"Come up to the heights of the precipice," he called out.
She came to him in all her splendour and beauty, that companion whom he had loved all his long and eventful life. Her auburn hair flew in the south-west wind, streaming out like the plume of a ship's sail. For some reason, he wept when he saw her.
Beauty always made him weep. There was pain and longing in his eyes, and her unruffled magnificence gave him a feeling of sadness, almost as though he was losing an ancient plaything of his youth, a toy once treasured and now cast aside, yet missed when vaguely remembered in the twilight of his days.
Why he should feel like this now, was a mystery.
"You will remember me when I'm gone," He asked, more a statement than a question.
She looked out to the far hills, with a quizzical expression on her face, and a look of expectation in her eyes.
"Never fear, Beloved," she replied.
The call of a wild bird distracted him. He saw it circling the crags and buttresses of the mountain rock.
"Oh to fly like that!," He thought. "To dive and run on the wind, like a paper plane in a whirlpool of air."
He looked at her and wasn't surprised to see that she appeared to have wings and a ring of gold about her head. It was probably the dying sunlight in her hair, and a trick of the elements, but she seemed ready to fly away from him, and join the wheeling bird in its restless flight about the valley below.
"Are you going to fly with me?" She asked.
"I'm too old for that kind of flight," he whispered, but she didn't hear him.
The women, whose name was Faith, took his hand in her own.
"Just come with me, do not fear, it will be exciting, just you and me and our vast experience of the unknowable." She laughed.
He couldn't help smiling, himself. She was incorrigible.
Without warning she was off the cliff. He pulled back, but her grip was stronger than his determination to resist.
For about a hundred feet they fell! For some reason there was no fear, only a slight apprehension that their "flight" would end. However, the wind, or they thought it was the wind, took over, and the plummet towards earth became a light floating, as if an invisible parachute had opened above them, as they came closer to their resting place. She rapped him in her arms, hugging him to her, as a mother hugs her child when the realisation comes that not only is this life all hers, and hers alone, but that she herself has been mysteriously instrumental in its creation.
"And all shall be well," she whispered.
"And all manner of thing shall be well," he completed the quotation.
"When the tongues of fire are in-folded," they sang in unison.
Within the knot of fire the Rose grew. It reminded him of "Fragrant Cloud," the perfection and the smell, of an unblemished bloom.
"And the fire and the rose are one." The poem ended as they had expected it would.
The voice was not theirs. From within the flower the sound of singing, and before them stood a throne.
"It's true!" He said
"It's true." She affirmed.