the wonders of the Mount, traveling through the Fifty Cities according to the demands of his career, exchanging one sort of splendor for another every few years. Dundilmir was his native city — his first canvases were scenes of the Fiery Valley, tempestuous and passionate with the ragged energies of youth — and then he dwelled some years in marvelous Canzilaine of the talking statues, and afterward in Stee the awesome, whose outskirts were three days' journey across, and in golden Halanx at the very fringes of the Castle, and for five years at the Castle itself, where he painted at the court of the Coronal Lord Thraym. His paintings were prized for their calm elegance and their perfection of form, which mirrored the flawlessness of the Fifty Cities to the ultimate degree. But the beauty of such places numbs the soul, after a time, and paralyzes the artistic instincts. When Nismile reached his fortieth year he found himself beginning to identify perfection with stagnation; he loathed his own most famous works; his spirit began to cry out for upheaval, unpredictability, transformation.
The moment of crisis overtook him in the gardens of Tolingar Barrier, that miraculous park on the plain between Dundilmir and Stipool. The Coronal had asked him for a suite of paintings of the gardens, to decorate a pergola under construction on the Castle's rim. Obligingly Nismile made the long journey down the slopes of the enormous mountain, toured the forty miles of park, chose the sites where he meant to work, set up his first canvas at Kazkas Promontory, where the contours of the garden swept outward in great green symmetrical pulsating scrolls. He had loved this place when he was a boy. On all of Majipoor there was no site more serene, more orderly, for the Tolingar gardens were composed of plants bred to maintain themselves in transcendental tidiness. No gardener's shears touched these shrubs and trees; they grew of their own accord in graceful balance, regulated their own spacing and rate of replacement, suppressed all weeds in their environs, and controlled their proportions so that the original design remained forever unbreached. When they shed their leaves or found it needful to drop an entire dead bough, enzymes within dissolved the cast-off matter quickly into useful compost. Lord Havilbove, more than a hundred years ago, had been the founder of this garden; his successors Lord Kanaba and Lord Sirruth had continued and extended the program of genetic modification that governed it; and under the present Coronal Lord Thraym its plan was wholly fulfilled, so that now it would remain eternally perfect, eternally balanced. It was that perfection which Nismile had come to capture.
He faced his blank canvas, drew breath deep down into his lungs, and readied himself for entering the trance state. In a moment his soul, leaping from his dreaming mind, would in a single instant imprint the unique intensity of his vision of this scene on the psychosensitive fabric. He glanced one last time at the gentle hills, the artful shrubbery, the delicately angled leaves — and a wave of rebellious fury crashed against him, and he quivered and shook and nearly fell. This immobile landscape, this static, sterile beauty, this impeccable and matchless garden, had no need of him; it was itself as unchanging as a painting, and as lifeless, frozen in its own faultless rhythms to the end of time. How ghastly! How hateful! Nismile swayed and pressed his hands to his pounding skull. He heard the soft surprised grunts of his companions, and when he opened his eyes he saw them all staring in horror and embarrassment at the blackened and bubbling canvas. "Cover it!" he cried, and turned away. Everyone was in motion at once; and in the center of the group Nismile stood statue-still. When he could speak again he said quietly, "Tell Lord Thraym I will be unable to fulfill his commission."
And so that day in Dundilmir he purchased what he needed and began his long journey to the lowlands, and out into the broad hot flood-plain of the Iyann River, and by riverboat interminably along the sluggish Iyann to the western port of Alaisor; and at Alaisor he boarded, after a wait of weeks, a ship bound for Numinor on the Isle of Sleep, where he tarried a month. Then he found passage on a pilgrim-ship sailing to Piliplok on the wild continent of Zimroel. Zimroel, he was sure, would not oppress him with elegance and perfection. It had only eight or nine cities, which in fact were probably little more than frontier towns. The entire interior of the continent was wilderness, into which Lord Stiamot had driven the aboriginal Metamorphs after their final defeat four thousand years ago. A man wearied of civilization might be able to restore his soul in such surroundings.
Nismile expected Piliplok to be a mudhole, but to his surprise it turned out to be an ancient and enormous city, laid out according to a maddeningly rigid mathematical plan. It was ugly but not in any refreshing way, and he moved on by riverboat up the Zimr. He journeyed past great Ni-moya, which was famous even to inhabitants of the other continent, and did not stop there; but at a town called Verf he impulsively left the boat and set forth in a hired wagon into the forests to the south. When he had traveled so deep into the wilderness that he could see no trace of civilization, he halted and built a cabin beside a swift dark stream. It was three years since he had left Castle Mount. Through all his journey he had been alone and had spoken to others only when necessary, and he had not painted at all.
Here Nismile felt himself beginning to heal. Everything in this place was unfamiliar and wonderful. On Castle Mount, where the climate was artificially controlled, an endless sweet springtime reigned, the unreal air was clear and pure, and rainfall came at predictable intervals. But now he was in a moist and humid rain-forest, where the soil was spongy and yielding, clouds and tongues of fog drifted by often, showers were frequent, and the vegetation was a chaotic, tangled anarchy, as far removed as he could imagine from the symmetries of Tolingar Barrier. He wore little clothing, learned by trial and error what roots and berries and shoots were safe to eat, and devised a wickerwork weir to help him catch the slender crimson fish that flashed like skyrockets through the stream. He walked for hours through the dense jungle, savoring not only its strange beauty but also the tense pleasure of wondering if he could find his way back to his cabin. Often he sang, in a loud erratic voice; he had never sung on Castle Mount. Occasionally he started to prepare a canvas, but always he put it away unused. He composed nonsensical poems, voluptuous strings of syllables, and chanted them to an audience of slender towering trees and incomprehensibly intertwined vines. Sometimes he wondered how it was going at the court of Lord Thraym, whether the Coronal had hired a new artist yet to paint the decorations for the pergola, and if the halatingas were blooming now along the road to High Morpin. But such thoughts came rarely to him.