With the purest and deepest blue the sky soared out over my head until with kissed the horizon. Clouds danced overhead: separating, joining, and twirling with their contours in graceful motion. Beyond the sand at my feet the ocean stretched out until it received the sky's glowing kiss. Behind me the island lay: the splendor of the rainforest, the parrots, the guava and muneie fruit trees, the coconuts, the tapirs and ocelots. The sun smiled at me with a warm touch. I sunk my feet deeper into the silky sand. As I stood there, a number of natives descended out of the flora. They had pleasant round faces and they had a look of solemn joy fixed upon them. They stopped right at the forests edge and lifted their faces to the sky. They began to sing. The sound was like a brook: smooth, gleeful and full of glory. I realized that everything around me was not just existing: it was living. The difference was that they were worshipping - this was their existence, their life, there joy, their glory. I was in rapture.

Then I saw the man. A small section of the beach was covered in sharp rocks rather than sand. Upon these rock was a man, bent and crouched over. His hands were placed upon the rocks. I went over to him. I could soon see that he was blind by his ignorant of my presence.
I spoke to him and discovered he was also deaf. His body was under the shade of a nearby tree but the shade ended near his hands and he was reaching out and feeling the warmth of the sun on the rocks. I yelled directly in his ear with lusty effort. Nothing.

I was looking pitifully at him when someone came up to me from the forest. It was an old man; thick smiling wrinkles covered his face. His hair was fuzzy and white and his eyes were like the blue sky.
"He is happy." He said with a sad smile.
"How can he be?" I replied- I had just noticed that the blind man's feet were bloody from the sharp rocks.
"He likes to feel the warm sun on the sharp rocks. It is enough pleasure for him. He desires nothing more." The old man said.
"Will he ever change?" I inquired.
"I doubt it." said the man. "All he has to do is hear my voice when I call to him. If he crawled back to me, away from the sun and into the shade, I have ointment for his eyes and ears that would make him seeing and able to hear."
"How can he hear your voice, is he not deaf?" I asked.
"There was a time when he could hear some." The man said. "It was because I went and gave him some ointment. Yet he did not listen to me. He could not take his hands away from the warm sun, he kept saying 'I will come in a while, but this is so good, please let me stay.' His hearing has slowly declined and now he is almost deaf."

I gazed around at the delights of this paradise around me. I bent down and closed my eyes. I reached out and touched the warm of the sun on a sharp rock. What a faint reflection of true life! I heard the old man's voice.

"Follow me" he said. "For you have seen very little, hear little, and felt little. Let me take you up to the mountain where He is. He makes the wonders of the beach seem like ugly and vain." He turned and plunged into the wall of brilliant foliage. With a low voice bursting with joy he said: "Come!"

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