And so Ingos took the Messenger to every part of the enchanted realm of Aphelos. Their journey lasted a whole month, and at the end they returned to the spot where Ingos liked best to sleep — a small grassy mound, on which there was an outcrop of bare rock.
‘This is my home,’ he said to the Messenger. ‘It reminds me of the bare rock on to which I was cast when first I came here on the flood. And now that my memory is restored, it puts me in mind of a place I loved in Thrâyeldim of old.’
‘Here, then, make the seat of your rule,’ said the Messenger. ‘Let us fetch a golden apple from your cave, and leave it on the rock to grow.’
Together they went up the great mountain, passing the stone column which stood on a spur of rock above the trees, and following the stream, until at last they came to Ingos’s old home, the cave. There inside were the Twelve Trees with their golden fruit. They went inside the cave, and Ingos picked a fruit.
‘It seems a shame to leave their number diminished,’ he said. ‘But they never grow again.’
‘Not of themselves,’ replied the white-robed Messenger. ‘But touch the place whence the apple came with the end of your staff.’
Ingos did as he was bidden, and at once a new golden fruit was swelling where the old one had been.
After that Ingos and the Messenger returned to Ingos’s hill. They placed the golden apple on the rock there. On the next day a tree was growing there, just like those in the cave, but greater, already nigh on ten feet high. Ingos was seven feet tall but could not reach the top with his hands.
‘Those trees are wondrous,’ said Ingos to the Messenger. ‘Can you tell me how they grow?’
‘I can tell you but little, for their mystery is great. They belong to the immortal world, which is your home too, Lord Ingos. They will grow here, but only in rock, for that alone is hard and material enough for them. This earth would look to you spectral and insubstantial by comparison with the undying world, and so it seems to the roots of these trees.’
‘And how is it that they vanish when all their fruit has been picked?’
‘When they have fulfilled their purpose they return to the deathless world. They seem to you to vanish; but rather they become too visible, too tangible, for you on this earth to see or feel. So is it with the immortals of this world. It is their destiny to become too material for this passing world to hold them.’
‘This is indeed a marvel!’ exclaimed the Lord Ingos. ‘But with my staff I restored fruit to a bare branch. How is that?’
‘The touch of a fruitless branch restores the fruit. And your staff, you remember, is a branch of one of those two great trees that are now the doorposts of your cave. That staff of yours is not dead, Lord Ingos, however it may seem to be. It is full of virtues.’
‘These trees are wonderful and worthy inhabitants of the deathless world,’ said Ingos. ‘But you tell me they will grow only in rock. Yet the seeds from those golden apples became all this —’ and he pointed to the forests around them.
‘You are right. All this grew from the seeds. For the seeds in the cores of those fruits are the seeds of every tree and plant of this world. This tree, growing above our heads, here, is at once all plants and no plant. All plants, because it produces the seeds of all plants; no plant, because it belongs not to earthly nature at all, but to over-nature. And so it is called Oyarúi, Everytree, and Engworrúya, Undying Tree. It is the tree of the undying world. From its fruit the Entellári first sowed the known earth, just as you have sown this hidden land.’
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