“These splotches that you see are not inanimate dirt but – collections of living beings”.
The botanist said these words when his interlocutor asked him why was he so interested in mold, as those are just splotches of grey, green, yellow, and other colors. The botanist replied that in his opinion these splotches were something more,than just dirt. He added that mold can make new generations, can fight each other for territory, grow and develop, so it is definitely a living being.
“And when I turned my head, I saw something like a schoolroom globe that shone with a faint light, a globe as large as the boulder beside which we had been the moment before”
The narrator said these words when he came to the Temple again and there something fantastic started happening. A boulder with mold, the bench, and The Temple vanished and the character saw a little globe with humanity that was growing, fighting, making new generations, starting revolutions and so on. This phenomenon reminded the narrator of the mold's manner of existence and he compared society with the mold.
“Is that supposed to be the history of mankind?...All right – but where are the arts and knowledge?...Where is consciousness, love, hate, yearning?...In short – where are the human souls and hearts?”
After observing the globe with everything people doing on it, the narrator couldn’t believe that human life is so familiar to the existence of the mold. He realized that often people don’t have hearts and souls, do awful things and are so rude and harmful to the planet. He was in shock with this fact and his inner world became cardinally different.
“My companion had vanished, but now I knew him by his mockery and melancholy”.
Having understood what the narrator saw, he would like to know who was his companion. As far as there happened such magical things, it was impossible for him to be just a botanist: he was something more. When the narrator was asking him all these questions, the botanist was only laughing in response. From here, the narrator supposed that the botanist was God. Only God can teach by showing, looking so deeply inside, searching the best way to heart and mind to make realize what He wanted to say.
