32. That I might know for certain, that such is their genius, it was allowed to represent to them meadows, fallow lands, gardens, woods, and rivers; to represent such things is imaginatively to exhibit them before another, in which case, in another world, they appear to the life; but they instantly transmuted them, obscuring the meadows and fallow fields, and by representations filling them with snakes. The rivers they made black, so that the water no longer appeared limpid. When I asked them why they did so, they said that they did not wish to think of such things, but of things real, which are the knowledges of things abstracted from what is terrestrial, especially of such things as exist in the heavens.