people can visit each other there as well as anywhere else. But visitors may not be equals for all that. In each society will be found those who love and affect birds and just as sure as he or she has a bird in the soul, just so sure will that bird be born thereof, and become, to all intents and purposes (except begetting its kind) a veritable bird. Others love trees, rivers, castles, brooks, hills, dales, vales, vineyards, gardens, groves, cottages, palaces, mountains, animals, and so on, through an interminable list, and interminable combinations of what that list may contain.
Whatever be the ideal of a man or community, just so will be the out-sphering thereof. Thus, Mohammed (and the Orientals generally) loved woman, for the sake of the sense-gratifications she was found capable of imparting. Accordingly, when his soul was transfigured, it went directly to that section of the Soul-world where were congregated those like unto himself; and, when he came back, he fired his partizans with the deepest and wildest enthusiasm ever known on earth, by telling them that the women of Paradise were fairer than the full moon, more lovely than the dawn, and that every mother's son of the faithful should be rewarded there, for all their earthly sorrows, by the absolute possession of the moderate number of seventy thousand houris.
Mohammed was not a liar nor an impostor; he told what he believed to be truth. His houris, like the birds and beasts just spoken of, were out-creations of the sensualistic mind of the sphere into which he rode on the saddle of Al Borak. Every man or woman's mind is an empire, and the higher the position each occupies upon the plane of the Harmonead, the more extensive is the
