This is what is vaguely understood on your earth as purgatory; the sufferings of spirits who love and long for the presence of their Creator, and who yet are not pure enough to approach Him.

Only by serving and saving others can they obtain at last their own joy.

Every act of ingratitude and forgetfulness and wickedness committed by a mortal, detains one or another of these patient workers longer away from Heaven--imagine then what a weary while many of them have to wait." I made no answer, and we floated on.

Higher and higher--higher and higher--till at last my guide, whom I knew to be that being whom Heliobas had called Azul, bade me pause.

We were floating close together in what seemed a sea of translucent light.