Charlotte was still crying a bit and putting my arm around her shoulder seemed natural and calmed her a bit. Her beautiful brown eyes were a bit reddened and I wiped away the tears from her cheeks with trembling hands, for I too felt deeply the gravity of the moment. Without speaking we continued into this mysterious building. The room just beyond the one where Edo was resting was a dining room of some kind. In the middle of the medium sized oval room was a sturdy wooden table, quite elegant in its simplicity, around which stood long rounded benches with pillows to sit on. Fifteen plates and glasses were set, but there was no indication that they had been used very recently.

Beyond this dining room lay a library. It was an incredible sight to see and wherever my eyes landed there was a new book that I had never seen before. I prided myself somewhat in my knowledge of books. Though lay no claim to having read all that many books in my life, I had knowledge of many of them. I spent a great deal of my time in one of the few places that made life in London bareable; the Royal Archives.

But the contents of this library was entirely new and I was fascinated. Most of them were in strange new languages, written in alphabets that were unknown to me. Some seemed recognizable to me, like several books in arabic and what appeared to be an encyclopedia written in russian. I found but a single book that I could read and luckily it had some bearing on where we were.

The name of the book was "The Lonely Blue Island" and I skimmed the first chapter. It described the arrival of a traveller from a faraway place, he landed on this island as the result of a spiritual quest. He found the island fascinating and decided settle down on it.

Charlotte listened as I read some of the book to her. She rightly pointed out that this book possibly had some answers to some of our queries and might even be a historical account of how this fantastic building we were inside had come to be constructed.

A look of wonder came over Charlotte's face as I read. She did not speak or ask any questions as I detailed the construction of the first shelter for our traveller. He explored the island and found that it contained all that he needed to survive, animals to hunt for meat, fruit to eat and wood to build with. But most wondrous of all, he discovered that the large inland trees were not the inert creatures as their brethren on the traveller's home world. They could move and exert a strange force on their surrounding.

The traveller also found that with practice and patience he was able to understand the trees and communicate with them. Exactly how this was possible was not evident from the text. But the result of this interaction was that the trees agreed to house our traveller in exchange for him cultivating them and helping them grow without interference from creatures that fed on them, killing most of them before they could grow large and old.

In particular one tree grew larger than the others with the traveller's help. It reached majestically into the sky eclipsing the very peak of the island. The traveller walked the interior and fashioned it as his home. But it he kept his word and kept the trees free from infestations and through time he learned the real secret of the island.

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