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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Purple Cloud, by M.P. Shiel
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Purple Cloud
+
+Author: M.P. Shiel
+
+Release Date: February 22, 2004 [eBook #11229]
+[Most recently updated: December 1, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: Suzanne Shell, Garrett Alley, Maria Khomenko and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PURPLE CLOUD ***
+
+
+
+
+THE PURPLE CLOUD
+
+By
+
+M.P. Shiel
+
+1901
+
+
+
+
+[Greek: estai kai Samos ammos, eseitai Daelos adaelos]
+
+_Sibylline Prophecy_
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+About three months ago--that is to say, toward the end of May of this
+year of 1900--the writer whose name appears on the title-page received
+as noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot to
+examine. They came from a very good friend of mine, whose name there is
+no reason that I should now conceal--Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M.A.
+(Oxon.), F.R.C.P. It happened that for two years I had been spending
+most of my time in France, and as Browne had a Norfolk practice, I had
+not seen him during my visits to London. Moreover, though our friendship
+was of the most intimate kind, we were both atrocious correspondents: so
+that only two notes passed between us during those years.
+
+Till, last May, there reached me the letter--and the packet--to which I
+refer. The packet consisted of four note-books, quite crowded
+throughout with those giddy shapes of Pitman's shorthand, whose
+_ensemble_ so resembles startled swarms hovering in flighty poses on the
+wing. They were scribbled in pencil, with little distinction between
+thick and thin strokes, few vowels: so that their slow deciphering, I
+can assure the reader, has been no holiday. The letter also was
+pencilled in shorthand; and this letter, together with the second of the
+note-books which I have deciphered (it was marked 'III.'), I now
+publish.
+
+[I must say, however, that in some five instances there will occur
+sentences rather crutched by my own guess-work; and in two instances the
+characters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon the
+passage with a head-ache. But all this will be found immaterial to the
+general narrative.]
+
+The following is Browne's letter:
+
+'DEAR OLD SHIEL,--I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishing
+that you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand before
+I--"_go_": for, by all appearance, "going" I am. Four days ago, I began
+to feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson's surgery
+at Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He muttered
+something about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by the
+time I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I had
+dyspnoca and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London for
+Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,
+and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. The
+difficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how little
+I suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what's what: the
+bronchi are involved--_too far_ involved--and as a matter of absolute
+fact, there isn't any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwelling
+upon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomy
+statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. The
+very small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialist
+in his own line. So we shall see.
+
+'I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered
+these notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but my
+habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from
+whom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as a
+literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you
+can manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.
+
+'I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little
+state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will
+tell you in the old Pitman's something about her. Her name was Miss Mary
+Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died,
+and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anything
+about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relation
+between us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before
+my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered
+from _tic douloureux_ of the fifth nerve. She had had most of her teeth
+drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the
+nerve on the left side by the external scission. But it made no
+difference: all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw,
+and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across _me_. My
+organisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, control
+over hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.
+
+'Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as my
+friend, Miss Wilson. Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold her
+suddenly without a sensation of shock: she suggested so inevitably what
+we call "the _other_ world," one detecting about her some odour of the
+worm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman. And yet I
+can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as to
+the contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashen
+cheeks. She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton,
+except the thigh-bones, being quite visible. Her eyes were of the bluish
+hue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthly
+gaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.
+
+'She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five
+miles from Ash Thomas. As you know, I was "beginning" in these parts at
+the time, and soon took up my residence at the manor. She insisted that
+I should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constituted
+the most lucrative practice which I ever had.
+
+'Well, I quickly found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilson
+possessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course,
+because peculiar to herself in _kind_, but because they were so
+constant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriest
+fledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically to
+you about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state--just as
+though it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, which
+the Psychical Research Society, only after endless investigation, admits
+to be scientific, has been perfectly well known to every old crone since
+the Middle Ages, and, I assume, long previously. What an unnecessary air
+of discovery! The certainty that someone in trance in Manchester can
+tell you what is going on in London, or in Pekin, was not, of course,
+left to the acumen of an office in Fleet Street; and the society, in
+establishing the fact beyond doubt for the general public, has not gone
+one step toward explaining it. They have, in fact, revealed nothing that
+many of us did not, with absolute assurance, know before.
+
+'But talking of poor Miss Wilson, I say that her powers were
+_remarkable_, because, though not exceptional in _genre_, they were so
+special in quantity,--so "constant," and "far-reaching." I believe it to
+be a fact that, _in general_, the powers of trance manifest themselves
+more particularly with regard to space, as distinct from time: the
+spirit roams in the present--it travels over a plain--it does not
+_usually_ attract the interest of observers by great ascents, or by
+great descents. I fancy that is so. But Miss Wilson's gift was special
+to this extent, that she travelled in every direction, and easily in all
+but one, north and south, up and down, in the past, the present, and the
+future.
+
+This I discovered, not at once, but gradually. She would emit a stream
+of sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it _speech_, so
+murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy
+breath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by an
+intense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk,
+considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression. I got into the
+habit of sitting long hours at her bed-side, quite fascinated by her,
+trying to catch the import of that opiate and visionary language which
+came puffing and fluttering in deliberate monotone from her lips.
+Gradually, in the course of months, my ear learned to detect the words;
+"the veil was rent" for me also; and I was able to follow somewhat the
+course of her musing and wandering spirit.
+
+At the end of six months I heard her one day repeat some words which
+were familiar to me. They were these: "Such were the arts by which the
+Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and
+the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe
+them with precision..." I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's
+"Decline and Fall," which I easily guessed that she had never read.
+
+I said in a stern voice: "Where are you?"
+
+She replied, "Us are in a room, eight hundred and eleven miles above. A
+man is writing. Us are reading."
+
+I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke of
+herself as "I," nor even as "we," but, for some unknown reason, in the
+_objective_ way, as "_us_": "us are," she would say--"us will," "us
+went"; though, of course, she was an educated lady, and I don't think
+ever lived in the West of England, where they say "us" in that way;
+secondly, when wandering in the past, she always represented herself as
+being "_above_" (the earth?), and higher the further back in time she
+went; in describing present events she appears to have felt herself _on_
+(the earth); while, as regards the future, she invariably declared that
+"_us_" were so many miles "within" (the earth).
+
+To her excursions in this last direction, however, there seemed to exist
+certain fixed limits: I say seemed, for I cannot be sure, and only mean
+that, in spite of my efforts, she never, in fact, went far in this
+direction. Three, four thousand "miles" were common figures on her lips
+in describing her distance "above"; but her distance "within" never got
+beyond sixty-three. Usually, she would say twenty, twenty-five. She
+appeared, in relation to the future, to resemble a diver in the deep
+sea, who, the deeper he strives, finds a more resistant pressure, till,
+at no great depth, resistance becomes prohibition, and he can no further
+strive.
+
+'I am afraid I can't go on: though I had a good deal to tell you about
+this lady. During fifteen years, off and on, I sat listening by her dim
+bed-side to her murmuring trances! At last my expert ear could detect
+the sense of her faintest sigh. I heard the "Decline and Fall" from
+beginning to end. Some of her reports were the most frivolous nonsense:
+over others I have hung in a horror of interest. Certainly, my friend, I
+have heard some amazing words proceed from those wan lips of Mary
+Wilson. Sometimes I could hitch her repeatedly to any scene or subject
+that I chose by the mere exercise of my will; at others, the flighty
+waywardness of her spirit eluded and baffled me: she resisted--she
+disobeyed: otherwise I might have sent you, not four note-books, but
+twenty, or forty. About the fifth year it struck me that it would be
+well to jot down her more connected utterances, since I knew shorthand.
+
+The note-book marked "I.," [1] which seems to me the most curious,
+belongs to the seventh year. Its history, like those of the other three,
+is this: I heard her one afternoon murmuring in the intonation used when
+_reading_; the matter interested me; I asked her where she was. She
+replied: "Us are forty-five miles within: us read, and another writes";
+from which I concluded that she was some fifteen to thirty years in the
+future, perusing an as yet unpublished work. After that, during some
+weeks, I managed to keep her to the same subject, and finally, I fancy,
+won pretty well the whole work. I believe you would find it striking,
+and hope you will be able to read my notes.
+
+'But no more of Mary Wilson now. Rather let us think a little of A.L.
+Browne, F.R.C.P.!--with a breathing-tube in his trachea, and Eternity
+under his pillow...' [Dr. Browne's letter then continues on a subject of
+no interest here.]
+
+[The present writer may add that Dr. Browne's prognosis of his own case
+proved correct, for he passed away two days after writing the above. My
+transcription of the shorthand book marked 'III.' I now proceed to give
+without comment, merely reminding the reader that the words form the
+substance of a book or document to be written, or to be motived
+(according to Miss Wilson) in that Future, which, no less than the Past,
+substantively exists in the Present--though, like the Past, we see it
+not. I need only add that the title, division into paragraphs, &c., have
+been arbitrarily contrived by myself for the sake of form and
+convenience.]
+
+
+[Footnote 1: This I intend to publish under the title of 'The Last
+Miracle; 'II.' will bear that of 'The Lord of the Sea'; the present book
+is marked 'III.' The perusal of 'IV.' I have yet finished, but so far do
+not consider it suitable for publication.]
+
+
+
+
+(_Here begins the note-book marked 'III.'_)
+
+
+
+
+THE PURPLE CLOUD
+
+
+Well, the memory seems to be getting rather impaired now, rather weak.
+What, for instance, was the name of that parson who preached, just
+before the _Boreal_ set out, about the wickedness of any further attempt
+to reach the North Pole? I have forgotten! Yet four years ago it was
+familiar to me as my own name.
+
+Things which took place before the voyage seem to be getting a little
+cloudy in the memory now. I have sat here, in the loggia of this Cornish
+villa, to write down some sort of account of what has happened--God
+knows why, since no eye can ever read it--and at the very beginning I
+cannot remember the parson's name.
+
+He was a strange sort of man surely, a Scotchman from Ayrshire, big and
+gaunt, with tawny hair. He used to go about London streets in shough
+and rough-spun clothes, a plaid flung from one shoulder. Once I saw him
+in Holborn with his rather wild stalk, frowning and muttering to
+himself. He had no sooner come to London, and opened chapel (I think in
+Fetter Lane), than the little room began to be crowded; and when, some
+years afterwards, he moved to a big establishment in Kensington, all
+sorts of men, even from America and Australia, flocked to hear the
+thunderstorms that he talked, though certainly it was not an age apt to
+fly into enthusiasms over that species of pulpit prophets and
+prophecies. But this particular man undoubtedly did wake the strong dark
+feelings that sleep in the heart; his eyes were very singular and
+powerful; his voice from a whisper ran gathering, like snow-balls, and
+crashed, as I have heard the pack-ice in commotion far yonder in the
+North; while his gestures were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's
+of the primitive ages.
+
+Well, this man--what _was_ his name?--Macintosh? Mackay? I think--yes,
+that was it! _Mackay_. Mackay saw fit to take offence at the new attempt
+to reach the Pole in the _Boreal_; and for three Sundays, when the
+preparations were nearing completion, stormed against it at Kensington.
+
+The excitement of the world with regard to the North Pole had at this
+date reached a pitch which can only be described as _fevered_, though
+that word hardly expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which
+prevailed: for the abstract interest which mankind, in mere desire for
+knowledge, had always felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a
+thousand and a thousand times intensified by a new, concrete interest--a
+tremendous _money_ interest.
+
+And the new zeal had ceased to be healthy in its tone as the old zeal
+was: for now the fierce demon Mammon was making his voice heard in this
+matter.
+
+Within the ten years preceding the _Boreal_ expedition, no less than
+twenty-seven expeditions had set out, and failed.
+
+The secret of this new rage lay in the last will and testament of Mr.
+Charles P. Stickney of Chicago, that king of faddists, supposed to be
+the richest individual who ever lived: he, just ten years before the
+_Boreal_ undertaking, had died, bequeathing 175 million dollars to the
+man, of whatever nationality, who first reached the Pole.
+
+Such was the actual wording of the will--_'the man who first reached'_:
+and from this loose method of designating the person intended had
+immediately burst forth a prolonged heat of controversy in Europe and
+America as to whether or no the testator meant _the Chief_ of the first
+expedition which reached: but it was finally decided, on the highest
+legal authority, that, in any case, the actual wording of the document
+held good: and that it was the individual, whatever his station in the
+expedition, whose foot first reached the 90th degree of north latitude,
+who would have title to the fortune.
+
+At all events, the public ferment had risen, as I say, to a pitch of
+positive fever; and as to the _Boreal_ in particular, the daily progress
+of her preparations was minutely discussed in the newspapers, everyone
+was an authority on her fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a
+hope, a jest, or a sneer: for now, at last, it was felt that success was
+probable. So this Mackay had an acutely interested audience, if a
+somewhat startled, and a somewhat cynical, one.
+
+A truly lion-hearted man this must have been, after all, to dare
+proclaim a point-of-view so at variance with the spirit of his age! One
+against four hundred millions, they bent one way, he the opposite,
+saying that they were wrong, all wrong! People used to call him 'John
+the Baptist Redivivus': and without doubt he did suggest something of
+that sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the face to denounce
+the _Boreal_ there was not a sovereign on any throne in Europe who, but
+for shame, would have been glad of a subordinate post on board.
+
+On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that
+Kensington chapel, and I heard him. And the wild talk he talked! He
+seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.
+
+The people sat quite spell-bound, while Mackay's prophesying voice
+ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the
+hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax: and those who came
+to scoff remained to wonder.
+
+Put simply, what he said was this: That there was undoubtedly some sort
+of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to
+the human race: that man's continued failure, in spite of continual
+efforts, to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and
+that this failure constituted a lesson--_and a warning_--which the race
+disregarded at its peril.
+
+The North Pole, he said, was not so very far away, and the difficulties
+in the way of reaching it were not, on the face of them, so very great:
+human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more
+difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in
+the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never
+reached: always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming
+chance--some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson--_herein the
+warning_. Wonderfully--really _wonderfully_--like the Tree of
+Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying
+open and offered to man--but _That_ persistently veiled and 'forbidden.'
+It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my
+child; wheresoever you will--but not here.'
+
+But human beings, he said, were free agents, with power to stop their
+ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning
+indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now
+come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that
+90th of latitude, and plant an impious right foot on the head of the
+earth--just as it had been given into the absolute power of Adam to
+stretch an impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but,
+said he--his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful
+augury--just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one
+case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he warned the
+entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering
+sky, and thundery weather.
+
+The man's frantic earnestness, authoritative voice, and savage gestures,
+could not but have their effect upon all; as for me, I declare, I sat as
+though a messenger from Heaven addressed me. But I believe that I had
+not yet reached home, when the whole impression of the discourse had
+passed from me like water from a duck's back. The Prophet in the
+twentieth century was not a success. John Baptist himself, camel-skin
+and all, would have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay
+from my mind with the thought: 'He is behind his age, I suppose.'
+
+But haven't I thought differently of Mackay since, my God...?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three weeks--it was about that--before that Sunday night discourse, I
+was visited by Clark, the chief of the coming expedition--a mere visit
+of friendship. I had then been established about a year at No. II,
+Harley Street, and, though under twenty-five, had, I suppose, as _élite_
+a practice as any doctor in Europe.
+
+_Élite_--but small. I was able to maintain my state, and move among the
+great: but now and again I would feel the secret pinch of
+moneylessness. Just about that time, in fact, I was only saved from
+considerable embarrassment by the success of my book, 'Applications of
+Science to the Arts.'
+
+In the course of conversation that afternoon, Clark said to me in his
+light hap-hazard way:
+
+'Do you know what I dreamed about you last night, Adam Jeffson? I
+dreamed that you were with us on the expedition.'
+
+I think he must have seen my start: on the same night I had myself
+dreamed the same thing; but not a word said I about it now. There was a
+stammer in my tongue when I answered:
+
+'Who? I?--on the expedition?--I would not go, if I were asked.'
+
+'Oh, you would.'
+
+'I wouldn't. You forget that I am about to be married.'
+
+'Well, we need not discuss the point, as Peters is not going to die,'
+said he. 'Still, if anything did happen to him, you know, it is you I
+should come straight to, Adam Jeffson.'
+
+'Clark, you jest,' I said: 'I know really very little of astronomy, or
+magnetic phenomena. Besides, I am about to be married....'
+
+'But what about your botany, my friend? _There's_ what we should be
+wanting from you: and as for nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your
+scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.'
+
+'You discuss the matter as gravely as though it were a possibility,
+Clark,' I said, smiling. 'Such a thought would never enter my head:
+there is, first of all, my _fiancée_----'
+
+'Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?--Well, but she, as far as I know
+the lady, would be the first to force you to go. The chance of stamping
+one's foot on the North Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.'
+
+'Do talk of something else!' I said. 'There is Peters....'
+
+'Well, of course, there is Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was
+so clear----'
+
+'Let me alone with your dreams, and your Poles!' I laughed.
+
+Yes, I remember: I pretended to laugh loud! But my secret heart knew,
+even _then_, that one of those crises was occurring in my life which,
+from my youth, has made it the most extraordinary which any creature of
+earth ever lived. And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the
+two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was
+drawing on my gloves to go to see my _fiancée_, I heard distinctly the
+old two Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!'
+and the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'
+
+The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would
+undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory
+impulses--or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how
+real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I
+heard them contend within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,'
+as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'
+
+About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
+evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a
+quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to
+me, inside of me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone
+else said: 'Don't go that way at all'--mere whispers then, which
+gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
+contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high,
+and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished
+mother that 'someone had pushed me' over the edge, and that someone else
+'had caught me' at the bottom!
+
+One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought
+struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or
+things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other,
+must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me,
+and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so
+and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like
+other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for--something.
+Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and
+primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so
+that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying'
+have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice
+was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that
+originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to
+know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval
+ones.
+
+But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I
+here state that I was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my
+'Varsity eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to
+decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that
+transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the
+matter--that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the
+one: 'Be a scientist--a doctor,' and the other: 'Be a lawyer, an
+engineer, an artist--be _anything_ but a doctor!'
+
+A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of
+medical schools--Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man,
+named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I
+remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally
+there. He was always talking about certain 'Black' and 'White Powers,
+till it became absurd, and the men used to call him
+'black-and-white-mystery-man,' because, one day, when someone said
+something about 'the black mystery of the universe,' Scotland
+interrupted him with the words: 'the black-and-white mystery.'
+
+Quite well I remember Scotland now--the sweetest, gentle soul he was,
+with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in
+stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his
+neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe
+was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black;
+that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our
+particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the
+best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been
+slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the
+Black would win--not everywhere perhaps, but _here_--and would carry
+off, if no other earth, at least _this_ one, for his prize.
+
+This was Scotland's doctrine, which he never tired of repeating; and
+while others heard him with mere toleration, little could they divine
+with what agony of inward interest, I, cynically smiling there, drank in
+his words. Most profound, most profound, was the impression they made
+upon me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But I was saying that when Clark left me, I was drawing on my gloves to
+go to see my _fiancée_, the Countess Clodagh, when I heard the two
+voices most clearly.
+
+Sometimes the urgency of one or other impulse is so overpowering, that
+there is no resisting it: and it was so then with the one that bid me
+go.
+
+I had to traverse the distance between Harley Street and Hanover Square,
+and all the time it was as though something shouted at my physical ear:
+'Since you go, breathe no word of the _Boreal_, and Clark's visit'; and
+another shout: 'Tell, tell, hide nothing!'
+
+It seemed to last a month: yet it was only some minutes before I was in
+Hanover Square, and Clodagh in my arms.
+
+She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh--that
+haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left
+shoulder. Superb! but ah--I know it now--a godless woman, Clodagh, a
+bitter heart.
+
+Clodagh once confessed to me that her favourite character in history was
+Lucrezia Borgia, and when she saw my horror, immediately added: 'Well,
+no, I am only joking!' Such was her duplicity: for I see now that she
+lived in the constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me. Yet, now
+I think of it, how completely did Clodagh enthral me!
+
+Our proposed marriage was opposed by both my family and hers: by mine,
+because her father and grandfather had died in lunatic asylums; and by
+hers, because, forsooth, I was neither a rich nor a noble match. A
+sister of hers, much older than herself, had married a common country
+doctor, Peters of Taunton, and this so-called _mésalliance_ made the
+so-called _mésalliance_ with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her
+relatives. But Clodagh's extraordinary passion for me was to be stemmed
+neither by their threats nor prayers. What a flame, after all, was
+Clodagh! Sometimes she frightened me.
+
+She was at this date no longer young, being by five years my senior, as
+also, by five years, the senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of
+her sister with Peters of Taunton. This nephew was Peter Peters, who was
+to accompany the _Boreal_ expedition as doctor, botanist, and
+meteorological assistant.
+
+On that day of Clark's visit to me I had not been seated five minutes
+with Clodagh, when I said:
+
+'Dr. Clark--ha! ha! ha!--has been talking to me about the Expedition. He
+says that if anything happened to Peters, I should be the first man he
+would run to. He has had an absurd dream...'
+
+The consciousness that filled me as I uttered these words was the
+_wickedness_ of me--the crooked wickedness. But I could no more help it
+than I could fly.
+
+Clodagh was standing at a window holding a rose at her face. For quite a
+minute she made no reply. I saw her sharp-cut, florid face in profile,
+steadily bent and smelling. She said presently in her cold, rapid way:
+
+'The man who first plants his foot on the North Pole will certainly be
+ennobled. I say nothing of the many millions... I only wish that I was
+a man!'
+
+'I don't know that I have any special ambition that way,' I rejoined. 'I
+am very happy in my warm Eden with my Clodagh. I don't like the outer
+Cold.'
+
+'Don't let me think little of you!' she answered pettishly.
+
+'Why should you, Clodagh? I am not bound to desire to go to the North
+Pole, am I?'
+
+'But you _would_ go, I suppose, if you could?'
+
+'I might--I--doubt it. There is our marriage....'
+
+'Marriage indeed! It is the one thing to transform our marriage from a
+sneaking difficulty to a ten times triumphant event.'
+
+'You mean if _I_ personally were the first to stand at the Pole. But
+there are many in an expedition. It is very unlikely that _I_,
+personally--'
+
+'For _me_ you will, Adam--' she began.
+
+'"_Will_," Clodagh?' I cried. 'You say "_will_"? there is not even the
+slightest shadow of a probability--!'
+
+'But why? There are still three weeks before the start. They say...'
+
+She stopped, she stopped.
+
+'They say what?'
+
+Her voice dropped:
+
+'That Peter takes atropine.'
+
+Ah, I started then. She moved from the window, sat in a rocking-chair,
+and turned the leaves of a book, without reading. We were silent, she
+and I; I standing, looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the
+leaf-edges, and beginning again, contemplatively. Then she laughed dryly
+a little--a dry, mad laugh.
+
+'Why did you start when I said that?' she asked, reading now at random.
+
+'_I_! I did not start, Clodagh! What made you think that I started? I
+did not start! Who told you, Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'
+
+'He is my nephew: I should know. But don't look dumbfoundered in that
+absurd fashion: I have no intention of poisoning him in order to see you
+a multimillionaire, and a Peer of the Realm....'
+
+'My dearest Clodagh!'
+
+'I easily might, however. He will be here presently. He is bringing Mr.
+Wilson for the evening.' (Wilson was going as electrician of the
+expedition.)
+
+'Clodagh.' I said, 'believe me, you jest in a manner which does not
+please me.'
+
+'Do I really?' she answered with that haughty, stiff half-turn of her
+throat: 'then I must be more exquisite. But, thank Heaven, it is only a
+jest. Women are no longer admired for doing such things.'
+
+'Ha! ha! ha!--no--no longer admired, Clodagh! Oh, my good Lord! let us
+change this talk....'
+
+But now she could talk of nothing else. She got from me that afternoon
+the history of all the Polar expeditions of late years, how far they
+reached, by what aids, and why they failed. Her eyes shone; she listened
+eagerly. Before this time, indeed, she had been interested in the
+_Boreal_, knew the details of her outfitting, and was acquainted with
+several members of the expedition. But now, suddenly, her mind seemed
+wholly possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her
+well a-burn with the Pole-fever.
+
+The passion of her kiss as I tore myself from her embrace that day I
+shall not forget. I went home with a pretty heavy heart.
+
+The house of Dr. Peter Peters was three doors from mine, on the opposite
+side of the street. Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me
+up with the news that Peters was very ill. I hurried to his bed-side,
+and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils
+that he was poisoned with atropine. Wilson, the electrician, who had
+passed the evening with him at Clodagh's in Hanover Square, was there.
+
+'What on earth is the matter?' he said to me.
+
+'Poisoned,' I answered.
+
+'Good God! what with?'
+
+'Atropine.'
+
+'Good Heavens!'
+
+'Don't be frightened: I think he will recover.'
+
+'Is that certain?'
+
+'Yes, I think--that is, if he leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'
+
+'What! it is he who has poisoned himself?'
+
+I hesitated, I hesitated. But I said:
+
+'He is in the habit of taking atropine, Wilson.'
+
+Three hours I remained there, and, God knows, toiled hard for his life:
+and when I left him in the dark of the fore-day, my mind was at rest: he
+would recover.
+
+I slept till 11 A.M., and then hurried over again to Peters. In the room
+were my two nurses, and Clodagh.
+
+My beloved put her forefinger to her lips, whispering:
+
+'Sh-h-h! he is asleep....'
+
+She came closer to my ear, saying:
+
+'I heard the news early. I am come to stay with him, till--the last....'
+
+We looked at each other some time--eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but
+mine dropped before Clodagh's. A word was on my mouth to say, but I said
+nothing.
+
+The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected. At the end
+of the first week he was still prostrate. It was then that I said to
+Clodagh:
+
+'Clodagh, your presence at the bed-side here somehow does not please me.
+It is so unnecessary.'
+
+'Unnecessary certainly,' she replied: 'but I always had a genius for
+nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body. Since no
+one objects, why should you?'
+
+'Ah!... I don't know. This is a case that I dislike. I have half a mind
+to throw it to the devil.'
+
+'Then do so.'
+
+'And you, too--go home, go home, Clodagh!'
+
+'But _why_?--if one does no harm. In these days of "the corruption of
+the upper classes," and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn't every
+innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the
+tide? Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine. I find a
+sensuous pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs--like
+Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great antique
+women, who were all excellent chymists. To study the human ship in a
+gale, and the slow drama of its foundering--isn't that a quite thrilling
+distraction? And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me
+have my little way----'
+
+Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me: but
+even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was
+really very sick.
+
+I have still a nausea to write about it! Lucrezia Borgia in her own age
+may have been heroic: but Lucrezia in this late century! One could retch
+up the heart...
+
+The man grew sick on that bed, I say. The second week passed, and only
+ten days remained before the start of the expedition.
+
+At the end of that second week, Wilson, the electrician, was one evening
+sitting by Peter's bedside when I entered.
+
+At the moment, Clodagh was about to administer a dose to Peters; but
+seeing me, she put down the medicine-glass on the night table, and came
+toward me; and as she came, I saw a sight which stabbed me: for Wilson
+took up the deposited medicine-glass, elevated it, looked at it,
+smelled into it: and he did it with a kind of hurried, light-fingered
+stealth; and he did it with an under-look, and a meaningness of
+expression which, I thought, proved mistrust....
+
+Meantime, Clark came each day. He had himself a medical degree, and
+about this time I called him in professionally, together with Alleyne of
+Cavendish Square, to consultation over Peters. The patient lay in a
+semi-coma broken by passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us
+all. I formally stated that he took atropine--had been originally
+poisoned by atropine: but we saw that his present symptoms were not
+atropine symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable
+poison, which we could not precisely name.
+
+'Mysterious thing,' said Clark to me, when we were alone.
+
+'_I_ don't understand it,' I said.
+
+'Who are the two nurses?'
+
+'Oh, highly recommended people of my own.'
+
+'At any rate, my dream about you comes true, Jeffson. It is clear that
+Peters is out of the running now.'
+
+I shrugged.
+
+'I now formally invite you to join the expedition,' said Clark: 'do you
+consent?'
+
+I shrugged again.
+
+'Well, if that means consent,' he said, 'let me remind you that you have
+only eight days, and all the world to do in them.'
+
+This conversation occurred in the dining-room of Peters' house: and as
+we passed through the door, I saw Clodagh gliding down the passage
+outside--rapidly--away from us.
+
+Not a word I said to her that day about Clark's invitation. Yet I asked
+myself repeatedly: Did she not know of it? Had she not _listened_, and
+heard?
+
+However that was, about midnight, to my great surprise, Peters opened
+his eyes, and smiled. By noon the next day, his fine vitality, which so
+fitted him for an Arctic expedition, had re-asserted itself. He was then
+leaning on an elbow, talking to Wilson, and except his pallor, and
+strong stomach-pains, there was now hardly a trace of his late approach
+to death. For the pains I prescribed some quarter-grain tablets of
+sulphate of morphia, and went away.
+
+Now, David Wilson and I never greatly loved each other, and that very
+day he brought about a painful situation as between Peters and me, by
+telling Peters that I had taken his place in the expedition. Peters, a
+touchy fellow, at once dictated a letter of protest to Clark; and Clark
+sent Peters' letter to me, marked with a big note of interrogation in
+blue pencil.
+
+Now, all Peters' preparations were made, mine not; and he had six days
+in which to recover himself. I therefore wrote to Clark, saying that the
+changed circumstances of course annulled my acceptance of his offer,
+though I had already incurred the inconvenience of negotiating with a
+_locum tenens_.
+
+This decided it: Peters was to go, I stay. The fifth day before the
+departure dawned. It was a Friday, the 15th June. Peters was now in an
+arm-chair. He was cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the
+stomach-pains. I was giving him three quarter-grains of morphia a day.
+That Friday night, at 11 P.M., I visited him, and found Clodagh there,
+talking to him. Peters was smoking a cigar.
+
+'Ah,' Clodagh said, 'I was waiting for you, Adam. I didn't know whether
+I was to inject anything to-night. Is it Yes or No?'
+
+'What do you think, Peters?' I said: 'any more pains?'
+
+'Well, perhaps you had better give us another quarter,' he answered:
+'there's still some trouble in the tummy off and on.'
+
+'A quarter-grain, then, Clodagh, 'I said.
+
+As she opened the syringe-box, she remarked with a pout:
+
+'Our patient has been naughty! He has taken some more atropine.'
+
+I became angry at once.
+
+'Peters,' I cried, 'you know you have no right to be doing things like
+that without consulting me! Do that once more, and I swear I have
+nothing further to do with you!'
+
+'Rubbish,' said Peters: 'why all this unnecessary heat? It was a mere
+flea-bite. I felt that I needed it.'
+
+'He injected it with his own hand...' remarked Clodagh.
+
+She was now standing at the mantel-piece, having lifted the syringe-box
+from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and
+the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to
+melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there. Her
+back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was standing; Peters
+in his arm-chair, smoking. Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity
+Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.
+
+She was long, she was long. The crazy thought passed through some dim
+region of my soul: 'Why is she so _long_?'
+
+'Ah, that was a pain!' went Peters: 'never mind the bazaar, aunt--think
+of the morphia.'
+
+Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me--to rush upon her, to dash
+syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands. I _must_ have obeyed
+it--I was on the tip-top point of obeying--my body already leant prone:
+but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said:
+
+'Well, how is everything?'
+
+It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there. With lightning
+swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen
+on his face. Oh, well, I would not, and could not!--she was my love--I
+stood like marble...
+
+Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the
+fragile glass containing the injection. My eyes were fastened on her
+face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence. I said to myself:
+'I must surely be mad!'
+
+An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and,
+kneeling there, injected his fore-arm. As she rose, laughing at
+something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her
+heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it. She put the syringe among a
+number of others on the mantel-piece.
+
+'Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,' she said again with that
+same pout: 'he has been taking more atropine.'
+
+'Not really?' said Wilson.
+
+'Let me alone, the whole of you,' answered Peters: 'I ain't a child.'
+
+These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke. He died shortly
+before 1 A.M. He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.
+
+From that moment to the moment when the _Boreal_ bore me down the
+Thames, all the world was a mere tumbling nightmare to me, of which
+hardly any detail remains in my memory. Only I remember the inquest, and
+how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself
+with atropine. This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the
+verdict was in accordance.
+
+And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only,
+but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.
+
+The first--and chief--is that tempest of words which I heard at
+Kensington from that big-mouthed Mackay on the Sunday night. What was it
+that led me, busy as I was, to that chapel that night? Well, perhaps I
+know.
+
+There I sat, and heard him: and most strangely have those words of his
+peroration planted themselves in my brain, when, rising to a passion of
+prophecy, he shouted: 'And as in the one case, transgression was
+followed by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, I warn
+the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a
+lowering sky, and thundery weather.'
+
+And this second thing I remember: that on reaching home, I walked into
+my disordered library (for I had had to hunt out some books), where I
+met my housekeeper in the act of rearranging things. She had apparently
+lifted an old Bible by the front cover to fling it on the table, for as
+I threw myself into a chair my eye fell upon the open print near the
+beginning. The print was very large, and a shaded lamp cast a light upon
+it. I had been hearing Mackay's wild comparison of the Pole with the
+tree of Eden, and that no doubt was the reason why such a start
+convulsed me: for my listless eyes had chanced to rest upon some words.
+
+'The woman gave me of the tree, and I did eat....'
+
+And a third thing I remember in all that turmoil of doubt and flurry:
+that as the ship moved down with the afternoon tide a telegram was put
+into my hand; it was a last word from Clodagh; and she said only this:
+
+'Be first--for Me.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Boreal_ left St. Katherine's Docks in beautiful weather on the
+afternoon of the 19th June, full of good hope, bound for the Pole.
+
+All about the docks was one region of heads stretched far in innumerable
+vagueness, and down the river to Woolwich a continuous dull roar and
+murmur of bees droned from both banks to cheer our departure.
+
+The expedition was partly a national affair, subvented by Government:
+and if ever ship was well-found it was the _Boreal_. She had a frame
+tougher far than any battle-ship's, capable of ramming some ten yards of
+drift-ice; and she was stuffed with sufficient pemmican, codroe,
+fish-meal, and so on, to last us not less than six years.
+
+We were seventeen, all told, the five Heads (so to speak) of the
+undertaking being Clark (our Chief), John Mew (commander), Aubrey
+Maitland (meteorologist), Wilson (electrician), and myself (doctor,
+botanist, and assistant meteorologist).
+
+The idea was to get as far east as the 100°, or the 120°, of longitude;
+to catch there the northern current; to push and drift our way
+northward; and when the ship could no further penetrate, to leave her
+(either three, or else four, of us, on ski), and with sledges drawn by
+dogs and reindeer make a dash for the Pole.
+
+This had also been the plan of the last expedition--that of the
+_Nix_--and of several others. The _Boreal_ only differed from the _Nix_,
+and others, in that she was a thing of nicer design, and of more
+exquisite forethought.
+
+Our voyage was without incident up to the end of July, when we
+encountered a drift of ice-floes. On the 1st August we were at Kabarova,
+where we met our coal-ship, and took in a little coal for emergency,
+liquid air being our proper motor; also forty-three dogs, four reindeer,
+and a quantity of reindeer-moss; and two days later we turned our bows
+finally northward and eastward, passing through heavy 'slack' ice under
+sail and liquid air in crisp weather, till, on the 27th August, we lay
+moored to a floe off the desolate island of Taimur.
+
+The first thing which we saw here was a bear on the shore, watching for
+young white-fish: and promptly Clark, Mew, and Lamburn (engineer) went
+on shore in the launch, I and Maitland following in the pram, each party
+with three dogs.
+
+It was while climbing away inland that Maitland said to me:
+
+'When Clark leaves the ship for the dash to the Pole, it is three, not
+two, of us, after all, that he is going to take with him, making a party
+of four.'
+
+_I_: 'Is that so? Who knows?'
+
+_Maitland_: 'Wilson does. Clark has let it out in conversation with
+Wilson.'
+
+_I_: 'Well, the more the merrier. Who will be the three?'
+
+_Maitland_: 'Wilson is sure to be in it, and there may be Mew, making
+the third. As to the fourth, I suppose _I_ shall get left out in the
+cold.'
+
+_I_: 'More likely I.'
+
+_Maitland_: 'Well, the race is between us four: Wilson, Mew, you and I.
+It is a question of physical fitness combined with special knowledge.
+You are too lucky a dog to get left out, Jeffson.'
+
+_I_: 'Well, what does it matter, so long as the expedition as a whole is
+successful? That is the main thing.'
+
+_Maitland_: 'Oh yes, that's all very fine talk, Jeffson! But is it quite
+sincere? Isn't it rather a pose to affect to despise $175,000,000? _I_
+want to be in at the death, and I mean to be, if I can. We are all more
+or less self-interested.'
+
+'Look,' I whispered--'a bear.'
+
+It was a mother and cub: and with determined trudge she came wagging her
+low head, having no doubt smelled the dogs. We separated on the
+instant, doubling different ways behind ice-boulders, wanting her to go
+on nearer the shore, before killing; but, passing close, she spied, and
+bore down at a trot upon me. I fired into her neck, and at once, with a
+roar, she turned tail, making now straight in Maitland's direction. I
+saw him run out from cover some hundred yards away, aiming his long-gun:
+but no report followed: and in half a minute he was under her fore-paws,
+she striking out slaps at the barking, shrinking dogs. Maitland roared
+for my help: and at that moment, I, poor wretch, in far worse plight
+than he, stood shivering in ague: for suddenly one of those wrangles of
+the voices of my destiny was filling my bosom with loud commotion, one
+urging me to fly to Maitland's aid, one passionately commanding me be
+still. But it lasted, I believe, some seconds only: I ran and got a shot
+into the bear's brain, and Maitland leapt up with a rent down his face.
+
+But singular destiny! Whatever I did--if I did evil, if I did good--the
+result was the same: tragedy dark and sinister! Poor Maitland was doomed
+that voyage, and my rescue of his life was the means employed to make
+his death the more certain.
+
+I think that I have already written, some pages back, about a man
+called Scotland, whom I met at Cambridge. He was always talking about
+certain 'Black' and 'White' beings, and their contention for the earth.
+We others used to call him the black-and-white mystery-man, because, one
+day--but that is no matter now. Well, with regard to all that, I have a
+fancy, a whim of the mind--quite wide of the truth, no doubt--but I have
+it here in my brain, and I will write it down now. It is this: that
+there may have been some sort of arrangement, or understanding, between
+Black and White, as in the case of Adam and the fruit, that, should
+mankind force his way to the Pole and the old forbidden secret biding
+there, then some mishap should not fail to overtake the race of man;
+that the White, being kindly disposed to mankind, did not wish this to
+occur, and intended, for the sake of the race, to destroy our entire
+expedition before it reached; and that the Black, knowing that the White
+meant to do this, and by what means, used me--_me_!--to outwit this
+design, first of all working that I should be one of the party of four
+to leave the ship on ski.
+
+But the childish attempt, my God, to read the immense riddle of the
+world! I could laugh loud at myself, and at poor Black-and-White
+Scotland, too. The thing can't be so simple.
+
+Well, we left Taimur the same day, and good-bye now to both land and
+open sea. Till we passed the latitude of Cape Chelyuskin (which we did
+not sight), it was one succession of ice-belts, with Mew in the
+crow's-nest tormenting the electric bell to the engine-room, the anchor
+hanging ready to drop, and Clark taking soundings. Progress was slow,
+and the Polar night gathered round us apace, as we stole still onward
+and onward into that blue and glimmering land of eternal frore. We now
+left off bed-coverings of reindeer-skin and took to sleeping-bags. Eight
+of the dogs had died by the 25th September, when we were experiencing
+19° of frost. In the darkest part of our night, the Northern Light
+spread its silent solemn banner over us, quivering round the heavens in
+a million fickle gauds.
+
+The relations between the members of our little crew were
+excellent--with one exception: David Wilson and I were not good friends.
+
+There was a something--a tone--in the evidence which he had given at the
+inquest on Peters, which made me mad every time I thought of it. He had
+heard Peters admit just before death that he, Peters, had administered
+atropine to himself: and he had had to give evidence of that fact. But
+he had given it in a most half-hearted way, so much so, that the coroner
+had asked him: 'What, sir, are you hiding from me?' Wilson had replied:
+'Nothing. I have nothing to tell.'
+
+And from that day he and I had hardly exchanged ten words, in spite of
+our constant companionship in the vessel; and one day, standing alone on
+a floe, I found myself hissing with clenched fist: 'If he dared suspect
+Clodagh of poisoning Peters, I could _kill_ him!'
+
+Up to 78° of latitude the weather had been superb, but on the night of
+the 7th October--well I remember it--we experienced a great storm. Our
+tub of a ship rolled like a swing, drenching the whimpering dogs at
+every lurch, and hurling everything on board into confusion. The
+petroleum-launch was washed from the davits; down at one time to 40°
+below zero sank the thermometer; while a high aurora was whiffed into a
+dishevelled chaos of hues, resembling the smeared palette of some
+turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim,
+and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and
+distraction. I, for the first time, was sick.
+
+It was with a dizzy brain, therefore, that I went off watch to my bunk.
+Soon, indeed, I fell asleep: but the rolls and shocks of the ship,
+combined with the heavy Greenland anorak which I had on, and the state
+of my body, together produced a fearful nightmare, in which I was
+conscious of a vain struggle to move, a vain fight for breath, for the
+sleeping-bag turned to an iceberg on my bosom. Of Clodagh was my gasping
+dream. I dreamed that she let fall, drop by drop, a liquid, coloured
+like pomegranate-seeds, into a glass of water; and she presented the
+glass to Peters. The draught, I knew, was poisonous as death: and in a
+last effort to break the bands of that dark slumber, I was conscious, as
+I jerked myself upright, of screaming aloud:
+
+'Clodagh! Clodagh! _Spare the man...!_'
+
+My eyes, starting with horror, opened to waking; the electric light was
+shining in the cabin; and there stood David Wilson looking at me.
+
+Wilson was a big man, with a massively-built, long face, made longer by
+a beard, and he had little nervous contractions of the flesh at the
+cheek-bones, and plenty of big freckles. His clinging pose, his smile of
+disgust, his whole air, as he stood crouching and lurching there, I can
+shut my eyes, and see now.
+
+What he was doing in my cabin I did not know. To think, my good God,
+that he should have been led there just then! This was one of the
+four-men starboard berths: _his_ was a-port: yet there he was! But he
+explained at once.
+
+'Sorry to interrupt your innocent dreams, says he: 'the mercury in
+Maitland's thermometer is frozen, and he asked me to hand him his
+spirits-of-wine one from his bunk...'
+
+I did not answer. A hatred was in my heart against this man.
+
+The next day the storm died away, and either three or four days later
+the slush-ice between the floes froze definitely. The _Boreal's_ way was
+thus blocked. We warped her with ice-anchors and the capstan into the
+position in which she should lay up for her winter's drift. This was in
+about 79° 20' N. The sun had now totally vanished from our bleak sky,
+not to reappear till the following year.
+
+Well, there was sledging with the dogs, and bear-hunting among the
+hummocks, as the months, one by one, went by. One day Wilson, by far our
+best shot, got a walrus-bull; Clark followed the traditional pursuit of
+a Chief, examining Crustacea; Maitland and I were in a relation of close
+friendship, and I assisted his meteorological observations in a snow-hut
+built near the ship. Often, through the twenty-four hours, a clear blue
+moon, very spectral, very fair, suffused all our dim and livid clime.
+
+It was five days before Christmas that Clark made the great
+announcement: he had determined, he said, if our splendid northward
+drift continued, to leave the ship about the middle of next March for
+the dash to the Pole. He would take with him the four reindeer, all the
+dogs, four sledges, four kayaks, and three companions. The companions
+whom he had decided to invite were: Wilson, Mew, and Maitland.
+
+He said it at dinner; and as he said it, David Wilson glanced at my wan
+face with a smile of pleased malice: for _I_ was left out.
+
+I remember well: the aurora that night was in the sky, and at its edge
+floated a moon surrounded by a ring, with two mock-moons. But all shone
+very vaguely and far, and a fog, which had already lasted some days,
+made the ship's bows indistinct to me, as I paced the bridge on my
+watch, two hours after Clark's announcement.
+
+For a long time all was very still, save for the occasional whine of a
+dog. I was alone, and it grew toward the end of my watch, when Maitland
+would succeed me. My slow tread tolled like a passing-bell, and the
+mountainous ice lay vague and white around me, its sheeted ghastliness
+not less dreadfully silent than eternity itself.
+
+Presently, several of the dogs began barking together, left off, and
+began again.
+
+I said to myself; 'There is a bear about somewhere.'
+
+And after some five minutes I saw--I thought that I saw--it. The fog
+had, if anything thickened; and it was now very near the end of my
+watch.
+
+It had entered the ship, I concluded, by the boards which slanted from
+an opening in the port bulwarks down to the ice. Once before, in
+November, a bear, having smelled the dogs, had ventured on board at
+midnight: but _then_ there had resulted a perfect hubbub among the dogs.
+_Now_, even in the midst of my excitement, I wondered at their
+quietness, though some whimpered--with fear, I thought. I saw the
+creature steal forward from the hatchway toward the kennels a-port; and
+I ran noiselessly, and seized the watch-gun which stood always loaded by
+the companionway.
+
+By this time, the form had passed the kennels, reached the bows, and now
+was making toward me on the starboard side. I took aim. Never, I
+thought, had I seen so huge a bear--though I made allowance for the
+magnifying effect of the fog.
+
+My finger was on the trigger: and at that moment a deathly shivering
+sickness took me, the wrangling voices shouted at me, with 'Shoot!'
+'Shoot not!' 'Shoot!' Ah well, that latter shout was irresistible. I
+drew the trigger. The report hooted through the Polar night.
+
+The creature dropped; both Wilson and Clark were up at once: and we
+three hurried to the spot.
+
+But the very first near glance showed a singular kind of bear. Wilson
+put his hand to the head, and a lax skin came away at his touch.... It
+was Aubrey Maitland who was underneath it, and I had shot him dead.
+
+For the past few days he had been cleaning skins, among them the skin of
+the bear from which I had saved him at Taimur. Now, Maitland was a born
+pantomimist, continually inventing practical jokes; and perhaps to
+startle me with a false alarm in the very skin of the old Bruin which
+had so nearly done for him, he had thrown it round him on finishing its
+cleaning, and so, in mere wanton fun, had crept on deck at the hour of
+his watch. The head of the bear-skin, and the fog, must have prevented
+him from seeing me taking aim.
+
+This tragedy made me ill for weeks. I saw that the hand of Fate was upon
+me. When I rose from bed, poor Maitland was lying in the ice behind the
+great camel-shaped hummock near us.
+
+By the end of January we had drifted to 80° 55'; and it was then that
+Clark, in the presence of Wilson, asked me if I would make the fourth
+man, in the place of poor Maitland, for the dash in the spring. As I
+said 'Yes, I am willing,' David Wilson spat with a disgusted emphasis. A
+minute later he sighed, with 'Ah, poor Maitland...' and drew in his
+breath with a _tut! tut!_
+
+God knows, I had an impulse to spring then and there at his throat, and
+strangle him: but I curbed myself.
+
+There remained now hardly a month before the dash, and all hands set to
+work with a will, measuring the dogs, making harness and seal-skin shoes
+for them, overhauling sledges and kayaks, and cutting every possible
+ounce of weight. But we were not destined, after all, to set out that
+year. About the 20th February, the ice began to pack, and the ship was
+subjected to an appalling pressure. We found it necessary to make
+trumpets of our hands to shout into one another's ears, for the whole
+ice-continent was crashing, popping, thundering everywhere in terrific
+upheaval. Expecting every moment to see the _Boreal_ crushed to
+splinters, we had to set about unpacking provisions, and placing
+sledges, kayaks, dogs and everything in a position for instant flight.
+It lasted five days, and was accompanied by a tempest from the north,
+which, by the end of February, had driven us back south into latitude
+79° 40'. Clark, of course, then abandoned the thought of the Pole for
+that summer.
+
+And immediately afterwards we made a startling discovery: our stock of
+reindeer-moss was found to be somehow ridiculously small. Egan, our
+second mate, was blamed; but that did not help matters: the sad fact
+remained. Clark was advised to kill one or two of the deer, but he
+pig-headedly refused: and by the beginning of summer they were all dead.
+
+Well, our northward drift recommenced. Toward the middle of February we
+saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of
+Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us. In an ice-pack
+of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all the summer.
+
+When the last of the deer died, my heart sank; and when the dogs killed
+two of their number, and a bear crushed a third, I was fully expecting
+what actually came; it was this: Clark announced that he could now take
+only two companions with him in the spring: and they were Wilson and
+Mew. So once more I saw David Wilson's pleased smile of malice.
+
+We settled into our second winter-quarters. Again came December, and all
+our drear sunless gloom, made worse by the fact that the windmill would
+not work, leaving us without the electric light.
+
+Ah me, none but those who have felt it could dream of one half the
+mental depression of that long Arctic night; how the soul takes on the
+hue of the world; and without and within is nothing but gloom, gloom,
+and the reign of the Power of Darkness.
+
+Not one of us but was in a melancholic, dismal and dire mood; and on the
+13th December Lamburn, the engineer, stabbed Cartwright, the old
+harpooner, in the arm.
+
+Three days before Christmas a bear came close to the ship, and then
+turned tail. Mew, Wilson, I and Meredith (a general hand) set out in
+pursuit. After a pretty long chase we lost him, and then scattered
+different ways. It was very dim, and after yet an hour's search, I was
+returning weary and disgusted to the ship, when I saw some shadow like a
+bear sailing away on my left, and at the same time sighted a man--I did
+not know whom--running like a handicapped ghost some little distance to
+the right. So I shouted out:
+
+'There he is--come on! This way!'
+
+The man quickly joined me, but as soon as ever he recognised me, stopped
+dead. The devil must have suddenly got into him, for he said:
+
+'No, thanks, Jeffson: alone with you I am in danger of my life....'
+
+It was Wilson. And I, too, forgetting at once all about the bear,
+stopped and faced him.
+
+'I see,' said I. 'But, Wilson, you are going to explain to me _now_ what
+you mean, you hear? What _do_ you mean, Wilson?'
+
+'What I say,' he answered deliberately, eyeing me up and down: 'alone
+with you I am in danger of my life. Just as poor Maitland was, and just
+as poor Peters was. Certainly, you are a deadly beast.'
+
+Fury leapt, my God, in my heart. Black as the tenebrous Arctic night was
+my soul.
+
+'Do you mean,' said I, 'that I want to put you out of the way in order
+to go in your place to the Pole? Is that your meaning, man?'
+
+'That's about my meaning, Jeffson,' says he: 'you are a deadly beast,
+you know.'
+
+'Stop!' I said, with blazing eye. 'I am going to kill _you_, Wilson--as
+sure as God lives: but I want to hear first. Who _told_ you that I
+killed Peters?'
+
+'Your lover killed him--with _your_ collusion. Why, I heard you, man, in
+your beastly sleep, calling the whole thing out. And I was pretty sure
+of it before, only I had no proofs. By God, I should enjoy putting a
+bullet into you, Jeffson!'
+
+'You wrong me--you, you wrong me!' I shrieked, my eyes staring with
+ravenous lust for his blood; 'and now I am going to pay you well for it.
+_Look out, you!_'
+
+I aimed my gun for his heart, and I touched the trigger. He held up his
+left hand.
+
+'Stop,' he said, 'stop.' (He was one of the coolest of men ordinarily.)
+'There is no gallows on the _Boreal_, but Clark could easily rig one for
+you. I want to kill you, too, because there are no criminal courts up
+here, and it would be doing a good action for my country. But not
+here--not now. Listen to me--don't shoot. Later we can meet, when all is
+ready, so that no one may be the wiser, and fight it all out.'
+
+As he spoke I let the gun drop. It was better so. I knew that he was
+much the best shot on the ship, and I an indifferent one: but I did not
+care, I did not care, if I was killed.
+
+It is a dim, inclement land, God knows: and the spirit of darkness and
+distraction is there.
+
+Twenty hours later we met behind the great saddle-shaped hummock, some
+six miles to the S.E. of the ship. We had set out at different times, so
+that no one might suspect. And each brought a ship's-lantern.
+
+Wilson had dug an ice-grave near the hummock, leaving at its edge a
+heap of brash-ice and snow to fill it. We stood separated by an interval
+of perhaps seventy yards, the grave between us, each with a lantern at
+his feet.
+
+Even so we were mere shadowy apparitions one to the other. The air
+glowered very drearily, and present in my inmost soul were the frills of
+cold. A chill moon, a mere abstraction of light, seemed to hang far
+outside the universe. The temperature was at 55° below zero, so that we
+had on wind-clothes over our anoraks, and heavy foot-bandages under our
+Lap boots. Nothing but a weird morgue seemed the world, haunted with
+despondent madness; and exactly like that world about us were the minds
+of us two poor men, full of macabre, bleak, and funereal feelings.
+
+Between us yawned an early grave for one or other of our bodies.
+
+I heard Wilson cry out:
+
+'Are you ready, Jeffson?'
+
+'Aye, Wilson!' cried I.
+
+'_Then here goes!_' cries he.
+
+Even as he spoke, he fired. Surely, the man was in deadly earnest to
+kill me.
+
+But his shot passed harmlessly by me: as indeed was only likely: we
+were mere shadows one to the other.
+
+I fired perhaps ten seconds later than he: but in those ten seconds he
+stood perfectly revealed to me in clear, lavender light.
+
+An Arctic fire-ball had traversed the sky, showering abroad, a
+sulphurous glamour over the snow-landscape. Before the intenser blue of
+its momentary shine had passed away, I saw Wilson stagger forward, and
+drop. And him and his lantern I buried deep there under the rubble ice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the 13th March, nearly three months later, Clark, Mew and I left the
+Boreal in latitude 85° 15'.
+
+We had with us thirty-two dogs, three sledges, three kayaks, human
+provisions for 112 days, and dog provisions for 40. Being now about 340
+miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in 43 days, then, turning
+south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land
+or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with
+a whaler.
+
+Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough
+and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every
+difficulty, and leaping over the traces. Clark had had the excellent
+idea of attaching a gold-beater's-skin balloon, with a lifting power of
+35 pounds, to each sledge, and we had with us a supply of zinc and
+sulphuric-acid to repair the hydrogen-waste from the bags; but on the
+third day Mew over-filled and burst his balloon, and I and Clark had to
+cut ours loose in order to equalise weights, for we could neither leave
+him behind, turn back to the ship, nor mend the bag. So it happened that
+at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and
+could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old
+Boreal. Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. of
+instruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, his
+sledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixed
+freight. But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and
+Mew took his place.
+
+Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. The
+sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Our
+sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were
+soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers,
+under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.
+Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would
+crash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope of
+reaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six
+mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth day
+Clark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only in
+latitude 86° 45'; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest point
+yet reached by man, viz. 86° 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers four
+years previously.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long lust for the
+eating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only,
+but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!
+A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.
+
+On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar
+silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had
+watched.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanes
+disappeared, and ridges became much less frequent. By the fifteenth day
+I was leaving behind the ice-grave of David Wilson at the rate of ten to
+thirteen miles a day.
+
+Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.
+
+His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses on
+the ship--all plausible enough. I had no idea that anyone connected me
+in any way with his death.
+
+But on our twenty-second day of march, 140 miles from our goal, he
+caused a conflagration of rage and hate to break out among us three.
+
+It was at the end of a march, when our stomachs were hollow, our frames
+ready to drop, and our mood ravenous and inflamed. One of Mew's dogs was
+sick: it was necessary to kill it: he asked me to do it.
+
+'Oh,' said I, 'you kill your own dog, of course.'
+
+'Well, I don't know,' he replied, catching fire at once, 'you ought to
+be used to killing, Jeffson.'
+
+'How do you mean, Mew?' said I with a mad start, for madness and the
+flames of Hell were instant and uppermost in us all: 'you mean because
+my profession----'
+
+'Profession! damn it, no,' he snarled like a dog: 'go and dig up David
+Wilson--I dare say you know where to find him--and he will tell you my
+meaning, right enough.'
+
+I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs,
+unharnessing: and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed:
+
+'That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!'
+
+'Well?' said Clark.
+
+'I'd split his skull as clean----!'
+
+'Go away, Adam Jeffson, and let me be!' snarled Clark.
+
+'Is that all you've got to say about it, then--you?'
+
+'To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!' cried he: 'you know
+your own conscience best, I suppose.'
+
+Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent. However,
+from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.
+Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous,
+fierceness. In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we had
+become almost like the beasts that perish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though
+sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower
+animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week
+spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a
+real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region--beyond doubt
+cursed--not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was the
+degeneration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived that
+savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood
+in mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the
+habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so
+would they be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four
+miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges
+lightened) to twenty.
+
+It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-looking
+objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually
+increased as we proceeded. They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces
+of iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and they
+were of every size. Their incrustations we soon determined to be
+diamonds, and other precious stones. On our first twenty-mile day Mew
+picked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child's foot, and such objects
+soon became common. We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond all
+dream; but as the bear and the walrus find them: for ourselves we had
+lost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for all those
+millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled
+something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance
+had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in
+their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to
+interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our
+way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We had all along had good weather: till, suddenly, on the morning of the
+13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mighty
+and solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it. It lasted in its
+full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our
+sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward. We had
+travelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so as
+soon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, we
+crawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.
+
+We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our
+eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle
+cracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempest
+stirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care:
+we slept deep.
+
+We were within ten miles of the Pole.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In my sleep it was as though someone suddenly shook my shoulder with
+urgent '_Up! up_!' It was neither Clark nor Mew, but a dream merely: for
+Clark and Mew, when I started up, I saw lying still in their
+sleeping-bag.
+
+I suppose it must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and my
+first numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh had
+prayed me 'Be first'--for her. Wondrous little now cared I for the
+Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth--precious little for
+the fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes lay
+unregarded around me. But that thought, _Be first!_ was deeply suggested
+in my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as the
+Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes,
+arose.
+
+The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the
+tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation. I
+looked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but waving
+horizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparkling
+meteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big as
+houses, most small as limbs. And this great plain was now rearranging
+itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like
+mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate
+mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and
+inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself,
+pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw
+the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers
+or spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime,
+filling all the air. As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I found
+the dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.
+
+I did not care. Instinctively, daftly, brutishly, I harnessed ten of
+them to my sledge; put on Canadian snow-shoes: and was away
+northward--alone.
+
+The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining: a ghostly,
+remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lighting
+of other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance. A
+great wind from the S.W., meantime, sent thin snow-sweepings flying
+northward past me.
+
+The odometer which I had with me had not yet measured four miles, when I
+began to notice two things: first that the jewelled meteor-stones were
+now accumulating beyond all limit, filling my range of vision to the
+northern horizon with a dazzling glister: in mounds, and parterres, and
+scattered disconnection they lay, like largesse of autumn leaves, spread
+out over those Elysian fields and fairy uplands of wealth, trillions of
+billions, so that I had need to steer my twining way among them. Now,
+too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had
+disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south
+being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me.
+It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt
+one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of
+the deep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now with a wild hilarity I flew. Gradually, a dizziness, a lunacy,
+had seized upon me, till finally, up-buoyed on air, and dancing mad, I
+sped, I spun, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and
+eyeballs of distraction: for a Fear, too--most cold and dreadful--had
+its hand of ice upon my heart, I being so alone in that place, face to
+face with the Ineffable: but still with a giddy levity, and a fatal joy,
+and a blind hilarity, on I sped, I spun.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The odometer measured nine miles from my start. I was in the immediate
+neighbourhood of the Pole.
+
+I cannot say when it began, but now I was conscious of a sound in my
+ears, distinct and near, a steady sound of splashing, or fluttering,
+resembling the noising of a cascade or brook: and it grew. Forty more
+steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)--perhaps
+sixty--perhaps eighty: and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a
+circular clean-cut lake.
+
+One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood: and then I dropped
+down flat in swoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a hundred years, I suppose, I should never succeed in analysing
+_why_ I swooned: but my consciousness still retains the impression of
+that horrid thrill. I saw nothing distinctly, for my whole being reeled
+and toppled drunken, like a spinning-top in desperate death-struggle at
+the moment when it flags, and wobbles dissolutely to fall; but the very
+instant that my eyes met what was before me, I knew, I knew, that here
+was the Sanctity of Sanctities, the old eternal inner secret of the Life
+of this Earth, which it was a most burning shame for a man to see. The
+lake, I fancy, must be a mile across, and in its middle is a pillar of
+ice, very low and broad; and I had the clear impression, or dream, or
+notion, that there was a name, or word, graven all round in the ice of
+the pillar in characters which I could never read; and under the name a
+long date; and the fluid of the lake seemed to me to be wheeling with a
+shivering ecstasy, splashing and fluttering, round the pillar, always
+from west to east, in the direction of the spinning of the earth; and it
+was borne in upon me--I can't at all say how--that this fluid was the
+substance of a living creature; and I had the distinct fancy, as my
+senses failed, that it was a creature with many dull and anguished eyes,
+and that, as it wheeled for ever round in fluttering lust, it kept its
+eyes always turned upon the name and the date graven in the pillar. But
+this must be my madness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It must have been not less than an hour before a sense of life returned
+to me; and when the thought stabbed my brain that a long, long time I
+had lain there in the presence of those gloomy orbs, my spirit seemed to
+groan and die within me.
+
+In some minutes, however, I had scrambled to my feet, clutched at a
+dog's harness, and without one backward glance, was flying from that
+place.
+
+Half-way to the halting-place, I waited Clark and Mew, being very sick
+and doddering, and unable to advance. But they did not come.
+
+Later on, when I gathered force to go further, I found that they had
+perished in the upheaval of the ice. One only of the sledges, half
+buried, I saw near the spot of our bivouac.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Alone that same day I began my way southward, and for five days made
+good progress. On the eighth day I noticed, stretched right across the
+south-eastern horizon, a region of purple vapour which luridly obscured
+the face of the sun: and day after day I saw it steadily brooding
+there. But what it could be I did not understand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, onward through the desert ice I continued my lonely way, with a
+baleful shrinking terror in my heart; for very stupendous, alas! is the
+burden of that Arctic solitude upon one poor human soul.
+
+Sometimes on a halt I have lain and listened long to the hollow silence,
+recoiling, crushed by it, hoping that at least one of the dogs might
+whine. I have even crept shivering from the thawed sleeping-bag to flog
+a dog, so that I might hear a sound.
+
+I had started from the Pole with a well-filled sledge, and the sixteen
+dogs left alive from the ice-packing which buried my comrades. This was
+on the evening of the 13th April. I had saved from the wreck of our
+things most of the whey-powder, pemmican, &c., as well as the
+theodolite, compass, chronometer, train-oil lamp for cooking, and other
+implements: I was therefore in no doubt as to my course, and I had
+provisions for ninety days. But ten days from the start my supply of
+dog-food failed, and I had to begin to slaughter my only companions, one
+by one.
+
+Well, in the third week the ice became horribly rough, and with moil
+and toil enough to wear a bear to death, I did only five miles a day.
+After the day's work I would crawl with a dying sigh into the
+sleeping-bag, clad still in the load of skins which stuck to me a mere
+filth of grease, to sleep the sleep of a swine, indifferent if I never
+woke.
+
+Always--day after day--on the south-eastern horizon, brooded sullenly
+that curious stretched-out region of purple vapour, like the smoke of
+the conflagration of the world. And I noticed that its length constantly
+reached out and out, and silently grew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once I had a very pleasant dream. I dreamed that I was in a garden--an
+Arabian paradise--so sweet was the perfume. All the time, however, I had
+a sub-consciousness of the gale which was actually blowing from the S.E.
+over the ice, and, at the moment when I awoke, was half-wittedly droning
+to myself; 'It is a Garden of Peaches; but I am not really in the
+garden: I am really on the ice; only, the S.E. storm is wafting to me
+the aroma of this Garden of Peaches.'
+
+I opened my eyes--I started--I sprang to my feet! For, of all the
+miracles!--I could not doubt--an actual aroma like peach-blossom was in
+the algid air about me!
+
+Before I could collect my astonished senses, I began to vomit pretty
+violently, and at the same time saw some of the dogs, mere skeletons as
+they were, vomiting, too. For a long time I lay very sick in a kind of
+daze, and, on rising, found two of the dogs dead, and all very queer.
+The wind had now changed to the north.
+
+Well, on I staggered, fighting every inch of my deplorably weary way.
+This odour of peach-blossom, my sickness, and the death of the two dogs,
+remained a wonder to me.
+
+Two days later, to my extreme mystification (and joy), I came across a
+bear and its cub lying dead at the foot of a hummock. I could not
+believe my eyes. There she lay on her right side, a spot of dirty-white
+in a disordered patch of snow, with one little eye open, and her
+fierce-looking mouth also; and the cub lay across her haunch, biting
+into her rough fur. I set to work upon her, and allowed the dogs a
+glorious feed on the blubber, while I myself had a great banquet on the
+fresh meat. I had to leave the greater part of the two carcasses, and I
+can feel again now the hankering reluctance--quite unnecessary, as it
+turned out--with which I trudged onwards. Again and again I found
+myself asking: 'Now, what could have killed those two bears?'
+
+With brutish stolidness I plodded ever on, almost like a walking
+machine, sometimes nodding in sleep while I helped the dogs, or
+manouvred the sledge over an ice-ridge, pushing or pulling. On the 3rd
+June, a month and a half from my start, I took an observation with the
+theodolite, and found that I was not yet 400 miles from the Pole, in
+latitude 84° 50'. It was just as though some Will, some Will, was
+obstructing and retarding me.
+
+However, the intolerable cold was over, and soon my clothes no longer
+hung stark on me like armour. Pools began to appear in the ice, and
+presently, what was worse, my God, long lanes, across which, somehow, I
+had to get the sledge. But about the same time all fear of starvation
+passed away: for on the 6th June I came across another dead bear, on the
+7th three, and thenceforth, in rapidly growing numbers, I met not bears
+only, but fulmars, guillemots, snipes, Ross's gulls, little awks--all,
+all, lying dead on the ice. And never anywhere a living thing, save me,
+and the two remaining dogs.
+
+If ever a poor man stood shocked before a mystery, it was I now. I had a
+big fear on my heart.
+
+On the 2nd July the ice began packing dangerously, and soon another
+storm broke loose upon me from the S.W. I left off my trek, and put up
+the silk tent on a five-acre square of ice surrounded by lanes: and
+_again_--for the second time--as I lay down, I smelled that delightful
+strange odour of peach-blossom, a mere whiff of it, and presently
+afterwards was taken sick. However, it passed off this time in a couple
+of hours.
+
+Now it was all lanes, lanes, alas! yet no open water, and such was the
+difficulty and woe of my life, that sometimes I would drop flat on the
+ice, and sob: 'Oh, no more, no more, my God: here let me die.' The
+crossing of a lane might occupy ten or twelve entire hours, and then, on
+the other side I might find another one opening right before me.
+Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber,
+suddenly died; and there was left me only 'Reinhardt,' a white-haired
+Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat's. Him, too,
+I had to kill on coming to open water.
+
+This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the
+Pole.
+
+I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling
+nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four
+long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a
+man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed
+and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others
+yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze,
+and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake.
+
+However, by the 28th July I knew from the look of the sky, and the
+absence of fresh-water ice, that the sea could not be far; so I set to
+work, and spent two days in putting to rights the now battered kayak.
+This done, I had no sooner resumed my way than I sighted far off a
+streaky haze, which I knew to be the basalt cliffs of Franz Josef Land;
+and in a craziness of joy I stood there, waving my ski-staff about my
+head, with the senile cheers of a very old man.
+
+In four days this land was visibly nearer, sheer basaltic cliffs mixed
+with glacier, forming apparently a great bay, with two small islands in
+the mid-distance; and at fore-day of the 3rd August I arrived at the
+definite edge of the pack-ice in moderate weather at about the
+freezing-point.
+
+I at once, but with great reluctance, shot Reinhardt, and set to work to
+get the last of the provisions, and the most necessary of the
+implements, into the kayak, making haste to put out to the toilless
+luxury of being borne on the water, after all the weary trudge. Within
+fourteen hours I was coasting, with my little lug-sail spread, along the
+shore-ice of that land. It was midnight of a calm Sabbath, and low on
+the horizon smoked the drowsing red sun-ball, as my canvas skiff lightly
+chopped her little way through this silent sea. Silent, silent: for
+neither snort of walrus, nor yelp of fox, nor cry of startled kittiwake,
+did I hear: but all was still as the jet-black shadow of the cliffs and
+glacier on the tranquil sea: and many bodies of dead things strewed the
+surface of the water.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I found a little fjord, I went up it to the end where stood a
+stretch of basalt columns, looking like a shattered temple of
+Antediluvians; and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a
+long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that
+night were like a fountain of tears. For the firm land is health and
+sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial
+ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the
+Power of Darkness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I knew that I was at Franz Josef Land, somewhere or other in the
+neighbourhood of C. Fligely (about 82° N.), and though it was so late,
+and getting cold, I still had the hope of reaching Spitzbergen that
+year, by alternately sailing all open water, and dragging the kayak over
+the slack drift-ice. All the ice which I saw was good flat fjord-ice,
+and the plan seemed feasible enough; so after coasting about a little,
+and then three days' good rest in the tent at the bottom of a ravine of
+columnar basalt opening upon the shore, I packed some bear and walrus
+flesh, with what artificial food was left, into the kayak, and I set out
+early in the morning, coasting the shore-ice with sail and paddle. In
+the afternoon I managed to climb a little way up an iceberg, and made
+out that I was in a bay whose terminating headlands were invisible. I
+accordingly decided to make S.W. by W. to cross it, but, in doing so, I
+was hardly out of sight of land, when a northern storm overtook me
+toward midnight; before I could think, the little sail was all but
+whiffed away, and the kayak upset. I only saved it by the happy chance
+of being near a floe with an ice-foot, which, projecting under the
+water, gave me foot-hold; and I lay on the floe in a mooning state the
+whole night under the storm, for I was half drowned.
+
+And at once, on recovering myself, I abandoned all thought of whalers
+and of Europe for that year. Happily, my instruments, &c., had been
+saved by the kayak-deck when she capsized.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A hundred yards inland from the shore-rim, in a circular place where
+there was some moss and soil, I built myself a semi-subterranean Eskimo
+den for the long Polar night. The spot was quite surrounded by high
+sloping walls of basalt, except to the west, where they opened in a
+three-foot cleft to the shore, and the ground was strewn with slabs and
+boulders of granite and basalt. I found there a dead she-bear, two
+well-grown cubs, and a fox, the latter having evidently fallen from the
+cliffs; in three places the snow was quite red, overgrown with a red
+lichen, which at first I took for blood. I did not even yet feel secure
+from possible bears, and took care to make my den fairly tight, a work
+which occupied me nearly four weeks, for I had no tools, save a hatchet,
+knife, and metal-shod ski-staff. I dug a passage in the ground two feet
+wide, two deep, and ten long, with perpendicular sides, and at its north
+end a circular space, twelve feet across, also with perpendicular sides,
+which I lined with stones; the whole excavation I covered with
+inch-thick walrus-hide, skinned during a whole bitter week from four of
+a number that lay about the shore-ice; for ridge-pole I used a thin
+pointed rock which I found near, though, even so, the roof remained
+nearly flat. This, when it was finished, I stocked well, putting in
+everything, except the kayak, blubber to serve both for fuel and
+occasional light, and foods of several sorts, which I procured by merely
+stretching out the hand. The roof of both circular part and passage was
+soon buried under snow and ice, and hardly distinguishable from the
+general level of the white-clad ground. Through the passage, if I passed
+in or out, I crawled flat, on hands and knees: but that was rare: and in
+the little round interior, mostly sitting in a cowering attitude, I
+wintered, harkening to the large and windy ravings of darkling December
+storms above me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All those months the burden of a thought bowed me; and an unanswered
+question, like the slow turning of a mechanism, revolved in my gloomy
+spirit: for everywhere around me lay bears, walruses, foxes, thousands
+upon thousands of little awks, kittiwakes, snow-owls, eider-ducks,
+gulls-dead, dead. Almost the only living things which I saw were some
+walruses on the drift-floes: but very few compared with the number
+which I expected. It was clear to me that some inconceivable catastrophe
+had overtaken the island during the summer, destroying all life about
+it, except some few of the amphibia, cetacea, and crustacea.
+
+On the 5th December, having crept out from the den during a southern
+storm, I had, for the third time, a distant whiff of that self-same
+odour of peach-blossom: but now without any after-effects.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, again came Christmas, the New Year--Spring: and on the 22nd May I
+set out with a well-stocked kayak. The water was fairly open, and the
+ice so good, that at one place I could sail the kayak over it, the wind
+sending me sliding at a fine pace. Being on the west coast of Franz
+Josef Land, I was in as favourable a situation as possible, and I turned
+my bow southward with much hope, keeping a good many days just in sight
+of land. Toward the evening of my third day out I noticed a large flat
+floe, presenting far-off a singular and lovely sight, for it seemed
+freighted thick with a profusion of pink and white roses, showing in its
+clear crystal the empurpled reflection. On getting near I saw that it
+was covered with millions of Ross's gulls, all dead, whose pretty rosy
+bosoms had given it that appearance.
+
+Up to the 29th June I made good progress southward and westward (the
+weather being mostly excellent), sometimes meeting dead bears, floating
+away on floes, sometimes dead or living walrus-herds, with troop after
+troop of dead kittiwakes, glaucus and ivory gulls, skuas, and every kind
+of Arctic fowl. On that last day--the 29th June--I was about to encamp
+on a floe soon after midnight, when, happening to look toward the sun,
+my eye fell, far away south across the ocean of floes, upon
+something--_the masts of a ship_.
+
+A phantom ship, or a real ship: it was all one; real, I must have
+instantly felt, it could not be: but at a sight so incredible my heart
+set to beating in my bosom as though I must surely die, and feebly
+waving the cane oar about my head, I staggered to my knees, and thence
+with wry mouth toppled flat.
+
+So overpoweringly sweet was the thought of springing once more, like the
+beasts of Circe, from a walrus into a man. At this time I was tearing my
+bear's-meat just like a bear; I was washing my hands in walrus-blood to
+produce a glairy sort of pink cleanliness, in place of the black grease
+which chronically coated them.
+
+Worn as I was, I made little delay to set out for that ship; and I had
+not travelled over water and ice four hours when, to my in-describable
+joy, I made out from the top of a steep floe that she was the _Boreal_.
+It seemed most strange that she should be anywhere hereabouts: I could
+only conclude that she must have forced and drifted her way thus far
+westward out of the ice-block in which our party had left her, and
+perhaps now was loitering here in the hope of picking us up on our way
+to Spitzbergen.
+
+In any case, wild was the haste with which I fought my way to be at her,
+my gasping mouth all the time drawn back in a _rictus_ of laughter at
+the anticipation of their gladness to see me, their excitement to hear
+the grand tidings of the Pole attained. Anon I waved the paddle, though
+I knew that they could not yet see me, and then I dug deep at the
+whitish water. What astonished me was her main-sail and fore-mast
+square-sail--set that calm morning; and her screws were still, for she
+moved not at all. The sun was abroad like a cold spirit of light,
+touching the great ocean-room of floes with dazzling spots, and a tint
+almost of rose was on the world, as it were of a just-dead bride in her
+spangles and white array. The _Boreal_ was the one little distant
+jet-black spot in all this purity: and upon her, as though she were
+Heaven, I paddled, I panted. But she was in a queerish state: by 9 A.M.
+I could see that. Two of the windmill arms were not there, and half
+lowered down her starboard beam a boat hung askew; moreover, soon after
+10 I could clearly see that her main-sail had a long rent down the
+middle.
+
+I could not at all make her out. She was not anchored, though a
+sheet-anchor hung over at the starboard cathead; she was not moored; and
+two small ice-floes, one on each side, were sluggishly bombarding her
+bows.
+
+I began now to wave the paddle, battling for my breath, ecstatic, crazy
+with excitement, each second like a year to me. Very soon I could make
+out someone at the bows, leaning well over, looking my way. Something
+put it into my head that it was Sallitt, and I began an impassioned
+shouting. 'Hi! Sallitt! Hallo! Hi!' I called.
+
+I did not see him move: I was still a good way off: but there he stood,
+leaning steadily over, looking my way. Between me and the ship now was
+all navigable water among the floes, and the sight of him so visibly
+near put into me such a shivering eagerness, that I was nothing else but
+a madman for the time, sending the kayak flying with venomous digs in
+quick-repeated spurts, and mixing with the diggings my crazy wavings,
+and with both the daft shoutings of 'Hallo! Hi! Bravo! I have _been to
+the Pole!_'
+
+Well, vanity, vanity. Nearer still I drew: it was broad morning, going
+on toward noon: I was half a mile away, I was fifty yards. But on board
+the _Boreal_, though now they _must_ have heard me, seen me, I observed
+no movement of welcome, but all, all was still as death that still
+Arctic morning, my God. Only, the ragged sail flapped a little, and--one
+on each side--two ice-floes sluggishly bombarded the bows, with hollow
+sounds.
+
+I was certain now that Sallitt it was who looked across the ice: but
+when the ship swung a little round, I noticed that the direction of his
+gaze was carried with her movement, he no longer looking my way.
+
+'Why, Sallitt!' I shouted reproachfully: 'why, Sallitt, man...!' I
+whined.
+
+But even as I shouted and whined, a perfect wild certainty was in my
+heart: for an aroma like peach, my God, had been suddenly wafted from
+the ship upon me, and I must have very well known then that that
+watchful outlook of Sallitt saw nothing, and on the _Boreal_ were dead
+men all; indeed, very soon I saw one of his eyes looking like a glass
+eye which has slid askew, and glares distraught. And now again my
+wretched body failed, and my head dropped forward, where I sat, upon
+the kayak-deck.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, after a long time, I lifted myself to look again at that forlorn
+and wandering craft. There she lay, quiet, tragic, as it were culpable
+of the dark secret she bore; and Sallitt, who had been such good friends
+with me, would not cease his stare. I knew quite well why he was there:
+he had leant over to vomit, and had leant ever since, his forearms
+pressed on the bulwark-beam, his left knee against the boards, and his
+left shoulder propped on the cathead. When I came quite near, I saw that
+with every bump of the two floes against the bows, his face shook in
+response, and nodded a little; strange to say, he had no covering on his
+head, and I noted the play of the faint breezes in his uncut hair. After
+a time I would approach no more, for I was afraid; I did not dare, the
+silence of the ship seemed so sacred and awful; and till late afternoon
+I sat there, watching the black and massive hull. Above her water-line
+emerged all round a half-floating fringe of fresh-green sea-weed,
+proving old neglect; an abortive attempt had apparently been made to
+lower, or take in, the larch-wood pram, for there she hung by a jammed
+davit-rope, stern up, bow in the water; the only two arms of the
+windmill moved this way and that, through some three degrees, with an
+_andante_ creaking sing-song; some washed clothes, tied on the bow-sprit
+rigging to dry, were still there; the iron casing all round the bluff
+bows was red and rough with rust; at several points the rigging was in
+considerable tangle; occasionally the boom moved a little with a
+tortured skirling cadence; and the sail, rotten, I presume, from
+exposure--for she had certainly encountered no bad weather--gave out
+anon a heavy languid flap at a rent down the middle. Besides Sallitt,
+looking out there where he had jammed himself, I saw no one.
+
+By a paddle-stroke now, and another presently, I had closely approached
+her about four in the afternoon, though my awe of the ship was
+complicated by that perfume of hers, whose fearful effects I knew. My
+tentative approach, however, proved to me, when I remained unaffected,
+that, here and now, whatever danger there had been was past; and
+finally, by a hanging rope, with a thumping desperation of heart, I
+clambered up her beam.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had died, it seemed, very suddenly, for nearly all the twelve were
+in poses of activity. Egan was in the very act of ascending the
+companion-way; Lamburn was sitting against the chart-room door,
+apparently cleaning two carbines; Odling at the bottom of the
+engine-room stair seemed to be drawing on a pair of reindeer komagar;
+and Cartwright, who was often in liquor, had his arms frozen tight round
+the neck of Martin, whom he seemed to be kissing, they two lying stark
+at the foot of the mizzen-mast.
+
+Over all--over men, decks, rope-coils--in the cabin, in the
+engine-room--between skylight leaves--on every shelf, in every
+cranny--lay a purplish ash or dust, very impalpably fine. And steadily
+reigning throughout the ship, like the very spirit of death, was that
+aroma of peach-blossom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here it had reigned, as I could see from the log-dates, from the rust on
+the machinery, from the look of the bodies, from a hundred indications,
+during something over a year. It was, therefore, mainly by the random
+workings of winds and currents that this fragrant ship of death had been
+brought hither to me.
+
+And this was the first direct intimation which I had that the Unseen
+Powers (whoever and whatever they may be), who through the history of
+the world had been so very, very careful to conceal their Hand from the
+eyes of men, hardly any longer intended to be at the pains to conceal
+their Hand from me. It was just as though the Boreal had been openly
+presented to me by a spiritual agency, which, though I could not see it,
+I could readily apprehend.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dust, though very thin and flighty above-decks, lay thickly
+deposited below, and after having made a tour of investigation
+throughout the ship, the first thing which I did was to examine
+that--though I had tasted nothing all day, and was exhausted to death. I
+found my own microscope where I had left it in the box in my berth to
+starboard, though I had to lift up Egan to get at it, and to step over
+Lamburn to enter the chart-room; but there, toward evening, I sat at the
+table and bent to see if I could make anything of the dust, while it
+seemed to me as if all the myriad spirits of men that have sojourned on
+the earth, and angel and devil, and all Time and all Eternity, hung
+silent round for my decision; and such an ague had me, that for a long
+time my wandering finger-tips, all ataxic with agitation, eluded every
+delicate effort which I made, and I could nothing do. Of course, I know
+that an odour of peach-blossom in the air, resulting in death, could
+only be associated with some vaporous effluvium of cyanogen, or of
+hydrocyanic ('prussic') acid, or of both; and when I at last managed to
+examine some of the dust under the microscope, I was not therefore
+surprised to find, among the general mass of purplish ash, a number of
+bright-yellow particles, which could only be minute crystals of potassic
+ferrocyanide. What potassic ferrocyanide was doing on board the _Boreal_
+I did not know, and I had neither the means, nor the force of mind,
+alas! to dive then further into the mystery; I understood only that by
+some extraordinary means the air of the region just south of the Polar
+environ had been impregnated with a vapour which was either cyanogen, or
+some product of cyanogen; also, that this deadly vapour, which is very
+soluble, had by now either been dissolved by the sea, or else dispersed
+into space (probably the latter), leaving only its faint after-perfume;
+and seeing this, I let my poor abandoned head drop again on the table,
+and long hours I sat there staring mad, for I had a suspicion, my God,
+and a fear, in my breast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Boreal,_ I found, contained sufficient provisions, untouched by
+the dust, in cases, casks, &c., to last me, probably, fifty years. After
+two days, when I had partially scrubbed and boiled the filth of fifteen
+months from my skin, and solaced myself with better food, I overhauled
+her thoroughly, and spent three more days in oiling and cleaning the
+engine. Then, all being ready, I dragged my twelve dead and laid them
+together in two rows on the chart-room floor; and I hoisted for love the
+poor little kayak which had served me through so many tribulations. At
+nine in the morning of the 6th July, a week from my first sighting of
+the _Boreal_, I descended to the engine-room to set out.
+
+The screws, like those of most quite modern ships, were driven by the
+simple contrivance of a constant stream of liquid air, contained in very
+powerful tanks, exploding through capillary tubes into non-expansion
+slide-valve chests, much as in the ordinary way with steam: a motor
+which gave her, in spite of her bluff hulk, a speed of sixteen knots. It
+is, therefore, the simplest thing for one man to take these ships round
+the world, since their movement, or stopping, depend upon nothing but
+the depressing or raising of a steel handle, provided that one does not
+get blown to the sky meantime, as liquid air, in spite of its thousand
+advantages, occasionally blows people. At any rate, I had tanks of air
+sufficient to last me through twelve years' voyaging; and there was the
+ordinary machine on board for making it, with forty tons of coal, in
+case of need, in the bunkers, and two excellent Belleville boilers: so I
+was well supplied with motors at least.
+
+The ice here was quite slack, and I do not think I ever saw Arctic
+weather so bright and gay, the temperature at 41°. I found that I was
+midway between Franz Josef and Spitzbergen, in latitude 79° 23' N. and
+longitude 39° E.; my way was perfectly clear; and something almost like
+a mournful hopefulness was in me as the engines slid into their clanking
+turmoil, and those long-silent screws began to churn the Arctic sea. I
+ran up with alacrity and took my stand at the wheel; and the bows of my
+eventful Argo turned southward and westward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I needed food or sleep, the ship slept, too: when I awoke, she
+continued her way.
+
+Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel,
+overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees would
+give, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not
+contrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the floes
+and bergs. By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polar
+clothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian fur
+cap on my head.
+
+At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as though
+the engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had a
+ghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, but
+the silence of their ghost.
+
+Sometimes I would startle from sleep, horrified to the heart at some
+sound of exploding iceberg, or bumping floe, noising far through that
+white mystery of quietude, where the floes and bergs were as floating
+tombs, and the world a liquid cemetery. Never could I describe the
+strange Doom's-day shock with which such a sound would recall me from
+far depths of chaos to recollection of myself: for often-times, both
+waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which planet I was, nor in
+which Age, but felt myself adrift in the great gulf of time and space
+and circumstance, without bottom for my consciousness to stand upon; and
+the world was all mirage and a new show to me; and the boundaries of
+dream and waking lost.
+
+Well, the weather was most fair all the time, and the sea like a pond.
+During the morning of the fifth day, the 11th July, I entered, and went
+moving down, an extraordinary long avenue of snow-bergs and floes, most
+regularly placed, half a mile across and miles long, like a Titanic
+double-procession of statues, or the Ming Tombs, but rising and sinking
+on the cadenced swell; many towering high, throwing placid shadows on
+the aisle between; some being of a lucid emerald tint; and three or four
+pouring down cascades that gave a far and chaunting sound. The sea
+between was of a strange thick bluishness, almost like raw egg-white;
+while, as always here, some snow-clouds, white and woolly, floated in
+the pale sky. Down this avenue, which produced a mysterious impression
+of Cyclopean cathedrals and odd sequesteredness, I had not passed a
+mile, when I sighted a black object at the end.
+
+I rushed to the shrouds, and very soon made out a whaler.
+
+Again the same panting agitations, mad rage to be at her, at once
+possessed me; I flew to the indicator, turned the lever to full, then
+back to give the wheel a spin, then up the main-mast ratlins, waving a
+long foot-bandage of vadmel tweed picked up at random, and by the time I
+was within five hundred yards of her, had worked myself to such a pitch,
+that I was again shouting that futile madness: 'Hullo! Hi! Bravo! _I
+have been to the Pole!_'
+
+And those twelve dead that I had in the chart-room there must have heard
+me, and the men on the whaler must have heard me, and smiled their
+smile.
+
+For, as to that whaler, I should have known better at once, if I had not
+been crazy, since she _looked_ like a ship of death, her boom slamming
+to port and starboard on the gentle heave of the sea, and her fore-sail
+reefed that serene morning. Only when I was quite near her, and hurrying
+down to stop the engines, did the real truth, with perfect suddenness,
+drench my heated brain; and I almost ran into her, I was so stunned.
+
+However, I stopped the _Boreal_ in time, and later on lowered the kayak,
+and boarded the other.
+
+This ship had evidently been stricken silent in the midst of a perfect
+drama of activity, for I saw not one of her crew of sixty-two who was
+not busy, except one boy. I found her a good-sized thing of 500 odd
+tons, ship-rigged, with auxiliary engine of seventy horse-power, and
+pretty heavily armour-plated round the bows. There was no part of her
+which I did not over-haul, and I could see that they had had a great
+time with whales, for a mighty carcass, attached to the outside of the
+ship by the powerful cant-purchase tackle, had been in process of
+flensing and cutting-in, and on the deck two great blankets of blubber,
+looking each a ton-weight, surrounded by twenty-seven men in many
+attitudes, some terrifying to see, some disgusting, several grotesque,
+all so unhuman, the whale dead, and the men dead, too, and death was
+there, and the rank-flourishing germs of Inanity, and a mesmerism, and a
+silence, whose dominion was established, and its reign was growing old.
+Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratified
+whalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh;
+also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead was
+visible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadily
+out over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of the
+probable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the
+'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whalebone
+plates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; and
+after visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boy
+of fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all the
+turned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, being
+evidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of the
+ship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all the
+three missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag near
+to each. They contained five men each and a steerer, and one had the
+harpoon-gun fired, with the loose line coiled round and round the head
+and upper part of the stroke line-manager; and in the others hundreds of
+fathoms of coiled rope, with toggle-irons, whale-lances, hand-harpoons,
+and dropped heads, and grins, and lazy _abandon_, and eyes that stared,
+and eyes that dozed, and eyes that winked.
+
+After this I began to sight ships not infrequently, and used regularly
+to have the three lights burning all night. On the 12th July I met one,
+on the 15th two, on the 16th one, on the 17th three, on the 18th
+two--all Greenlanders, I think: but, of the nine, I boarded only three,
+the glass quite clearly showing me, when yet far off, that on the others
+was no life; and on the three which I boarded were dead men; so that
+that suspicion which I had, and that fear, grew very heavy upon me.
+
+I went on southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at my
+wheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemed
+mixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of a
+world lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. It
+was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of
+death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and
+limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries
+lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to
+utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon
+in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon
+waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly
+grew. But still the _Boreal_ moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless
+Eternity: and I reached latitude 72°, not far now from Northern Europe.
+
+And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent--even while some floes were yet
+around me--I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set out
+to search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy gales
+from their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him with
+their perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus. For I
+had now reached a zone where the peach-aroma was constant; all the world
+seemed embalmed in its spicy fragrance; and I could easily imagine
+myself voyaging beyond the world toward some clime of perpetual and
+enchanting Spring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call 'the blink of the ice';
+that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when it
+is left behind, or not yet come-to. By this time I was in a region where
+a good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continually
+meeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many I
+boarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram. Just below latitude 70° I
+came upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod and
+herring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northward
+current. They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden with
+curing fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they
+being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The
+evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun
+just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking
+brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of
+things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the
+appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a
+dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were braw
+carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the
+chin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decks
+a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I took
+into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a
+forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two
+knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their
+islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of
+them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquid
+air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a
+stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to
+jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the
+dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an
+awful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I went
+up again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There
+being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that
+half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset
+me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and
+sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the
+ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.
+
+Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats
+these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, I
+boarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the
+Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy
+who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now,
+his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. These
+stalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in every
+pose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectly
+preserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaks
+they rocked a little, nonchalantly: each, as it were, with a certain
+sub-consciousness of its own personality, and callous unconsciousness of
+all the others round it: yet each a copy of the others: the same hooks
+and lines, disembowelling-knives, barrels of salt and pickle, piles and
+casks of opened cod, kegs of biscuit, and low-creaking rockings, and a
+bilgy smell, and dead men. The next day, about eighty miles south of the
+latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be
+the French cruiser _Lazare Tréport_. I boarded and overhauled her
+during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to
+her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two
+big, rusted turret-guns. Three men in the engine-room had been much
+mangled, after death, I presume, by a burst boiler; floating about 800
+yards to the north-east lay a long-boat of hers, low in the water,
+crammed with marines, one oar still there, jammed between the row-lock
+and the rower's forced-back chin; on the ship's starboard deck, in the
+long stretch of space between the two masts, the blue-jackets had
+evidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serried
+disorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing could
+be of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of this
+poor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets,
+busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash that
+was quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of her
+steely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on my
+breast, furtively eyeing the bluish turned-up feet, all shrunk,
+exsanguined, of a sailor who lay on his back before me; his soles were
+all that I could see, the rest of him lying head-downwards beyond the
+steel door-sill.
+
+Drenched in seas of lugubrious reverie I sat, till, with a shuddering
+start, I awoke, paddled back to the _Boreal_, and, till sleep conquered
+me, went on my way. At ten the next morning, coming on deck, I spied to
+the west a group of craft, and turned my course upon them. They turned
+out to be eight Shetland sixerns, which must have drifted north-eastward
+hither. I examined them well, but they were as the long list of the
+others: for all the men, and all the boys, and all the dogs on them were
+dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could have come to land a long time before I did: but I would not: I
+was so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used
+to the silence of the sea: but, God knows it, I was afraid of the
+silence of the land.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, on the 15th July, I had seen a whale, or thought I did, spouting
+very remotely afar on the S.E. horizon; and on the 19th I distinctly saw
+a shoal of porpoises vaulting the sea-surface, in their swift-successive
+manner, northward: and seeing them, I had said pitifully to myself:
+'Well, I am not quite alone in the world, then, my good God--not quite
+alone.'
+
+Moreover, some days later, the _Boreal_ had found herself in a bank of
+cod making away northward, millions of fish, for I saw them, and one
+afternoon caught three, hand-running, with the hook.
+
+So the sea, at least, had its tribes to be my mates.
+
+But if I should find the land as still as the sea, without even the
+spouting whale, or school of tumbling sea-hogs--_if Paris were dumber
+than the eternal ice_--what then, I asked myself, should I do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could have made short work, and landed at Shetland, for I found myself
+as far westward as longitude 11° 23' W.: but I would not: I was so
+afraid. The shrinking within me to face that vague suspicion which I
+had, turned me first to a foreign land.
+
+I made for Norway, and on the first night of this definite intention, at
+about nine o'clock, the weather being gusty, the sky lowering, the air
+sombrous, and the sea hard-looking, dark, and ridged, I was steaming
+along at a good rate, holding the wheel, my poor port and starboard
+lights still burning there, when, without the least notice, I received
+the roughest physical shock of my life, being shot bodily right over
+the wheel, thence, as from a cannon, twenty feet to the cabin-door,
+through it head-foremost down the companion-way, and still beyond some
+six yards along the passage. I had crashed into some dark and dead ship,
+probably of large size, though I never saw her, nor any sign of her; and
+all that night, and the next day till four in the afternoon, the
+_Boreal_ went driving alone over the sea, whither she would: for I lay
+unconscious. When I woke, I found that I had received really very small
+injuries, considering: but I sat there on the floor a long time in a
+sulky, morose, disgusted, and bitter mood; and when I rose, pettishly
+stopped the ship's engines, seeing my twelve dead all huddled and
+disfigured. Now I was afraid to steam by night, and even in the daytime
+I would not go on for three days: for I was childishly angry with I know
+not what, and inclined to quarrel with Those whom I could not see.
+
+However, on the fourth day, a rough swell which knocked the ship about,
+and made me very uncomfortable, coaxed me into moving; and I did so with
+bows turned eastward and southward.
+
+I sighted the Norway coast four days later, in latitude 63° 19', at noon
+of the 11th August, and pricked off my course to follow it; but it was
+with a slow and dawdling reluctance that I went, at much less than
+half-speed. In some eight hours, as I knew from the chart, I ought to
+sight the lighthouse light on Smoelen Island; and when quiet night came,
+the black water being branded with trails of still moonlight, I passed
+quite close to it, between ten and twelve, almost under the shadow of
+the mighty hills: but, oh my God, no light was there. And all the way
+down I marked the rugged sea-board slumber darkling, afar or near, with
+never, alas! one friendly light.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whose
+passing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate. During
+four days I had seen not one sign of present life on the Norway coast,
+only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark;
+and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the
+very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained
+unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the
+infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness
+a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from
+left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would
+startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering the
+profound confidential warning: _You must not stare so, or it is over
+with you!_' Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaning
+over the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if some
+instinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud: 'If you
+look just yonder, _you will see...!_' I started, and in one instant had
+surged up from all that depth of reverie to reality: I glanced to the
+right: and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved,
+rapidly moved: at last!--and it came to me.
+
+That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortable
+usual, a million-fold too intense for words--how sweetly consoling it
+was! Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it--the rocky solidity,
+the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live. From the day
+when I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made me
+swoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that other
+beings like myself were alive on the earth with me: till now, suddenly,
+I had the sweet indubitable proof: for on the south-western sea, not
+four knots away, I saw a large, swift ship: and her bows, which were
+sharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at a
+pretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that went
+wide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as she
+ran the sea in haste, straight northward.
+
+At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from a
+shadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel one
+frantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to the
+bridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put a
+foot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all the
+mocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the cap
+from my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-faced
+maniac that I was: for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she was
+flying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and I
+did not know what she was flying those flags there for: and I was
+embittered and driven mad.
+
+With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in
+that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow,
+like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows
+under the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I made
+out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian
+passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came
+no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere. All
+about her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the low
+sun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to a
+smaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to a
+homogeneous band of livid silver.
+
+The double speed of the _Boreal_ and the other, hastening opposite ways,
+must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was
+accomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time I
+crowded years of life. I was shouting passionately at her, my eyes
+starting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone,
+loud and urgent. For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign of
+seeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, with
+steadfast run. I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense of
+relation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can only
+remember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by the
+fiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing high
+and madly: for I was crying: 'Hi! Bravo! Why don't you stop? _Madmen! I
+have been to the Pole!'_
+
+That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most
+detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware
+of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past
+me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She
+was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for
+offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks
+piled thick with her festered dead.
+
+In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-corner
+caught the word _Yaroslav_, as I bent over the rail to retch and cough
+and vomit at her. She was a horrid thing.
+
+This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical or
+sub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead: for all the bodies
+which I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give out
+a certain perfume of the peach. She was evidently one of those many
+ships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yet
+retained their old steam-funnels, &c., in case of emergency: for air, I
+believe, was still looked at askance by several builders, on account of
+the terrible accidents which it sometimes caused. The _Boreal_ herself
+is a similar instance of both motors. This vessel, the _Yaroslav_, must
+have been left with working engines when her crew were overtaken by
+death, and, her air-tanks being still unexhausted, must have been
+ranging the ocean with impunity ever since, during I knew not how many
+months, or, it might be, years.
+
+Well, I coasted Norway for nearly a hundred and sixty miles without once
+going nearer land than two or three miles: for something held me back.
+But passing the fjord-mouth where I knew that Aadheim was, I suddenly
+turned the helm to port, almost before I knew that I was doing it, and
+made for land.
+
+In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains on
+either hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;
+and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.
+
+This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, only
+the curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scene
+was changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could see
+behind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like a
+lake.
+
+I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,
+reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which
+hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled
+about the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not to
+bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or
+dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle
+yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all
+seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and
+made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds
+of the peach.
+
+I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having
+forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and
+sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,
+familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy
+scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place
+at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of
+asphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.
+
+Alas! but I had the glass at my side, and for me nepenthe was mixed with
+a despair immense as the vault of heaven, my good God: for anon I would
+take it up to spy some perched hut of the peasant, or burg of the
+'bonder,' on the peaks: and I saw no one there; and to the left, at the
+third marked bend of the fjord, where there is one of those watch-towers
+that these people used for watching in-coming fish, I spied, lying on a
+craggy slope just before the tower, a body which looked as if it must
+surely tumble head-long, but did not. And when I saw that, I felt
+definitely, for the first time, that shoreless despair which I alone of
+men have felt, high beyond the stars, and deep as hell; and I fell to
+staring again that blank stare of Nirvana and the lunacy of Nothingness,
+wherein Time merges in Eternity, and all being, like one drop of water,
+flies scattered to fill the bottomless void of space, and is lost.
+
+The _Boreal's_ bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me,
+and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, I
+saw two people. The shore there is some three feet above the water, and
+edged with boulders of rock, about which grows a fringe of shrubs and
+small trees: behind this fringe is a path, curving upward through a
+sombre wooded little gorge; and on the path, near the water, I saw a
+driver of one of those Norwegian sulkies that were called karjolers: he,
+on the high front seat, was dead, lying sideways and backwards, with low
+head resting on the wheel; and on a trunk strapped to a frame on the
+axle behind was a boy, his head, too, resting sideways on the wheel,
+near the other's; and the little pony was dead, pitched forward on its
+head and fore-knees, tilting the shafts downward; and some distance from
+them on the water floated an empty skiff.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I turned the next fore-land, I all at once began to see a number of
+craft, which increased as I advanced, most of them small boats, with
+some schooners, sloops, and larger craft, the majority a-ground: and
+suddenly now I was conscious that, mingling with that delicious odour of
+spring-blossoms--profoundly modifying, yet not destroying it--was
+another odour, wafted to me on the wings of the very faint land-breeze:
+and 'Man,' I said, 'is decomposing': for I knew it well: it was the
+odour of human corruption.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quite
+steep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water
+to their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay,
+and a modest, homely old town.
+
+Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the
+_Boreal_. Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and his
+scythe mown.
+
+I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an
+empty boat that lay at the ship's side when she stopped; and I paddled
+twenty yards toward the little quay. There was a brigantine with all her
+courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails,
+and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and
+wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there
+were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five
+Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and the
+sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I
+passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent,
+an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality--the inner mind
+and meaning of Azrael--than aught that I could have conceived: for all,
+as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.
+
+Well, I went up the old mossed steps, in that strange dazed state in
+which one notices frivolous things: I remember, for instance, feeling
+the lightness of my new clothes: for the weather was quite mild, and the
+day before I had changed to Summer things, having on now only a common
+undyed woollen shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and cord trousers, with a
+belt, and a cloth cap over my long hair, and an old pair of yellow
+shoes, without laces, and without socks. And I stood on the unhewn
+stones of the edge of the quay, and looked abroad over a largish piece
+of unpaved ground, which lay between the first house-row and the quay.
+
+What I saw was not only most woeful, but wildly startling: woeful,
+because a great crowd of people had assembled, and lay dead, there; and
+wildly startling, because something in their _tout ensemble_ told me in
+one minute why they were there in such number.
+
+They were there in the hope, and with the thought, to fly westward by
+boat.
+
+And the something which told me this was a certain _foreign_ air about
+that field of the dead as the eye rested on it, something un-northern,
+southern, and Oriental.
+
+Two yards from my feet, as I stepped to the top, lay a group of three:
+one a Norway peasant-girl in skirt of olive-green, scarlet stomacher,
+embroidered bodice, Scotch bonnet trimmed with silver lace, and big
+silver shoe-buckles; the second was an old Norway man in knee-breeches,
+and eighteenth-century small-clothes, and red worsted cap; and the third
+was, I decided, an old Jew of the Polish Pale, in gaberdine and
+skull-cap, with ear-locks.
+
+I went nearer to where they lay thick as reaped stubble between the
+quay and a little stone fountain in the middle of the space, and I saw
+among those northern dead two dark-skinned women in costly dress, either
+Spanish or Italian, and the yellower mortality of a Mongolian, probably
+a Magyar, and a big negro in zouave dress, and some twenty-five obvious
+French, and two Morocco fezes, and the green turban of a shereef, and
+the white of an Ulema.
+
+And I asked myself this question: 'How came these foreign stragglers
+here in this obscure northern town?'
+
+And my wild heart answered: 'There has been an impassioned stampede,
+northward and westward, of all the tribes of Man. And this that I, Adam
+Jeffson, here see is but the far-tossed spray of that monstrous,
+infuriate flood.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, I passed up a street before me, careful, careful where I trod. It
+was not utterly silent, nor was the quay-square, but haunted by a pretty
+dense cloud of mosquitoes, and dreamy twinges of music, like the drawing
+of the violin-bow in elf-land. The street was narrow, pavered, steep,
+and dark; and the sensations with which I, poor bent man, passed
+through that dead town, only Atlas, fabled to bear the burden of this
+Earth, could divine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I thought to myself: If now a wave from the Deep has washed over this
+planetary ship of earth, and I, who alone happened to be in the extreme
+bows, am the sole survivor of that crew?... What then, my God, shall I
+do?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I felt, I felt, that in this townlet, save the water-gnats of Norway,
+was no living thing; that the hum and the savour of Eternity filled, and
+wrapped, and embalmed it.
+
+The houses are mostly of wood, some of them fairly large, with a
+_porte-cochère_ leading into a semi-circular yard, around which the
+building stands, very steep-roofed, and shingled, in view of the heavy
+snow-masses of winter. Glancing into one open casement near the ground,
+I saw an aged woman, stout and capped, lie on her face before a very
+large porcelain stove; but I paced on without stoppage, traversed
+several streets, and came out, as it became dark, upon a piece of
+grass-land leading downward to a mountain-gorge. It was some distance
+along this gorge that I found myself sitting the next morning: and how,
+and in what trance, I passed that whole blank night is obliterated from
+my consciousness. When I looked about with the return of light I saw
+majestic fir-grown mountains on either hand, almost meeting overhead at
+some points, deeply shading the mossy gorge. I rose, and careless of
+direction, went still onward, and walked and walked for hours,
+unconscious of hunger; there was a profusion of wild
+mountain-strawberries, very tiny, which must grow almost into winter, a
+few of which I ate; there were blue gentianellas, and
+lilies-of-the-valley, and luxuriance of verdure, and a noise of waters.
+Occasionally, I saw little cataracts on high, fluttering like white wild
+rags, for they broke in the mid-fall, and were caught away, and
+scattered; patches also of reaped hay and barley, hung up, in a singular
+way, on stakes six feet high, I suppose to dry; there were perched huts,
+and a seemingly inaccessible small castle or burg, but none of these did
+I enter: and five bodies only I saw in the gorge, a woman with a babe,
+and a man with two small oxen.
+
+About three in the afternoon I was startled to find myself there, and
+turned back. It was dark when I again passed through those gloomy
+streets of Aadheim, making for the quay, and now I felt both my hunger
+and a dropping weariness. I had no thought of entering any house, but
+as I passed by one open _porte-cochère_, something, I know not what,
+made me turn sharply in, for my mind had become as fluff on the winds,
+not working of its own action, but the sport of impulses that seemed
+external. I went across the yard, and ascended a wooden spiral stair by
+a twilight which just enabled me to pick my way among five or six vague
+forms fallen there. In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; I
+mounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; I
+mounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance I
+took a step inward where all was pitch darkness, the window-stores being
+drawn. I hesitated: it was very dark. I tried to utter that word of
+mine, but it came in a whisper inaudible to my ears: I tried again, and
+this time heard myself say: '_anyone_?' At the same time I had made
+another step forward, and trodden upon a soft abdomen; and at that
+contact terrors the most cold and ghastly thrilled me through and
+through, for it was as though I saw in that darkness the sudden eyeballs
+of Hell and frenzy glare upon me, and with a low gurgle of affright I
+was gone, helter-skelter down the stairs, treading upon flesh, across
+the yard, and down the street, with pelting feet, and open arms, and
+sobbing bosom, for I thought that all Aadheim was after me; nor was my
+horrid haste appeased till I was on board the _Boreal_, and moving down
+the fjord.
+
+Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visited
+Bergen, and put in at Stavanger. And I saw that Bergen and Stavanger
+were dead.
+
+It was then, on the 19th August, that I turned my bow toward my native
+land.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.
+
+I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the
+ships, the ships--ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone
+of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving
+through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty and
+wide-spread fleet.
+
+Over all that great expanse of the North Sea, where, in its most
+populous days of trade, the sailor might perhaps sight a sail or two, I
+had now at every moment at least ten or twelve within scope of the
+glass, oftentimes as many as forty, forty-five.
+
+And very still they lay on a still sea, itself a dead thing, livid as
+the lips of death; and there was an intensity in the calm that was
+appalling: for the ocean seemed weighted, and the air drugged.
+
+Extremely slow was my advance, for at first I would not leave any ship,
+however remotely small, without approaching sufficiently to investigate
+her, at least with the spy-glass: and a strange multitudinous mixture of
+species they were, trawlers in hosts, war-ships of every nation, used,
+it seemed, as passenger-boats, smacks, feluccas, liners, steam-barges,
+great four-masters with sails, Channel boats, luggers, a Venetian
+_burchiello_, colliers, yachts, _remorqueurs_, training ships, dredgers,
+two _dahabeeahs_ with curving gaffs, Marseilles fishers, a Maltese
+_speronare_, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrento
+lug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers,
+called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdam
+flat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts--anything from anywhere that
+could bear a human freight on water had come, and was here: and all, I
+knew, had been making westward, or northward, or both; and all, I knew,
+were crowded; and all were tombs, listlessly wandering, my God, on the
+wandering sea with their dead.
+
+And so fair was the world about them, too: the brightest suavest autumn
+weather; all the still air aromatic with that vernal perfume of peach:
+yet not so utterly still, but if I passed close to the lee of any
+floating thing, the spicy stirrings of morning or evening wafted me
+faint puffs of the odour of mortality over-ripe for the grave.
+
+So abominable and accursed did this become to me, such a plague and a
+hissing, vague as was the offence, that I began to shun rather than seek
+the ships, and also I now dropped my twelve, whom I had kept to be my
+companions all the way from the Far North, one by one, into the sea: for
+now I had definitely passed into a zone of settled warmth.
+
+I was convinced, however, that the poison, whatever it might be, had
+some embalming, or antiseptic, effect upon the bodies: at Aadheim,
+Bergen and Stavanger, for instance, where the temperature permitted me
+to go without a jacket, only the merest hints and whiffs of the
+processes of dissolution had troubled me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very benign, I say, and pleasant to see, was sky and sea during all that
+voyage: but it was at sun-set that my sense of the wondrously beautiful
+was roused and excited, in spite of that great burden which I carried.
+Certainly, I never saw sun-sets resembling those, nor could have
+conceived of aught so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched: for the
+whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies,
+warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God
+defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies. But many
+evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of
+the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought
+pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of
+the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, I
+believe, over the world, after the eruption of the volcano of Krakatoa.
+
+And whereas I had before said to myself: 'If now a wave from the Deep
+has washed over this planetary ship of earth...,' I said now: 'A
+wave--but not from the Deep: a wave rather which she had reserved, and
+has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had some knowledge of Morse telegraphy, and of the manipulation of
+tape-machines, telegraphic typing-machines, and the ordinary wireless
+transmitter and coherer, as of most little things of that sort which
+came within the outskirts of the interest of a man of science; I had
+collaborated with Professor Stanistreet in the production of a text-book
+called 'Applications of Science to the Arts,' which had brought us some
+notoriety; and, on the whole, the _minutiae_ of modern things were
+still pretty fresh in my memory. I could therefore have wired from
+Bergen or Stavanger, supposing the batteries not run down, to somewhere:
+but I would not: I was so afraid; afraid lest for ever from nowhere
+should come one answering click, or flash, or stirring....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could have made short work, and landed at Hull: but I would not: I was
+so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used to
+the silence of the sea: but I was afraid of the silence of England.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I came in sight of the coast on the morning of the 26th August,
+somewhere about Hornsea, but did not see any town, for I put the helm to
+port, and went on further south, no longer bothering with the
+instruments, but coasting at hap-hazard, now in sight of land, and now
+in the centre of a circle of sea; not admitting to myself the motive of
+this loitering slowness, nor thinking at all, but ignoring the
+deep-buried fear of the to-morrow which I shirked, and instinctively
+hiding myself in to-day. I passed the Wash, I passed Yarmouth,
+Felixstowe. By now the things that floated motionless on the sea were
+beyond numbering, for I could hardly lower my eyes ten minutes and lift
+them, without seeing yet another there: so that soon after dusk I, too,
+had to lie still among them all, till morning: for they lay dark, and to
+move at any pace would have been to drown the already dead.
+
+Well, I came to the Thames-mouth, and lay pretty well in among the Flats
+and Pan Sands towards eight one evening, not seven miles from Sheppey
+and the North Kent coast: and I did not see any Nore Light, nor Girdler
+Light: and all along the coast I had seen no light: but as to that I
+said not one word to myself, not admitting it, nor letting my heart know
+what my brain thought, nor my brain know what my heart surmised; but
+with a daft and mock-mistrustful under-look I would regard the darkling
+land, holding it a sentient thing that would be playing a prank upon a
+poor man like me.
+
+And the next morning, when I moved again, my furtive eye-corners were
+very well aware of the Prince's Channel light-ship, and also the Tongue
+ship, for there they were: but I would not look at them at all, nor go
+near them: for I did not wish to have anything to do with whatever might
+have happened beyond my own ken, and it was better to look straight
+before, seeing nothing, and concerning one's-self with one's-self.
+
+The next evening, after having gone out to sea again, I was in a little
+to the E. by S. of the North Foreland: and I saw no light there, nor any
+Sandhead light; but over the sea vast signs of wreckage, and the coasts
+were strewn with old wrecked fleets. I turned about S.E., very slowly
+moving--for anywhere hereabouts hundreds upon hundreds of craft lay dead
+within a ten-mile circle of sea--and by two in the fore-day had wandered
+up well in sight of the French cliffs: for I had said: 'I will go and
+see the light-beam of the great revolving-drum on Calais pier that
+nightly beams half-way over-sea to England.' And the moon shone clear in
+the southern heaven that morning, like a great old dying queen whose
+Court swarms distantly from around her, diffident, pale, and tremulous,
+the paler the nearer; and I could see the mountain-shadows on her spotty
+full-face, and her misty aureole, and her lights on the sea, as it were
+kisses stolen in the kingdom of sleep; and all among the quiet ships
+mysterious white trails and powderings of light, like palace-corridors
+in some fairy-land forlorn, full of breathless wan whispers, scandals,
+and runnings-to-and-fro, with leers, and agitated last embraces, and
+flight of the princess, and death-bed of the king; and on the N.E.
+horizon a bank of brown cloud that seemed to have no relation with the
+world; and yonder, not far, the white coast-cliffs, not so low as at
+Calais near, but arranged in masses separated by vales of sward, each
+with its wreck: but no light of any revolving-drum I saw.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could not sleep that night: for all the operations of my mind and body
+seemed in abeyance. Mechanically I turned the ship westward again; and
+when the sun came up, there, hardly two miles from me, were the cliffs
+of Dover; and on the crenulated summit of the Castle I spied the Union
+Jack hang motionless.
+
+I heard eight, nine o'clock strike in the cabin, and I was still at sea.
+But some mad, audacious whisper was at my brain: and at 10.30, the 2nd
+September, immediately opposite the Cross Wall Custom House, the
+_Boreal's_ anchor-chain, after a voyage of three years, two months, and
+fourteen days, ran thundering, thundering, through the starboard
+hawse-hole.
+
+Ah heaven! but I must have been stark mad to let the anchor go! for the
+effect upon me of that shocking obstreperous hubbub, breaking in upon
+all that cemetery repose that blessed morning, and lasting it seemed a
+year, was most appalling; and at the sudden racket I stood excruciated,
+with shivering knees and flinching heart, God knows: for not less
+terrifically uproarious than the clatter of the last Trump it raged and
+raged, and I thought that all the billion dead could not fail to start,
+and rise, at alarum so excessive, and question me with their eyes....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the top of the Cross Wall near I saw a grey crab fearlessly crawl; at
+the end where the street begins, I saw a single gas-light palely burn
+that broad day, and at its foot a black man lay on his face, clad only
+in a shirt and one boot; the harbour was almost packed with every sort
+of craft, and on a Calais-Dover boat, eight yards from my stern, which
+must have left Calais crowded to suffocation, I saw the rotted dead lie
+heaped, she being unmoored, and continually grinding against an anchored
+green brig.
+
+And when I saw that, I dropped down upon my knees at the capstan, and my
+poor heart sobbed out the frail cry: 'Well, Lord God, Thou hast
+destroyed the work of Thy hand...'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a time I got up, went below in a state of somnambulism, took a
+packet of pemmican cakes, leapt to land, and went following the railway
+that runs from the Admiralty Pier. In an enclosed passage ten yards
+long, with railway masonry on one side, I saw five dead lie, and could
+not believe that I was in England, for all were dark-skinned people,
+three gaudily dressed, and two in flowing white robes. It was the same
+when I turned into a long street, leading northward, for here were a
+hundred, or more, and never saw I, except in Constantinople, where I
+once lived eighteen months, so variegated a mixture of races, black,
+brunette, brown, yellow, white, in all the shades, some emaciated like
+people dead from hunger, and, overlooking them all, one English boy with
+a clean Eton collar sitting on a bicycle, supported by a lamp-post which
+his arms clasped, he proving clearly the extraordinary suddenness of the
+death which had overtaken them all.
+
+I did not know whither, nor why, I went, nor had I the least idea
+whether all this was visually seen by me in the world which I had known,
+or in some other, or was all phantasy of my disembodied spirit--for I
+had the thought that I, too, might be dead since old ages, and my spirit
+wandering now through the universe of space, in which there is neither
+north nor south, nor up nor down, nor measure nor relation, nor aught
+whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness.
+Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of
+memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was
+neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three
+or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details
+the most frivolous, the most ludicrous--the name of a street, Strond
+Street, Snargate Street; the round fur cap--black fur for the side,
+white ermine for the top--of a portly Karaite priest on his back, whose
+robes had been blown to his spread knees, as if lifted and neatly folded
+there; a violin-bow gripped between the thick, irregular teeth of a
+little Spaniard with brushed-back hair and mad-looking eyes; odd shoes
+on the foot of a French girl, one black, one brown. They lay in the
+street about as numerous as gunners who fall round their carriage, at
+intervals of five to ten feet, the majority--as was the case also in
+Norway, and on the ships--in poses of distraction, with spread arms, or
+wildly distorted limbs, like men who, the instant before death, called
+upon the rocks and hills to cover them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the left I came to an opening in the land, called, I believe, 'The
+Shaft,' and into this I turned, climbing a very great number of steps,
+almost covered at one point with dead: the steps I began to count, but
+left off, then the dead, and left off. Finally, at the top, which must
+be even higher than the Castle, I came to a great open space laid out
+with gravel-walks, and saw fortifications, barracks, a citadel. I did
+not know the town, except by passings-through, and was surprised at the
+breadth of view. Between me and the Castle to the east lay the district
+of crowding houses, brick and ragstone, mixed in the distance with vague
+azure haze; and to the right the harbour, the sea, with their ships; and
+visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust;
+the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a
+mist, which was the coast of France.
+
+It seemed too big for one poor man.
+
+My head nodded. I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and
+back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded,
+heavy-headed and weary: for it was too big for me. And as I nodded, with
+forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my
+right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my
+childhood: and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal
+nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and
+raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.
+
+    I'll buy the ring,
+    You'll rear the kids:
+    Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
+    .   .   .   .   .
+    .   .   .   .   .
+    Ting, ting,
+    Won't we be happy?
+    Ting, ting,
+    That shall be it:
+    I'll buy the ring,
+    You'll rear the kids:
+    Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
+    .   .   .   .   .
+    .   .   .   .   .
+
+So maundering, I fell forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours,
+the living undistinguished from the dead, I slept there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was awakened by drizzle, leapt up, looked at a silver chronometer
+which, attached by a leather to my belt, I carried in my
+breeches-pocket, and saw that it was 10 A.M. The sky was dark, and a
+moaning wind--almost a new thing now to me--had arisen.
+
+I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance--needless as it turned
+out--to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt,
+in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I
+could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent
+the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering
+about. Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I
+expected to find the town over-crowded with dead: but this was not so;
+and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen
+thousand foreigners, were in it: for that westward rage and stampede
+must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever
+new-coming hosts.
+
+The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer's shop, which
+was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get
+a message through to London. In the shop a single gas-light was burning
+its last, and this, with that near the pier, were the only two that I
+saw: and ghastly enough they looked, transparently wannish, and as it
+were ashamed, like blinking night-things overtaken by the glare of day.
+I conjectured that they had so burned and watched during months, or
+years: for they were now blazing diminished, with streaks and rays in
+the flame, as if by effort, and if these were the only two, they must
+have needed time to all-but exhaust the works. Before the counter lay a
+fashionably-dressed negro with a number of tied parcels scattered about
+him, and on the counter an empty till, and behind it a tall thin woman
+with her face resting sideways in the till, fingers clutching the outer
+counter-rim, and such an expression of frantic terror as I never saw. I
+got over the counter to a table behind a wire-gauze, and, like a numb
+fool, went over the Morse alphabet in my mind before touching the
+transmitting key, though I knew no code-words, and there, big enough to
+be seen, was the ABC dial, and who was to answer my message I did not
+ask myself: for habit was still strong upon me, and my mind refused to
+reason from what I saw to what I did not see; but the moment I touched
+the key, and peered greedily at the galvanometer-needle at my right, I
+saw that it did not move, for no current was passing; and with a kind of
+fright, I was up, leapt, and got away from the place, though there was a
+great number of telegrams about the receiver which, if I had been in my
+senses, I would have stopped and read.
+
+Turning the corner of the next street, I saw wide-open the door of a
+substantial large house, and went in. From bottom to top there was no
+one there, except one English girl, sitting back in an easy-chair in the
+drawing-room, which was richly furnished with Valenciennes curtains and
+azure-satin things. She was a girl of the lowest class, hardly clad in
+black rags, and there she lay with hanging jaw, in a very crooked and
+awkward pose, a jemmy at her feet, in her left hand a roll of
+bank-notes, and in her lap three watches. In fact, the bodies which I
+saw here were, in general, either those of new-come foreigners, or else
+of the very poor, the very old, or the very young.
+
+But what made me remember this house was that I found here on one of the
+sofas a newspaper: _The Kent Express_; and sitting unconscious of my
+dead neighbour, I pored a long while over what was written there.
+
+It said in a passage which I tore out and kept:
+
+'Telegraphic communication with Tilsit, Insterburg, Warsaw, Cracow,
+Przemysl, Gross Wardein, Karlsburg, and many smaller towns lying
+immediately eastward of the 21st parallel of longitude has ceased during
+the night. In some at least of them there must have been operators still
+at their duty, undrawn into the great westward-rushing torrent: but as
+all messages from Western Europe have been answered only by that dread
+mysterious silence which, just three months and two days since,
+astounded the world in the case of Eastern New Zealand, we can only
+assume that these towns, too, have been added to the long and mournful
+list; indeed, after last evening's Paris telegrams we might have
+prophesied with some certainty, not merely their overthrow, but even the
+hour of it: for the rate-uniformity of the slow-riding vapour which is
+touring our globe is no longer doubtful, and has even been definitely
+fixed by Professor Craven at 100-1/2 miles per day, or 4 miles 330 yards
+per hour. Its nature, its origin, remains, of course, nothing but matter
+of conjecture: for it leaves no living thing behind it: nor, God knows,
+is that of any moment now to us who remain. The rumour that it is
+associated with an odour of almonds is declared, on high authority, to
+be improbable; but the morose purple of its impending gloom has been
+attested by tardy fugitives from the face of its rolling and smoky
+march.
+
+'Is this the end? We do not, and cannot, believe it. Will the pure sky
+which we to-day see above us be invaded in nine days, or less, by this
+smoke of the Pit of Darkness? In spite of the assurances of the
+scientists, we still doubt. For, if so, to what purpose that long drama
+of History, in which we seem to see the Hand of the Dramaturgist?
+Surely, the end of a Fifth Act should be obvious, satisfying to one's
+sense of the complete: but History, so far, long as it has been,
+resembles rather a Prologue than a Fifth Act. Can it be that the
+Manager, utterly dissatisfied, would sweep all off, and 'hang up' the
+piece for ever? Certainly, the sins of mankind have been as scarlet: and
+if the fair earth which he has turned into Hell, send forth now upon him
+the smoke of Hell, little the wonder. But we cannot yet believe. There
+is a sparing strain in nature, and through the world, as a thread, is
+spun a silence which smiles, and on the end of events we find placarded
+large the words: "Why were ye afraid?" A dignified Hope, therefore--even
+now, when we cower beneath this worldwide shadow of the wings of the
+Condor of Death--becomes us: and, indeed, we see such an attitude among
+some of the humblest of our people, from whose heart ascends the cry:
+"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Here, therefore, O Lord! O
+Lord, look down, and save!
+
+'But even as we thus write of hope, Reason, if we would hear her,
+whispers us "fool": and inclement is the sky of earth. No more ships can
+New York Harbour contain, and whereas among us men die weekly of
+privations by the hundred thousand, yonder across the sea they perish by
+the million: for where the rich are pinched, how can the poor live?
+Already 700 out of the 1000 millions of our race have perished, and the
+empires of civilisation have crumbled like sand-castles in a horror of
+anarchy. Thousands upon thousands of unburied dead, anticipating the
+more deliberate doom that comes and smokes, and rides and comes and
+comes, and does not fail, encumber the streets of London, Manchester,
+Liverpool. The guides of the nation have fled; the father stabs his
+child, and the wife her husband, for a morsel of food; the fields lie
+waste; wanton crowds carouse in our churches, universities, palaces,
+banks and hospitals; we understand that late last night three
+territorial regiments, the Munster Fusiliers, and the Lotian and East
+Lancashire Regiments, riotously disbanded themselves, shooting two
+officers; infectious diseases, as we all know, have spread beyond limit;
+in several towns the police seem to have disappeared, and, in nearly
+all, every vestige of decency; the results following upon the sudden
+release of the convicts appear to be monstrous in the respective
+districts; and within three short months Hell seems to have acquired
+this entire planet, sending forth Horror, like a rabid wolf, and
+Despair, like a disastrous sky, to devour and confound her. Hear,
+therefore, O Lord, and forgive our iniquities! O Lord, we beseech Thee!
+Look down, O Lord, and spare!'
+
+     *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I had read this, and the rest of the paper, which had one whole
+sheet-side blank, I sat a long hour there, eyeing a little patch of the
+purple ash on a waxed board near the corner where the girl sat with her
+time-pieces, so useless in her Eternity; and there was not a feeling in
+me, except a pricking of curiosity, which afterwards became morbid and
+ravenous, to know something more of that cloud, or smoke, of which this
+man spoke, of its dates, its origin, its nature, its minute details.
+Afterwards, I went down, and entered several houses, searching for more
+papers, but did not find any; then I found a paper-shop which was open,
+with boards outside, but either it had been deserted, or printing must
+have stopped about the date of the paper which I had read, for the only
+three news-papers there were dated long prior, and I did not read them.
+
+Now it was raining, and a blustering autumn day it was, distributing the
+odours of the world, and bringing me continual mixed whiffs of flowers
+and the hateful stench of decay. But I would not mind it much.
+
+I wandered and wandered, till I was tired of spahi and bashi-bazouk, of
+Greek and Catalan, of Russian 'pope' and Coptic abuna, of dragoman and
+Calmuck, of Egyptian maulawi and Afghan mullah, Neapolitan and sheik,
+and the nightmare of wild poses, colours, stuffs and garbs, the
+yellow-green kefie of the Bedouin, shawl-turbans of Baghdad, the
+voluminous rose-silk tob of women, and face-veils, and stark distorted
+nakedness, and sashes of figured muslin, and the workman's cords, and
+the red tarboosh. About four, for very weariness, I was sitting on a
+door-steep, bent beneath the rain; but soon was up again, fascinated no
+doubt by this changing bazaar of sameness, its chance combinations and
+permutations, and novelty in monotony. About five I was at a station,
+marked Harbour Station, in and about which lay a considerable crowd, but
+not one train. I sat again, and rested, rose and roamed again; soon
+after six I found myself at another station, called 'Priory'; and here I
+saw two long trains, both crowded, one on a siding, and one at the
+up-platform.
+
+I examined both engines, and found them of the old boiler steam-type
+with manholes, heaters, autoclaves, feed-pump, &c., now rare in western
+countries, except England. In one there was no water, but in that at the
+platform, the float-lever, barely tilted toward the float, showed that
+there was some in the boiler. Of this one I overhauled all the
+machinery, and found it good, though rusted. There was plenty of fuel,
+and oil, which I supplemented from a near shop: and during ninety
+minutes my brain and hands worked with an intelligence as it were
+automatic, of their own motion. After three journeys across the station
+and street, I saw the fire blaze well, and the manometer move; when the
+lever of the safety-valve, whose load I lightened by half an atmosphere,
+lifted, I jumped down, and tried to disconnect the long string of
+carriages from the engine: but failed, the coupling being an automatic
+arrangement new to me; nor did I care. It was now very dark; but there
+was still oil for bull's-eye and lantern, and I lit them. I forgot
+nothing. I rolled driver and stoker--the guard was absent--one to the
+platform, one upon the rails: and I took their place there. At about
+8.30 I ran out from Dover, my throttle-valve pealing high a long
+falsetto through the bleak and desolate night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My aim was London. But even as I set out, my heart smote me: I knew
+nothing of the metals, their junctions, facing-points, sidings,
+shuntings, and complexities. Even as to whether I was going toward, or
+away from, London, I was not sure. But just in proportion as my first
+timorousness of the engine hardened into familiarity and self-sureness,
+I quickened speed, wilfully, with an obstinacy deaf and blind.
+
+Finally, from a mere crawl at first, I was flying at a shocking
+velocity, while something, tongue in cheek, seemed to whisper me: 'There
+must be other trains blocking the lines, at stations, in yards, and
+everywhere--it is a maniac's ride, a ride of death, and Flying
+Dutchman's frenzy: remember your dark five-deep brigade of passengers,
+who rock and bump together, and will suffer in a collision.' But with
+mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I
+raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic,
+but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my
+bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass
+of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and
+deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the
+half-blind saw 'men like trees walking.'
+
+Long, however, it did not last: I could not have been twenty miles from
+Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a
+tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point: and at once callousness
+changed to terror within me. But even as I plied the brake, I felt that
+it was too late: I rushed to the gangway to make a wild leap down an
+embankment to the right, but was thrown backward by a quick series of
+rough bumps, caused by eight or ten cattle which lay there across the
+lines: and when I picked myself up, and leapt, some seconds before the
+impact, the speed must have considerably slackened, for I received no
+fracture, but lay in semi-coma in a patch of yellow-flowered whin on
+level ground, and was even conscious of a fire on the lines forty yards
+away, and, all the night, of vague thunder sounding from somewhere.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About five, or half-past, in the morning I was sitting up, rubbing my
+eyes, in a dim light mixed with drizzle. I could see that the train of
+my last night's debauch was a huddled-up chaos of fallen carriages and
+disfigured bodies. A five-barred gate on my left opened into a hedge,
+and swung with creaks: two yards from my feet lay a little shaggy pony
+with swollen wan abdomen, the very picture of death, and also about me a
+number of dead wet birds.
+
+I picked myself up, passed through the gate, and walked up a row of
+trees to a house at their end. I found it to be a little country-tavern
+with a barn, forming one house, the barn part much larger than the
+tavern part. I went into the tavern by a small side-door--behind the
+bar--into a parlour--up a little stair--into two rooms: but no one was
+there. I then went round into the barn, which was paved with
+cobble-stones, and there lay a dead mare and foal, some fowls, with two
+cows. A ladder-stair led to a closed trap-door in the floor above. I
+went up, and in the middle of a wilderness of hay saw nine
+people--labourers, no doubt--five men and four women, huddled together,
+and with them a tin-pail containing the last of some spirit; so that
+these had died merry.
+
+I slept three hours among them, and afterwards went back to the tavern,
+and had some biscuits of which I opened a new tin, with some ham, jam
+and apples, of which I made a good meal, for my pemmican was gone.
+
+Afterwards I went following the rail-track on foot, for the engines of
+both the collided trains were smashed. I knew northward from southward
+by the position of the sun: and after a good many stoppages at houses,
+and by railway-banks, I came, at about eleven in the night, to a great
+and populous town.
+
+By the Dane John and the Cathedral, I immediately recognised it as
+Canterbury, which I knew quite well. And I walked up Castle Street to
+the High Street, conscious for the first time of that
+regularly-repeated sound, like a sob or groan, which was proceeding from
+my throat. As there was no visible moon, and these old streets very dim,
+I had to pick my way, lest I should desecrate the dead with my foot, and
+they all should rise with hue and cry to hunt me. However, the bodies
+here were not numerous, most, as before, being foreigners: and these,
+scattered about this strict old English burg that mourning dark night,
+presented such a scene of the baneful wrath of God, and all abomination
+of desolation, as broke me quite down at one place, where I stood in
+travail with jeremiads and sore sobbings and lamentations, crying out
+upon it all, God knows.
+
+Only when I stood at the west entrance of the Cathedral I could discern,
+spreading up the dark nave, to the lantern, to the choir, a
+phantasmagorical mass of forms: I went a little inward, and striking
+three matches, peered nearer: the two transepts, too, seemed
+crowded--the cloister-doorway was blocked--the southwest porch thronged,
+so that a great congregation must have flocked hither shortly before
+their fate overtook them.
+
+Here it was that I became definitely certain that the after-odour of the
+poison was not simply lingering in the air, but was being more or less
+given off by the bodies: for the blossomy odour of this church actually
+overcame that other odour, the whole rather giving the scent of old
+mouldy linens long embalmed in cedars.
+
+Well, away with stealthy trot I ran from the abysmal silence of that
+place, and in Palace Street near made one of those sudden immoderate
+rackets that seemed to outrage the universe, and left me so woefully
+faint, decrepit, and gasping for life (the noise of the train was
+different, for there I was flying, but here a captive, and which way I
+ran was capture). Passing in Palace Street, I saw a little lampshop, and
+wanting a lantern, tried to get in, but the door was locked; so, after
+going a few steps, and kicking against a policeman's truncheon, I
+returned to break the window-glass. I knew that it would make a fearful
+noise, and for some fifteen or twenty minutes stood hesitating: but
+never could I have dreamed, my good God, of _such_ a noise, so
+passionate, so dominant, so divulgent, and, O Heaven, so long-lasting:
+for I seemed to have struck upon the weak spot of some planet, which
+came suddenly tumbling, with protracted bellowing and _débâcle_, about
+my ears. It was a good hour before I would climb in; but then quickly
+found what I wanted, and some big oil-cans; and till one or two in the
+morning, the innovating flicker of my lantern went peering at random
+into the gloomy nooks of the town.
+
+Under a deep old Gothic arch that spanned a pavered alley, I saw the
+little window of a little house of rubble, and between the two
+diamond-paned sashes rags tightly beaten in, the idea evidently being to
+make the place air-tight against the poison. When I went in I found the
+door of that room open, though it, too, apparently, had been stuffed at
+the edges; and on the threshold an old man and woman lay low. I
+conjectured that, thus protected, they had remained shut in, till either
+hunger, or the lack of oxygen in the used-up air, drove them forth,
+whereupon the poison, still active, must have instantly ended them. I
+found afterwards that this expedient of making air-tight had been widely
+resorted to; and it might well have proved successful, if both the
+supply of inclosed air, and of food, had been anywhere commensurate with
+the durability of the poisonous state.
+
+Weary, weary as I grew, some morbid persistence sustained me, and I
+would not rest. About four in the morning I was at a station again,
+industriously bending, poor wretch, at the sooty task of getting another
+engine ready for travel. This time, when steam was up, I succeeded in
+uncoupling the carriages from the engine, and by the time morning
+broke, I was lightly gliding away over the country, whither I did not
+know, but making for London.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I went with more intelligence and caution, and got on very well,
+travelling seven days, never at night, except it was very clear, never
+at more than twenty or twenty-five miles, and crawling through tunnels.
+I do not know the maze into which the train took me, for very soon after
+leaving Canterbury it must have gone down some branch-line, and though
+the names were marked at stations, that hardly helped me, for of their
+situation relatively to London I was seldom sure. Moreover, again and
+again was my progress impeded by trains on the metals, when I would have
+to run back to a shunting-point or a siding, and, in two instances,
+these being far behind, changed from my own to the impeding engine. On
+the first day I travelled unhindered till noon, when I stopped in open
+country that seemed uninhabited for ages, only that half a mile to the
+left, on a shaded sward, was a large stone house of artistic design,
+coated with tinted harling, the roof of red Ruabon tiles, and timbered
+gables. I walked to it after another row with putting out the fire and
+arranging for a new one, the day being bright and mild, with great
+masses of white cloud in the sky. The house had an outer and an inner
+hall, three reception rooms, fine oil-paintings, a kind of museum, and a
+large kitchen. In a bed-room above-stairs I found three women with
+servants' caps, and a footman, arranged in a strange symmetrical way,
+head to head, like rays of a star. As I stood looking at them, I could
+have sworn, my good God, that I heard someone coming up the stairs. But
+it was some slight creaking of the breeze in the house, augmented a
+hundredfold to my inflamed and fevered hearing: for, used for years now
+to this silence of Eternity, it is as though I hear all sounds through
+an ear-trumpet. I went down, and after eating, and drinking some
+clary-water, made of brandy, sugar, cinnamon, and rose water, which I
+found in plenty, I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall, and slept a
+quiet sleep until near midnight.
+
+I went out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London,
+and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky
+thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought,
+perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence,
+with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the
+long night I travelled, stopping twice only, once to get the coal from
+an engine which had impeded me, and once to drink some water, which I
+took care, as always, should be running water. When I felt my head nod,
+and my eyes close about 5 A.M., I threw myself, just outside the arch of
+a tunnel upon a grassy bank, pretty thick with stalks and flowers, the
+workings of early dawn being then in the east: and there, till near
+eleven, slept.
+
+On waking, I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey than
+Kent: there was that regular swell and sinking of the land; but, in
+fact, though it must have been either, it looked like neither, for
+already all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature, and I
+could see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil. Near
+before me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth, that I
+was led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the condition
+of vegetation with some minuteness, and nearly everywhere I detected a
+certain hypertrophie tendency in stamens, calycles, pericarps, and
+pistils, in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at, in the
+rushes, above all, the fronds, mosses, lichens, and all cryptogamia, and
+in the trefoils, clover especially, and some creepers. Many
+crop-fields, it was clear, had been prepared, but not sown; some had
+not been reaped: and in both cases I was struck with their appearance of
+rankness, as I was also when in Norway, and was all the more surprised
+that this should be the case at a time when a poison, whose action is
+the arrest of oxidation, had traversed the earth; I could only conclude
+that its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmosphere
+had been more or less temporary, and that the tendency to exuberance
+which I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts with
+freer energy and larger scope in the absence of man.
+
+Two yards from the rails I saw, when I got up, a little rill beside a
+rotten piece of fence, barely oozing itself onward under masses of foul
+and stagnant fungoids: and here there was a sudden splash, and life: and
+I caught sight of the hind legs of a diving young frog. I went and lay
+on my belly, poring over the clear dulcet little water, and presently
+saw two tiny bleaks, or ablets, go gliding low among the swaying
+moss-hair of the bottom-rocks, and thought how gladly would I be one of
+them, with my home so thatched and shady, and my life drowned in their
+wide-eyed reverie. At any rate, these little creatures are alive, the
+batrachians also, and, as I found the next day, pupae and chrysales of
+one sort or another, for, to my deep emotion, I saw a little white
+butterfly staggering in the air over the flower-garden of a rustic
+station named Butley.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that a
+thought came into my head: for I said to myself: 'If now I be here
+alone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girth
+have a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind? Into what
+kind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so!
+What will have happened then? I may live five years--ten! What will have
+happened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty...'
+
+Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a
+mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the
+foot-paths, and reached my shoulder. After turning the brow of a hill, I
+came to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and three
+persons, and emerged upon a terraced lawn, at the end of which stood an
+Early English house of pale brick with copings, plinths, stringcourses
+of limestone, and spandrels of carved marble; and some distance from the
+porch a long table, or series of tables, in the open air, still spread
+with cloths that were like shrouds after a month of burial; and the
+table had old foods on it, and some lamps; and all around it, and all on
+the lawn, were dead peasants. I seemed to know the house, probably from
+some print which I may have seen, but I could not make out the
+escutcheon, though I saw from its simplicity that it must be very
+ancient. Right across the façade spread still some of the letters in
+evergreens of the motto: 'Many happy returns of the day,' so that
+someone must have come of age, or something, for inside all was gala,
+and it was clear that these people had defied a fate which they, of
+course, foreknew. I went nearly throughout the whole spacious place of
+thick-carpeted halls, marbles, and famous oils, antlers and arras, and
+gilt saloons, and placid large bed-chambers: and it took me an hour.
+There were here not less than a hundred and eighty people. In the first
+of a vista of three large reception-rooms lay what could only have been
+a number of quadrille parties, for to the _coup d'oeil_ they presented a
+two-and-two appearance, made very repulsive by their jewels and
+evening-dress. I had to steel my heart to go through this house, for I
+did not know if these people were looking at me as soon as my back was
+turned. Once I was on the very point of flying, for I was going up the
+great central stairway, and there came a pelt of dead leaves against a
+window-pane in a corridor just above on the first floor, which thrilled
+me to the inmost soul. But I thought that if I once fled, they would all
+be at me from behind, and I should be gibbering mad long, long before I
+reached the outer hall, and so stood my ground, even defiantly
+advancing. In a small dark bedroom in the north wing on the second
+floor--that is to say, at the top of the house--I saw a tall young lady
+and a groom, or wood-man, to judge by his clothes, horribly riveted in
+an embrace on a settee, she with a light coronet on her head in
+low-necked dress, and their lipless teeth still fiercely pressed
+together. I collected in a bag a few delicacies from the under-regions
+of this house, Lyons sausages, salami, mortadel, apples, roes, raisins,
+artichokes, biscuits, a few wines, a ham, bottled fruit, pickles,
+coffee, and so on, with a gold plate, tin-opener, cork-screw, fork, &c.,
+and dragged them all the long way back to the engine before I could eat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My brain was in such a way, that it was several days before the
+perfectly obvious means of finding my way to London, since I wished to
+go there, at all occurred to me; and the engine went wandering the
+intricate railway-system of the south country, I having twice to water
+her with a coal-bucket from a pool, for the injector was giving no water
+from the tank under the coals, and I did not know where to find any near
+tank-sheds. On the fifth evening, instead of into London, I ran into
+Guildford.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, from eleven till the next day, there was a great storm over
+England: let me note it down. And ten days later, on the 17th of the
+month came another; and on the 23rd another; and I should be put to it
+to count the great number since. And they do not resemble English
+storms, but rather Arctic ones, in a certain very suggestive something
+of personalness, and a carousing malice, and a Tartarus gloom, which I
+cannot quite describe. That night at Guildford, after wandering about,
+and becoming very weary, I threw myself upon a cushioned pew in an old
+Norman church with two east apses, called St. Mary's, using a
+Bible-cushion for pillow, and placing some distance away a little tin
+lamp turned low, whose ray served me for _veilleuse_ through the night.
+Happily I had taken care to close up everything, or, I feel sure, the
+roof must have gone. Only one dead, an old lady in a chapel on the north
+side of the chancel, whom I rather mistrusted, was there with me: and
+there I lay listening: for, after all, I could not sleep a wink, while
+outside vogued the immense tempest. And I communed with myself,
+thinking: 'I, poor man, lost in this conflux of infinitudes and vortex
+of the world, what can become of me, my God? For dark, ah dark, is the
+waste void into which from solid ground I am now plunged a million
+fathoms deep, the sport of all the whirlwinds: and it were better for me
+to have died with the dead, and never to have seen the wrath and
+turbulence of the Ineffable, nor to have heard the thrilling bleakness
+of the winds of Eternity, when they pine, and long, and whimper, and
+when they vociferate and blaspheme, and when they expostulate and
+intrigue and implore, and when they despair and die, which ear of man
+should never hear. For they mean to eat me up, I know, these Titanic
+darknesses: and soon like a whiff I shall pass away, and leave the world
+to them.' So till next morning I lay mumping, with shivers and
+cowerings: for the shocks of the storm pervaded the locked church to my
+very heart; and there were thunders that night, my God, like callings
+and laughs and banterings, exchanged between distant hill-tops in Hell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, the next morning I went down the steep High Street, and found a
+young nun at the bottom whom I had left the previous evening with a
+number of girls in uniform opposite the Guildhall--half-way up the
+street. She must have been spun down, arm over arm, for the wind was
+westerly, and whereas I had left her completely dressed to her wimple
+and beads, she was now nearly stripped, and her little flock scattered.
+And branches of trees, and wrecked houses, and reeling clouds of dead
+leaves were everywhere that wild morning.
+
+This town of Guildford appeared to be the junction of an extraordinary
+number of railway-lines, and before again setting out in the afternoon,
+when the wind had lulled, having got an A B C guide, and a railway-map,
+I decided upon my line, and upon a new engine, feeling pretty sure now
+of making London, only thirty miles away. I then set out, and about five
+o'clock was at Surbiton, near my aim; I kept on, expecting every few
+minutes to see the great city, till darkness fell, and still, at
+considerable risk, I went, as I thought, forward: but no London was
+there. I had, in fact, been on a loop-line, and at Surbiton gone wrong
+again; for the next evening I found myself at Wokingham, farther away
+than ever.
+
+I slept on a rug in the passage of an inn called The Rose, for there was
+a wild, Russian-looking man, with projecting top-teeth, on a bed in the
+house, whose appearance I did not like, and it was late, and I too tired
+to walk further; and the next morning pretty early I set out again, and
+at 10 A.M. was at Reading.
+
+The notion of navigating the land by precisely the same means as the
+sea, simple and natural as it was, had not at all occurred to me: but at
+the first accidental sight of a compass in a little shop-window near the
+river at Reading, my difficulties as to getting to any desired place in
+the world vanished once and for all: for a good chart or map, the
+compass, a pair of compasses, and, in the case of longer distances, a
+quadrant, sextant or theodolite, with a piece of paper and pencil, were
+all that were necessary to turn an engine into a land-ship, one choosing
+the lines that ran nearest the direction of one's course, whenever they
+did not run precisely.
+
+Thus provided, I ran out from Reading about seven in the evening, while
+there was still some light, having spent there some nine hours. This was
+the town where I first observed that shocking crush of humanity, which
+I afterwards met in every large town west of London. Here, I should say,
+the English were quite equal in number to the foreigners: and there were
+enough of both, God knows: for London must have poured many here. There
+were houses, in every room of which, and on the stairs, the dead
+actually overlay each other, and in the streets before them were points
+where only on flesh, or under carriages, was it possible to walk. I went
+into the great County Gaol, from which, as I had read, the prisoners had
+been released two weeks before-hand, and there I found the same pressed
+condition, cells occupied by ten or twelve, the galleries continuously
+rough-paved with faces, heads, and old-clothes-shops of robes; and in
+the parade-ground, against one wall, a mass of human stuff, like tough
+grey clay mixed with rags and trickling black gore, where a crush as of
+hydraulic power must have acted. At a corner between a gate and a wall
+near the biscuit-factory of this town I saw a boy, whom I believe to
+have been blind, standing jammed, at his wrist a chain-ring, and, at the
+end of the chain, a dog; from his hap-hazard posture I conjectured that
+he, and chain, and dog had been lifted from the street, and placed so,
+by the storm of the 7th of the month; and what made it very curious was
+that his right arm pointed a little outward just over the dog, so that,
+at the moment when I first sighted him, he seemed a drunken fellow
+setting his dog at me. In fact, all the dead I found much mauled and
+stripped and huddled: and the earth seemed to be making an abortive
+effort to sweep her streets.
+
+Well, some little distance from Reading I saw a big flower-seed farm,
+looking dead in some plots, and in others quite rank: and here again,
+fluttering quite near the engine, two little winged aurelians in the
+quiet evening air. I went on, passing a great number of crowded trains
+on the down-line, two of them in collision, and very broken up, and one
+exploded engine; even the fields and cuttings on either hand of the line
+had a rather populous look, as if people, when trains and vehicles
+failed, had set to trudging westward in caravans and streams. When I
+came to a long tunnel near Slough, I saw round the foot of the arch an
+extraordinary quantity of wooden _débris_, and as I went very slowly
+through, was alarmed by the continuous bumping of the train, which, I
+knew, was passing over bodies; at the other end were more _débris_; and
+I easily guessed that a company of desperate people had made the tunnel
+air-tight at the two arches, and provisioned themselves, with the hope
+to live there till the day of destiny was passed; whereupon their
+barricades must have been crashed through by some up-train and
+themselves crushed, or else, other crowds, mad to share their cave of
+refuge, had stormed the boardings. This latter, as I afterwards found,
+was a very usual event.
+
+I should very soon have got to London now, but, as my bad luck would
+have it, I met a long up-train on the metals, with not one creature in
+any part of it. There was nothing to do but to tranship, with all my
+things, to its engine, which I found in good condition with plenty of
+coal and water, and to set it going, a hateful labour: I being already
+jet-black from hair to toes. However, by half-past ten I found myself
+stopped by another train only a quarter of a mile from Paddington, and
+walked the rest of the way among trains in which the standing dead still
+stood, propped by their neighbours, and over metals where bodies were as
+ordinary and cheap as waves on the sea, or twigs in a forest. I believe
+that wild crowds had given chase on foot to moving trains, or fore-run
+them in the frenzied hope of inducing them to stop.
+
+I came to the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, the
+night being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and the hour about
+eleven.
+
+I found later that all the electric generating-stations, or all that I
+visited, were intact; that is to say, must have been shut down before
+the arrival of the doom; also that the gas-works had almost certainly
+been abandoned some time previously: so that this city of dreadful
+night, in which, at the moment when Silence choked it, not less than
+forty to sixty millions swarmed and droned, must have more resembled
+Tartarus and the foul shades of Hell than aught to which my fancy can
+liken it.
+
+For, coming nearer the platforms, I saw that trains, in order to move at
+all, must have moved through a slough of bodies pushed from behind, and
+forming a packed homogeneous mass on the metals: and I knew that they
+_had_ moved. Nor could _I_ now move, unless I decided to wade: for flesh
+was everywhere, on the roofs of trains, cramming the interval between
+them, on the platforms, splashing the pillars like spray, piled on
+trucks and lorries, a carnal quagmire; and outside, it filled the space
+between a great host of vehicles, carpeting all that region of London.
+And all here that odour of blossoms, which nowhere yet, save on one vile
+ship, had failed, was now wholly overcome by another: and the thought
+was in my head, my God, that if the soul of man had sent up to Heaven
+the odour which his body gave to me, then it was not so strange that
+things were as they were.
+
+I got out from the station, with ears, God knows, that still awaited the
+accustomed noising of this accursed town, habituated as I now was to all
+the dumb and absent void of Soundlessness; and I was overwhelmed in a
+new awe, and lost in a wilder woesomeness, when, instead of lights and
+business, I saw the long street which I knew brood darker than Babylons
+long desolate, and in place of its ancient noising, heard, my God, a
+shocking silence, rising higher than I had ever heard it, and blending
+with the silence of the inane, eternal stars in heaven.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I could not get into any vehicle for some time, for all thereabouts was
+practically a mere block; but near the Park, which I attained by
+stooping among wheels, and selecting my foul steps, I overhauled a
+Daimler car, found in it two cylinders of petrol, lit the ignition-lamp,
+removed with averted abhorrence three bodies, mounted, and broke that
+populous stillness. And through streets nowhere empty of bodies I went
+urging eastward my jolting, and spattered, and humming way.
+
+That I should have persisted, with so much pains, to come to this
+unbounded catacomb, seems now singular to me: for by that time I could
+not have been sufficiently daft to expect to find another being like
+myself on the earth, though I cherished, I remember, the irrational hope
+of yet somewhere finding dog, or cat, or horse, to be with me, and would
+anon think bitterly of Reinhardt, my Arctic dog, which my own hand had
+shot. But, in reality, a morbid curiosity must have been within me all
+the time to read the real truth of what had happened, so far as it was
+known, or guessed, and to gloat upon all that drama, and cup of
+trembling, and pouring out of the vials of the wrath of God, which must
+have preceded the actual advent of the end of Time. This inquisitiveness
+had, at every town which I reached, made the search for newspapers
+uppermost in my mind; but, by bad luck, I had found only four, all of
+them ante-dated to the one which I had read at Dover, though their dates
+gave me some idea of the period when printing must have ceased, viz.
+soon after the 17th July--about three months subsequent to my arrival at
+the Pole--for none I found later than this date; and these contained
+nothing scientific, but only orisons and despairings. On arriving,
+therefore, at London, I made straight for the office of the _Times_,
+only stopping at a chemist's in Oxford Street for a bottle of antiseptic
+to hold near my nose, though, having once left the neighbourhood of
+Paddington, I had hardly much need of this.
+
+I made my way to the square where the paper was printed, to find that,
+even there, the ground was closely strewn with calpac and pugaree, black
+abayeh and fringed praying-shawl, hob-nail and sandal, figured lungi and
+striped silk, all very muddled and mauled. Through the dark square to
+the twice-dark building I passed, and found open the door of an
+advertisement-office; but on striking a match, saw that it had been
+lighted by electricity, and had therefore to retrace my stumbling steps,
+till I came to a shop of lamps in a near alley, walking meantime with
+timid cares that I might hurt no one--for in this enclosed neighbourhood
+I began to feel strange tremors, and kept striking matches, which, so
+still was the black air, hardly flickered.
+
+When I returned to the building with a little lighted lamp, I at once
+saw a file on a table, and since there were a number of dead there, and
+I wished to be alone, I took the heavy mass of paper between my left arm
+and side, and the lamp in my right hand; passed then behind a counter;
+and then, to the right, up a stair which led me into a very great
+building and complexity of wooden steps and corridors, where I went
+peering, the lamp visibly trembling in my hand, for here also were the
+dead. Finally, I entered a good-sized carpeted room with a baize-covered
+table in the middle, and large smooth chairs, and on the table many
+manuscripts impregnated with purple dust, and around were books in
+shelves. This room had been locked upon a single man, a tall man in a
+frock-coat, with a pointed grey beard, who at the last moment had
+decided to fly from it, for he lay at the threshold, apparently fallen
+dead the moment he opened the door. Him, by drawing his feet aside, I
+removed, locked the door upon myself, sat at the table before the dusty
+file, and, with the little lamp near, began to search.
+
+I searched and read till far into the morning. But God knows, He
+alone....
+
+I had not properly filled the little reservoir with oil, and at about
+three in the fore-day, it began to burn sullenly lower, letting sparks,
+and turning the glass grey: and in my deepest chilly heart was the
+question: 'Suppose the lamp goes out before the daylight....'
+
+I knew the Pole, and cold, I knew them well: but to be frozen by panic,
+my God! I read, I say, I searched, I would not stop: but I read that
+night racked by terrors such as have never yet entered into the heart
+of man to conceive. My flesh moved and crawled like a lake which, here
+and there, the breeze ruffles. Sometimes for two, three, four minutes,
+the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would
+peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of
+one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the
+wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should
+start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the
+world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and
+the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect
+my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the
+toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered
+very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins,
+lych-gates and sextons, and the grating of ropes that lower down the
+dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and
+gloomy home of the mortal; that lethal look of cold dead fingers I
+seemed to see before me, the insipidness of dead tongues, the pout of
+the drowned, and the vapid froths that ridge their lips, till my flesh
+was moist as with the stale washing-waters of morgues and mortuaries,
+and with such sweats as corpses sweat, and the mawkish tear that lies
+on dead men's cheeks; for what is one poor insignificant man in his
+flesh against a whole world of the disembodied, he alone with them, and
+nowhere, nowhere another of his kind, to whom to appeal against them? I
+read, and I searched: but God, God knows ... If a leaf of the paper,
+which I slowly, warily, stealingly turned, made but one faintest rustle,
+how did that _reveille_ boom in echoes through the vacant and haunted
+chambers of my poor aching heart, my God! and there was a cough in my
+throat which for a cruelly long time I would not cough, till it burst in
+horrid clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmost
+blood. For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of
+crawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks of
+madness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the black
+Vale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption. Twice during the ghostly
+hours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that some
+presence--some most gashly silent being--stood at my right elbow, so
+thrilled me, that I leapt to my feet to confront it with clenched fists,
+and hairs that bristled stiff in horror and frenzy. After that second
+time I must have fainted; for when it was broad day, I found my dropped
+head over the file of papers, supported on my arms. And I resolved then
+never again after sunset to remain in any house: for that night was
+enough to kill a horse, my good God; and that this is a haunted planet I
+know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What I read in the _Times_ was not very definite, for how could it be?
+but in the main it confirmed inferences which I had myself drawn, and
+fairly satisfied my mind.
+
+There had been a battle royal in the paper between my old collaborator
+Professor Stanistreet and Dr. Martin Rogers, and never could I have
+conceived such an indecorous piece of business, men like them calling
+one another 'tyro,' 'dreamer,' and in one place 'block-head.'
+Stanistreet denied that the perfumed odour of almonds attributed to the
+advancing cloud could be due to anything but the excited fancy of the
+reporting fugitives, because, said he, it was unknown that either Cn,
+HCn, or K_4FeCn_6 had been given out by volcanoes, and the
+destructiveness to life of the travelling cloud could only be owing to
+CO and CO_2. To this Rogers, in an article characterised by
+extraordinary heat, replied that he could not understand how even a
+'tyro'(!) in chemical and geological phenomena would venture to rush
+into print with the statement that HCn had not commonly been given out
+by volcanoes: that it _had_ been, he said, was perfectly certain; though
+whether it had been or not could not affect the decision of a reasoning
+mind as to whether it was being: for that cyanogen, as a matter of fact,
+was not rare in nature, though not directly occurring, being one of the
+products of the common distillation of pit-coal, and found in roots,
+peaches, almonds, and many tropical flora; also that it had been
+actually pointed out as probable by more than one thinker that some salt
+or salts of Cn, the potassic, or the potassic ferrocyanide, or both,
+must exist in considerable stores in the earth at volcanic depths. In
+reply to this, Stanistreet in a two-column article used the word
+'dreamer,' and Rogers, when Berlin had been already silenced, finally
+replied with his amazing 'block-head.' But, in my opinion, by far the
+most learned and lucid of the scientific dicta was from the rather
+unexpected source of Sloggett, of the Dublin Science and Art Department:
+he, without fuss, accepted the statements of the fugitive eye-witnesses,
+down to the assertion that the cloud, as it rolled travelling, seemed
+mixed from its base to the clouds with languid tongues of purple flame,
+rose-coloured at their edges. This, Sloggett explained, was the
+characteristic flame of both cyanogen and hydrocyanic acid vapour,
+which, being inflammable, may have become locally ignited in the passage
+over cities, and only burned in that limited and languid way on account
+of the ponderous volumes of carbonic anhydride with which they must, of
+course, be mixed: the dark empurpled colour was due to the presence of
+large quantities of the scoriae of the trappean rocks: basalts,
+green-stone, trachytes, and the various porphyries. This article was
+most remarkable for its clear divination, because written so early--not
+long, in fact, after the cessation of telegraphic communication with
+Australia and China; and at a date so early Sloggett stated that the
+character of the devastation not only proved an eruption--another, but
+far greater Krakatoa--probably in some South Sea region, but indicated
+that its most active product must be, not CO, but potassic ferrocyanide
+(K_4FeCn_6), which, undergoing distillation with the products of sulphur
+in the heat of eruption, produced hydrocyanic acid (HCn); and this
+volatile acid, he said, remaining in a vaporous state in all climates
+above a temperature of 26.5° C., might involve the entire earth, if the
+eruption proved sufficiently powerful, travelling chiefly in a direction
+contrary to the earth's west-to-east motion, the only regions which
+would certainly be exempt being the colder regions of the Arctic
+circles, where the vapour of the acid would assume the liquid state, and
+fall as rain. He did not anticipate that vegetation would be permanently
+affected, unless the eruption were of inconceivable duration and
+activity, for though the poisonous quality of hydrocyanic acid consisted
+in its sudden and complete arrest of oxidation, vegetation had two
+sources of life--the soil as well as the air; with this exception, all
+life, down to the lowest evolutionary forms, would disappear (here was
+the one point in which he was somewhat at fault), until the earth
+reproduced them. For the rest, he fixed the rate of the on-coming cloud
+at from 100 to 105 miles a day; and the date of eruption, either the
+14th, 15th, or 16th of April--which was either one, two, or three days
+after the arrival of the _Boreal_ party at the Pole; and he concluded by
+saying that, if the facts were as he had stated them, then he could
+suggest no hiding-place for the race of man, unless such places as mines
+and tunnels could be made air-tight; nor could even they be of use to
+any considerable number, except in the event of the poisonous state of
+the air being of very short duration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had thought of mines before: but in a very languid way, till this
+article, and other things that I read, as it were struck my brain a slap
+with the notion. For 'there,' I said, 'if anywhere, shall I find a
+man....'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I went out from that building that morning feeling like a man bowed down
+with age, for the depths of unutterable horror into which I had had
+glimpses during that one night made me very feeble, and my steps
+tottered, and my brain reeled.
+
+I got out into Farringdon Street, and at the near Circus, where four
+streets meet, had under my furthest range of vision nothing but four
+fields of bodies, bodies, clad in a rag-shop of every faded colour, or
+half-clad, or not clad at all, actually, in many cases, over-lying one
+another, as I had seen at Reading, but here with a markedly more
+skeleton appearance: for I saw the swollen-looking shoulders, sharp
+hips, hollow abdomens, and stiff bony limbs of people dead from famine,
+the whole having the grotesque air of some _macabre_ battle-field of
+fallen marionettes. Mixed with these was an extraordinary number of
+vehicles of all sorts, so that I saw that driving among them would be
+impracticable, whereas the street which I had taken during the night
+was fairly clear. I thought a minute what I should do: then went by a
+parallel back-street, and came out to a shop in the Strand, where I
+hoped to find all the information which I needed about the excavations
+of the country. The shutters were up, and I did not wish to make any
+noise among these people, though the morning was bright, it being about
+ten o'clock, and it was easy to effect entrance, for I saw a crow-bar in
+a big covered furniture-van near. I, therefore, went northward, till I
+came to the British Museum, the cataloguing-system of which I knew well,
+and passed in. There was no one at the library-door to bid me stop, and
+in the great round reading-room not a soul, except one old man with a
+bag of goître hung at his neck, and spectacles, he lying up a
+book-ladder near the shelves, a 'reader' to the last. I got to the
+printed catalogues, and for an hour was upstairs among the dim sacred
+galleries of this still place, and at the sight of certain Greek and
+Coptic papyri, charters, seals, had such a dream of this ancient earth,
+my good God, as even an angel's pen could not half express on paper.
+Afterwards, I went away loaded with a good hundred-weight of
+Ordnance-maps, which I had stuffed into a bag found in the cloak-room,
+with three topographical books; I then, at an instrument-maker's in
+Holborn, got a sextant and theodolite, and at a grocer's near the river
+put into a sack-bag provisions to last me a week or two; at Blackfriars
+Bridge wharf-station I found a little sharp white steamer of a few tons,
+which happily was driven by liquid air, so that I had no troublesome
+fire to light: and by noon I was cutting my solitary way up the Thames,
+which flowed as before the ancient Britons were born, and saw it, and
+built mud-huts there amid the primaeval forest; and afterwards the
+Romans came, and saw it, and called it Tamesis, or Thamesis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night, as I lay asleep on the cabin-cushions of my little boat
+under the lee of an island at Richmond, I had a clear dream, in which
+something, or someone, came to me, and asked me a question: for it said:
+'Why do you go seeking another man?--that you may fall upon him, and
+kiss him? or that you may fall upon him, and murder him?' And I answered
+sullenly in my dream: 'I would not murder him. I do not wish to murder
+anyone.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What was essential to me was to know, with certainty, whether I was
+really alone: for some instinct began to whisper me: 'Find that out: be
+sure, be sure: for without the assurance you can never be--yourself.'
+
+I passed into the great Midland Canal, and went northward, leisurely
+advancing, for I was in no hurry. The weather remained very warm, and
+great part of the country was still dressed in autumn leaves. I have
+written, I think, of the terrific character of the tempests witnessed in
+England since my return: well, the calms were just as intense and novel.
+This observation was forced upon me: and I could not but be surprised.
+There seemed no middle course now: if there was a wind, it was a storm:
+if there was not a storm, no leaf stirred, not a roughening zephyr ran
+the water. I was reminded of maniacs that laugh now, and rave now--but
+never smile, and never sigh.
+
+On the fourth afternoon I passed by Leicester, and the next morning left
+my pleasant boat, carrying maps and compass, and at a small station took
+engine, bound for Yorkshire, where I loitered and idled away two foolish
+months, sometimes travelling by steam-engine, sometimes by automobile,
+sometimes by bicycle, and sometimes on foot, till the autumn was quite
+over.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were two houses in London to which especially I had thought to
+go: one in Harley Street, and one in Hanover Square: but when it came to
+the point, I would not; and there was a little embowered home in
+Yorkshire, where I was born, to which I thought to go: but I would not,
+confining myself for many days to the eastern half of the county.
+
+One morning, while passing on foot along the coast-wall from Bridlington
+to Flambro', on turning my eyes from the sea, I was confronted by a
+thing which for a moment or two struck me with the most profound
+astonishment. I had come to a mansion, surrounded by trees, three
+hundred yards from the cliffs: and there, on a path at the bottom of the
+domain, right before me, was a board marked: 'Trespassers will be
+Prosecuted.' At once a mad desire--the first which I had had--to laugh,
+to roar with laughter, to send wild echoes of merriment clapping among
+the chalk gullies, and abroad on the morning air, seized upon me: but I
+kept it under, though I could not help smiling at this poor man, with
+his little delusion that a part of the earth was his.
+
+Here the cliffs are, I should say, seventy feet high, broken by frequent
+slips in the upper stratum of clay, and, as I proceeded, climbing
+always, I encountered some rather formidable gullies in the chalk, down
+and then up which I had to scramble, till I came to a great mound or
+barrier, stretching right across the great promontory, and backed by a
+natural ravine, this, no doubt, having been raised as a rampart by some
+of those old invading pirate-peoples, who had their hot life-scuffle,
+and are done now, like the rest. Going on, I came to a bay in the cliff,
+with a great number of boats lodged on the slopes, some quite high,
+though the declivities are steep; toward the inner slopes is a lime-kiln
+which I explored, but found no one there. When I came out on the other
+side, I saw the village, with an old tower at one end, on a bare stretch
+of land; and thence, after an hour's rest in the kitchen of a little
+inn, went out to the coast-guard station, and the lighthouse.
+
+Looking across the sea eastward, the light-keepers here must have seen
+that thick cloud of convolving browns and purples, perhaps mixed with
+small tongues of fire, slowly walking the water, its roof in the clouds,
+upon them: for this headland is in precisely the same longitude as
+London; and, reckoning from the hour when, as recorded in the _Times_,
+the cloud was seen from Dover over Calais, London and Flambro' must have
+been overtaken soon after three o'clock on the Sunday afternoon, the
+25th July. At sight in open daylight of a doom so gloomy--prophesied,
+but perhaps hoped against to the last, and now come--the light-keepers
+must have fled howling, supposing them to have so long remained faithful
+to duty: for here was no one, and in the village very few. In this
+lighthouse, which is a circular white tower, eighty feet high, on the
+edge of the cliff, is a book for visitors to sign their names: and I
+will write something down here in black and white: for the secret is
+between God only, and me: After reading a few of the names, I took my
+pencil, and I wrote my name there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The reef before the Head stretches out a quarter of a mile, looking bold
+in the dead low-water that then was, and showing to what extent the sea
+has pushed back this coast, three wrecks impaled on them, and a big
+steamer quite near, waiting for the first movements of the already
+strewn sea to perish. All along the cliff-wall to the bluff crowned by
+Scarborough Castle northward, and to the low vanishing coast of
+Holderness southward, appeared those cracks and caves which had brought
+me here, though there seemed no attempts at barricades; however, I got
+down a rough slope on the south side to a rude wild beach, strewn with
+wave-worn masses of chalk: and never did I feel so paltry and short a
+thing as there, with far-outstretched bays of crags about me, their
+bluffs encrusted at the base with stale old leprosies of shells and
+barnacles, and crass algae-beards, and, higher up, the white cliff all
+stained and weather-spoiled, the rock in some parts looking quite
+chalky, and elsewhere gleaming hard and dull like dirty marbles, while
+in the huge withdrawals of the coast yawn darksome gullies and caverns.
+Here, in that morning's walk, I saw three little hermit-crabs, a limpet,
+and two ninnycocks in a pool of weeds under a bearded rock. What
+astonished me here, and, indeed, above, and everywhere, in London even,
+and other towns, was the incredible number of birds that strewed the
+ground, at some points resembling a real rain, birds of nearly every
+sort, including tropic specimens: so that I had to conclude that they,
+too, had fled before the cloud from country to country, till conquered
+by weariness and grief, and then by death.
+
+By climbing over rocks thick with periwinkles, and splashing through
+great sloppy stretches of crinkled sea-weed, which give a raw stench of
+brine, I entered the first of the gullies: a narrow, long, winding one,
+with sides polished by the sea-wash, and the floor rising inwards. In
+the dark interior I struck matches, able still to hear from outside the
+ponderous spasmodic rush and jostle of the sea between the crags of the
+reef, but now quite faintly. Here, I knew, I could meet only dead men,
+but urged by some curiosity, I searched to the end, wading in the middle
+through a three-feet depth of sea-weed twine: but there was no one; and
+only belemnites and fossils in the chalk. I searched several to the
+south of the headland, and then went northward past it toward another
+opening and place of perched boats, called in the map North Landing:
+where, even now, a distinct smell of fish, left by the old crabbers and
+herring-fishers, was perceptible. A number of coves and bays opened as I
+proceeded; a faded green turf comes down in curves at some parts on the
+cliff-brows, like wings of a young soldier's hair, parted in the middle,
+and plastered on his brow; isolated chalk-masses are numerous, obelisks,
+top-heavy columns, bastions; at one point no less than eight headlands
+stretched to the end of the world before me, each pierced by its arch,
+Norman or Gothic, in whole or in half; and here again caves, in one of
+which I found a carpet-bag stuffed with a wet pulp like bread, and,
+stuck to the rock, a Turkish tarboosh; also, under a limestone quarry,
+five dead asses: but no man. The east coast had evidently been shunned.
+Finally, in the afternoon I reached Filey, very tired, and there slept.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I went onward by train-engine all along the coast to a region of
+iron-ore, alum, and jet-excavations round Whitby and Middlesborough. By
+by-ways near the small place of Goldsborough I got down to the shore at
+Kettleness, and reached the middle of a bay in which is a cave called
+the Hob-Hole, with excavations all around, none of great depth, made by
+jet-diggers and quarrymen. In the cave lay a small herd of cattle,
+though for what purpose put there I cannot guess; and in the
+jet-excavations I found nothing. A little further south is the chief
+alum-region, as at Sandsend, but as soon as I saw a works, and the great
+gap in the ground like a crater, where the lias is quarried, containing
+only heaps of alum-shale, brushwood-stacks, and piles of cement-nodules
+extracted from the lias, I concluded that here could have been found no
+hiding; nor did I purposely visit the others, though I saw two later.
+From round Whitby, and those rough moors, I went on to Darlington, not
+far now from my home: but I would not continue that way, and after two
+days' indecisive lounging, started for Richmond and the lead mines
+about Arkengarth Dale, near Reeth. Here begins a region of mountain,
+various with glens, fells, screes, scars, swards, becks, passes,
+villages, river-heads, and dales. Some of the faces which I saw in it
+almost seemed to speak to me in a broad dialect which I knew. But they
+were not numerous in proportion: for all this country-side must have had
+its population multiplied by at least some hundreds; and the villages
+had rather the air of Danube, Levant, or Spanish villages. In one, named
+Marrick, I saw that the street had become the scene either of a great
+battle or a great massacre; and soon I was everywhere coming upon men
+and women, English and foreign, dead from violence: cracked heads,
+wounds, unhung jaws, broken limbs, and so on. Instead of going direct to
+the mines from Reeth, that waywardness which now rules my mind, as
+squalls an abandoned boat, took me somewhat further south-west to the
+village of Thwaite, which I actually could not enter, so occupied with
+dead was every spot on which the eye rested a hundred yards about it.
+Not far from here I turned up, on foot now, a very steep, stony road to
+the right, which leads over the Buttertubs Pass into Wensleydale, the
+day being very warm and bright, with large clouds that looked like
+lakes of molten silver giving off grey fumes in their centre, casting
+moody shadows over the swardy dale, which below Thwaite expands, showing
+Muker two miles off, the largest village of Upper Swaledale. Soon,
+climbing, I could look down upon miles of Swaledale and the hills
+beyond, a rustic panorama of glens and grass, river and cloudshadow, and
+there was something of lightness in my step that fair day, for I had
+left all my maps and things, except one, at Reeth, to which I meant to
+return, and the earth, which is very good, was--mine. The ascent was
+rough, and also long: but if I paused and looked behind--I saw, I saw.
+Man's notion of a Heaven, a Paradise, reserved for the spirits of the
+good, clearly arose from impressions which the earth made upon his mind:
+for no Paradise can be fairer than this; just as his notion of a Hell
+arose from the squalid mess into which his own foolish habits of thought
+and action turned this Paradise. At least, so it struck me then: and,
+thinking it, there was a hiss in my breath, as I went up into what more
+and more acquired the character of a mountain pass, with points of
+almost Alpine savagery: for after I had skirted the edge of a deep glen
+on the left, the slopes changed in character, heather was on the
+mountain-sides, a fretting beck sent up its noise, then screes, and
+scars, and a considerable waterfall, and a landscape of crags; and
+lastly a broad and rather desolate summit, palpably nearer the clouds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later I was at the mines: and here I first saw that wide-spread
+scene of horror with which I have since become familiar. The story of
+six out of ten of them all is the same, and short: selfish 'owners,' an
+ousted world, an easy bombardment, and the destruction of all concerned,
+before the arrival of the cloud in many cases. About some of the Durham
+pit-mouths I have been given the impression that the human race lay
+collected there; and that the notion of hiding himself in a mine must
+have occurred to every man alive, and sent him thither.
+
+In these lead mines, as in most vein-mining, there are more shafts than
+in collieries, and hardly any attempt at artificial ventilation, except
+at rises, winzes and cul-de-sacs. I found accordingly that, though their
+depth does not exceed three hundred feet, suffocation must often have
+anticipated the other dreaded death. In nearly every shaft, both up-take
+and down-take, was a ladder, either of the mine, or of the fugitives,
+and I was able to descend without difficulty, having dressed myself in a
+house at the village in a check flannel shirt, a pair of two-buttoned
+trousers with circles of leather at the knees, thick boots, and a
+miner's hat, having a leather socket attached to it, into which fitted a
+straight handle from a cylindrical candlestick; with this light, and
+also a Davy-lamp, which I carried about with me for a good many months,
+I lived for the most part in the deeps of the earth, searching for the
+treasure of a life, to find everywhere, in English duckies and guggs,
+Pomeranian women in gaudy stiff cloaks, the Walachian, the Mameluk, the
+Khirgiz, the Bonze, the Imaum, and almost every type of man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One most brilliant Autumn day I walked by the village market-cross at
+Barnard, come at last, but with a tenderness in my heart, and a
+reluctance, to where I was born; for I said I would go and see my sister
+Ada, and--the other old one. I leaned and loitered a long time on the
+bridge, gazing up to the craggy height, which is heavy with waving wood,
+and crowned by the Castle-tower, the Tees sweeping round the
+mountain-base, smooth here and sunlit, but a mile down, where I wished
+to go, but would not, brawling bedraggled and lacerated, like a sweet
+strumpet, all shallow among rocks under reaches of shadow--the shadow of
+Rokeby Woods. I climbed very leisurely up the hill-side, having in my
+hand a bag with a meal, and up the stair in the wall to the top I went,
+where there is no parapet, but a massiveness of wall that precludes
+danger; and here in my miner's attire I sat three hours, brooding
+sleepily upon the scene of lush umbrageous old wood that marks the long
+way the river takes, from Marwood Chase up above, and where the rapid
+Balder bickers in, down to bowery Rokeby, touched now with autumn; the
+thickness of trees lessening away toward the uplands, where there are
+far etherealized stretches of fields within hedgerows, and in the sunny
+mirage of the farthest azure remoteness hints of lonesome moorland. It
+was not till near three that I went down along the river, then, near
+Rokeby, traversing the old meadow, and ascending the old hill: and
+there, as of old, was the little black square with yellow letters on the
+gate-wall:
+
+  HUNT HILL HOUSE.
+
+No part, no house, I believe, of this country-side was empty of strange
+corpses: and they were in Hunt Hill, too. I saw three in the weedy plot
+to the right of the garden-path, where once the hawthorn and lilac tree
+had grown from well-rollered grass, and in the little bush-wilderness to
+the left, which was always a wilderness, one more: and in the
+breakfast-room, to the right of the hall, three; and in the new wooden
+clinker-built attachment opening upon the breakfast-room, two, half
+under the billiard-table; and in her room overlooking the porch on the
+first floor, the long thin form of my mother on her bed, with crushed-in
+left temple, and at the foot of the bed, face-downward on the floor,
+black-haired Ada in a night-dress.
+
+Of all the men and women who died, they two alone had burying. For I
+digged a hole with the stable-spade under the front lilac; and I wound
+them in the sheets, foot and form and head; and, not without throes and
+qualms, I bore and buried them there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some time passed after this before the long, multitudinous, and
+perplexing task of visiting the mine-regions again claimed me. I found
+myself at a place called Ingleborough, which is a big table-mountain,
+with a top of fifteen to twenty acres, from which the sea is visible
+across Lancashire to the west; and in the sides of this strange hill are
+a number of caves which I searched during three days, sleeping in a
+garden-shed at a very rural and flower-embowered village, for every room
+in it was thronged, a place marked Clapham in the chart, in Clapdale,
+which latter is a dale penetrating the slopes of the mountain: and there
+I found by far the greatest of the caves which I saw, having ascended a
+path from the village to a hollow between two grass slopes, where there
+is a beck, and so entering an arch to the left, screened by trees, into
+the limestone cliff. The passage narrows pretty rapidly inwards, and I
+had not proceeded two yards before I saw the clear traces of a great
+battle here. All this region had, in fact, been invaded, for the cave
+must have been famous, though I did not remember it myself, and for some
+miles round the dead were pretty frequent, making the immediate approach
+to the cave a matter for care, if the foot was to be saved from
+pollution. It is clear that there had been an iron gate across the
+entrance, that within this a wall had been built across, shutting in I
+do not know how many, perhaps one or two, perhaps hundreds: and both
+gate and wall had been stormed and broken down, for there still were the
+sledges and rocks which, without doubt, had done it. I had a lamp, and
+at my forehead the lighted candle, and I went on quickly, seeing it
+useless now to choose my steps where there was no choice, through a
+passage incrusted, roof and sides, with a scabrous petrified lichen, the
+roof low for some ninety yards, covered with down-looking cones, like
+an inverted forest of children's toy-trees. I then came to a round hole,
+apparently artificial, opening through a curtain of stalagmitic
+formation into a great cavern beyond, which was quite animated and
+festal with flashes, sparkles, and diamond-lustres, hung in their
+myriads upon a movement of the eye, these being produced by large
+numbers of snowy wet stalagmites, very large and high, down the centre
+of which ran a continuous long lane of clothes and hats and faces; with
+hasty reluctant feet I somehow passed over them, the cave all the time
+widening, thousands of stalactites appearing on the roof of every size,
+from virgin's breast to giant's club, and now everywhere the wet drip,
+drip, as it were a populous busy bazaar of perspiring brows and hurrying
+feet, in which the only business is to drip. Where stalactite meets
+stalagmite there are pillars: where stalactite meets stalactite in
+fissures long or short there are elegances, flimsy draperies, delicate
+fantasies; there were also pools of water in which hung heads and feet,
+and there were vacant spots at outlying spaces, where the arched roof,
+which continually heightened itself, was reflected in the chill gleam of
+the floor. Suddenly, the roof came down, the floor went up, and they
+seemed to meet before me; but looking, I found a low opening, through
+which, drawing myself on the belly over slime for some yards in
+repulsive proximity to dead personalities, I came out upon a floor of
+sand and pebbles under a long dry tunnel, arched and narrow, grim and
+dull, without stalactites, suggestive of monks, and catacomb-vaults, and
+the route to the grave; and here the dead were much fewer, proving
+either that the general mob had not had time to penetrate so far inward,
+or else that those within, if they were numerous, had gone out to
+defend, or to harken to, the storm of their citadel. This passage led me
+into an open space, the grandest of all, loftily vaulted, full of genie
+riches and buried treasures of light, the million-fold _ensemble_ of
+lustres dancing schottishe with the eye, as it moved or was still: this
+place, I should guess, being quite half a mile from the entrance. My
+prying lantern showed me here only nineteen dead, men of various
+nations, and at the far end two holes in the floor, large enough to
+admit the body, through which from below came up a sound of falling
+water. Both of these holes, I could see, had been filled with cement
+concrete--wisely, I fancy, for a current of air from somewhere seemed to
+be now passing through them: and this would have resulted in the death
+of the hiders. Both, however, of the fillings had been broken through,
+one partially, the other wholly, by the ignorant, I presume, who
+thought to hide in a secret place yet beyond, where they may have
+believed, on seeing the artificial work, that others were. I had my ear
+a long time at one of these openings, listening to that mysterious chant
+down below in a darkness most murky and dismal; and afterwards, spurred
+by the stubborn will which I had to be thorough, I went back, took a
+number of outer robes from the bodies, tied them well together, then one
+end round the nearest pillar, and having put my mouth to the hole,
+calling: _'Anyone? Anyone?'_ let myself down by the rope of garments,
+the candle at my head: I had not, however, descended far into those
+mournful shades, when my right foot plunged into water: and instantly
+the feeling of terror pierced me that all the evil things in the
+universe were at my leg to drag me down to Hell: and I was up quicker
+than I went down: nor did my flight cease till, with a sigh of
+deliverance, I found myself in open air.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this, seeing that the autumn warmth was passing away, I set myself
+with more system to my task, and within the next six months worked with
+steadfast will, and strenuous assiduity, seeking, not indeed for a man
+in a mine, but for some evidence of the possibility that a man might be
+alive, visiting in that time Northumberland and Durham, Fife and
+Kinross, South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cornwall and the Midlands, the
+lead mines of Derbyshire, of Allandale and other parts of
+Northumberland, of Alston Moor and other parts of Cumberland, of
+Arkendale and other parts of Yorkshire, of the western part of Durham,
+of Salop, of Cornwall, of the Mendip Hills of Somersetshire, of Flint,
+Cardigan, and Montgomery, of Lanark and Argyll, of the Isle of Man, of
+Waterford and Down; I have gone down the 360-ft. Grand Pipe iron ladder
+of the abandoned graphite-mine at Barrowdale in Cumberland, half-way up
+a mountain 2,000 feet high; and visited where cobalt and manganese ore
+is mined in pockets at the Foel Hiraeddog mine near Rhyl in Flintshire,
+and the lead and copper Newton Stewart workings in Galloway; the Bristol
+coal-fields, and mines of South Staffordshire, where, as in Somerset,
+Gloucester, and Shropshire, the veins are thin, and the mining-system is
+the 'long-wall,' whereas in the North, and Wales, the system is the
+'pillar-and stall'; I have visited the open workings for iron ores of
+Northamptonshire, and the underground stone-quarries, and the
+underground slate-quarries, with their alternate pillars and chambers,
+in the Festiniog district of North Wales; also the rock-salt workings;
+the tin, copper and cobalt workings of Cornwall; and where the minerals
+were brought to the surface on the backs of men, and where they were
+brought by adit-levels provided with rail-roads, and where, as in old
+Cornish mines, there are two ladders in the shaft, moved up and down
+alternately, see-saw, and by skipping from one to the other at right
+moments you ascended or descended, and where the drawing-up is by a gin
+or horse-whinn, with vertical drum; the Tisbury and Chilmark quarries in
+Wiltshire, the Spinkwell and Cliffwood quarries in Yorkshire; and every
+tunnel, and every recorded hole: for something urged within me, saying:
+'You must be sure first, or you can never be--yourself.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Farnbrook Coal-field, in the Red Colt Pit, my inexperience nearly
+ended my life: for though I had a minute theoretical knowledge of all
+British workings, I was, in my practical relation to them, like a man
+who has learnt seamanship on shore. At this place the dead were
+accumulated, I think beyond precedent, the dark plain around for at
+least three miles being as strewn as a reaped field with stacks, and,
+near the bank, much more strewn than stack-fields, filling the only
+house within sight of the pit-mouth--the small place provided for the
+company's officials--and even lying over the great mountain-heap of
+wark, composed of the shale and _débris_ of the working. Here I arrived
+on the morning of the 15th December, to find that, unlike the others,
+there was here no rope-ladder or other contrivance fixed by the
+fugitives in the ventilating-shaft, which, usually, is not very deep,
+being also the pumping-shaft, containing a plug-rod at one end of the
+beam-engine which works the pumps; but looking down the shaft, I
+discerned a vague mass of clothes, and afterwards a thing that could
+only be a rope-ladder, which a batch of the fugitives, by hanging to it
+their united weight, must have dragged down upon themselves, to prevent
+the descent of yet others. My only way of going down, therefore, was by
+the pit-mouth, and as this was an important place, after some hesitation
+I decided, very rashly. First I provided for my coming up again by
+getting a great coil of half-inch rope, which I found in the bailiff's
+office, probably 130 fathoms long, rope at most mines being so
+plentiful, that it almost seemed as if each fugitive had provided
+himself in that way. This length of rope I threw over the beam of the
+beam-engine in the bite where it sustains the rod, and paid one end
+down the shaft, till both were at the bottom: in this way I could come
+up, by tying one rope-end to the rope-ladder, hoisting it, fastening the
+other end below, and climbing the ladder; and I then set to work to
+light the pit-mouth engine-fire to effect my descent. This done, I
+started the engine, and brought up the cage from the bottom, the 300
+yards of wire-rope winding with a quaint deliberateness round the drum,
+reminding me of a camel's nonchalant leisurely obedience. When I saw the
+four meeting chains of the cage-roof emerge, the pointed roof, and
+two-sided frame, I stopped the ascent, and next attached to the
+knock-off gear a long piece of twine which I had provided; carried the
+other end to the cage, in which I had five companions; lit my
+hat-candle, which was my test for choke-damp, and the Davy; and without
+the least reflection, pulled the string. That hole was 900 feet deep.
+First the cage gave a little up-leap, and then began to descend--quite
+normally, I thought, though the candle at once went out--nor had I the
+least fear; a strong current of air, indeed, blew up the shaft: but that
+happens in shafts. _This_ current, however, soon became too vehemently
+boisterous for anything: I saw the lamp-light struggle, the dead cheeks
+quiver, I heard the cage-shoes go singing down the wire-rope guides,
+and quicker we went, and quicker, that facile descent of Avernus,
+slipping lightly, then raging, with sparks at the shoes and guides, and
+a hurricane in my ears and eyes and mouth. When we bumped upon the
+'dogs' at the bottom, I was tossed a foot upwards with the stern-faced
+others, and then lay among them in the eight-foot space without
+consciousness.
+
+It was only when I sat, an hour later, disgustedly reflecting on this
+incident, that I remembered that there was always some 'hand-working' of
+the engine during the cage-descents, an engineman reversing the action
+by a handle at every stroke of the piston, to prevent bumping. However,
+the only permanent injury was to the lamp: and I found many others
+inside.
+
+I got out into the coal-hole, a large black hall 70 feet square by 15
+high, the floor paved with iron sheets; there were some little holes
+round the wall, dug for some purpose which I never could discover, some
+waggons full of coal and shale standing about, and all among the
+waggons, and on them, and under them, bodies, clothes. I got a new lamp,
+pouring in my own oil, and went down a long steep ducky-road, very
+rough, with numerous rollers, over which ran a rope to the pit-mouth
+for drawing up the waggons; and in the sides here, at regular intervals,
+man-holes, within which to rescue one's self from down-tearing waggons;
+and within these man-holes, here and there, a dead, and in others every
+sort of food, and at one place on the right a high dead heap, and the
+air here hot at 64 or 65 degrees, and getting hotter with the descent.
+
+The ducky led me down into a standing--a space with a turn-table--of
+unusual size, which I made my base of operations for exploring. Here was
+a very considerable number of punt-shaped putts on carriages, and also
+waggons, such as took the new-mined coal from putt to pit-mouth; and
+raying out from this open standing, several avenues, some ascending as
+guggs, some descending as dipples, and the dead here all arranged in
+groups, the heads of this group pointing up this gugg, of that group
+toward that twin-way, of that other down that dipple, and the central
+space, where weighing was done, almost empty: and the darksome silence
+of this deep place, with all these multitudes, I found extremely
+gravitating and hypnotic, drawing me, too, into their great Passion of
+Silence in which they lay, all, all, so fixed and veteran; and at one
+time I fell a-staring, nearer perhaps to death and the empty Gulf than
+I knew; but I said I would be strong, and not sink into their habit of
+stillness, but let them keep to their own way, and follow their own
+fashion, and I would keep to my own way, and follow my own fashion, nor
+yield to them, though I was but one against many; and I roused myself
+with a shudder; and setting to work, caught hold of the drum-chain of a
+long gugg, and planting my feet in the chogg-holes in which rested the
+wheels of the putt-carriages that used to come roaring down the gugg, I
+got up, stooping under a roof only three feet high, till I came, near
+the end of the ascent, upon the scene of another battle: for in this
+gugg about fifteen of the mine-hands had clubbed to wall themselves in,
+and had done it, and I saw them lie there all by themselves through the
+broken cement, with their bare feet, trousers, naked bodies all black,
+visage all fierce and wild, the grime still streaked with sweat-furrows,
+the candle in their rimless hats, and, outside, their own 'getting'
+mattocks and boring-irons to besiege them. From the bottom of this gugg
+I went along a very undulating twin-way, into which, every thirty yards
+or so, opened one of those steep putt-ways which they called topples,
+the twin-ways having plates of about 2-1/2 ft. gauge for the putts from
+the headings, or workings, above to come down upon, full of coal and
+shale: and all about here, in twin-way and topples, were ends and
+corners, and not one had been left without its walling-in, and only one
+was then intact, some, I fancied, having been broken open by their own
+builders at the spur of suffocation, or hunger; and the one intact I
+broke into with a mattock--it was only a thin cake of plaster, but
+air-tight--and in a space not seven feet long behind it I found the very
+ill-smelling corpse of a carting-boy, with guss and tugger at his feet,
+and the pad which protected his head in pushing the putts, and a great
+heap of loaves, sardines, and bottled beer against the walls, and five
+or six mice that suddenly pitched screaming through the opening which I
+made, greatly startling me, there being of dead mice an extraordinary
+number in all this mine-region. I went back to the standing, and at one
+point in the ground, where there was a windlass and chain, lowered
+myself down a 'cut'--a small pit sunk perpendicularly to a lower
+coal-stratum, and here, almost thinking I could hear the perpetual
+rat-tat of notice once exchanged between the putt-boys below and the
+windlass-boys above, I proceeded down a dipple to another place like a
+standing, for in this mine there were six, or perhaps seven, veins: and
+there immediately I came upon the acme of the horrible drama of this
+Tartarus, for all here was not merely crowded, but, at some points, a
+packed congestion of flesh, giving out a strong smell of the peach,
+curiously mixed with the stale coal-odour of the pit, for here
+ventilation must have been very limited; and a large number of these
+masses had been shot down by only three hands, as I found: for through
+three hermetical holes in a plaster-wall, built across a large gugg,
+projected a little the muzzles of three rifles, which must have glutted
+themselves with slaughter; and when, after a horror of disgust, having
+swum as it were through a dead sea, I got to the wall, I peeped from a
+small clear space before it through a hole, and made out a man, two
+youths in their teens, two women, three girls, and piles of cartridges
+and provisions; the hole had no doubt been broken from within at the
+spur of suffocation, when the poison must have entered; and I
+conjectured that here must be the mine-owner, director, manager, or
+something of that sort, with his family. In another dipple-region, when
+I had re-ascended to a higher level, I nearly fainted before I could
+retire from the commencement of a region of after-damp, where there had
+been an explosion, the bodies lying all hairless, devastated, and
+grotesque. But I did not desist from searching every other quarter, no
+momentary work, for not till near six did I go up by the pumping-shaft
+rope-ladder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One day, standing in that wild region of bare rock and sea, called
+Cornwall Point, whence one can see the crags and postillion wild rocks
+where Land's End dashes out into the sea, and all the wild blue sea
+between, and not a house in sight, save the chimney of some little
+mill-like place peeping between the rocks inland--on that day I finished
+what I may call my official search.
+
+In going away from that place, walking northward, I came upon a lonely
+house by the sea, a very beautiful house, made, it was clear, by an
+artist, of the bungalow type, with an exquisitely sea-side expression. I
+went to it, and found its special feature a spacious loggia or verandah,
+sheltered by the overhanging upper story. Up to the first floor, the
+exterior is of stone in rough-hewn blocks with a distinct batter, while
+extra protection from weather is afforded by green slating above. The
+roofs, of low pitch, are also covered with green slates, and a feeling
+of strength and repose is heightened by the very long horizontal lines.
+At one end of the loggia is a hexagonal turret, opening upon the loggia,
+containing a study or nook. In front, the garden slopes down to the
+sea, surrounded by an architectural sea-wall; and in this place I lived
+three weeks. It was the house of the poet Machen, whose name, when I saw
+it, I remembered very well, and he had married a very beautiful young
+girl of eighteen, obviously Spanish, who lay on the bed in the large
+bright bedroom to the right of the loggia, on her left exposed breast
+being a baby with an india-rubber comforter in its mouth, both mother
+and child wonderfully preserved, she still quite lovely, white brow
+under low curves of black hair. The poet, strange to say, had not died
+with them, but sat in the sitting-room behind the bedroom in a long
+loose silky-grey jacket, at his desk--actually writing a poem! writing,
+I could see, furiously fast, the place all littered with the written
+leaves--at three o'clock in the morning, when, as I knew, the cloud
+overtook this end of Cornwall, and stopped him, and put his head to rest
+on the desk; and the poor little wife must have got sleepy, waiting for
+it to come, perhaps sleepless for many long nights before, and gone to
+bed, he perhaps promising to follow in a minute to die with her, but
+bent upon finishing that poem, and writing feverishly on, running a race
+with the cloud, thinking, no doubt, 'just two couplets more,' till the
+thing came, and put his head to rest on the desk, poor carle: and I do
+not know that I ever encountered aught so complimentary to my race as
+this dead poet Machen, and his race with the cloud: for it is clear now
+that the better kind of those poet men did not write to please the vague
+inferior tribes who might read them, but to deliver themselves of the
+divine warmth that thronged in their bosom; and if all the readers were
+dead, still they would have written; and for God to read they wrote. At
+any rate, I was so pleased with these poor people, that I stayed with
+them three weeks, sleeping under blankets on a couch in the
+drawing-room, a place full of lovely pictures and faded flowers, like
+all the house: for I would not touch the young mother to remove her. And
+finding on Machen's desk a big note-book with soft covers, dappled red
+and yellow, not yet written in, I took it, and a pencil, and in the
+little turret-nook wrote day after day for hours this account of what
+has happened, nearly as far as it has now gone. And I think that I may
+continue to write it, for I find in it a strange consolation, and
+companionship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the Severn Valley, somewhere in the plain between Gloucester and
+Cheltenham, in a rather lonely spot, I at that time travelling on a
+tricycle-motor, I spied a curious erection, and went to it. I found it
+of considerable size, perhaps fifty feet square, and thirty high, made
+of pressed bricks, the perfectly flat roof, too, of brick, and not one
+window, and only one door: this door, which I found open, was rimmed all
+round its slanting rims with india-rubber, and when closed must have
+been perfectly air-tight. Just inside I came upon fifteen English people
+of the dressed class, except two, who were evidently bricklayers: six
+ladies, and nine men: and at the further end, two more, men, who had
+their throats cut; along one wall, from end to end were provisions; and
+I saw a chest full of mixed potassic chlorate and black oxide of
+manganese, with an apparatus for heating it, and producing oxygen--a
+foolish thing, for additional oxygen could not alter the quantity of
+breathed carbonic anhydride, which is a direct narcotic poison. Whether
+the two with cut throats had sacrificed themselves for the others when
+breathing difficulties commenced, or been killed by the others, was not
+clear. When they could bear it no longer, they must have finally opened
+the door, hoping that by then, after the passage of many days perhaps,
+the outer air would be harmless, and so met their death. I believe that
+this erection must have been run up by their own hands under the
+direction of the two bricklayers, for they could not, I suppose, have
+got workmen, except on the condition of the workmen's admission: on
+which condition they would naturally employ as few as possible.
+
+In general, I remarked that the rich must have been more urgent and
+earnest in seeking escape than the others: for the poor realised only
+the near and visible, lived in to-day, and cherished the always-false
+notion that to-morrow would be just like to-day. In an out-patients'
+waiting-room, for instance, in the Gloucester infirmary, I chanced to
+see an astonishing thing: five bodies of poor old women in shawls, come
+to have their ailments seen-to on the day of doom; and these, I
+concluded, had been unable to realise that anything would really happen
+to the daily old earth which they knew, and had walked with assurance
+on: for if everybody was to die, they must have thought, who would
+preach in the Cathedral on Sunday evenings?--so they could not have
+believed. In an adjoining room sat an old doctor at a table, the
+stethoscope-tips still clinging in his ears: a woman with bared chest
+before him; and I thought to myself: 'Well, this old man, too, died
+doing his work....'
+
+In this same infirmary there was one surgical ward--for in a listless
+mood I went over it--where the patients had died, not of the poison, nor
+of suffocation, but of hunger: for the doctors, or someone, had made the
+long room air-tight, double-boarding the windows, felting the doors, and
+then locking them outside; they themselves may have perished before
+their precautions for the imprisoned patients were complete: for I found
+a heap of maimed shapes, mere skeletons, crowded round the door within.
+I knew very well that they had not died of the cloud-poison, for the
+pestilence of the ward was unmixed with that odour of peach which did
+not fail to have more or less embalming effects upon the bodies which it
+saturated. I rushed stifling from that place; and thinking it a pity,
+and a danger, that such a horror should be, I at once set to work to
+gather combustibles to burn the building to the ground.
+
+It was while I sat in an arm-chair in the street the next afternoon,
+smoking, and watching the flames of this structure, that something was
+suddenly born in me, something from the lowest Hell: and I smiled a
+smile that never yet man smiled. And I said: 'I will burn, I will burn:
+I will return to London....'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While I was on this Eastward journey, stopping for the night at the
+town of Swindon, I had a dream: for I dreamed that a little brown bald
+old man, with a bent back, whose beard ran in one thin streamlet of
+silver from his chin to trail along the ground, said to me: 'You think
+that you are alone on the earth, its sole Despot: well, have your fling:
+but as sure as God lives, as God lives, as God lives'--he repeated it
+six times--'sooner or later, later or sooner, you will meet another....'
+
+And I started from that frightful sleep with the brow of a corpse, wet
+with sweat....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I returned to London on the 29th of March, arriving within a hundred
+yards of the Northern Station one windy dark evening about eight, where
+I alighted, and walked to Euston Road, then eastward along it, till I
+came to a shop which I knew to be a jeweller's, though it was too dark
+to see any painted words. The door, to my annoyance, was locked, like
+nearly all the shop-doors in London: I therefore went looking near the
+ground, and into a cart, for something heavy, very soon saw a labourer's
+ponderous boots, cut one from the shrivelled foot, and set to beat at
+the glass till it came raining; then knocked away the bottom splinters,
+and entered.
+
+No horrors now at that clatter of broken glass; no sick qualms; my
+pulse steady; my head high; my step royal; my eye cold and calm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eight months previously, I had left London a poor burdened, cowering
+wight. I could scream with laughter now at that folly! But it did not
+last long. I returned to it--the Sultan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No private palace being near, I was going to that great hotel in
+Bloomsbury: but though I knew that numbers of candle-sticks would be
+there, I was not sure that I should find sufficient: for I had acquired
+the habit within the past few months of sleeping with at least sixty
+lighted about me, and their form, pattern, style, age, and material was
+of no small importance I selected ten from the broken shop, eight gold
+and silver, and two of old ecclesiastical brass, and having made a
+bundle, went out, found a bicycle at the Metropolitan Station, pumped
+it, tied my bundle to the handle-bar, and set off riding. But since I
+was too lazy to walk, I should certainly have procured some other means
+of travelling, for I had not gone ten jolted and creaking yards, when
+something went snap--it was a front fork--and I found myself half on
+the ground, and half across the bare knees of a Highland soldier. I flew
+with a shower of kicks upon the foolish thing: but that booted nothing;
+and this was my last attempt in that way in London, the streets being in
+an unsuitable condition.
+
+All that dismal night it blew great guns: and during nearly three weeks,
+till London was no more, there was a storm, with hardly a lull, that
+seemed to behowl her destruction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I slept in a room on the second-floor of a Bloomsbury hotel that night;
+and waking the next day at ten, ate with accursed shiverings in the cold
+banqueting-room; went out then, and under drear low skies walked a long
+way to the West district, accompanied all the time by a sound of
+flapping flags--fluttering robes and rags--and grotesquely grim glimpses
+of decay. It was pretty cold, and though I was warmly clad, the base
+_bizarrerie_ of the European clothes which I wore had become a perpetual
+offence and mockery in my eyes: at the first moment, therefore, I set
+out whither I knew that I should find such clothes as a man might wear:
+to the Turkish Embassy in Bryanston Square.
+
+I found it open, and all the house, like most other houses, almost
+carpeted with dead forms. I had been acquainted with Redouza Pasha, and
+cast an eye about for him amid that invasion of veiled hanums,
+fierce-looking Caucasians in skins of beasts, a Sheik-ul-Islam in green
+cloak, a khalifa, three emirs in cashmere turbans, two tziganes, their
+gaudy brown mortality more glaringly abominable than even the Western's.
+I could recognise no Redouza here: but the stair was fairly clear, and I
+soon came to one of those boudoirs which sweetly recall the deep-buried
+inner seclusion and dim sanctity of the Eastern home: a door encrusted
+with mother-of-pearl, sculptured ceiling, candles clustered in tulips
+and roses of opal, a brazen brasero, and, all in disarray, the silken
+chemise, the long winter-cafetan doubled with furs, costly cabinets,
+sachets of aromas, babooshes, stuffs of silk. When, after two hours, I
+went from the house, I was bathed, anointed, combed, scented, and robed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have said to myself: 'I will ravage and riot in my Kingdoms. I will
+rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like
+Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus. I will build
+me a palace, vast as a city, in which to strut and parade my Monarchy
+before the Heavens, with stones of pure molten gold, and rough
+frontispiece of diamond, and cupola of amethyst, and pillars of pearl.
+For there were many men to the eye: but there was One only, really: and
+I was he. And always I knew it:--some faintest secret whisper which
+whispered me: "_You_ are the Arch-one, the _motif_ of the world, Adam,
+and the rest of men not much." And they are gone--all! all!--as no doubt
+they deserved: and I, as was meet, remain. And there are wines, and
+opiums, and haschish; and there are oils, and spices, fruits and
+bivalves, and soft-breathing Cyclades, and scarlet luxurious Orients. I
+will be restless and turbulent in my territories: and again, I will be
+languishing and fond. I will say to my soul: "Be Full."'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I watch my mind, as in the old days I would watch a new precipitate in a
+test-tube, to see into what sediment it would settle.
+
+I am very averse to trouble of any sort, so that the necessity for the
+simplest manual operations will rouse me to indignation: but if a thing
+will contribute largely to my ever-growing voluptuousness, I will
+undergo a considerable amount of labour to accomplish it, though
+without steady effort, being liable to side-winds and whims, and
+purposeless relaxations.
+
+In the country I became very irritable at the need which confronted me
+of occasionally cooking some green vegetable--the only item of food
+which it was necessary to take some trouble over: for all meats, and
+many fish, some quite delicious, I find already prepared in forms which
+will remain good probably a century after my death, should I ever die.
+In Gloucester, however, I found peas, asparagus, olives, and other
+greens, already prepared to be eaten without base cares: and these, I
+now see, exist everywhere in stores so vast comparatively to the needs
+of a single man, that they may be called infinite. Everything, in fact,
+is infinite compared with my needs. I take my meals, therefore, without
+more trouble than a man who had to carve his joint, or chicken: though
+even that little I sometimes find most irksome. There remains the
+detestable degradation of lighting fires for warmth, which I have
+occasionally to do: for the fire at the hotel invariably goes out while
+I sleep. But that is an inconvenience of this vile northern island only,
+to which I shall soon bid eternal glad farewells.
+
+During the afternoon of my second day in London, I sought out a strong
+petrol motor in Holborn, overhauled and oiled it a little, and set off
+over Blackfriars Bridge, making for Woolwich through that other more
+putrid London on the south river-side. One after the other, I connected,
+as I came upon them, two drays, a cab, and a private carriage, to my
+motor in line behind, having cut away the withered horses, and using the
+reins, chain-harness, &c., as impromptu couplings. And with this novel
+train, I rumbled eastward.
+
+Half-way I happened to look at my old silver chronometer of
+_Boreal_-days, which I have kept carefully wound--and how I can be still
+thrown into these sudden frantic agitations by a nothing, a nothing, my
+good God! I do not know. This time it was only the simple fact that the
+hands chanced to point to 3.10 P.M., the precise moment at which all the
+clocks of London had stopped--for each town has its thousand weird
+fore-fingers, pointing, pointing still, to the moment of doom. In London
+it was 3.10 on a Sunday afternoon. I first noticed it going up the river
+on the face of the 'Big Ben' of the Parliament-house, and I now find
+that they all, all, have this 3.10 mania, time-keepers still, but
+keepers of the end of Time, fixedly noting for ever and ever that one
+moment. The cloud-mass of fine penetrating _scoriae_ must have instantly
+stopped their works, and they had fallen silent with man. But in their
+insistence upon this particular minute I had found something so
+hideously solemn, yet mock-solemn, personal, and as it were addressed to
+_me_, that when my own watch dared to point to the same moment, I was
+thrown into one of those sudden, paroxysmal, panting turmoils of mind,
+half rage, half horror, which have hardly once visited me since I left
+the _Boreal_. On the morrow, alas, another awaited me; and again on the
+second morrow after.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My train was execrably slow, and not until after five did I arrive at
+the entrance-gates of the Woolwich Royal Arsenal; and seeing that it was
+too late to work, I uncoupled the motor, and leaving the others there,
+turned back; but overtaken by lassitude, I procured candles, stopped at
+the Greenwich Observatory, and in that old dark pile, remained for the
+night, listening to a furious storm. But, a-stir by eight the next
+morning, I got back by ten to the Arsenal, and proceeded to analyse that
+vast and multiple entity. Many parts of it seemed to have been abandoned
+in undisciplined haste, and in the Cap Factory, which I first entered, I
+found tools by which to effect entry into any desired part. My first
+search was for time-fuses of good type, of which I needed two or three
+thousand, and after a wearily long time found a great number
+symmetrically arranged in rows in a range of buildings called the
+Ordnance Store Department. I then descended, walked back to the wharf,
+brought up my train, and began to lower the fuses in bag-fulls by ropes
+through a shoot, letting go each rope as the fuses reached the cart.
+However, on winding one fuse, I found that the mechanism would not go,
+choked with scoriae; and I had to resign myself to the task of opening
+and dusting every one: a wretched labour in which I spent that day, like
+a workman. But about four I threw them to the devil, having done two
+hundred odd, and then hummed back in the motor to London.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That same evening at six I paid, for the first time, a visit to my old
+self in Harley Street. It was getting dark, and a bleak storm that
+hooted like whooping-cough swept the world. At once I saw that even _I_
+had been invaded: for my door swung open, banging, a lowered catch
+preventing it from slamming; in the passage the car-lamp shewed me a
+young man who seemed a Jew, sitting as if in sleep with dropped head, a
+back-tilted silk-hat pressed down upon his head to the ears; and lying
+on face, or back, or side, six more, one a girl with Arlesienne
+head-dress, one a negress, one a Deal lifeboat's-man, and three of
+uncertain race; the first room--the waiting-room--is much more
+numerously occupied, though there still, on the table, lies the volume
+of _Punch_, the _Gentlewoman_, and the book of London views in
+heliograph. Behind this, descending two steps, is the study and
+consulting-room, and there, as ever, the revolving-cover oak
+writing-desk: but on my little shabby-red sofa, a large lady much too
+big for it, in shimmering brown silk, round her left wrist a _trousseau_
+of massive gold trinkets, her head dropped right back, almost severed by
+an infernal gash from the throat. Here were two old silver
+candle-sticks, which I lit, and went upstairs: in the drawing-room sat
+my old house-keeper, placidly dead in a rocking-chair, her left hand
+pressing down a batch of the open piano-keys, among many strangers. But
+she was very good: she had locked my bedroom against intrusion; and as
+the door stands across a corner behind a green-baize curtain, it had not
+been seen, or, at least, not forced. I did not know where the key might
+be, but a few thumps with my back drove it open: and there lay my bed
+intact, and everything tidy. This was a strange coming-back to it, Adam.
+
+But what intensely interested me in that room was a big thing standing
+at the maroon-and-gold wall between wardrobe and dressing-table--that
+gilt frame--and that man painted within it there. It was myself in oils,
+done by--I forget his name now: a towering celebrity he was, and rather
+a close friend of mine at one time. In a studio in St. John's Wood, I
+remember, he did it; and many people said that it was quite a great work
+of art. I suppose I was standing before it quite thirty minutes that
+night, holding up the bits of candle, lost in wonder, in amused contempt
+at that thing there. It is I, certainly: that I must admit. There is the
+high-curving brow--really a King's brow, after all, it strikes me
+now--and that vacillating look about the eyes and mouth which used to
+make my sister Ada say: 'Adam is weak and luxurious.' Yes, that is
+wonderfully done, the eyes, that dear, vacillating look of mine; for
+although it is rather a staring look, yet one can almost see the dark
+pupils stir from side to side: very well done. And there is the longish
+face; and the rather thin, stuck-out moustache, shewing both lips which
+pout a bit; and there is the nearly black hair; and there is the rather
+visible paunch; and there is, oh good Heaven, the neat pink cravat--ah,
+it must have been _that--the cravat_--that made me burst out into
+laughter so loud, mocking, and uncontrollable the moment my eye rested
+there! 'Adam Jeffson,' I muttered reproachfully when it was over, 'could
+that poor thing in the frame have been you?'
+
+I cannot quite state why the tendency toward Orientalism--Oriental
+dress--all the manner of an Oriental monarch--has taken full possession
+of me: but so it is: for surely I am hardly any longer a Western,
+'modern' mind, but a primitive and Eastern one. Certainly, that cravat
+in the frame has receded a million, million leagues, ten thousand
+forgotten aeons, from me! Whether this is a result due to my own
+personality, of old acquainted with Eastern notions, or whether,
+perhaps, it is the natural accident to any mind wholly freed from
+trammels, I do not know. But I seem to have gone right back to the very
+beginnings, and resemblance with man in his first, simple, gaudy
+conditions. My hair, as I sit here writing, already hangs a black, oiled
+string down my back; my scented beard sweeps in two opening whisks to my
+ribs; I have on the _izar_, a pair of drawers of yomani cloth like
+cotton, but with yellow stripes; over this a soft shirt, or quamis, of
+white silk, reaching to my calves; over this a short vest of
+gold-embroidered crimson, the _sudeyree_; over this a khaftan of
+green-striped silk, reaching to the ankles, with wide, long sleeves
+divided at the wrist, and bound at the waist with a voluminous gaudy
+shawl of Cashmere for girdle; over this a warm wide-flowing torrent of
+white drapery, lined with ermine. On my head is the skull-cap, covered
+by a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel; and on my feet is a pair of
+thin yellow-morocco shoes, covered over with thick red-morocco
+babooshes. My ankles--my ten fingers--my wrists--are heavy with gold and
+silver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I bored
+three days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes for
+rings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+O Liberty! I am free....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, at
+the very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square,
+this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seething
+in me: 'If now I should lift my eyes, and see a man walking yonder--just
+yonder--_at the corner there_--turning from Harewood Place into Oxford
+Street--what, my good God, should I do?--I without even a knife to run
+and plunge into his heart?'
+
+And I turned my eyes--ogling, suspicious eyes of furtive
+horror--reluctantly, lingeringly turned--and I peered deeply with
+lowered brows across the murky winds at that same spot: but no man was
+there.
+
+Hideously frequent is this nonsense now become with me--in streets of
+towns--in deep nooks of the country: the invincible assurance that, if I
+but turn the head, and glance _there_--at a certain fixed spot--I shall
+surely see--I _must_ see--a man. And glance I must, glance I must,
+though I perish: and when I glance, though my hairs creep and stiffen
+like stirring amobse, yet in my eyes, I know, is monarch indignation
+against the intruder, and my neck stands stiff as sovereignty itself,
+and on my brow sits more than all the lordship of Persepolis and Iraz.
+
+To what point of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do
+not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man
+to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One
+inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but
+the _only_ natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other
+arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, and
+far-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers and
+faddists. That the whole world should have been made for _me_
+alone--that London should have been built only in order that _I_ might
+enjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning--that all history, and
+all civilisation should have existed only in order to accumulate for
+_my_ pleasures its inventions and facilities, its stores of purple and
+wine, of spices and gold--no more extraordinary does it all seem to me
+than to some little unreflecting Duke of my former days seemed the
+possessing of lands which his remote forefathers seized, and slew the
+occupiers: nor, in reality, is it even so extraordinary, I being alone.
+But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that the
+present condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem the
+common-place and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem
+_so_ common-place and natural--in nine months. The mind of Adam Jeffson
+is adaptable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I sat a long time thinking such things by my bed that night, till
+finally I was disposed to sleep there. But I had no considerable number
+of candle-sticks, nor was even sure of candles. I remembered, however,
+that Peter Peters, three doors away on the other side of the street,
+had had four handsome silver candelabra in his drawing-room, each
+containing six stems; and I said to myself: 'I will search for candles
+in the kitchen, and if I find any, I will go and get Peter Peters'
+candelabra, and sleep here.'
+
+I took then the two lights which I had, my good God; went down to the
+passage; then down to the basement; and there had no difficulty in
+finding three packets of large candles, the fact being, I suppose, that
+the cessation of gas-lighting had compelled everyone to provide
+themselves in this way, for there were a great many wherever I looked.
+With these I re-ascended, went into a little alcove on the second-floor
+where I had kept some drugs, got a bottle of carbolic oil, and for ten
+minutes went dashing all the corpses in the house. I then left the two
+lighted bits of candle on the waiting-room table, and, with the
+car-lamp, passed along the passage to the front-door, which was very
+violently banging. I stepped out to find that the storm had increased to
+a mighty turbulence (though it was dry), which at once caught my
+clothes, and whirled them into a flapping cloud about and above me;
+also, I had not crossed the street when my lamp was out. I persisted,
+however, half blinded, to Peters' door. It was locked: but immediately
+near the pavement was a window, the lower sash up, into which, with
+little trouble, I lifted myself and passed. My foot, as I lowered it,
+stood on a body: and this made me angry and restless. I hissed a curse,
+and passed on, scraping the carpet with my soles, that I might hurt no
+one: for I did not wish to hurt any one. Even in the almost darkness of
+the room I recognised Peters' furniture, as I expected: for the house
+was his on a long lease, and I knew that his mother had had the
+intention to occupy it after his death. But as I passed into the
+passage, all was mere blank darkness, and I, depending upon the lamp,
+had left the matches in the other house. I groped my way to the stairs,
+and had my foot on the first step, when I was stopped by a vicious
+shaking of the front-door, which someone seemed to be at with hustlings
+and the most urgent poundings: I stood with peering stern brows two or
+three minutes, for I knew that if I once yielded to the flinching at my
+heart, no mercy would be shown me in this house of tragedy, and
+thrilling shrieks would of themselves arise and ring through its haunted
+chambers. The rattling continued an inordinate time, and so instant and
+imperative, that it seemed as if it could not fail to force the door.
+But, though horrified, I whispered to my heart that it could only be the
+storm which was struggling at it like the grasp of a man, and after a
+time went on, feeling my way by the broad rail, in my brain somehow the
+thought of a dream which I had had in the _Boreal_ of the woman Clodagh,
+how she let drop a fluid like pomegranate-seeds into water, and tendered
+it to Peter Peters: and it was a mortal purging draught; but I would not
+stop, but step by step went up, though I suffered very much, my brows
+peering at the utter darkness, and my heart shocked at its own rashness.
+I got to the first landing, and as I turned to ascend the second part of
+the stair, my left hand touched something icily cold: I made some quick
+instinctive movement of terror, and, doing so, my foot struck against
+something, and I stumbled, half falling over what seemed a small table
+there. Immediately a horrible row followed, for something fell to the
+ground: and at that instant, ah, I heard something--a voice--a human
+voice, which uttered words close to my ear--the voice of Clodagh, for I
+knew it: yet not the voice of Clodagh in the flesh, but her voice
+clogged with clay and worms, and full of effort, and thick-tongued: and
+in that ghastly speech of the grave I distinctly heard the words:
+
+'_Things being as they are in the matter of the death of Peter ..._'
+
+And there it stopped dead, leaving me so sick, my God, so sick, that I
+could hardly snatch my robes about me to fly, fly, fly, soft-footed,
+murmuring in pain, down the steps, down like a sneaking thief, but
+quick, snatching myself away, then wrestling with the cruel catch of the
+door which she would not let me open, feeling her all the time behind
+me, watching me. And when I did get out, I was away up the length of the
+street, trailing my long _jubbah_, glancing backward, panting, for I
+thought that she might dare to follow, with her daring evil will. And
+all that night I lay on a common bench in the wind-tossed and dismal
+Park.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first thing which I did when the sun was up was to return to that
+place: and I returned with hard and masterful brow.
+
+Approaching Peters' house I saw now, what the darkness had hidden from
+me, that on his balcony was someone--quite alone there. The balcony is a
+slight open-work wrought-iron structure, connected to a small roof by
+three slender voluted pillars, two at the ends, one in the middle: and
+at the middle one I saw someone, a woman--kneeling--her arms clasped
+tight about the pillar, and her face rather upward-looking. Never did I
+see aught more horrid: there were the gracious curves of the woman's
+bust and hips still well preserved in a clinging dress of red cloth,
+very faded now; and her reddish hair floated loose in a large flimsy
+cloud about her; but her face, in that exposed position, had been quite
+eaten away by the winds to a noseless skeleton, which grinned from ear
+to ear, with slightly-dropped under-jaw--most horrid in contrast with
+the body, and frame of hair. I meditated upon her a long time that
+morning from the opposite pavement. An oval locket at her throat
+contained, I knew, my likeness: for eight years previously I had given
+it her. It was Clodagh, the poisoner.
+
+I thought that I would go into that house, and walk through it from top
+to bottom, and sit in it, and spit in it, and stamp in it, in spite of
+any one: for the sun was now high. I accordingly went in again, and up
+the stairs to the spot where I had been frightened, and had heard the
+words. And here a great rage took me, for I at once saw that I had been
+made the dupe of the malign wills that beset me, and the laughing-stock
+of Those for whom I care not a fig. From a little mahogany table there I
+had knocked sideways to the ground, in my stumble, a small phonograph
+with a great 25-inch japanned-tin horn, which, the moment that I now
+noticed it, I took and flung with a great racket down the stairs: for
+that this it was which had addressed me I did not doubt; it being indeed
+evident that its clock-work mechanism had been stopped by the volcanic
+scoriae in the midst of the delivery of a record, but had been started
+into a few fresh oscillations by the shock of the fall, making it utter
+those thirteen words, and stop. I was sufficiently indignant at the
+moment, but have since been glad, for I was thereby put upon the notion
+of collecting a number of cylinders with records, and have been touched
+with indescribable sensations, sometimes thrilled, at hearing the
+silence of this Eternity broken by those singing and speaking voices, so
+life-like, yet most ghostly, of the old dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, the most of that same day I spent in a high chamber at Woolwich,
+dusting out, and sometimes oiling, time-fuses: a work in which I
+acquired such facility in some hours, that each finally occupied me no
+more than ninety to a hundred seconds, so that by evening I had, with
+the previous day's work, close on 600. The construction of these little
+things is very simple, and, I believe, effective, so that I should have
+no difficulty in making them myself in large numbers, if it were
+necessary. Most contain a tiny dry battery, which sends a current along
+a bell or copper wire at the running-down moment, the clocks being
+contrived to be set for so many days, hours, and minutes, while others
+ignite by striking. I arranged in rows in the covered van those which I
+had prepared, and passed the night in an inn near the Barracks. I had
+brought candle-sticks from London in the morning, and arranged the
+furniture--a settee, chest-of-drawers, basin-stand, table, and a number
+of chairs--in three-quarter-circle round the bed, so getting a
+triple-row altar of lights, mixed with vases of the house containing
+small palms and evergreens; with this I mingled a smell of ambergris
+from the scattered contents of some Turkish sachets which I had; in the
+bed a bottle of sweet Chypre-wine, with _bonbons_, nuts, and Havannas.
+As I lay me down, I could not but reflect, with a smile which I knew to
+be evil, upon that steady, strong, smouldering lust within me which was
+urging me through all those pains at the Arsenal, I who shirked every
+labour as unkingly. So, however, it was: and the next morning I was at
+it again after an early breakfast, my fingers at first quite stiff with
+cold, for it blew a keen and January gale. By nine I had 820 fuses; and
+judging those sufficient to commence with, got into the motor, and took
+it round to a place called the East Laboratory, a series of detached
+buildings, where I knew that I should find whatever I wanted: and I
+prepared my mind for a day's labour. In this place I found incredible
+stores: mountains of percussion-caps, more chambers of fuses, small-arm
+cartridges, shells, and all those murderous explosive mixtures, a-making
+and made, with which modern savagery occupied its leisure in
+exterminating itself: or, at least, savagery civilised in its top-story
+only: for civilisation was apparently from the head downwards, and never
+once grew below the neck in all those centuries, those people being
+certainly much more mental than cordial, though I doubt if they were
+genuinely mental either--reminding one rather of that composite image of
+Nebuchadnezzar, head of gold, breast brazen, feet of clay--head
+man-like, heart cannibal, feet bestial--like aegipeds, and mermaids, and
+puzzling undeveloped births. However, it is of no importance: and
+perhaps I am not much better than the rest, for I, too, after all, am of
+them. At any rate, their lyddites, melanites, cordites, dynamites,
+powders, jellies, oils, marls, and civilised barbarisms and obiahs, came
+in very well for their own destruction: for by two o'clock I had so
+worked, that I had on the first cart the phalanx of fuses; on the
+second a goodly number of kegs, cartridge-cases and cartridge-boxes,
+full of powder, explosive cottons and gelatines, and liquid
+nitro-glycerine, and earthy dynamite, with some bombs, two reels of
+cordite, two pieces of tarred cloth, a small iron ladle, a shovel, and a
+crow-bar; the cab came next, containing a considerable quantity of loose
+coal; and lastly, in the private carriage lay four big cans of common
+oil. And first, in the Laboratory, I connected a fuse-conductor with a
+huge tun of blasting-gelatine, and I set the fuse on the ground, timed
+for the midnight of the twelfth day thence; and after that I visited the
+Main Factory, the Carriage Department, the Ordnance Store Department,
+the Royal Artillery Barracks, and the Powder Magazines in the Marshes,
+traversing, as it seemed to me, miles of building; and in some I laid
+heaps of oil-saturated coal with an explosive in suitable spots on the
+ground-floor near wood-work, and in some an explosive alone: and all I
+timed for ignition at midnight of the twelfth day. Hot now, and black as
+ink, I proceeded through the town, stopping with perfect system at every
+hundredth door: and I laid the faggots of a great burning: and timed
+them all for ignition at midnight of the twelfth day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whatever door I found closed against me I drove at it with a maniac
+malice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shall I commit the whole dark fact to paper?--that deep, deep secret of
+the human organism?
+
+As I wrought, I waxed wicked as a demon! And with lowered neck, and
+forward curve of the lower spine, and the blasphemous strut of tragic
+play-actors, I went. For here was no harmless burning which I did--but
+the crime of arson; and a most fiendish, though vague, malevolence, and
+the rage to burn and raven and riot, was upon me like a dog-madness, and
+all the mood of Nero, and Nebuchadnezzar: and from my mouth proceeded
+all the obscenities of the slum and of the gutter, and I sent up such
+hisses and giggles of challenge to Heaven that day as never yet has man
+let out. But this way lies a spinning frenzy....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have taken a dead girl with wild huggings to my bosom; and I have
+touched the corrupted lip, and spat upon her face, and tossed her down,
+and crushed her teeth with my heel, and jumped and jumped upon her
+breast, like the snake-stamping zebra, mad, mad...!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was desolated, however, that first day of the faggot-laying, even in
+the midst of my sense of omnipotence, by one thing, which made me give
+some kicks to the motor: for it was only crawling, so that a good part
+of the way I was stalking by its side; and when I came to that hill near
+the Old Dover Road, the whole thing stopped, and refused to move, the
+weight of the train being too great for my horse-power traction. I did
+not know what to do, and stood there in angry impotence a full
+half-hour, for the notion of setting up an electric station, with or
+without automatic stoking-gear, presented so hideous a picture of labour
+to me, that I would not entertain it. After a time, however, I thought
+that I remembered that there was a comparatively new power station in
+St. Paneras driven by turbines: and at once, I uncoupled the motor,
+covered the drays with the tarpaulins, and went driving at singing
+speed, choosing the emptier by-streets, and not caring whom I crushed.
+After some trouble I found, in fact, the station in an obscure by-street
+made of two long walls, and went in by a window, a rage upon me to have
+my will quickly accomplished. I ran up some stairs, across two rooms,
+into a gallery containing a switch-board, and in the room below saw the
+works, all very neat-looking, but, as I soon found, very dusty. I went
+down, and fixed upon a generating set--there were three--that would give
+a decent load, and then saw that the switch-gear belonging to this
+particular generator was in order. I then got some cloths and thoroughly
+cleaned the dust off the commutators; ran next--for I was in a strange
+fierce haste--and turned the water into the turbines, and away went the
+engine; I hurried to set the lubricators running on the bearings, and in
+a couple of minutes had adjusted the speed, and the brushes of the
+generators, and switched the current on to the line. By this time,
+however, I saw that it was getting dark, and feared that little could be
+done that day; still, I hurried out, the station still running, got into
+the car, and was off to look for a good electric one, of which there are
+hosts in the streets, in order at least to clean up and adjust the motor
+that night. I drove down three by-streets, till I turned into Euston
+Road: but I had no sooner reached it than I pulled up--with sudden
+jerk--with a shout of astonishment.
+
+That cursed street was all lighted up and gay! and three shimmering
+electric globes, not far apart, illuminated every feature of a ghastly
+battle-field of dead.
+
+And there was a thing there, the grinning impression of which I shall
+carry to my grave: a thing which spelled and spelled at me, and ceased,
+and began again, and ceased, and spelled at me. For, above a shop which
+faced me was a flag, a red flag with white letters, fluttering on the
+gale the words: 'Metcalfe's Stores'; and beneath the flag, stretched
+right across the house, was the thing which spelled, letter by letter,
+in letters of light: and it spelled two words, deliberately, coming to
+the end, and going back to recommence:
+
+  _Drink_
+  ROBORAL.
+
+And that was the last word of civilised Man to me, Adam Jeffson--its
+final counsel--its ultimate gospel and message--to _me_, my good God!
+_Drink Roboral!_
+
+I was put into such a passion of rage by this blatant ribaldry, which
+affected me like the laughter of a skeleton, that I rushed from the car,
+with the intention, I believe, of seeking stones to stone it: but no
+stones were there: and I had to stand impotently enduring that rape of
+my eyes, its victoriously-dogged iteration, its taunting leer, its
+Drink Roboral--D, R, I, N, K R, O, B, O, R, A, L.
+
+It was one of those electrical spelling-advertisements, worked by a
+small motor commutator driven by a works-motor, and I had now set it
+going: for on some night before that Sabbath of doom the chemist must
+have set it to work, but finding the works abandoned, had not troubled
+to shut it down again. At any rate, this thing stopped my work for that
+day, for when I went to shut down the works it was night; and I drove to
+the place which I had made my home in sullen and weary mood: for I knew
+that Roboral would not cure the least of all my sores.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning I awoke in quite another frame of mind, disposed to
+idle, and let things go. After rising, dressing, washing in cold diluted
+rose-water, and descending to the _salle-à-manger_, where I had laid my
+morning-meal the previous evening, I promenaded an hour the only one of
+these long sombrous tufted corridors in which there were not more than
+two dead, though behind the doors on either hand, all of which I had
+locked, I knew that they lay in plenty. When I was warmed, I again went
+down, looked into my motor, got three cylinders from one of a number of
+motors standing near, lit up, and drove away--to Woolwich, as I thought
+at first: but instead of crossing the river by Blackfriars, I went more
+eastward; and having passed from Holborn into Cheapside, which was
+impassable, unless I crawled, was about to turn, when I noticed a
+phonograph-shop: into this I got by a side-door, suddenly seized by
+quite a curiosity to hear what I might hear. I took a good one with
+microphone diaphragm, and a number of record-cylinders in a
+brass-handled box, and I put them into the car, for there was still a
+very strong peach-odour in this closed shop, which displeased me. I then
+proceeded southward and westward through by-streets, seeking some
+probable house into which to go from the rough cold winds, when I saw
+the Parliament-house, and thither, turning river-ward by Westminster
+Hall to Palace Yard, I went, and with my two parcels, one weighting each
+arm, walked into this old place along a line of purple-dusted busts; I
+deposited my boxes on a table beside a massive brass thing lying there,
+which, I suppose, must be what they called the Mace; and I sat to hear.
+
+Unfortunately, the phonograph was a clock-work one, and when I wound it,
+it would not go: so that I got very angry at my absurdity in not
+bringing an electric mechanism, as I could with much less trouble have
+put in a chemical than cleaned the clock-work; and this thing put me
+into such a rage, that I nearly tore it to pieces, and was half for
+kicking it: but there was a man sitting in an old straight-backed chair
+quite near me, which they called the Speaker's Chair, who was in such a
+pose, that he had, every time I glanced suddenly at him, precisely the
+air of bending forward with interest to watch what I was doing, a
+Mohrgrabim kind of man, almost black, with Jewish nose, crinkled hair,
+keffie, and flowing robe, probably, I should say, an Abyssinian Galla;
+with him were only five or six people about the benches, mostly leaning
+forward with rested head, so that this place had quite a void
+sequestered mood. At all events, this Galla, or Bedouin, with his
+grotesque interest in my doings, restrained my hands: and, finally, by
+dint of peering, poking, dusting, and adjusting, in an hour's time I got
+the phonograph to go very well.
+
+And all that morning, and far into late afternoon, forgetful of food,
+and of the cold which gradually possessed me, I sat there listening,
+musing--cylinder after cylinder: frivolous songs, orchestras, voices of
+famous men whom I had spoken with, and shaken their solid hands,
+speaking again to me, but thick-tongued, with hoarse effort and
+gurgles, from out the vague void beyond the grave: most strange, most
+strange. And the third cylinder that I put on, ah, I knew, with a
+fearful start, that voice of thunder, I knew it well: it was the
+preacher, Mackay's; and many, many times over I heard those words of his
+that day, originally spoken, it seems, when the cloud had just passed
+the longitude of Vienna; and in all that torrent of speech not one
+single word of 'I told you so': but he cries:
+
+'...praise Him, O Earth, for He is He: and if He slay me, I will laugh
+raillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword is
+sharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, little
+flock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweets
+to your tongue: for though ye have sinned, and hardened yourselves as
+brass, and gone far, far astray in these latter wildernesses, yet He is
+infinitely greater than your sin, and will lead you back. Break not,
+break not, poor broken heart of Earth: for from Him I run herald to thee
+this night with the sweet and secret message, that of old He chose thee,
+and once mixed conjugally with thee in an ancient sleep, O Afflicted:
+and He is thou, and thou art He, flesh of His flesh, and bone of His
+bone; and if thou perish utterly, it is that He has perished utterly,
+too: for thou art He. Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at
+the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel,
+and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics
+and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He
+falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His
+feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but
+the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His
+Parthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, and the last end
+of this Earth shall be no poison-cloud, I say to you, but Carnival and
+Harvest-home ... though ye have sinned, poor hearts ...'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Mackay, with thick-tongued metallic effort. I found this brown room
+of the Commons-house, with its green benches, and grilled galleries, so
+agreeable to my mood, that I went again the next morning, and listened
+to more records, till they tired me: for what I had was a prurient itch
+to hear secret scandals, and revelations of the festering heart, but
+these cylinders, gathered from a shop, divulged nothing. I then went out
+to make for Woolwich, but in the car saw the poet's note-book in which I
+had written: and I took it, went back, and was writing an hour, till I
+was tired of that, too; and judging it too late for Woolwich that day,
+wandered about the dusty committee-rooms and recesses of this
+considerable place. In one room another foolishness suddenly seized upon
+me, shewing how my slightest whim has become more imperious within me
+than all the Jaws of the Medes and Persians: for in that room, Committee
+Room No. 15, I found an apparently young policeman lying flat on his
+back, who pleased me: his helmet tilted under his head, and near one
+white-gloved hand a blue official envelope; the air of that stagnant
+quiet room was still perceptibly peach-scented, and he gave not the
+slightest odour that I could detect, though he had been corporal and
+stalwart, his face now the colour of dark ashes, in each hollow cheek a
+ragged hole about the size of a sixpence, the flimsy vaulted eye-lids
+well embedded in their caverns, from under whose fringe of eye-lash
+seemed whispered the word: '_Eternity._' His hair seemed very long for a
+policeman, or perhaps it had grown since death; but what interested me
+about him, was the envelope at his hand: for 'what,' I asked myself,
+'was this fellow doing here with an envelope at three o'clock on a
+Sunday afternoon?' This made me look closer, and then I saw by a mark at
+the left temple that he had been shot, or felled; whereupon I was
+thrown into quite a great rage, for I thought that this poor man was
+killed in the execution of his duty, when many of his kind perhaps, and
+many higher than he, had fled their post to pray or riot. So, after
+looking at him a long time, I said to him: 'Well, D. 47, you sleep very
+well: and you did well, dying so: I am pleased with you, and to mark my
+favour, I decree that you shall neither rot in the common air, nor burn
+in the common flames: for by my own hand shall you be distinguished with
+burial.' And this wind so possessed me, that I at once went out: with
+the crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger's in
+Parliament Street, got a spade, and went into Westminster Abbey. I soon
+prised up a grave-slab of some famous man in the north transept, and
+commenced to shovel: but, I do not know how, by the time I had digged a
+foot the whole impulse passed from me: I left off the work, promising to
+resume it: but nothing was ever done, for the next day I was at
+Woolwich, and busy enough about other matters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the next nine days I worked with a fever on me, and a map of
+London before me.
+
+There were places in that city!--secrets, vastnesses, horrors! In the
+wine-vaults at London Docks was a vat which must certainly have
+contained between twenty and thirty thousand gallons: and with dancing
+heart I laid a train there; the tobacco-warehouse must have covered
+eighty acres: and there I laid a fuse. In a house near Regent's Park,
+standing in a garden, and shut from the street by a high wall, I saw a
+thing...! and what shapes a great city hid I now first know.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I left no quarter unremembered, taking a train, no longer of four, but
+of eight, vehicles, drawn by an electric motor which I re-charged every
+morning, mostly from the turbine station in St. Pancras, once from a
+steam-station with very small engine and dynamo, found in the Palace
+Theatre, which gave little trouble, and once from a similar little
+station in a Strand hotel. With these I visited West Ham and Kew,
+Finchley and Clapham, Dalston and Marylebone; I exhausted London; I
+deposited piles in the Guildhall, in Holloway Gaol, in the new pillared
+Justice-hall of Newgate, in the Tower, in the Parliament-house, in St.
+Giles' Workhouse, in the Crypt and under the organ of St. Paul's, in the
+South Kensington Museum, in the Royal Agricultural Society, in
+Whiteley's place, in the Trinity House, in Liverpool Street, in the
+Office of Works, in the secret recesses of the British Museum; in a
+hundred inflammable warehouses, in five hundred shops, in a thousand
+private dwellings. And I timed them all for ignition at midnight of the
+23rd April.
+
+By five in the afternoon of the 22nd, when I left my train in Maida
+Vale, and drove alone to the solitary house on high ground near
+Hampstead Heath which I had chosen, the work was well finished.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The great morning dawned, and I was early a-stir: for I had much to do
+that day.
+
+I intended to make for the sea-shore the next morning, and had therefore
+to choose a good petrol motor, store it, and have it in a place of
+safety; I had also to drag another vehicle after me, stored with trunks
+of time-fuses, books, clothes, and other little things.
+
+My first journey was to Woolwich, whence I took all that I might ever
+require in the way of mechanism; thence to the National Gallery, where I
+cut from their frames the 'Vision of St. Helena,' Murillo's 'Boy
+Drinking,' and 'Christ at the Column'; and thence to the Embassy to
+bathe, anoint myself, and dress.
+
+As I had anticipated, and hoped, a blustering spring gale was blowing
+from the north.
+
+Even as I set out from Hampstead, about 9 A.M., I had been able to guess
+that some of my fuses had somehow anticipated the appointed hour: for I
+saw three red hazes at various points in the air, and heard the far
+vague booming of an occasional explosion; and by 11 A.M. I felt sure
+that a large region of north-eastern London must be in flames. With the
+solemn feelings of bridegrooms and marriage-mornings--with a flinching,
+a flinching heart, God knows, yet a heart up-buoyed on thrilling joys--I
+went about making preparations for the Gargantuan orgy of the night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house at Hampstead, which no doubt still stands, is of rather
+pleasing design in quite a stone and rural style, with good breadths of
+wall-surface, two plain coped gables, mullioned windows, and oversailing
+slate verge roofs, but, rather spoiling it, a high square three-storied
+tower at the south-east angle, on the topmost floor of which I had slept
+the previous night. There I had provided myself with a jar of pale
+tobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house in
+Seymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the best
+wines, nuts, and so on, and a gold harp of the musician Krasinski,
+stamped with his name, taken from his house in Portland Street.
+
+But so much did I find to do that day, and so many odd things turned up
+which I thought that I would take with me, that it was not till near six
+that I drove finally northward through Camden Town. And now an ineffable
+awe possessed my soul at the solemn noise which everywhere encompassed
+me, an ineffable awe, a blissful terror. Never, never could I have
+dreamed of aught so great and potent. All above my head there rushed
+southward with wide-spread wing of haste a sparkling smoke; and mixed
+with the immense roaring I heard mysterious hubbubs of tumblings and
+rumblings, which I could not at all comprehend, like the moving-about of
+furniture in the houses of Titans; while pervading all the air was a
+most weird and tearful sound, as it were threnody, and a wild wail of
+pain, and dying swan-songs, and all lamentations and tribulations of the
+world. Yet I was aware that, at an hour so early, the flames must be far
+from general; in fact, they had not well commenced.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I had left a good semicircular region of houses, with a radius of
+four hundred yards, without combustibles to the south of the isolated
+house which I was to occupy, and as the wind was so strongly from the
+north, I simply left my two vehicles at the door of the house, without
+fear of any injury: nor did any occur. I then went up to the top of the
+tower, lit the candles, and ate voraciously of the dinner which I had
+left ready, for since the morning I had taken nothing; and then, with
+hands and heart that quivered, I arranged the clothes of the low
+spring-bed upon which to throw my frame in the morning hours. Opposite
+the wall, where lay the bed, was a Gothic window, pretty large, with low
+sill, hung with poppy-figured muslin, and looking directly south, so
+that I could recline at ease in the red-velvet easy-chair, and see. It
+had evidently been a young lady's room: for on the toilette were
+cut-glass bottles, a plait of brown hair, powders, _rouge-aux-lèvres,_
+one little bronze slipper, and knick-knacks, and I loved her and hated
+her, though I did not see her anywhere. About half-past eight I sat at
+the window to watch, all being arranged and ready at my right hand, the
+candles extinguished in the red room: for the theatre was opened, was
+opened: and the atmosphere of this earth seemed turned into Hell, and
+Hell was in my soul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Soon after midnight there was a sudden and very visible increase in the
+conflagration. On all hands I began to see blazing structures soar, with
+grand hurrahs, on high. In fives and tens, in twenties and thirties, all
+between me and the remote limit of my vision, they leapt, they lingered
+long, they fell. My spirit more and more felt, and danced--deeper
+mysteries of sensation, sweeter thrills. I sipped exquisitely, I drew
+out enjoyment leisurely. Anon, when some more expansive angel of flame
+would arise from the Pit with steady aspiration, and linger with
+outspread arms, and burst, I would lift a little from the chair, leaning
+forward to clap, as at some famous acting; or I would call to them in
+shouts of cheer, giving them the names of Woman. For now I seemed to see
+nothing but some bellowing pandemonic universe through crimson glasses,
+and the air was wildly hot, and my eye-balls like theirs that walk
+staring in the inner midst of burning fiery furnaces, and my skin itched
+with a fierce and prickly itch. Anon I touched the chords of the harp to
+the air of Wagner's 'Walküren-ritt.'
+
+Near three in the morning, I reached the climax of my guilty sweets. My
+drunken eye-lids closed in a luxury of pleasure, and my lips lay
+stretched in a smile that dribbled; a sensation of dear peace, of
+almighty power, consoled me: for now the whole area which through
+streaming tears I surveyed, mustering its ten thousand thunders, and
+brawling beyond the stars the voice of its southward-rushing torment,
+billowed to the horizon one grand Atlantic of smokeless and flushing
+flame; and in it sported and washed themselves all the fiends of Hell,
+with laughter, shouts, wild flights, and holiday; and I--first of my
+race--had flashed a signal to the nearer planets....
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those words: 'signal to the nearer planets' I wrote nearly fourteen
+months ago, some days after the destruction of London, I being then on
+board the old _Boreal_, making for the coast of France: for the night
+was dark, though calm, and I was afraid of running into some ship, yet
+not sleepy, so I wrote to occupy my fingers, the ship lying still. The
+book in which I wrote has been near me: but no impulse to write anything
+has visited me, till now I continue; not, however, that I have very much
+to put down.
+
+I had no intention of wearing out my life in lighting fires every
+morning to warm myself in the inhospitable island of Britain, and set
+out to France with the view of seeking some palace in the Riviera,
+Spain, or perhaps Algiers, there, for the present at least, to make my
+home.
+
+I started from Calais toward the end of April, taking my things along,
+the first two days by train, and then determining that I was in no
+hurry, and a petrol motor easier, took one, and maintained a generally
+southern and somewhat eastern direction, ever-anew astonished at the
+wildness of the forest vegetation which, within so short a space since
+the disappearance of man, chokes this pleasant land, even before the
+definite advent of summer.
+
+After three weeks of very slow travelling--for though I know several
+countries very well, France with her pavered villages, hilly character,
+vines, forests, and primeval country-manner, is always new and charming
+to me--after three weeks I came unexpectedly to a valley which had never
+entered my head; and the moment that I saw it, I said: 'Here I will
+live,' though I had no idea what it was, for the monastery which I saw
+did not look at all like a monastery, according to my ideas: but when I
+searched the map, I discovered that it must be La Chartreuse de
+Vauclaire in Périgord.
+
+It is my belief that this word 'Vauclaire' is nothing else than a
+corruption of the Latin _Vallis Clara,_ or Bright Valley, for _l'_s and
+_u'_s did interchange about in this way, I remember: _cheval_ becoming
+_chevau(x)_ in the plural, like 'fool' and 'fou,' and the rest: which
+proves the dear laziness of French people, for the 'l' was too much
+trouble for them to sing, and when they came to _two_ 'l's' they quite
+succumbed, shying that vault, or vo_u_te, and calling it some _y_. But
+at any rate, this Vauclaire, or Valclear, was well named: for here, if
+anywhere, is Paradise, and if anyone knew how and where to build and
+brew liqueurs, it was those good old monks, who followed their Master
+with _entrain_ in that Cana miracle, and in many other things, I fancy,
+but aesthetically shirked to say to any mountain: 'Be thou removed.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The general hue of the vale is a deep cerulean, resembling that blue of
+the robes of Albertinelli's Madonnas; so, at least, it strikes the eye
+on a clear forenoon of spring or summer. The monastery consists of an
+oblong space, or garth, around three sides of which stand sixteen small
+houses, with regular intervals between, all identical, the cells of the
+fathers; between the oblong space and the cells come the cloisters, with
+only one opening to the exterior; in the western part of the oblong is
+a little square of earth under a large cypress-shade, within which, as
+in a home of peace, it sleeps: and there, straight and slanting, stand
+little plain black crosses over graves....
+
+To the west of the quadrangle is the church, with the hostelry, and an
+asphalted court with some trees and a fountain; and beyond, the
+entrance-gate.
+
+All this stands on a hill of gentle slope, green as grass; and it is
+backed close against a steep mountain-side, of which the tree-trunks are
+conjectural, for I never saw any, the trees resembling rather one
+continuous leafy tree-top, run out high and far over the extent of the
+mountain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was there four months, till something drove me away. I do not know
+what had become of the fathers and brothers, for I only found five, four
+of whom I took in two journeys in the motor beyond the church of Saint
+Martial d'Artenset, and left them there; and the fifth remained three
+weeks with me, for I would not disturb him in his prayer. He was a
+bearded brother of forty years or thereabouts, who knelt in his cell
+robed and hooded in all his phantom white: for in no way different from
+whatever is most phantom, visionary and eerie must a procession of these
+people have seemed by gloaming, or dark night This particular brother
+knelt, I say, in his small chaste room, glaring upward at his Christ,
+who hung long-armed in a little recess between the side of three narrow
+bookshelves and a projection of the wall; and under the Christ a gilt
+and blue Madonna; the books on the three shelves few, leaning different
+ways. His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a
+wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed: a bed all enclosed in
+dark boards, a broad perpendicular board along the foot, reaching the
+ceiling, a horizontal board at the side over which he got into bed,
+another narrower one like it at the ceiling for fringe and curtain, and
+another perpendicular one hiding the pillow, making the clean bed within
+a very shady and cosy little den, on the wall of this den being another
+smaller Christ and a little picture. On the perpendicular board at the
+foot hung two white garments, and over a second chair at the bed-side
+another: all very neat and holy. He was a large stern man, blond as
+corn, but with some red, too, in his hairy beard; and appalling was the
+significance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity of
+those saffron cheeks. I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence for
+this man; but I had it, certainly. Many of the others, it is clear, had
+fled: but not he: and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross,
+holding one real as the other--he alone among many. For Christianity was
+an _élite_ religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing
+from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within
+their reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's,
+it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.
+
+It was my way to plant at the portal the big, carved chair from the
+chancel on the hot days, and rest my soul, refusing to think of
+anything, drowsing and smoking for hours. All down there in the plain
+waved gardens of delicious fruit about the prolonged silver thread of
+the river Isle, whose course winds loitering quite near the foot of the
+monastery-slope. This slope dominates a tract of distance that is not
+only vast, but looks immense, although the horizon is bounded by a
+semicircle of low hills, rather too stiff and uniform for perfect
+beauty; the interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed lands
+which were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by
+vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne,
+orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all
+embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the
+village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played
+there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or
+foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river
+divides, and takes the shape of a heart; and very far away are visible
+the grey banks of the Gironde. On the semicircle of hills, when there
+was little distance-mist, I saw the ruins of some seigneurial château,
+for the seigneurs, too, knew where to build; and to my left, between a
+clump of oaks and an avenue of poplars, the bell-tower of the
+village--church of Saint Martial d'Artenset--a very ancient type of
+tower, I believe, and common in France, rather ponderous, consisting of
+a square mass with a smaller square mass stuck on, the latter having
+large Gothic windows; and behind me the west face of the
+monastery-church, over the door being the statue of Saint Bruno.
+
+Well, one morning after four months, I opened my eyes in my cell to the
+piercing consciousness that I had burned Monpont over-night: and so
+overcome was I with regret for this poor inoffensive little place, that
+for two days, hardly eating, I paced between the oak and walnut pews of
+the nave, massive stalls they are, separated by grooved Corinthian
+pilasters, wondering what was to become of me, and if I was not already
+mad; and there are some little angels with extraordinarily human
+Greuze-like faces, supporting the nerves of the apse, which, after a
+time, every time I passed them, seemed conscious of me and my existence
+there; and the wood-work which ornaments the length of the nave, and of
+the choir also, elaborate with carved marguerites and roses, here and
+there took in my eyes significant forms from certain points of view; and
+there is a partition--for the nave is divided into two chapels, one for
+the brothers and one for the fathers, I conclude--and in this partition
+a massive door, which yet looks quite light and graceful, carved with
+oak and acanthus leaves, and every time I passed through I had the
+impression that the door was a sentient thing, subconscious of me; and
+the delicate Italian-Renaissance brick vault which springs from the vast
+nave seemed to look upon me with a gloomy knowledge of me, and of the
+heart within me; and at about four in the afternoon of the second day,
+after pacing the church for hours, I fell down at one of the two altars
+near that carved door of the screen, praying God to have mercy upon my
+soul; and in the very midst of my praying, I was up and away, the devil
+in me, and I got into the motor, and did not come back to Vauclaire for
+another month, and came leaving great tracts of burned desolation behind
+me, towns and forests, Bordeaux burned, Lebourne burned, Bergerac
+burned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there I
+experienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before my
+Maker. And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of the
+monastery-gate, something said to me: 'You will never be a good man, nor
+permanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life,
+devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exact
+all your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modern
+things, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand:
+otherwise you are bound to succumb. Do this, therefore, beginning, not
+to-morrow nor this afternoon, but now: for though no man will see your
+work, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in His
+way: and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan: and perhaps,
+seeing, He may have mercy upon you.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this way arose the idea of the Palace--an idea, indeed, which had
+entered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcome
+of my raving moods: now, however, in a very different way, soberly, and
+soon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations,
+and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which,
+one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, over-borne by
+the vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessed
+me. After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes: and I said: I
+will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the
+first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace
+worthy the King of Earth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a very
+different man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble,
+making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole,
+drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and the
+rule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at a
+little over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weight
+and bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the _sort_, deciding as to
+the size and structure of the crane, forge, and work-shop, and the
+necessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list of
+over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure
+from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole
+earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn
+streets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults,
+etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris,
+and then lying in the _Speranza_ at Dover; nor had I sufficient
+familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the
+aid of _Bottins_, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now
+catalogued. My ship was the _Speranza_, which brought me from Havre, for
+at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all
+purposes, the _Speranza_ being an American yacht, very palatially
+fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000
+tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting
+tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables me
+to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting
+air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons
+only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days' work
+at the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw out
+her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on
+the quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and the
+half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to
+Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of
+dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London:
+meaning to make Dover my _dépôt_, and the London rails my thoroughfare
+from all parts of the country.
+
+Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: a
+harrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from
+the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as
+well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: for
+the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down
+sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake.
+However, all's well that ends well, though if I had it to go through
+again, certainly I should not. The _Speranza_ is now lying seven miles
+off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th of
+June at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and I
+pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such
+a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good
+God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the
+devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When the
+thirty-three ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeen
+years since--long years--seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to
+what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of
+the _Speranza_, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's
+aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.
+
+I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few
+lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man
+not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen,
+seventeen ... ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I
+have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if
+the spelling of some of them is queer. My brain has been thinking
+inarticulately perhaps, all these years: and the English words and
+letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and
+foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who
+has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the
+impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of
+tackling them. Or perhaps it is only my fancy: for that I have fancies I
+know.
+
+But what to write? The history of those seventeen years could not be put
+down, my good God: at least, it would take me seventeen more to do it.
+If I were to detail the building of the palace alone, and how it killed
+me nearly, and how I twice fled from it, and had to return, and became
+its bounden slave, and dreamed of it, and grovelled before it, and
+prayed, and raved, and rolled; and how I forgot to make provision on the
+west side for the contraction and expansion of the gold in the colder
+weather and the heats of summer, and had to break down nine months'
+work, and how I cursed Thee, how I cursed Thee; and how the lake of wine
+evaporated faster than the conduits replenished it, and the three
+journeys which I had to take to Constantinople for shiploads of wine,
+and my frothing despairs, till I had the thought of placing the
+reservoir in the platform; and how I had then to break down the south
+side of the platform to the very bottom, and of the month-long nightmare
+of terror that I had lest the south side of the palace would undergo
+subsidence; and how the petrol failed, and of the three-weeks' search
+for petrol along the coast; and how, after list-rubbing all the jet, I
+found that I had forgotten the necessary rouge for polishing; and how,
+in the third year, I found the fluate, which I had for water-proofing
+the pores of the platform-stone, nearly all leaked away in the
+_Speranza's_ hold, and I had to get silicate of soda at Gallipoli; and
+how, after two years' observation, I had to come to the conclusion that
+the lake was leaking, and discovered that this Imbros sand was not
+suitable for mixing with the skin of Portland cement which covered the
+cement concrete, and had to substitute sheet-bitumen in three places;
+and how I did all, all for the sake of God, thinking: 'I will work, and
+be a good man, and cast Hell from me: and when I see it stand finished,
+it will be an Altar and a Testimony to me, and I shall find peace, and
+be well': and how I have been cheated--seventeen years, long years of my
+life--for there is no God; and how my plasterers'-hair failed me, and I
+had to use flock, hessian, scrym, wadding, wood-street paving-blocks,
+and whatever I could find, for filling the interspaces between the
+platform cross-walls; and of the espagnolette bolts, how a number of
+them mysteriously disappeared, as if snatched to Hell by harpies, and I
+had to make them; and how the crane-chain would not reach two of the
+silver-panel castings when they were finished, and they were too heavy
+for me to lift, and the wringing of the hands of my despair, and my
+biting of the earth, and the transport of my fury; and how, for a whole
+wild week, I searched in vain for the text-book which describes the
+ambering process; and how, when all was nearly over, in the blasting
+away of the forge and crane with dynamite, a long crack appeared down
+the gold of the east platform-steps, and how I would not be consoled,
+but mourned and mourned; and how, in spite of all my tribulations, it
+was sweetly interesting to watch my power slowly grow from the first
+feeble beginnings of the landing of materials and unloading them from
+the motor, a hundred-weight at a time, till I could swing four tons--see
+the solid metals flow--enjoy the gliding sounds of the handle,
+crank-shaft, and system of levers, forcing inwards the mould-end, and
+the upper and lower plungers, for pressing the material--build at ease
+in a travelling-cage--and watch from my hut-door through sleepless
+hours, under the electric moonlight of this land, the three piles of
+gold stones, the silver panels, the two-foot squares of jet, and be
+comforted; and how the putty-wash--but it is past, it is past: and not
+to live over again that vulgar nightmare of means and ends have I taken
+to this writing again--but to put down something else, if I dare.
+
+Seventeen years, my good God, of that delusion! I could write down no
+sort of explanation for all those groans and griefs, at which a
+reasoning being would not shriek with laughter. I should have lived at
+ease in some palace of the Middle-Orient, and burned my cities: but no,
+I must be 'a good man'--vain thought. The words of a wild madman, that
+preaching man in England who prophesied what happened, were with me,
+where he says: 'the defeat of Man is _His_ defeat'; and I said to
+myself: 'Well, the last man shall not be quite a fiend, just to spite
+That Other.' And I worked and groaned, saying: 'I will be a good man,
+and burn nothing, nor utter aught unseemly, nor debauch myself, but
+choke back the blasphemies that Those Others shriek through my throat,
+and build and build, with moils and groans.' And it was Vanity: though I
+do love the house, too, I love it well, for it is my home on the waste
+earth.
+
+I had calculated to finish it in twelve years, and I should undoubtedly
+have finished it in fourteen, instead of in sixteen and seven months,
+but one day, when the south, north, and east platform-steps were already
+finished--it was in the July of the third year, and near sunset--as I
+left off work, instead of going to the tent where my dinner lay ready, I
+walked down to the ship--most strangely--in a daft, mechanical sort of
+way, without saying a word to myself, an evil-meaning smile of malice on
+my lips; and at midnight I was lying off Mitylene, thirty miles to the
+south, having bid, as I thought, a last farewell to all those toils. I
+was going to burn Athens.
+
+I did not, however: but kept on my way westward round Cape Matapan,
+intending to destroy the forests and towns of Sicily, if I found there a
+suitable motor for travelling, for I had not been at the pains to take
+the motor on board at Imbros; otherwise I would ravage parts of southern
+Italy. But when I came thereabouts, I was confronted with an awful
+horror: for no southern Italy was there, and no Sicily was there, unless
+a small new island, probably not five miles long, was Sicily; and
+nothing else I saw, save the still-smoking crater of Stromboli. I
+cruised northward, searching for land, and for a long time would not
+believe the evidence of the instruments, thinking that they wilfully
+misled me, or I stark mad. But no: no Italy was there, till I came to
+the latitude of Naples, it, too, having disappeared, engulfed, engulfed,
+all that stretch. From this monstrous thing I received so solemn a shock
+and mood of awe, that the evil mind in me was quite chilled and quelled:
+for it was, and is, my belief that a wide-spread re-arrangement of the
+earth's surface is being purposed, and in all that drama, O my God, how
+shall _I_ be found?
+
+However, I went on my way, but more leisurely, not daring for a long
+time to do anything, lest I might offend anyone; and, in this foolish
+cowering mind, coasted all the western coast of Spain and France during
+five weeks, in that prolonged intensity of calm weather which now
+alternates with storms that transcend all thought, till I came again to
+Calais: and there, for the first time, landed.
+
+Here I would no longer contain myself, but burned; and that magnificent
+stretch of forest that lay between Agincourt and Abbéville, covering
+five square miles, I burned; and Abbéville I burned; and Amiens I
+burned; and three forests between Amiens and Paris I burned; and Paris I
+burned; burning and burning during four months, leaving behind me
+smoking districts, a long tract of ravage, like some being of the Pit
+that blights where pass his flaming wings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This of city-burning has now become a habit with me more enchaining--and
+infinitely more debased--than ever was opium to the smoker, or alcohol
+to the drunkard. I count it among the prime necessaries of my life: it
+is my brandy, my bacchanal, my secret sin. I have burned Calcutta,
+Pekin, and San Francisco. In spite of the restraining influence of this
+palace, I have burned and burned. I have burned two hundred cities and
+countrysides. Like Leviathan disporting himself in the sea, so I have
+rioted in this earth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After an absence of six months, I returned to Imbros: for I was for
+looking again upon the work which I had done, that I might mock myself
+for all that unkingly grovelling: and when I saw it, standing there as I
+had left it, frustrate and forlorn, and waiting its maker's hand, some
+pity and instinct to build took me--for something of God was in Man--and
+I fell upon my knees, and spread my arms to God, and was converted,
+promising to finish the palace, with prayers that as I built so He
+would build my soul, and save the last man from the enemy. And I set to
+work that day to list-rub the last few dalles of the jet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I did not leave Imbros after that during four years, except for
+occasional brief trips to the coast--to Kilid-Bahr, Gallipoli, Lapsaki,
+Gamos, Rodosto, Erdek, Erekli, or even once to Constantinople and
+Scutari--if I happened to want anything, or if I was tired of work: but
+without once doing the least harm to anything, but containing my
+humours, and fearing my Maker. And full of peaceful charm were those
+little cruises through this Levantic world, which, truly, is rather like
+a light sketch in water-colours done by an angel than like the dun real
+earth; and full of self-satisfaction and pious contentment would I
+return to Imbros, approved of my conscience, for that I had surmounted
+temptation, and lived tame and stainless.
+
+I had set up the southern of the two closed-lotus pillars, and the
+platform-top was already looking as lovely as heaven, with its alternate
+two-foot squares of pellucid gold and pellucid jet, when I noticed one
+morning that the _Speranza's_ bottom was really now too foul, and the
+whim took me then and there to leave all, and clean her as far as I
+could. I at once went on board, descended to the hold, took off my
+sudeyrie, and began to shift the ballast over to starboard, so as to
+tilt up her port bottom to the scraper. This was wearying labour, and
+about noon I was sitting on a bag, resting in the almost darkness, when
+something seemed to whisper to me these words: '_You dreamed last night
+that there is an old Chinaman alive in Pekin._' Horridly I started: I
+_had_ dreamed something of the sort, but, from the moment of waking,
+till then, had forgotten it: and I leapt livid to my feet.
+
+I cleaned no _Speranza_ that day, nor for four days did I anything, but
+sat on the cabin-house and mused, my supporting palm among the hairy
+draperies of my chin: for the thought of such a thing, if it could by
+any possibility be true, was detestable as death to me, changing the
+colour of the sun, and the whole aspect of the world: and anon, at the
+outrage of that thing, my brow would flush with wrath, and my eyes
+blaze: till, on the fourth afternoon, I said to myself: 'That old
+Chinaman in Pekin is likely to get burned to death, I think, or blown to
+the clouds!'
+
+So, a second time, on the 4th March, the poor palace was left to build
+itself. For, after a short trip to Gallipoli, where I got some young
+lime-twigs in boxes of earth, and some preserved limes and ginger, I set
+out for a long voyage to the East, passing through the Suez Canal, and
+visiting Bombay, where I was three weeks, and then destroyed it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I had the thought of going across Hindustan by engine, but did not like
+to leave my ship, to which I was very attached, not sure of finding
+anything so suitable and good at Calcutta; and, moreover, I was afraid
+to abandon my petrol motor, which I had taken on board with the
+air-windlass, since I was going to uncivilised land. I therefore coasted
+down western Hindustan.
+
+All that northern shore of the Arabian Sea has at the present time an
+odour which it wafts far over the water, resembling odours of happy
+vague dream-lands, sweet to smell in the early mornings as if the earth
+were nothing but a perfume, and life an inhalation.
+
+On that voyage, however, I had, from beginning to end, twenty-seven
+fearful storms, or, if I count that one near the Carolines, then
+twenty-eight. But I do not wish to write of these rages: they were too
+inhuman: and how I came alive through them against all my wildest hope,
+Someone, or Something, only knows.
+
+I will write down here a thing: it is this, my God--something which I
+have observed: a definite obstreperousness in the mood of the elements
+now, when once roused, which grows, which grows continually. Tempests
+have become very very far more wrathful, the sea more truculent and
+unbounded in its insolence; when it thunders, it thunders with a venom
+new to me, cracking as though it would split the firmament, and bawling
+through the heaven of heavens, as if roaring to devour all things; in
+Bombay once, and in China thrice, I was shaken by earthquakes, the
+second and third marked by a certain extravagance of agitation, that
+might turn a man grey. Why should this be, my God? I remember reading
+very long ago that on the American prairies, which from time immemorial
+had been swept by great storms, the storms gradually subsided when man
+went to reside permanently there. If this be true, it would seem that
+the mere presence of man had a certain subduing or mesmerising effect
+upon the native turbulence of Nature, and his absence now may have
+removed the curb. It is my belief that within fifty years from now the
+huge forces of the earth will be let fully loose to tumble as they will;
+and this planet will become one of the undisputed playgrounds of Hell,
+and the theatre of commotions stupendous as those witnessed on the face
+of Saturn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with
+thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty
+griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth: and I,
+poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. Upon
+her I brood, and do not cease, but brood and brood--the habit, if I
+remember right, first becoming fixed and fated during that long voyage
+eastward: for what is in store for her God only knows, and I have seen
+in my broodings long visions of her future, which, if a man should see
+with the eye of flesh, he would spread the arms, and wheel and wheel
+through the mazes of a hiccuping giggling frenzy, for the vision only is
+the very verge of madness. If I might cease but for one hour that
+perpetual brooding upon her! But I am her child, and my mind grows and
+grows to her like the off-shoots of the banyan-tree, that take root
+downward, and she sucks and draws it, as she draws my feet by
+gravitation, and I cannot take wing from her: for she is greater than I,
+and there is no escaping her; and at the last, I know, my soul will
+dash itself to ruin, like erring sea-fowl upon pharos-lights, against
+her wild and mighty bosom. Often a whole night through I lie open-eyed
+in the dark, with bursting brain, thinking of that hollow Gulf of
+Mexico, how identical in shape and size with the protuberance of Africa
+just opposite, and how the protuberance of the Venezuelan and Brazilian
+coast fits in with the in-curve of Africa: so that it is obvious to
+me--it is quite _obvious_--that they once were one; and one night rushed
+so far apart; and the wild Atlantic knew that thing, and ran gladly,
+hasting in between: and how if eye of flesh had been there to see, and
+ear to hear that cruel thundering, my God, my God--what horror! And if
+now they meet again, so long apart ...but that way fury lies. Yet one
+cannot help but think: I lie awake and think, for she fills my soul, and
+absorbs it, with all her moods and ways. She has meanings, secrets,
+plans. Strange, strange, for instance, that similarity between the
+scheme of Europe and the scheme of Asia: each with three southern
+peninsulas pointing south: Spain corresponding with Arabia, Italy with
+India, the Morea and Greece, divided by the Gulf of Corinth,
+corresponding with the Malay Peninsula and Annam, divided by the Gulf of
+Siam; each with two northern peninsulas pointing south, Sweden and
+Norway, and Korea and Kamschatka; each with two great islands similarly
+placed, Britain and Ireland, and the Japanese Hondo and Yezo; the Old
+World and the New has each a peninsula pointing north--Denmark and
+Yucatan: a forefinger with long nail--and a thumb--pointing to the Pole.
+What does she mean? What can she mean, O Ye that made her? Is she
+herself a living being, with a will and a fate, as sailors said that
+ships were living entities? And that thing that wheeled at the Pole,
+wheels it still yonder, yonder, in its dark ecstasy? Strange that
+volcanoes are all near the sea: I don't know why; I don't think that
+anyone ever knew. This fact, in connection with submarine explosions,
+used to be cited in support of the chemical theory of volcanoes, which
+supposed the infiltration of the sea into ravines containing the
+materials which form the fuel of eruptions: but God knows if that is
+true. The lofty ones are intermittent--a century, two, ten, of silent
+waiting, and then their talk silenced for ever some poor district; the
+low ones are constant in action. Who could know the dark way of the
+world? Sometimes they form a linear system, consisting of several vents
+which extend in one direction, near together, like chimneys of some long
+foundry beneath. In mountains, a series of serrated peaks denotes the
+presence of dolomites; rounded heads mean calcareous rocks; and needles,
+crystalline schists. The preponderance of land in the northern
+hemisphere denotes the greater intensity there of the causes of
+elevation at a remote geologic epoch: that is all that one can say about
+it: but whence that greater intensity? I have some knowledge of the
+earth for only ten miles down: but she has eight thousand miles: and
+whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do
+not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot
+sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the
+metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and
+volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which
+constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of
+flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know
+them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same
+furnace of her fiery heart. She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated,
+and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise,
+and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of
+Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and
+Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday,
+old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like
+vihârah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock;
+and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo,
+and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that
+great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well
+of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my
+cheeks: for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man 'passeth away.'
+These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only
+that these are round, and mine are square: for I chose it so: but the
+same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the
+small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine
+have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court,
+then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the
+dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are
+crowned with boldly-projecting cornices, surmounted by an abacus. And
+here, till the pressing want of food drove me back, I remained: for more
+and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I
+ask myself this question: 'Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and
+become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and
+fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic--morose and
+turbulent--fitful, and deranged, and sad--like her?'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A whole month of that voyage, from May the 15th to June the 13th, I
+wasted at the Andaman Islands near Malay: for that any old Chinaman
+could be alive in Pekin began, after some time, to seem the most
+quixotic notion that ever entered a human brain; and these jungled
+islands, to which I came after a shocking vast orgy one night at
+Calcutta, when I fired not only the city but the river, pleased my fancy
+to such an extent, that at one time I intended to abide there. I was at
+the one called in the chart 'Saddle Hill,' the smallest of them, I
+think: and seldom have I had such sensations of peace as I lay a whole
+burning day in a rising vale, deeply-shaded in palm and tropical
+ranknesses, watching thence the _Speranza_ at anchor: for there was a
+little offing here at the shore whence the valley arose, and I could see
+one of its long peaks lined with cocoanut-trees, and all cloud burned
+out of the sky except the flimsiest lawn-figments, and the sea as
+absolutely calm as a lake roughened with breezes, yet making a
+considerable noise in its breaking on the shore, as I have noticed in
+these sorts of places: I do not know why. These poor Andaman people seem
+to have been quite savage, for I met a number of them in roaming the
+island, nearly skeletons, yet with limbs and vertebrae still, in
+general, cohering, and in some cases dry-skinned and mummified relics of
+flesh, and never anywhere a sign of clothes: a very singular thing,
+considering their nearness to high old civilisations all about them.
+They looked small and black, or almost; and I never found a man without
+finding on or near him a spear and other weapons: so that they were
+eager folk, and the wayward dark earth was in them, too, as she should
+be in her children. They had in many cases some reddish discoloration,
+which may have been the traces of betel-nut stains: for betel-nuts
+abound there. And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on
+board with the gig one of their little tree-canoes: which was my
+foolishness: for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from
+the decks into the middle of the sea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I passed down the Straits of Malacca, and in that short distance between
+the Andaman Islands, and the S.W. corner of Borneo I was thrice so
+mauled, that at times it seemed quite out of the question that anything
+built by man could escape such unfettered cataclysms, and I resigned
+myself, but with bitter reproaches, to perish darkly. The effect of the
+third upon me, when it was over, was the unloosening afresh of all my
+evil passion: for I said: 'Since they mean to slay me, death shall find
+me rebellious'; and for weeks I could not sight some specially happy
+village, or umbrageous spread of woodland, that I did not stop the ship,
+and land the materials for their destruction; so that nearly all those
+spicy lands about the north of Australia will bear the traces of my hand
+for many a year: for more and more my voyage became dawdling and
+zigzaged, as the merest whim directed it, or the movement of the pointer
+on the chart; and I thought of eating the lotus of surcease and nepenthe
+in some enchanted nook of this bowering summer, where from my hut-door I
+could see through the pearl-hues of opium the sea-lagoon slaver lazily
+upon the old coral atol, and the cocoanut-tree would droop like slumber,
+and the bread-fruit tree would moan in sweet and weary dream, and I
+should watch the _Speranza_ lie anchored in the pale atol-lake, year
+after year, and wonder what she was, and whence, and why she dozed so
+deep for ever, and after an age of melancholy peace and burdened bliss,
+I should note that sun and moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert,
+opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh
+'Enough,' and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep: for that any old
+Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac,
+as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that left
+me faint.
+
+During a space of four months, from the 18th June to the 23rd October, I
+visited the Fijis, where I saw skulls still surrounded with remnants of
+extraordinary haloes of stiff hair, women clad in girdles made of thongs
+fixed in a belt, and, in Samoa near, bodies crowned with coronets of
+nautilus-shell, and traces of turmeric-paint and tattooing, and in one
+townlet a great assemblage of carcasses, suggesting by their look some
+festival, or dance: so that I believe that these people were overthrown
+without the least fore-knowledge of anything. The women of the Maoris
+wore an abundance of green-jade ornaments, and I found a peculiar kind
+of shell-trumpet, one of which I have now, also a tattooing chisel, and
+a nicely-carved wooden bowl. The people of New Caledonia, on the other
+hand, went, I should think, naked, confining their attention to the
+hair, and in this resembling the Fijians, for they seemed to wear an
+artificial hair made of the fur of some creature like a bat, and also
+they wore wooden masks, and great rings--for the ear, no doubt--which
+must have fallen to the shoulders: for the earth was in them all, and
+made them wild, perverse and various like herself. I went from one to
+the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal
+resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying
+of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the
+world. But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me
+to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One evening, the 29th November, I dined rather late--at eight--sitting,
+as was my custom in calm weather, cross-legged on the cabin-rug at the
+port aft corner, a small semicircle of _Speranza_ gold-plate before me,
+and near above me the red-shaded lamp with green conical reservoir,
+whose creakings never cease in the stillest mid-sea, and beyond the
+plates the array of preserved soups, meat-extracts, meats, fruit,
+sweets, wines, nuts, liqueurs, coffee on the silver spirit-tripod,
+glasses, cruet, and so on, which it was always my first care to select
+from the store-room, open, and lay out once for all in the morning on
+rising. I was late, seven being my hour: for on that day I had been
+engaged in the occasionally necessary, but always deferred, task of
+overhauling the ship, brushing here a rope with tar, there a board with
+paint, there a crank with oil, rubbing a door-handle, a brass-fitting,
+filling the three cabin-lamps, dusting mirrors and furniture, dashing
+the great neat-joinered plains of deck with bucketfulls, or, high in
+air, chopping loose with its rigging the mizzen top-mast, which since a
+month was sprained at the clamps, all this in cotton drawers under loose
+_quamis_, bare-footed, my beard knotted up, the sun a-blaze, the sea
+smooth and pale with the smooth pallor of strong currents, the ship
+still enough, no land in sight, yet great tracts of sea-weed making
+eastward--I working from 11 A.M. till near 7, when sudden darkness
+interrupted: for I wished to have it all over in one obnoxious day. I
+was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain-lever
+lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner
+in the dining-hall corner. I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual,
+pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but
+never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan
+manner, and drinking pretty freely. Still I was tired, and went upon
+deck, where I had the threadbare blue-velvet easy-chair with the broken
+left arm before the wheel, and in it sat smoking cigar after cigar from
+the Indian D box, half-asleep, yet conscious. The moon came up into a
+pretty cloudless sky, and she was bright, but not bright enough to
+out-shine the enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one
+continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint
+luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole
+trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous
+purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic
+current. I could hear it, in my slumbrous lassitude, struggling and
+gurgling at the tied rudder, and making wet sloppy noises under the
+sheer of the poop; and I was aware that the _Speranza_ was gliding along
+pretty fast, drawn into that procession, probably at the rate of four to
+six knots: but I did not care, knowing very well that no land was within
+two hundred miles of my bows, for I was in longitude 173°, in the
+latitude of Fiji and the Society Islands, between those two: and after a
+time the cigar drooped and dropped from my mouth, and sleep overcame
+me, and I slept there, in the lap of the Infinite.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So that something preserves me, Something, Someone: _and for what?_ ...
+If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for
+lying there on the poop, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed on
+the ice, far, far yonder in the forgotten hyperborean North: that I was
+in an Arabian paradise, a Garden of Peaches; and I had a very long
+vision of it, for I walked among the trees, and picked the fruit, and
+pressed the blossoms to my nostrils with breathless inhalations of love:
+till a horrible sickness woke me: and when I opened my eyes, the night
+was black, the moon gone down, everything wet with dew, the sky arrayed
+with most glorious stars like a thronged bazaar of tiaraed rajahs and
+begums with spangled trains, and all the air fragrant with that mortal
+scent; and high and wide uplifted before me--stretching from the
+northern to the southern limit--a row of eight or nine inflamed smokes,
+as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean foundry a-work all night, most
+solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn night: eight or nine, I
+should say, or it might be seven, or it might be ten, for I did not
+count them; and from those craters puffed up gusts of encrimsoned
+material, here a gust and there a gust, with tinselled fumes that
+convolved upon themselves, and sparks and flashes, all veiled in a
+garish haze of light: for the foundry worked, though languidly; and upon
+a rocky land four miles ahead, which no chart had ever marked, the
+_Speranza_ drove straight with the current of the phosphorus sea.
+
+As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of
+existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream. I must
+at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the
+destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood
+with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow
+crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind
+that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory,
+or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do
+not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with
+desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face
+as I moved the regulator in the engine-room: but any recollection of
+going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not. Happily, the
+wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she
+must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the
+wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head
+against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in
+sight, and morning breaking.
+
+This made me so sick, that for either two or three days I lay without
+eating in the chair near the wheel, only rarely waking to sufficient
+sense to see to it that she was making westward from that place; and on
+the morning when I finally roused myself I did not know whether it was
+the second or the third morning: so that my calendar, so scrupulously
+kept, may be a day out, for to this day I have never been at the pains
+to ascertain whether I am here writing now on the 5th or the 6th of
+June.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, on the fourth, or the fifth, evening after this, just as the sun
+was sinking beyond the rim of the sea, I happened to look where he hung
+motionless on the starboard bow: and there I saw a clean-cut black-green
+spot against his red--a most unusual sight here and now--a ship: a poor
+thing, as it turned out when I got near her, without any sign of mast,
+heavily water-logged, some relics of old rigging hanging over, even her
+bowsprit apparently broken in the middle (though I could not see it),
+and she nothing more than a hirsute green mass of old weeds and
+sea-things from bowsprit-tip to poop, and from bulwarks to water-line,
+stout as a hedgehog, only awaiting there the next high sea to founder.
+
+It being near my dinner-hour and night's rest, I stopped the _Speranza_
+some fifteen yards from her, and commenced to pace my spacious poop, as
+usual, before eating; and as I paced, I would glance at her, wondering
+at her destiny, and who were the human men that had lived on her, their
+Christian names, and family names, their age, and thought, and way of
+life, and beards; till the desire arose within me to go to her, and see;
+and I threw off my outer garments, uncovered and unroped the cedar
+cutter--the only boat, except the air-pinnace, left to me intact--and
+got her down by the mizzen five-block pulley-system. But it was a
+ridiculous nonsense, for having paddled to her, I was thrown into
+paroxysms of rage by repeated failures to scale her bulwarks, low as
+they were; my hands, indeed, could reach, but I found no hold upon the
+slimy mass, and three rope-ends which I caught were also untenably
+slippery: so that I jerked always back into the boat, my clothes a mass
+of filth, and the only thought in my blazing brain a twenty-pound
+charge of guncotton, of which I had plenty, to blow her to uttermost
+Hell. I had to return to the _Speranza_, get a half-inch rope, then back
+to the other, for I would not be baulked in such a way, though now the
+dark was come, only slightly tempered by a half-moon, and I getting
+hungry, and from minute to minute more fiendishly ferocious. Finally, by
+dint of throwing, I got the rope-loop round a mast-stump, drew myself
+up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and
+all for what? the imperiousness of a whim. The faint moonlight shewed an
+ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid
+seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of
+seaweed. She was a ship of probably 1,500 tons, three-masted, and a
+sailer. I got aft (for I had on thick outer babooshes), and saw that
+only four of the companion-steps remained; by a small leap, however, I
+could descend into that desolation, where the stale sea-stench seemed
+concentrated into a very essence of rankness. Here I experienced a
+singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or
+something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary cabin, with some
+fungoids, skulls, bones and rags, but not one cohering skeleton. In the
+second starboard berth was a small table, and on the floor a thick
+round ink-pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down;
+and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved
+half-open of itself, for it had been wet and stained. This I took, and
+went back to the _Speranza_: for that ship was nothing but an emptiness,
+and a stench of the crude elements of life, nearly assimilated now to
+the rank deep to which she was wedded, and soon to be absorbed into its
+nature and being, to become a sea in little, as I, in time, my God,
+shall be nothing but an earth in little.
+
+During dinner, and after, I read the book, with some difficulty, for it
+was pen-written in French, and discoloured, and it turned out to be the
+journal of someone, a passenger and voyager, I imagine, who called
+himself Albert Tissu, and the ship the _Marie Meyer_. There was nothing
+remarkable in the narrative that I could see--common-place descriptions
+of South Sea scenes, records of weather, cargoes, and the like--till I
+came to the last written page: and that was remarkable enough. It was
+dated the 13th of April--strange thing, my good God, incredibly
+strange--that same day, twenty long years ago, when I reached the Pole;
+and the writing on that page was quite different from the neat look of
+the rest, proving immoderate excitement, wildest haste; and he heads it
+'_Cinq Heures_,'--I suppose in the evening, for he does not say: and he
+writes: 'Monstrous event! phenomenon without likeness! the witnesses of
+which must for ever live immortalised in the annals of the universe, an
+event which will make even Mama, Henri and Juliette admit that I was
+justified in undertaking this most eventful voyage. Talking with Captain
+Tombarel on the poop, when a sudden exclamation from him--"_Mon Dieu!_"
+His visage whitens! I follow the direction of his gaze to eastward! I
+behold! eight kilomètres perhaps away--, _ten monstrous waterspouts_,
+reaching up, up, high enough--all apparently in one straight line, with
+intervals of nine hundred _mètres_, very regularly placed. They do not
+wander, dance, nor waver, as waterspouts do; nor are they at all
+lily-shaped, like waterspouts: but ten hewn pillars of water, with
+uniform diameter from top to bottom, only a little twisted here and
+there, and, as I divine, fifty _mètres_ in girth. Five, ten, stupendous
+minutes we look, Captain Tombarel mechanically repeating and repeating
+under his breath "_Mon Dieu!_" "_Mon Dieu!_" the whole crew now on the
+poop, I agitated, but collected, watch in hand. And suddenly, all is
+blotted out: the pillars of water, doubtless still there, can no more be
+seen: for the ocean all about them is steaming, hissing higher than the
+pillars a dense white vapour, vast in extent, whose venomous sibilation
+we at this distance can quite distinctly hear. It is affrighting, it is
+intolerable! the eyes can hardly bear to watch, the ears to hear! it
+seems unholy travail, monstrous birth! But it lasts not long: all at
+once the _Marie Meyer_ commences to pitch and roll violently, and the
+sea, a moment since calm, is now rough! and at the same time, through
+the white vapour, we see a dark shadow slowly rising--the shadow of a
+mighty back, a new-born land, bearing upwards ten flames of fire,
+slowly, steadily, out of the sea, into the clouds. At the moment when
+that sublime emergence ceases, or seems to cease, the grand thought that
+smites me is this: "I, Albert Tissu, am immortalised: my name shall
+never perish from among men!" I rush down, I write it. The latitude is
+16° 21' 13" South; the longitude 176° 58' 19" West[1]. There is a great
+deal of running about on the decks--they are descending. There is surely
+a strange odour of almonds--I only hope--it is so dark, _mon D_----'
+
+So the Frenchman, Tissu.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: This must be French reckoning, from meridian of Paris.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With all that region I would have no more to do: for all here, it used
+to be said, lies a great sunken continent; and I thought it would be
+rising and shewing itself to my eyes, and driving me stark mad: for the
+earth is full of these contortions, sudden monstrous grimaces and
+apparitions, which are like the face of Medusa, affrighting a man into
+spinning stone; and nothing could be more appallingly insecure than
+living on a planet.
+
+I did not stop till I had got so far northward as the Philippine
+Islands, where I was two weeks--exuberant, odorous places, but so hilly
+and rude, that at one place I abandoned all attempt at travelling in the
+motor, and left it in a valley by a broad, shallow, noisy river, full of
+mossy stones: for I said: 'Here I will live, and be at peace'; and then
+I had a fright, for during three days I could not re-discover the river
+and the motor, and I was in the greatest despair, thinking: 'When shall
+I find my way out of these jungles and vastnesses?' For I was where no
+paths were, and had lost myself in deeps where the lure of the earth is
+too strong and rank for a single man, since in such places, I suppose, a
+man would rapidly be transformed into a tree, or a snake, or a tiger. At
+last, however, I found the place, to my great joy, but I would not shew
+that I was glad, and to hide it, fell upon a front wheel of the car with
+some kicks. I could not make out who the people were that lived here:
+for the relics of some seemed quite black, like New Zealand races, and I
+could still detect the traces of tattooing, while others suggested
+Mongolian types, and some looked like pigmies, and some like whites. But
+I cannot detail the two-years' incidents of that voyage: for it is past,
+and like a dream: and not to write of that--of all that--have I taken
+this pencil in hand after seventeen long, long years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Singular my reluctance to put it on paper. I will write rather of the
+voyage to China, and how I landed the motor on the wharf at Tientsin,
+and went up the river through a maize and rice-land most charming in
+spite of intense cold, I thick with clothes as an Arctic traveller; and
+of the three dreadful earthquakes within two weeks; and how the only map
+which I had of the city gave no indication of the whereabouts of its
+military depositories, and I had to seek for them; and of the three
+days' effort to enter them, for every gate was solid and closed; and how
+I burned it, but had to observe its flames, without deep pleasure, from
+beyond the walls to the south, the whole place being one cursed plain;
+yet how, at one moment, I cried aloud with wild banterings and glad
+laughters of Tophet to that old Chinaman still alive within it; and how
+I coasted, and saw the hairy Ainus, man and woman hairy alike; and how,
+lying one midnight awake in my cabin, the _Speranza_ being in a still
+glassy water under a cliff overhung by drooping trees--it was the
+harbour of Chemulpo--to me lying awake came the thought: 'Suppose now
+you should hear a step walking to and fro, leisurely, on the poop above
+you--_just suppose'_; and the night of horrors which I had, for I could
+not help supposing, and at one time really thought that I heard it: and
+how the sweat rolled and poured from my brow; and how I went to
+Nagasaki, and burned it; and how I crossed over the great Pacific deep
+to San Francisco, for I knew that Chinamen had been there, too, and one
+of them might be alive; and how, one calm day, the 15th or the 16th
+April, I, sitting by the wheel in the mid-Pacific, suddenly saw a great
+white hole that ran and wheeled, and wheeled and ran, in the sea, coming
+toward me, and I was aware of the hot breath of a reeling wind, and then
+of the hot wind itself, which deep-groaned the sound of the letter _V_,
+humming like a billion spinning-tops, and the _Speranza_ was on her
+side, sea pouring over her port-bulwarks, and myself in the corner
+between deck and taffrail, drowning fast, but unable to stir; but all
+was soon past and the white hole in the sea, and the hot spinning-top of
+wind, ran wheeling beyond, to the southern horizon, and the _Speranza_
+righted herself: so that it was clear that someone wished to destroy me,
+for that a typhoon of such vehemence ever blew before I cannot think;
+and how I came to San Francisco, and how I burned it, and had my sweets:
+for it was mine; and how I thought to pass over the great
+trans-continental railway to New York, but would not, fearing to leave
+the _Speranza_, lest all the ships in the harbour there should be
+wrecked, or rusted, and buried under sea-weed, and turned unto the sea;
+and how I went back, my mind all given up now to musings upon the earth
+and her ways, and a thought in my soul that I would return to those deep
+places of the Filipinas, and become an autochthone--a tree, or a snake,
+or a man with snake-limbs, like the old autochthones: but I would not:
+for Heaven was in man, too: Earth and Heaven; and how as I steamed round
+west again, another winter come, and I now in a mood of dismal
+despondencies, on the very brink of the inane abyss and smiling idiotcy,
+I saw in the island of Java the great temple of Boro Budor: and like a
+tornado, or volcanic event, my soul was changed: for my recent studies
+in the architecture of the human race recurred to me with interest, and
+three nights I slept in the temple, examining it by day. It is vast,
+with that look of solid massiveness which above all characterises the
+Japanese and Chinese building, my measurement of its width being 529
+feet, and it rises terrace-like in six stories to a height of about 120
+or 130 feet: here Buddhist and Brahmin forms are combined into a most
+richly-developed whole, with a voluptuousness of tracery that is simply
+intoxicating, each of the five off-sets being divided up into an
+innumerable series of external niches, containing each a statue of the
+sitting Boodh, all surmounted by a number of cupolas, and the whole
+crowned by a magnificent dagop: and when I saw this, I had the impulse
+to return to my home after so long wandering, and to finish the temple
+of temples, and the palace of palaces; and I said: 'I will return, and
+build it as a testimony to God.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Save for a time, near Cairo, I did not once stop on that homeward
+voyage, but turned into the little harbour at Imbros at a tranquil
+sunset on the 7th of March (as I reckon), and I moored the _Speranza_ to
+the ring in the little quay, and I raised the battered motor from the
+hold with the middle air-engine (battered by the typhoon in the
+mid-Pacific, which had broken it from the rope-fastenings and tumbled it
+head-over-heels to port), and I went through the windowless
+village-street, and up through the plantains and cypresses which I knew,
+and the Nile mimosas, and mulberries, and Trebizond palms, and pines,
+and acacias, and fig-trees, till the thicket stopped me, and I had to
+alight: for in those two years the path had finally disappeared; and on,
+on foot, I made my way, till I came to the board-bridge, and leant
+there, and looked at the rill; and thence climbed the steep path in the
+sward toward that rolling table-land where I had built with many a
+groan; and half-way up, I saw the tip of the crane-arm, then the blazing
+top of the south pillar, then the shed-roof, then the platform, a
+blinking blotch of glory to the watery eyes under the setting sun. But
+the tent, and nearly all that it contained, was gone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For four days I would do nothing, simply lying and watching, shirking a
+load so huge: but on the fifth morning I languidly began something: and
+I had not worked an hour, when a fever took me--to finish it, to finish
+it--and it lasted upon me, with only three brief intervals, nearly seven
+years; nor would the end have been so long in coming, but for the
+unexpected difficulty of getting the four flat roofs water-tight, for I
+had to take down half the east one. Finally, I made them of gold slabs
+one-and-a-quarter inch thick, smooth on both sides, on each beam double
+gutters being fixed along each side of the top flange to catch any
+leakage at the joints, which are filled with slaters'-cement. The slabs
+are clamped to the top flanges by steel clips, having bolts set with
+plaster-of-Paris in holes drilled in the slabs. These clips are 1-1/2
+in. by 3/17 in., and are 17 in. apart. The roofs are slightly pitched to
+the front edges, where they drain into gold-plated copper-gutters on
+plated wrought-iron brackets, with one side flashed up over the blocks,
+which raise the slabs from the beam-tops, to clear the joint gutters....
+But now I babble again of that base servitude, which I would forget, but
+cannot: for every measurement, bolt, ring, is in my brain, like a
+burden: but it is past, it is past--and it was vanity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months ago to-day it was finished: six months more protracted,
+desolate, burdened, than all those sixteen years in which I built.
+
+I wonder what a man--another man--some Shah, or Tsar, of that far-off
+past, would say now of me, if eye could rest upon me! With what awe
+would he certainly shrink before the wild majesty of these eyes; and
+though I am not lunatic--for I am not, I am not--how would he fly me
+with the exclamation: 'There is the very lunacy of Pride!'
+
+For there would seem to him--it must be so--in myself, in all about me,
+something extravagantly royal, touched with terror. My body has
+fattened, and my girth now fills out to a portly roundness its broad
+Babylonish girdle of crimson cloth, minutely gold-embroidered, and hung
+with silver, copper and gold coins of the Orient; my beard, still black,
+sweeps in two divergent sheaves to my hips, flustered by every wind; as
+I walk through this palace, the amber-and-silver floor reflects in its
+depths my low-necked, short-armed robe of purple, blue, and scarlet,
+a-glow with luminous stones. I am ten times crowned Lord and Emperor; I
+sit a hundred times enthroned in confirmed, obese old Majesty. Challenge
+me who will--challenge me who dare! Among those myriad worlds upon which
+I nightly pore, I may have my Peers and Compeers and Fellow-denizens ...
+but _here_ I am Sole; Earth acknowledges my ancient sway and hereditary
+sceptre: for though she draws me, not yet, not yet, am I hers, but she
+is mine. It seems to me not less than a million million aeons since
+other beings, more or less resembling me, walked impudently in the open
+sunlight on this planet, which is rightly mine--I can indeed no longer
+picture to myself, nor even credit, that such a state of things--so
+fantastic, so far-fetched, so infinitely droll--could have existed:
+though, at bottom, I suppose, I know that it must have been really so.
+Up to ten years ago, in fact, I used frequently to dream that there were
+others. I would see them walk in the streets like ghosts, and be
+troubled, and start awake: but never now could such a thing, I think,
+occur to me in sleep: for the wildness of the circumstance would
+certainly strike my consciousness, and immediately I should know that
+the dream was a dream. For now, at least, I am sole, I am lord. The
+golden walls of this palace which I have built look down, enamoured of
+their reflection, into a lake of the choicest, purplest wine.
+
+Not that I made it of wine because wine is rare; nor the walls of gold
+because gold is rare: that would have been too childish: but because I
+would match for beauty a human work with the works of those Others: and
+because it happens, by some persistent freak of the earth, that
+precisely things most rare and costly are generally the most beautiful.
+
+The vision of glorious loveliness which is this palace now risen before
+my eyes cannot be described by pen and paper, though there _may_ be
+words in the lexicons of language which, if I sought for them with
+inspired wit for sixteen years, as I have built for sixteen years, might
+as vividly express my thought on paper, as the stones-of-gold, so
+grouped and built, express it to the eye: but, failing such labours and
+skill, I suppose I could not give, if there were another man, and I
+tried to give, the faintest conception of its celestial charm.
+
+It is a structure positively as clear as the sun, and as fair as the
+moon--the sole great human work in the making of which no restraining
+thought of cost has played a part: one of its steps alone being of more
+cost than all the temples, mosques and besestins, the palaces, pagodas
+and cathedrals, built between the ages of the Nimrods and the Napoleons.
+
+The house itself is very small--only 40 ft. long, by 35 broad, by 27
+high: yet the structure as a whole is sufficiently enormous, high
+uplifted: the rest of the bulk being occupied by the platform, on which
+the house stands, each side of this measuring at its base 480 ft., its
+height from top to bottom 130 ft, and its top 48 ft. square, the
+elevation of the steps being just nearly 30 degrees, and the top reached
+from each of the four points of the compass by 183 low long steps, very
+massively overlaid with smooth molten gold--not forming a continuous
+flight, but broken into threes and fives, sixes and nines, with landings
+between the series, these from the top looking like a great terraced
+parterre of gold. It is thus an Assyrian palace in scheme: only that the
+platform has steps on all sides, instead of on one. The platform-top,
+from its edge to the golden walls of the house, is a mosaic consisting
+of squares of the glassiest clarified gold, and squares of the glassiest
+jet, corner to corner, each square 2 ft. wide. Around the edge of the
+platform on top run 48 square plain gold pilasters, 12 on each side, 2
+ft. high, tapering upwards, and topped by a knob of solid gold, pierced
+with a hole through which passes a lax inch-and-a-half silver chain,
+hung with little silver balls which strike together in the breeze. The
+mansion consists of an outer court, facing east toward the sea, and the
+house proper, which encloses an inner court. The outer court is a hollow
+oblong 32 ft. wide by 8 ft. long, the summit of its three walls being
+battlemented; they are 18-1/2 ft. in height, or 8-1/2 ft. lower than the
+house; around their gold sides, on inside and outside, 3 ft. from the
+top, runs a plain flat band of silver, 1 ft. wide, projecting 2/3 in.,
+and at the gate, which is a plain Egyptian entrance, facing eastwards,
+2-1/2 ft. narrower at top than at bottom, stand the two great square
+pillars of massive plain gold, tapering upwards, 45 ft. high, with their
+capital of band, closed lotus, and thin plinth; in the outer court,
+immediately opposite the gate, is an oblong well, 12 ft. by 3 ft,
+reproducing in little the shape of the court, its sides, which are
+gold-lined, tapering downward to near the bottom of the platform, where
+a conduit of 1/8 in. diameter automatically replenishes the ascertained
+mean evaporation of the lake during the year, the well containing
+105,360 litres when nearly full, and the lake occupying a circle round
+the platform of 980 ft. diameter, with a depth of 3-1/2 ft. Round the
+well run pilasters connected by silver chains with little balls, and it
+communicates by a 1/8 in. conduit with a pool of wine let into the inner
+court, this being fed from eight tall and narrow golden tanks, tapering
+upwards, which surround it, each containing a different red wine,
+sufficient on the whole to last for all purposes during my lifetime. The
+ground of the outer court is also a mosaic of jet and gold: but
+thenceforth the jet-squares give place throughout to squares of silver,
+and the gold-squares to squares of clear amber, clear as solidified oil.
+The entrance is by an Egyptian doorway 7 ft. high, with folding-doors of
+gold-plated cedar, opening inwards, surrounded by a very large
+projecting coping of plain silver, 3-1/2 ft. wide, severe simplicity of
+line throughout enormously multiplying the effect of richness of
+material. The interior resembles, I believe, rather a Homeric, than an
+Assyrian or Egyptian house--except for the 'galleries,' which are purely
+Babylonish and Old Hebrew. The inner court, with its wine-pool and
+tanks, is a small oblong of 8 ft. by 9 ft., upon which open four
+silver-latticed window-oblongs in the same proportion, and two doors,
+before and behind, oblongs in the same proportion. Round this run the
+eight walls of the house proper, the inner 10 ft. from the outer, each
+parallel two forming a single long corridor-like chamber, except the
+front (east) two, which are divided into three apartments; in each side
+of the house are six panels of massive plain silver, half-an-inch
+thinner in their central space, where are affixed paintings, 22 or else
+21 taken at the burning of Paris from a place called 'The Louvre,' and 2
+or else 3 from a place in England: so that the panels have the look of
+frames, and are surrounded by oval garlands of the palest amethyst,
+topaz, sapphire, and turquoise which I could find, each garland being of
+only one kind of stone, a mere oval ring two feet wide at the sides and
+narrowing to an inch at the top and bottom, without designs. The
+galleries are five separate recesses in the outer walls under the roofs,
+two in the east façade, and one in the north, south, and west, hung with
+pavilions of purple, blue, rose and white silk on rings and rods of
+gold, with gold pilasters and banisters, each entered by four steps from
+the roof, to which lead, north and south, two spiral stairs of cedar. On
+the east roof stands the kiosk, under which is the little lunar
+telescope; and from that height, and from the galleries, I can watch
+under the bright moonlight of this climate, which is very like
+lime-light, the for-ever silent blue hills of Macedonia, and where the
+islands of Samothraki, Lemnos, Tenedos slumber like purplish fairies on
+the Aegean Sea: for, usually, I sleep during the day, and keep a
+night-long vigil, often at midnight descending to bathe my coloured
+baths in the lake, and to disport myself in that strange intoxication of
+nostrils, eyes, and pores, dreaming long wide-eyed dreams at the bottom,
+to return dazed, and weak, and drunken. Or again--_twice_ within these
+last void and idle six months--I have suddenly run, bawling out, from
+this temple of luxury, tearing off my gaudy rags, to hide in a hut by
+the shore, smitten for one intense moment with realisation of the past
+of this earth, and moaning: 'alone, alone ... all alone, alone, alone
+... alone, alone....' For events precisely resembling eruptions take
+place in my brain; and one spangled midnight--ah, how spangled!--I may
+kneel on the roof with streaming, uplifted face, with outspread arms,
+and awe-struck heart, adoring the Eternal: the next, I may strut like a
+cock, wanton as sin, lusting to burn a city, to wallow in filth, and,
+like the Babylonian maniac, calling myself the equal of Heaven.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it was not to write of this--of all this--!
+
+Of the furnishing of the palace I have written nothing.... But why I
+hesitate to admit to myself what I _know_, is not clear. If They speak
+to me, I may surely write of Them: for I do not fear Them, but am Their
+peer.
+
+Of the island I have written nothing: its size, climate, form,
+vegetation.... There are two winds: a north and a south wind; the north
+is cool, and the south is warm; and the south blows during the winter
+months, so that sometimes on Christmas-day it is quite hot; and the
+north, which is cool, blows from May to September, so that the summer is
+hardly ever oppressive, and the climate was made for a king. The
+mangal-stove in the south hall I have never once lit.
+
+The length, I should say, is 19 miles; the breadth 10, or thereabouts;
+and the highest mountains should reach a height of some 2,000 ft.,
+though I have not been all over it. It is very densely wooded in most
+parts, and I have seen large growths of wheat and barley, obviously
+degenerate now, with currants, figs, valonia, tobacco, vines in rank
+abundance, and two marble quarries. From the palace, which lies on a
+sunny plateau of beautifully-sloping swards, dotted with the circular
+shadows thrown by fifteen huge cedars, and seven planes, I can see on
+all sides an edge of forest, with the gleam of a lake to the north, and
+in the hollow to the east the rivulet with its little bridge, and a few
+clumps and beds of flowers. I can also spy right through----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It shall be written now:
+
+I have this day heard within me the contention of the Voices.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I thought that they were done with me! That all, all, all, was ended! I
+have not heard them for twenty years!
+
+But to-day--distinctly--breaking in with brawling impassioned
+suddenness upon my consciousness.... I heard.
+
+This late _far niente_ and vacuous inaction here have been undermining
+my spirit; this inert brooding upon the earth; this empty life, and
+bursting brain! Immediately after eating at noon to-day, I said to
+myself:
+
+'I have been duped by the palace: for I have wasted myself in building,
+hoping for peace, and there is no peace. Therefore now I shall fly from
+it, to another, sweeter work--not of building, but of destroying--not of
+Heaven, but of Hell--not of self-denial, but of reddest orgy.
+Constantinople--beware!' I tossed the chair aside, and with a stamp was
+on my feet: and as I stood--again, again--I heard: the startlingly
+sudden wrangle, the fierce, vulgar outbreak and voluble controversy,
+till my consciousness could not hear its ears: and one urged: 'Go! go!'
+and the other: 'Not there...! where you like, ... but not there...! for
+your life!'
+
+I did not--for I could not--go: I was so overcome. I fell upon the couch
+shivering.
+
+These Voices, or impulses, plainly as I felt them of old, quarrel within
+me now with an openness new to them. Lately, influenced by my long
+scientific habit of thought, I have occasionally wondered whether what I
+used to call 'the two Voices' were not in reality two strong
+instinctive movements, such as most men may have felt, though with less
+force. But to-day doubt is past, doubt is past: nor, unless I be very
+mad, can I ever doubt again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been thinking, thinking of my life: there is a something which I
+cannot understand.
+
+There was a man whom I met once in that dark backward and abysm of time,
+when I must have been very young--I fancy at some college or school in
+England, and his name now is far enough beyond scope of my memory, lost
+in the vast limbo of past things. But he used to talk continually about
+certain 'Black' and 'White' Powers, and of their strife for this world.
+He was a short man with a Roman nose, and lived in fear of growing a
+paunch. His forehead a-top, in profile, was more prominent than the
+nose-end, he parted his hair in the middle, and had the theory that the
+male form was more beautiful than the female. I forget what his name
+was--the dim clear-obscure being. Very profound was the effect of his
+words upon me, though, I think, I used to make a point of slighting
+them. This man always declared that 'the Black' would carry off the
+victory in the end: and so he has, so he has.
+
+But assuming the existence of this 'Black' and this 'White' being--and
+supposing it to be a fact that my reaching the Pole had any connection
+with the destruction of my race, according to the notions of that
+extraordinary Scotch parson--then it must have been the power of '_the
+Black_' which carried me, in spite of all obstacles, to the Pole. So far
+I can understand.
+
+But _after_ I had reached the Pole, what further use had either White or
+Black for me? Which was it--White or Black--that preserved my life
+through my long return on the ice--and _why_? It _could_ not have been
+'the Black'! For I readily divine that from the moment when I touched
+the Pole, the only desire of the Black, which had previously preserved,
+must have been to destroy me, with the rest. It must have been 'the
+White,' then, that led me back, retarding me long, so that I should not
+enter the poison-cloud, and then openly presenting me the _Boreal_ to
+bring me home to Europe. But his motive? And the significance of these
+recommencing wrangles, after such a silence? This I do not understand!
+
+Curse Them, curse Them, with their mad tangles! I care nothing for Them!
+Are there any White Idiots and Black Idiots--_at all_? Or are these
+Voices that I hear nothing but the cries of my own strained nerves, and
+I all mad and morbid, morbid and mad, mad, my good God?
+
+This inertia here is _not good_ for me! This stalking about the palace!
+and long thinkings about Earth and Heaven, Black and White, White and
+Black, and things beyond the stars! My brain is like bursting through
+the walls of my poor head.
+
+To-morrow, then, to Constantinople.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Descending to go to the ship, I had almost reached the middle of the
+east platform-steps, when my foot slipped on the smooth gold: and the
+fall, though I was not walking carelessly, had, I swear, all the
+violence of a fall caused by a push. I struck my head, and, as I rolled
+downward, swooned. When I came to myself, I was lying on the very bottom
+step, which is thinly washed by the wine-waves: another roll and I
+suppose I must have drowned. I sat there an hour, lost in amazement,
+then crossed the causeway, came down to the _Speransa_ with the motor,
+went through her, spent the day in work, slept on her, worked again
+to-day, till four, at both ship and time-fuses (I with only 700 fuses
+left, and in Stamboul alone must be 8,000 houses, without counting
+Galata, Tophana, Kassim-pacha, Scutari, and the rest), started out at
+5.30, and am now at 11 P.M. lying motionless two miles off the north
+coast of the island of Marmora, with moonlight gloating on the water, a
+faint north breeze, and the little pale land looking immensely
+stretched-out, solemn and great, as if that were the world, and there
+were nothing else; and the tiny island at its end immense, and the
+_Speranza_ vast, and I only little. To-morrow at 11 A.M. I will moor the
+_Speranza_ in the Golden Horn at the spot where there is that low damp
+nook of the bagnio behind the naval magazines and that hill where the
+palace of the Capitan Pacha is.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found that great tangle of ships in the Golden Horn wonderfully
+preserved, many with hardly any moss-growths. This must be due, I
+suppose, to the little Ali-Bey and Kezat-Hanah, which flow into the Horn
+at the top, and made no doubt a constant current.
+
+Ah, I remember the place: long ago I lived here some months, or, it may
+be, years. It is the fairest of cities--and the greatest. I believe that
+London in England was larger: but no city, surely, ever _seemed_ so
+large. But it is flimsy, and will burn like tinder. The houses are made
+of light timber, with interstices filled by earth and bricks, and some
+of them look ruinous already, with their lovely faded tints of green
+and gold and red and blue and yellow, like the hues of withered flowers:
+for it is a city of paints and trees, and all in the little winding
+streets, as I write, are volatile almond-blossoms, mixed with
+maple-blossoms, white with purple. Even the most splendid of the
+Sultan's palaces are built in this combustible way: for I believe that
+they had a notion that stone-building was presumptuous, though I have
+seen some very thick stone-houses in Galata. This place, I remember,
+lived in a constant state of sensation on account of nightly flares-up;
+and I have come across several tracts already devastated by fires. The
+ministers-of-state used to attend them, and if the fire would not go
+out, the Sultan himself was obliged to be there, in order to encourage
+the firemen. Now it will burn still better.
+
+But I have been here six weeks, and still no burning: for the place
+seems to plead with me, it is so ravishing, so that I do not know why I
+did not live here, and spare my toils during those sixteen nightmare
+years; for two whole weeks the impulse to burn was quieted; and since
+then there has been an irritating whisper at my ear which said: 'It is
+not really like the great King that you are, this burning, but like a
+foolish child, or a savage, who liked to see fireworks: or at least, if
+you must burn, do not burn poor Constantinople, which is so charming,
+and so very old, with its balsamic perfumes, and the blossomy trees of
+white and light-purple peeping over the walls of the cloistered painted
+houses, and all those lichened tombs--those granite menhirs and regions
+of ancient marble tombs between the quarters, Greek tombs, Byzantine,
+Jew, Mussulman tombs, with their strange and sacred
+inscriptions--overwaved by their cypresses and vast plane-trees.' And
+for weeks I would do nothing: but roamed about, with two minds in me,
+under the tropic brilliance of the sky by day, and the vast dreamy
+nights of this place that are like nights seen through azure-tinted
+glasses, and in each of them is not one night, but the thousand-and-one
+long crowded nights of glamour and fancy: for I would sit on the immense
+esplanade of the Seraskierat, or the mighty grey stones of the porch of
+the mosque of Sultan Mehmed-fatih, dominating from its great steps all
+old Stamboul, and watch the moon for hours and hours, so passionately
+bright she soared through clear and cloud, till I would be smitten with
+doubt of my own identity, for whether I were she, or the earth, or
+myself, or some other thing or man, I did not know, all being so silent
+alike, and all, except myself, so vast, the Seraskierat, and the
+Suleimanieh, and Stamboul, and the Marmora Sea, and the earth, and
+those argent fields of the moon, all large alike compared with me, and
+measure and space were lost, and I with them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+These proud Turks died stolidly, many of them. In streets of
+Kassim-pacha, in crowded Taxim on the heights of Pera, and under the
+long Moorish arcades of Sultan-Selim, I have seen the open-air barber's
+razor with his bones, and with him the half-shaved skull of the
+faithful, and the long two-hours' narghile with traces of burnt tembaki
+and haschish still in the bowl. Ashes now are they all, and dry yellow
+bone; but in the houses of Phanar and noisy old Galata, and in the Jew
+quarter of Pri-pacha, the black shoe and head-dress of the Greek is
+still distinguishable from the Hebrew blue. It was a mixed ritual of
+colours here in boot and hat: yellow for Mussulman, red boots, black
+calpac for Armenian, for the Effendi a white turban, for the Greek a
+black. The Tartar skull shines from under a high taper calpac, the
+Nizain-djid's from a melon-shaped head-piece; the Imam's and Dervish's
+from a grey conical felt; and there is here and there a Frank in
+European rags. I have seen the towering turban of the Bashi-bazouk, and
+his long sword, and some softas in the domes on the great wall of
+Stamboul, and the beggar, and the street-merchant with large tray of
+water-melons, sweetmeats, raisins, sherbet, and the bear-shewer, and the
+Barbary organ, and the night-watchman who evermore cried 'Fire!' with
+his long lantern, two pistols, dirk, and wooden javelin. Strange how all
+that old life has come back to my fancy now, pretty vividly, and for the
+first time, though I have been here several times lately. I have gone
+out to those plains beyond the walls with their view of rather barren
+mountain-peaks, the city looking nothing but minarets shooting through
+black cypress-tops, and I seemed to see the wild muezzin at some summit,
+crying the midday prayer: '_Mohammed Resoul Allah!_'--the wild man; and
+from that great avenue of cypresses which traverses the cemetery of
+Scutari, the walled city of Stamboul lay spread entire up to Phanar and
+Eyoub in their cypress-woods before me, the whole embowered now in
+trees, all that complexity of ways and dark alleys with overhanging
+balconies of old Byzantine houses, beneath which a rider had to stoop
+the head, where old Turks would lose their way in mazes of the
+picturesque; and on the shaded Bosphorus coast, to Foundoucli and
+beyond, some peeping yali, snow-white palace, or old Armenian cot; and
+the Seraglio by the sea, a town within a town; and southward the Sea of
+Marmora, blue-and-white, and vast, and fresh as a sea just born,
+rejoicing at its birth and at the jovial sun, all brisk, alert, to the
+shadowy islands afar: and as I looked, I suddenly said aloud a wild, mad
+thing, my God, a wild and maniac thing, a shrieking maniac thing for
+Hell to laugh at: for something said with my tongue: '_This city is not
+quite dead._'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three nights I slept in Stamboul itself at the palace of some sanjak-bey
+or emir, or rather dozed, with one slumbrous eye that would open to
+watch my visitors Sinbad, and Ali Baba, and old Haroun, to see how they
+slumbered and dozed: for it was in the small luxurious chamber where the
+bey received those speechless all-night visits of the Turks, long rosy
+hours of perfumed romance, and drunkenness of the fancy, and visionary
+languor, sinking toward morning into the yet deeper peace of dreamless
+sleep; and there, still, were the white _yatags_ for the guests to sit
+cross-legged on for the waking dream, and to fall upon for the final
+swoon, and the copper brazier still scenting of essence-of-rose, and the
+cushions, rugs, hangings, the monsters on the wall, the
+haschish-chibouques, narghiles, hookahs, and drugged pale cigarettes,
+and a secret-looking lattice beyond the door, painted with trees and
+birds; and the air narcotic and grey with the pastilles which I had
+burned, and the scented smokes which I had smoked; and I all drugged and
+mumbling, my left eye suspicious of Ali there, and Sinbad, and old
+Haroun, who dozed. And when I had slept, and rose to wash in a room near
+the overhanging latticed balcony of the façade, before me to the north
+lay old Galata in sunshine, and that steep large street mounting to
+Pera, once full at every night-fall of divans on which grave dervishes
+smoked narghiles, and there was no space for passage, for all was
+divans, lounges, almond-trees, heaven-high hum, chibouques in forests,
+the dervish, and the innumerable porter, the horse-hirer with his horse
+from Tophana, and arsenal-men from Kassim, and traders from Galata, and
+artillery-workmen from Tophana; and on the other side of the house, the
+south end, a covered bridge led across a street, which consisted mostly
+of two immense blind walls, into a great tangled wilderness of flowers,
+which was the harem-garden, where I passed some hours; and here I might
+have remained many days, many weeks perhaps, but that, dozing one
+fore-day with those fancied others, it was as if there occurred a laugh
+somewhere, and a thing said: 'But this city is not quite dead!' waking
+me from deeps of peace to startled wakefulness. And I thought to myself:
+'If it be not quite dead, it _will_ be soon--and with some suddenness!'
+And the next morning I was at the Arsenal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is long since I have so deeply enjoyed, even to the marrow. It may be
+'the White' who has the guardianship of my life: but assuredly it is
+'the Black' who reigns in my soul.
+
+Grandly did old Stamboul, Galata, Tophana, Kassim, right out beyond the
+walls to Phanar and Eyoub, blaze and burn. The whole place, except one
+little region of Galata, was like so much tinder, and in the five hours
+between 8 P.M. and 1 A.M. all was over. I saw the tops of those vast
+masses of cemetery-cypresses round the tombs of the Osmanlis outside the
+walls, and those in the cemetery of Kassim, and those round the sacred
+mosque of Eyoub, shrivel away instantaneously, like flimsy hair caught
+by a flame; I saw the Genoese tower of Galata go heading obliquely on an
+upward curve, like Sir Roger de Coverley and wild rockets, and burst
+high, high, with a report; in pairs, and threes, and fours, I saw the
+blue cupolas of the twelve or fourteen great mosques give in and
+subside, or soar and rain, and the great minarets nod the head, and
+topple; and I saw the flames reach out and out across the empty breadth
+of the Etmeidan--three hundred yards--to the six minarets of the Mosque
+of Achmet, wrapping the red Egyptian-granite obelisk in the centre; and
+across the breadth of the Serai-Meidani it reached to the buildings of
+the Seraglio and the Sublime Porte; and across those vague barren
+stretches that lie between the houses and the great wall; and across the
+seventy or eighty great arcaded bazaars, all-enwrapping, it reached; and
+the spirit of fire grew upon me: for the Golden Horn itself was a tongue
+of fire, crowded, west of the galley-harbour, with exploding
+battleships, Turkish frigates, corvettes, brigs--and east, with tens of
+thousands of feluccas, caiques, gondolas and merchantmen aflame. On my
+left burned all Scutari; and between six and eight in the evening I had
+sent out thirty-seven vessels under low horse-powers of air, with trains
+and fuses laid for 11 P.M., to light with their wandering fires the Sea
+of Marmora. By midnight I was encompassed in one great furnace and fiery
+gulf, all the sea and sky inflamed, and earth a-flare. Not far from me
+to the left I saw the vast Tophana barracks of the Cannoniers, and the
+Artillery-works, after long reluctance and delay, take wing together;
+and three minutes later, down by the water, the barrack of the
+Bombardiers and the Military School together, grandly, grandly; and
+then, to the right, in the valley of Kassim, the Arsenal: these
+occupying the sky like smoky suns, and shedding a glaring day over many
+a mile of sea and land; I saw the two lines of ruddier flaring where the
+barge-bridge and the raft-bridge over the Golden Horn made haste to
+burn; and all that vastness burned with haste, quicker and quicker--to
+fervour--to fury--to unanimous rabies: and when its red roaring stormed
+the infinite, and the might of its glowing heart was Gravitation, Being,
+Sensation, and I its compliant wife--then my head nodded, and with
+crooked lips I sighed as it were my last sigh, and tumbled, weak and
+drunken, upon my face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+O wild Providence! Unfathomable madness of Heaven! that ever I should
+write what now I write! I will not write it....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hissing of it! It is only a crazy dream! a tearing-out of the hair
+by the roots to scatter upon the raving storms of Saturn! My hand will
+not write it!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In God's name----! During four nights after the burning I slept in a
+house--French as I saw by the books, &c., probably the Ambassador's, for
+it has very large gardens and a beautiful view over the sea, situated on
+the rapid east declivity of Pera; it is one of the few large houses
+which, for my safety, I had left standing round the minaret whence I had
+watched, this minaret being at the top of the old Mussulman quarter on
+the heights of Taxim, between Pera proper and Foundoucli. At the bottom,
+both at the quay of Foundoucli, and at that of Tophana, I had left under
+shelter two caiques for double safety, one a Sultan's gilt craft, with
+gold spur at the prow, and one a boat of those zaptias that used to
+patrol the Golden Horn as water-police: by one or other of these I meant
+to reach the _Speranza_, she being then safely anchored some distance up
+the Bosphorus coast. So, on the fifth morning I set out for the Tophana
+quay; but a light rain had fallen over-night, and this had re-excited
+the thin grey smoke resembling quenched steam, which, as from some
+reeking province of Abaddon, still trickled upward over many a square
+mile of blackened tract, though of flame I could see no sign. I had not
+accordingly advanced far over every sort of _débris_, when I found my
+eyes watering, my throat choked, and my way almost blocked by roughness:
+whereupon I said: 'I will turn back, cross the region of tombs and
+barren waste behind Pera, descend the hill, get the zaptia boat at the
+Foundoucli quay, and so reach the _Speranza_.'
+
+Accordingly, I made my way out of the region of smoke, passed beyond the
+limits of smouldering ruin and tomb, and soon entered a rich woodland,
+somewhat scorched at first, but soon green and flourishing as the
+jungle. This cooled and soothed me, and being in no hurry to reach the
+ship, I was led on and on, in a somewhat north-western direction, I
+fancy. Somewhere hereabouts, I thought, was the place they called 'The
+Sweet Waters,' and I went on with the vague notion of coming upon them,
+thinking to pass the day, till afternoon, in the forest. Here nature, in
+only twenty years has returned to an exuberant savagery, and all was now
+the wildest vegetation, dark dells, rills wimpling through deep-brown
+shade of sensitive mimosa, large pendulous fuchsia, palm, cypress,
+mulberry, jonquil, narcissus, daffodil, rhododendron, acacia, fig. Once
+I stumbled upon a cemetery of old gilt tombs, absolutely overgrown and
+lost, and thrice caught glimpses of little trellised yalis choked in
+boscage. With slow and listless foot I went, munching an almond or an
+olive, though I could swear that olives were not formerly indigenous to
+any soil so northern: yet here they are now, pretty plentiful, though
+elementary, so that modifications whose end I cannot see are certainly
+proceeding in everything, some of the cypresses which I met that day
+being immense beyond anything I ever heard of: and the thought, I
+remember, was in my head, that if a twig or leaf should change into a
+bird, or a fish with wings, and fly before my eyes, what then should I
+do? and I would eye a branch suspiciously anon. After a long time I
+penetrated into a very sombre grove. The day outside the wood was
+brilliant and hot, and very still, the leaves and flowers here all
+motionless. I seemed, as it were, to hear the vacant silence of the
+world, and my foot treading on a twig, produced the report of pistols. I
+presently reached a glade in a thicket, about eight yards across, that
+had a scent of lime and orange, where the just-sufficient twilight
+enabled me to see some old bones, three skulls, and the edge of a
+tam-tam peeping from a tuft of wild corn with corn-flowers, and here and
+there some golden champac, and all about a profusion of musk-roses. I
+had stopped--_why_ I do not recollect--perhaps thinking that if I was
+not getting to the Sweet Waters, I should seriously set about finding my
+way out. And as I stood looking about me, I remember that some cruising
+insect trawled near my ear its lonely drone.
+
+Suddenly, God knows, I started, I started.
+
+I imagined--I dreamed--that I saw a pressure in a bed of moss and
+violets, _recently made!_ And while I stood gloating upon that
+impossible thing, I imagined--I dreamed--the lunacy of it!--that I heard
+a laugh...! the laugh, my good God, of a human soul.
+
+Or it seemed half a laugh, and half a sob: and it passed from me in one
+fleeting instant.
+
+Laughs, and sobs, and idiot hallucinations, I had often heard before,
+feet walking, sounds behind me: and even as I had heard them, I had
+known that they were nothing. But brief as was this impression, it was
+yet so thrillingly _real_, that my poor heart received, as it were, the
+very shock of death, and I fell backward into a mass of moss, supported
+on the right palm, while the left pressed my working bosom; and there,
+toiling to catch my breath, I lay still, all my soul focussed into my
+ears. But now I could hear no sound, save only the vast and audible hum
+of the silence of the universe.
+
+
+There was, however, the foot-print. If my eye and ear should so
+conspire against me, that, I thought, was hard.
+
+Still I lay, still, in that same pose, without a stir, sick and
+dry-mouthed, infirm and languishing, with dying breaths: but keen,
+keen--and malign.
+
+I would wait, I said to myself, I would be artful as snakes, though so
+woefully sick and invalid: I would make no sound....
+
+After some minutes I became conscious that my eyes were leering--leering
+in one fixed direction: and instantly, the mere fact that I had a sense
+of direction proved to me that I must, _in truth_, have heard something!
+I strove--I managed--to raise myself: and as I stood upright, feebly
+swaying there, not the terrors of death alone were in my breast, but the
+authority of the monarch was on my brow.
+
+I moved: I found the strength.
+
+Slow step by slow step, with daintiest noiselessness, I moved to a
+thread of moss that from the glade passed into the thicket, and along
+its winding way I stepped, in the direction of the sound. Now my ears
+caught the purling noise of a brooklet, and following the moss-path, I
+was led into a mass of bush only two or three feet higher than my head.
+Through this, prowling like a stealthy cat, I wheedled my painful way,
+emerged upon a strip of open long-grass, and now was faced, three yards
+before me, by a wall of acacia-trees, prickly-pear and pichulas, between
+which and a forest beyond I spied a gleam of running water.
+
+On hands and knees I crept toward the acacia-thicket, entered it a
+little, and leaning far forward, peered. And there--at once--ten yards
+to my right--I saw.
+
+Singular to say, my agitation, instead of intensifying to the point of
+apoplexy and death, now, at the actual sight, subsided to something very
+like calmness. With malign and sullen eye askance I stood, and steadily
+I watched her there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was on her knees, her palms lightly touching the ground, supporting
+her. At the edge of the streamlet she knelt, and she was looking with a
+species of startled shy astonishment at the reflexion of her face in the
+limpid brown water. And I, with sullen eye askance regarded her a good
+ten minutes' space.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I believe that her momentary laugh and sob, which I had heard, was the
+result of surprise at seeing her own image; and I firmly believe, from
+the expression of her face, that this was the first time that she had
+seen it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Never, I thought, as I stood moodily gazing, had I seen on the earth a
+creature so fair (though, analysing now at leisure, I can quite conclude
+that there was nothing at all remarkable about her good looks). Her
+hair, somewhat lighter than auburn, and frizzy, was a real garment to
+her nakedness, covering her below the hips, some strings of it falling,
+too, into the water: her eyes, a dark blue, were wide in a most silly
+expression of bewilderment. Even as I eyed and eyed her, she slowly
+rose: and at once I saw in all her manner an air of unfamiliarity with
+the world, as of one wholly at a loss what to do. Her pupils did not
+seem accustomed to light; and I could swear that that was the first day
+in which she had seen a tree or a stream.
+
+Her age appeared eighteen or twenty. I guessed that she was of
+Circassian blood, or, at least, origin. Her skin was whitey-brown, or
+old ivory-white.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She stood up motionless, at a loss. She took a lock of her hair, and
+drew it through her lips. There was some look in her eyes, which I
+could plainly see now, somehow indicating wild hunger, though the wood
+was full of food. After letting go her hair, she stood again feckless
+and imbecile, with sideward-hung head, very pitiable to see I think now,
+though no faintest pity touched me then. It was clear that she did not
+at all know what to make of the look of things. Finally, she sat on a
+moss-bank, reached and took a musk-rose on her palm, and looked
+hopelessly at it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One minute after my first actual sight of her my extravagance of
+agitation, I say, died down to something like calm. The earth was mine
+by old right: I felt that: and this creature a mere slave upon whom,
+without heat or haste, I might perform my will: and for some time I
+stood, coolly enough considering what that will should be.
+
+I had at my girdle the little cangiar, with silver handle encrusted with
+coral, and curved blade six inches long, damascened in gold, and sharp
+as a razor; the blackest and the basest of all the devils of the Pit was
+whispering in my breast with calm persistence: 'Kill, kill--and eat.'
+
+_Why_ I should have killed her I do not know. That question I now ask
+myself. It must be true, true that it is '_not good_' for man to be
+alone. There was a religious sect in the Past which called itself
+'Socialist': and with these must have been the truth, man being at his
+best and highest when most social, and at his worst and lowest when
+isolated: for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and
+makes it fierce, base, and materialistic, like sultans, aristocracies,
+and the like: but Heaven is where two or three are gathered together. It
+may be so: I do not know, nor care. But I know that after twenty years
+of solitude on a planet the human soul is more enamoured of solitude
+than of life, shrinking like a tender nerve from the rough intrusion of
+Another into the secret realm of Self: and hence, perhaps, the
+bitterness with which solitary castes, Brahmins, patricians,
+aristocracies, always resisted any attempt to invade their
+slowly-acquired domain of privileges. Also, it may be true, it may, it
+may, that after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes,
+without suspecting it--not at all noticing the slow stages--a real and
+true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling, like that King of
+Babylon, his nails like birds' claws, and his hair like eagles'
+feathers, with instincts all inflamed and fierce, delighting in
+darkness and crime for their own sake. I do not know, nor care: but I
+know that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all the
+devils was whispering me, tongue in cheek: 'Kill, kill--and be merry.'
+
+With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve
+of the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her through
+the wall of bush, the knife behind my back. Once only there was a
+restraint, a check: I felt myself held back: I had to stop: for one of
+the ends of my divided beard had caught in a limb of prickly-pear.
+
+I set to disentangling it: and it was, I believe, at the moment of
+succeeding that I first noticed the state of the sky, a strip of which I
+could see across the rivulet: a minute or so before it had been pretty
+clear, but now was busy with hurrying clouds. It was a sinister
+muttering of thunder which had made me glance upward.
+
+When my eyes returned to the sitting figure, she was looking foolishly
+about the sky with an expression which almost proved that she had never
+before heard that sound of thunder, or at least had no idea what it
+could bode. My fixed regard lost not one of her movements, while inch by
+inch, not breathing, careful as the poise of a balance, I crawled. And
+suddenly, with a rush, I was out in the open, running her down....
+
+She leapt: perhaps two, perhaps three, paces she fled: then stock still
+she stood--within some four yards of me--with panting nostrils, with
+enquiring face.
+
+I saw it all in one instant, and in one instant all was over. I had not
+checked the impetus of my run at her stoppage, and I was on the point of
+reaching her with uplifted knife, when I was suddenly checked and
+smitten by a stupendous violence: a flash of blinding light, attracted
+by the steel which I held, struck tingling through my frame, and at the
+same time the most passionate crash of thunder that ever shocked a poor
+human ear felled me to the ground. The cangiar, snatched from my hand,
+fell near the girl's foot.
+
+I did not entirely lose consciousness, though, surely, the Powers no
+longer hide themselves from me, and their close contact is too
+intolerably rough and vigorous for a poor mortal man. During, I should
+think, three or four minutes, I lay so astounded under that bullying cry
+of wrath, that I could not move a finger. When at last I did sit up, the
+girl was standing near me, with a sort of smile, holding out to me the
+cangiar in a pouring rain.
+
+I took it from her, and my doddering fingers dropped it into the
+stream.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pour, pour came the rain, raining as it can in this place, not long, but
+a deluge while it lasts, dripping in thick-liquidity, like a profuse
+sweat, through the forest, I seeking to get back by the way I had come,
+flying, but with difficulty and slowness, and a feeling in me that I was
+being tracked. And so it proved: for when I struck into more open space,
+nearly opposite the west walls, but now on the north side of the Golden
+Horn, where there is a flat grassy ground somewhere between the valley
+of Kassim and Charkoi, with horror I saw that _protégée_ of Heaven, or
+of someone, not ten yards behind, following me like a mechanical figure,
+it being now near three in the afternoon, and the rain drenching me
+through, and I tired and hungry, and from all the ruins of
+Constantinople not one whiff of smoke ascending.
+
+I trudged on wearily till I came to the quay of Foundoucli, and the
+zaptia boat; and there she was with me still, her hair nothing but a
+thin drowned string down her back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not only can she not speak to me in any language that I know: but she
+can speak in _no_ language: it is my firm belief that she has _never_
+spoken.
+
+She never saw a boat, or water, or the world, till now--I could swear
+it. She came into the boat with me, and sat astern, clinging for dear
+life to the gunwale by her finger-nails, and I paddled the eight hundred
+yards to the _Speranza_, and she came up to the deck after me. When she
+saw the open water, the boat, the yalis on the coast, and then the ship,
+astonishment was imprinted on her face. But she appears to know little
+fear. She smiled like a child, and on the ship touched this and that, as
+if each were a living thing.
+
+It was only here and there that one could see the ivory-brown colour of
+her skin: the rest was covered with dirt, like old bottles long lying in
+cellars.
+
+By the time we reached the _Speranza_, the rain suddenly stopped: I went
+down to my cabin to change my clothes, and had to shut the door in her
+face to keep her out. When I opened it, she was there, and she followed
+me to the windlass, when I went to set the anchor-engine going. I
+intended, I suppose, to take her to Imbros, where she might live in one
+of the broken-down houses of the village. But when the anchor was not
+yet half up, I stopped the engine, and let the chain run again. For I
+said, 'No, I will be alone, I am not a child.'
+
+I knew that she was hungry by the look in her eyes: but I cared nothing
+for that. I was hungry, too: and that was all I cared about.
+
+I would not let her be there with me another instant. I got down into
+the boat, and when she followed, I rowed her back all the way past
+Foundoucli and the Tophana quay to where one turns into the Golden Horn
+by St. Sophia, around the mouth of the Horn being a vast semicircle of
+charred wreckage, carried out by the river-currents. I went up the steps
+on the Galata side before one comes to where the barge-bridge was. When
+she had followed me on to the embankment, I walked up one of those
+rising streets, very encumbered now with stone-_débris_ and ashes, but
+still marked by some standing black wall-fragments, it being now not far
+from night, but the air as clear and washed as the translucency of a
+great purple diamond with the rain and the afterglow of the sun, and all
+the west aflame.
+
+When I was about a hundred yards up in this old mixed quarter of Greeks,
+Turks, Jews, Italians, Albanians, and noise and cafedjis and
+wine-bibbing, having turned two corners, I suddenly gathered my skirts,
+spun round, and, as fast as I could, was off at a heavy trot back to
+the quay. She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, was
+distanced a little at first. However, by the time I could scurry myself
+down into the boat, she was so near, that she only saved herself from
+the water by a balancing stoppage at the brink, as I pushed off. I then
+set out to get back to the ship, muttering: 'You can have Turkey, if you
+like, and I will keep the rest of the world.'
+
+I rowed sea-ward, my face toward her, but steadily averted, for I would
+not look her way to see what she was doing. However, as I turned the
+point of the quay, where the open sea washes quite rough and loud, to go
+northward and disappear from her, I heard a babbling cry--the first
+sound which she had uttered. I did look then: and she was still quite
+near me, for the silly maniac had been running along the embankment,
+following me.
+
+'Little fool!' I cried out across the water, 'what are you after now?'
+And, oh my good God, shall I ever forget that strangeness, that wild
+strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human
+soul?
+
+There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me. I turned the
+boat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her two
+stinging slaps, one on each cheek. While she cowered, surprised no
+doubt, I took her by the hand, led her back to the boat, landed on the
+Stamboul side, and set off, still leading her, my object being to find
+some sort of possible edifice near by, not hopelessly burned, in which
+to leave her: for in all Galata there was plainly none, and Pera, I
+thought, was too far to walk to. But it would have been better if I had
+gone to Pera, for we had to walk quite three miles from Seraglio Point
+all along the city battlements to the Seven-towers, she picking her
+bare-footed way after me through the great Sahara of charred stuff, and
+night now well arrived, and the moon a-drift in the heaven, making the
+desolate lonesomeness of the ruins tenfold desolate, so that my heart
+smote me then with bitterness and remorse, and I had a vision of myself
+that night which I will not put down on paper. At last, however, pretty
+late in the evening, I spied a large mansion with green lattice-work
+façade, and shaknisier, and terrace-roof, which had been hidden from me
+by the arcades of a bazaar, a vast open space at about the centre of
+Stamboul, one of the largest of the bazaars, I should think, in the
+middle of which stood the mansion, probably the home of pasha or vizier:
+for it had a very distinguished look in that place. It seemed very
+little hurt, though the vegetation that had apparently choked the great
+open space was singed to a black fluff, among which lay thousands of
+calcined bones of man, horse, ass, and camel, for all was distinct in
+the bright, yet so pensive and forlorn, moonlight, which was that
+Eastern moonlight of pure astral mystery which illumines Persepolis, and
+Babylon, and ruined cities of the old Anakim.
+
+The house, I knew, would contain divans, _yatags_, cushions, foods,
+wines, sherbets, henna, saffron, mastic, raki, haschish, costumes, and a
+hundred luxuries still good. There was an outer wall, but the foliage
+over it had been singed away, and the gate all charred. It gave way at a
+push from my palm. The girl was close behind me. I next threw open a
+little green lattice-door in the façade under the shaknisier, and
+entered. Here it was dark, and the moment that she, too, was within, I
+slipped out quickly, slammed the door in her face, and hooked it upon
+her by a little hook over the latch.
+
+I now walked some yards beyond the court, then stopped, listening for
+her expected cry: but all was still: five minutes--ten--I waited: but no
+sound. I then continued my morose and melancholy way, hollow with
+hunger, intending to start that night for Imbros.
+
+But this time I had hardly advanced twenty steps, when I heard a frail
+and strangled cry, apparently in mid-air behind me, and glancing, saw
+the creature lying at the gateway, a white thing in black stubble-ashes.
+She had evidently jumped, well outward, from a small casement of lattice
+on a level with the little shaknisier grating, through which once peeped
+bright eyes, thirty feet aloft.
+
+I hardly believe that she was conscious of any danger in jumping, for
+all the laws of life are new to her, and, having sought and found the
+opening, she may have merely come with blind instinctiveness after me,
+taking the first way open to her. I walked back, pulled at her arm, and
+found that she could not stand. Her face was screwed with silent
+pain--she did not moan. Her left foot, I could see, was bleeding: and by
+the wounded ankle I took her, and dragged her so through the ashes
+across the narrow court, and tossed her like a little dog with all my
+force within the door, cursing her.
+
+Now I would not go back the long way to the ship, but struck a match,
+and went lighting up girandoles, cressets, candelabra, into a confusion
+of lights among great numbers of pale-tinted pillars, rose and azure,
+with verd-antique, olive, and Portoro marble, and serpentine. The
+mansion was large, I having to traverse quite a desert of embroidered
+brocade-hangings, slender columns, and Broussa silks, till I saw a
+stair-case doorway behind a Smyrna _portière_, went up, and wandered
+some time in a house of gilt-barred windows, with very little furniture,
+but palatial spaces, solitary huge pieces of _faïence_ of inestimable
+age, and arms, my footfalls quite stifled in the Persian carpeting. I
+passed through a covered-in hanging-gallery, with one window-grating
+overlooking an inner court, and by this entered the harem, which
+declared itself by a greater luxury, bric-à-bracerie, and profusion of
+manner. Here, descending a short curved stair behind a _portière_, I
+came into a marble-paved sort of larder, in which was an old negress in
+blue dress, her hair still adhering, and an infinite supply of
+sweetmeats, French preserved foods, sherbets, wines, and so on. I put a
+number of things into a pannier, went up again, found some of those
+exquisite pale cigarettes which drunken in the hollow of an emerald,
+also a jewelled two-yard-long chibouque, and tembaki: and with all
+descended by another stair, and laid them on the steps of a little
+raised kiosk of green marble in a corner of the court; went up again,
+and brought down a still-snowy _yatag_ to sleep on; and there, by the
+kiosk-step, ate and passed the night, smoking for several hours in a
+state of languor. In the centre of the court is a square marble well,
+looking white through a rankness of wild vine, acacias in flower, weeds,
+jasmines, and roses, which overgrew it, as well as the kiosk and the
+whole court, climbing even the four-square arcade of Moorish arches
+round the open space, under one of which I had deposited a long lantern
+of crimson silk: for here no breath of the fire had come. About two in
+morning I fell to sleep, a deeper peace of shadow now reigning where so
+long the melancholy silver of the moon had lingered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About eight in the morning I rose and made my way to the front,
+intending that that should be my last night in this ruined place: for
+all the night, sleeping and waking, the thing which had happened filled
+my brain, growing from one depth of incredibility to a deeper, so that
+at last I arrived at a sort of certainty that it could be nothing but a
+drunken dream: but as I opened my eyes afresh, the deep-cutting
+realisation of that impossibility smote like a pang of lightning-stroke
+through my being: and I said: 'I will go again to the far Orient, and
+forget': and I started out from the court, not knowing what had become
+of her during the night, till, having reached the outer chamber, with a
+wild start I saw her lying there at the door in the very spot where I
+had flung her, asleep sideways, head on arm ... Softly, softly, I stept
+over her, got out, and went running at a cautious clandestine trot. The
+morning was in high _fête_, most fresh and pure, and to breathe was to
+be young, and to see such a sunlight lighten even upon ruin so vast was
+to be blithe. After running two hundred yards to one of the great broken
+bazaar-portals, I looked back to see if I was followed: but all that
+space was desolately empty. I then walked on past the arch, on which a
+green oblong, once inscribed, as usual, with some text in gilt
+hieroglyphs, is still discernible; and, emerging, saw the great panorama
+of destruction, a few vast standing walls, with hollow Oriental windows
+framing deep sky beyond, and here and there a pillar, or half-minaret,
+and down within the walls of the old Seraglio still some leafless,
+branchless trunks, and in Eyoub and Phanar leafless forests, and on the
+northern horizon Pera with the steep upper-half of the Iani-Chircha
+street still there, and on the height the European houses, and all
+between blackness, stones, a rolling landscape of ravine, like the hilly
+pack-ice of the North if its snow were ink, and to the right Scutari,
+black, laid low, with its vast region of tombs, and rare stumps of its
+forests, and the blithe blue sea, with the widening semicircle of
+floating _débris_, looking like brown foul scum at some points,
+congested before the bridgeless Golden Horn: for I stood pretty high in
+the centre of Stamboul somewhere in the region of the Suleimanieh, or of
+Sultan-Selim, as I judged, with immense purviews into abstract distances
+and mirage. And to me it seemed too vast, too lonesome, and after
+advancing a few hundred yards beyond the bazaar, I turned again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I found the girl still asleep at the house-door, and stirring her with
+my foot, woke her. She leapt up with a start of surprise, and a
+remarkable sinuous agility, and gazed an astounded moment at me, till,
+separating reality from dream and habit, she realised me: but
+immediately subsided to the floor again, being in evident pain. I pulled
+her up, and made her limp after me through several halls to the inner
+court, and the well, where I set her upon the weedy margin, took her
+foot in my lap, examined it, drew water, washed it, and bandaged it with
+a strip torn from my caftan-hem, now and again speaking gruffly to her,
+so that she might no more follow me.
+
+After this, I had breakfast by the kiosk-steps, and when I was
+finished, put a mass of truffled _foie gras_ on a plate, brushed through
+the thicket to the well, and gave it her. She took it, but looked
+foolish, not eating. I then, with my forefinger, put a little into her
+mouth, whereupon she set hungrily to eat it all. I also gave her some
+ginger-bread, a handful of bonbons, some Krishnu wine, and some
+anisette.
+
+I then started out afresh, gruffly bidding her stay there, and left her
+sitting on the well, her hair falling down the opening, she peering
+after me through the bushes. But I had not half reached the ogival
+bazaar-portal, when looking anxiously back, I saw that she was limping
+after me. So that this creature tracks me in the manner of a nutshell
+following about in the wake of a ship.
+
+I turned back with her to the house, for it was necessary that I should
+plan some further method of eluding her. That was five days ago, and
+here I have stayed: for the house and court are sufficiently agreeable,
+and form a museum of real _objets d'art_. It is settled, however, that
+to-morrow I return to Imbros.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seems certain that she never wore, saw, nor knew of, clothes.
+
+I have dressed her, first sousing her thoroughly with sponge and soap
+in luke-warm rose-water in the silver cistern of the harem-bath, which
+is a circular marbled apartment with a fountain and the complicated
+ceilings of these houses, and frescoes, and gilt texts of the Koran on
+the walls, and pale rose-silk hangings. On the divan I had heaped a
+number of selected garments, and having shewed her how to towel herself,
+I made her step into a pair of the trousers called _shintiyan_ made of
+yellow-striped white-silk; this, by a running string, I tied loosely
+round the upper part of her hips; then, drawing up the bottoms to her
+knees, tied them there, so that their voluminous baggy folds,
+overhanging still to the ankles, have rather the look of a skirt; over
+this I put upon her a blue-striped chiffon chemise, or quamis, reaching
+a little below the hips; I then put on a short jacket or vest of scarlet
+satin, thickly embroidered in gold and precious stones, reaching
+somewhat below the waist, and pretty tight-fitting; and, making her lie
+on the couch, I put upon her little feet little yellow baboosh-slippers,
+then anklets, on her fingers rings, round her neck a necklace of
+sequins, finally dyeing her nails, which I cut, with henna. There
+remained her head, but with this I would have nothing to do, only
+pointing to the tarboosh which I had brought, to a square kerchief, to
+some corals, and to the fresco of a woman on the wall, which, if she
+chose, she might copy. Lastly, I pierced her ears with the silver
+needles which they used here: and after two hours of it left her.
+
+About an hour afterwards I saw her in the arcade round the court, and,
+to my great surprise, she had a perfect plait down her back, and over
+her head and brows a green-silk feredjeh, or hood, precisely as in the
+picture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here is a question, the answer to which would be interesting to me:
+Whether or not for twenty years--or say rather twenty centuries, twenty
+eternal aeons--I have been stark mad, a raving maniac; and whether or
+not I am now suddenly sane, sitting here writing in my right mind, my
+whole mood and tone changed, or rapidly changing? And whether such
+change can be due to the presence of only one other being in the world
+with me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This singular being! Where she has lived--and how--is a problem to which
+not the faintest solution is conceivable. She had, I say, never seen
+clothes: for when I began to dress her, her perplexity was unbounded;
+also, during her twenty years, she has never seen almonds, figs, nuts,
+liqueurs, chocolate, conserves, vegetables, sugar, oil, honey,
+sweetmeats, orange-sherbet, mastic, salt, raki, tobacco, and many such
+things: for she showed perplexity at all these, hesitation to eat them:
+but she has known and tasted _white wine_: I could see that. Here, then,
+is a mystery.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have not gone to Imbros, but remained here some days longer observing
+her.
+
+I have allowed her to sit in a corner at meal-time, not far from where I
+eat, and I have given her food.
+
+She is wonderfully clever! I continually find that, after an incredibly
+short time, she has most completely adapted herself to this or that.
+Already she wears her outfit as coquettishly as though born to clothes.
+Without at all seeming observant--for, on the contrary, she gives an
+impression of great flightiness--she watches me, I am convinced, with
+pretty exact observation. She knows precisely when I am speaking
+roughly, bidding her go, bidding her come, tired of her, tolerant of
+her, scorning her, cursing her. If I wish her to the devil, she quickly
+divines it by my face, and will disappear. Yesterday I noticed
+something queer about her, and soon discovered that she had been
+staining her lids with black kohol, like the _hanums_, so that, having
+found a box, she must have guessed its use from the pictures.
+Wonderfully clever!--imitative as a mirror. Two mornings ago I found an
+old mother-of-pearl kittur, and sitting under the arcade, touched the
+strings, playing a simple air; I could just see her behind one of the
+arch-pillars on the opposite side, and she was listening with apparent
+eagerness, and, I fancied, panting. Well, returning from a walk beyond
+the Phanar walls in the afternoon, I heard the same air coming out from
+the house, for she was repeating it pretty faultlessly by ear.
+
+Also, during the forenoon of the previous day, I came upon her--for
+footsteps make no sound in this house--in the pacha's visitors'-hall:
+and what was she doing?--copying the poses of three dancing-girls
+frescoed there! So that she would seem to have a character as light as a
+butterfly's, and is afraid of nothing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now I know.
+
+I had observed that at the beginning of every meal she seemed to have
+something on her mind, going toward the door, hesitating as if to see
+whether I would follow, and then returning. At length yesterday, after
+sitting to eat, she jumped up, and to my infinite surprise, said her
+first word: said it with a most quaint, experimental effort of the
+tongue, as a fledgling trying the air: the word '_Come_.'
+
+That morning, meeting her in the court, I had told her to repeat some
+words after me: but she had made no attempt, as if shy to break the long
+silence of her life; and now I felt some sort of foolish pleasure in
+hearing her utter that word, often no doubt heard from me: and after
+hurriedly eating, I went with her, saying to myself: 'She must be about
+to shew me the food to which she is accustomed: and perhaps that will
+solve her origin.'
+
+And so it has proved. I have now discovered that to the moment when she
+saw me, she had tasted only her mother's milk, dates, and that white
+wine of Ismidt which the Koran permits.
+
+As it was getting dark, I lit and took with me the big red-silk lantern,
+and we set out, she leading, and walking confoundedly fast, slackening
+when I swore at her, and getting fast again: and she walks with a
+certain levity, flightiness, and liberated _furore_, very hard to
+describe, as though space were a luxury to be revelled in. By what
+instinctive cleverness, or native vigour of memory, she found her way I
+cannot tell, but she led me such a walk that night, miles, miles, till I
+became furious, darkness having soon fallen with only a faint moon
+obscured by cloud, and a drizzle which haunted the air, she without
+light climbing and picking her thinly-slippered steps over mounds of
+_débris_ and loosely-strewn masonry with unfailing agility, I
+occasionally splashing a foot with horror into one of those little ponds
+which always marked the Stamboul streets. When I was nearer her, I would
+see her peer across and upward toward Pera, as if that were a remembered
+land-mark, and would note the perpetual aspen oscillations of the long
+coral drops in her ears, and the nimble ply of her limbs, wondering with
+a groan if Pera was our goal.
+
+Our goal was even beyond Pera. When we came to the Golden Horn, she
+pointed to my caique which lay at the Old Seraglio steps, and over the
+water we went, she lying quite at ease now, with her face at the level
+of the water in the centre of the crescent-shape, as familiarly as a
+_hanum_ of old engaged in some escapade through the crowded Babel of
+Galata and that north side of the Horn.
+
+Through Galata we passed, I already cursing the journey: and, following
+the line of the coast and the great steep thoroughfare of Pera, we came
+at last, almost in the country, to a great wall, and the entrance to an
+immense terraced garden, whose limits were invisible, many of the trees
+and avenues being still intact.
+
+I knew it at once: I had lain a special fuse-train in the great palace
+at the top of the terraces: it was the royal palace, Yildiz.
+
+Up and up we went through the grounds, a few unburned old bodies in rags
+of uniform still discernible here and there as the lantern swung past
+them, a musician in sky-blue, a fantassin and officer-of-the-guard in
+scarlet, forming a cross, with domestics of the palace in
+red-and-orange.
+
+The palace itself was quite in ruins, together with all its surrounding
+barracks, mosque, and seraglio, and, as we reached the top of the
+grounds, presented a picture very like those which I have seen of the
+ruins of Persepolis, only that here the columns, both standing and
+fallen, were innumerable, and all more or less blackened; and through
+doorless doors we passed, down immensely-wide short flights of steps,
+and up them, and over strewed courtyards, by tottering fragments of
+arcades, all roofless, and tracts of charcoal between interrupted
+avenues of pillars, I following, expectant, and she very eager now.
+Finally, down a flight of twelve or fourteen rather steep and narrow
+steps, very dislocated, we went to a level which, I thought, must be the
+floor of the palace vaults: for at the bottom of the steps we stood on a
+large plain floor of plaster, which bore the marks of the flames; and
+over this the girl ran a few steps, pointed with excited recognition to
+a hole in it, ran further, and disappeared down the hole.
+
+When I followed, and lowered the lantern a little, I saw that the drop
+down was about eight feet, made less than six feet by a heap of
+stone-rubbish below, the falling of which had caused the hole: and it
+was by standing on this rubbish-heap, I knew at once, that she must have
+been enabled to climb out into the world.
+
+I dropped down, and found myself in a low flat-roofed cellar, with a
+floor of black earth, very fusty and damp, but so very vast in extent
+that even in the day-time, I suppose, I could not have discerned its
+boundaries; I fancy, indeed, that it extends beneath the whole palace
+and its environs--an enormous stretch of space: with the lantern I could
+only see a very limited portion of its area. She still led me eagerly
+on, and I presently came upon a whole region of flat boxes, each about
+two feet square, and nine inches high, made of very thin laths, packed
+to the roof; and about a-hundred-and-fifty feet from these I saw, where
+she pointed, another region of bottles, fat-bellied bottles in chemises
+of wicker-work, stretching away into gloom and total darkness. The
+boxes, of which a great number lay broken open, as they can be by merely
+pulling with the fingers at a pliant crack, contain dates; and the
+bottles, of which many thousands lay empty, contain, I saw, old
+Ismidt wine. Some fifty or sixty casks, covered with mildew, some old
+pieces of furniture, and a great cube of rotting, curling parchments,
+showed that this cellar had been more or less loosely used for the
+occasional storage of superfluous stores and knick-knacks.
+
+It was also more or less loosely used as a domestic prison. For in the
+lane between the region of boxes and the region of bottles, near the
+former, there lay on the ground the skeleton of a woman, the details of
+whose costume were still appreciable, with thin brass gyves on her
+wrists: and when I had examined her well, I knew the whole history of
+the creature standing silent by my side.
+
+She is the daughter of the Sultan, as I assumed when I had once
+determined that the skeleton is both the skeleton of her mother, and the
+skeleton of the Sultana.
+
+That the skeleton was her mother is clear: for the cloud occurred just
+twenty-one years since, and the dead woman was, of course, at that
+moment in the prison, which must have been air-tight, and with her the
+girl: but since the girl is quite certainly not much more than
+twenty--she looks younger--she must at that time have been either unborn
+or a young babe: but a babe would hardly be imprisoned with another than
+its own mother. I am rather inclined to think that the girl was unborn
+at the moment of the cloud, and was born in the cellar.
+
+That the mother was the Sultana is clear from her fragments of dress,
+and the symbolic character of her every ornament, crescent earrings,
+heron-feather, and the blue campaca enamelled in a bracelet. This poor
+woman, I have thought, may have been the victim of some unbounded fit of
+imperial passion, incurred by some domestic crime, real or imagined,
+which may have been pardoned in a day had not death overtaken her master
+and the world.
+
+There are four steep stone steps at about the centre of the cellar,
+leading up to a locked iron trap-door, apparently the only opening into
+this great hole: and this trap-door must have been so nearly air-tight
+as to bar the intrusion of the poison in anything like deadly quantity.
+
+But how rare--how strange--the coincidence of chances here. For, if the
+trap-door was absolutely air-tight, I cannot think that the supply of
+oxygen in the cellar, large as it was, would have been sufficient to
+last the girl twenty years, to say nothing of what her mother used up
+before death: for I imagine that the woman must have continued to live
+some time in her dungeon, sufficiently long, at least, to teach her
+child to procure its food of dates and wine; so that the door must have
+been only just sufficiently hermetic to bar the poison, yet admit some
+oxygen; or else, the place may have been absolutely air-tight at the
+time of the cloud, and some crack, which I have not seen, opened to
+admit oxygen after the poison was dispersed: in any case--the
+all-but-infinite rarity of the chance!
+
+Thinking these things I climbed out, and we walked to Pera, where I
+slept in a great white-stone house in five or six acres of garden
+overlooking the cemetery of Kassim, having pointed out to the girl
+another house in which to sleep.
+
+This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunless
+world hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only sky
+which she knew collapse at one point! a hole appeared into yet a world
+beyond! It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set her
+free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ah, I see something now! I see! it was for this that I was preserved: I
+to be a sort of new-fangled Adam--and this little creature to be my Eve!
+That is it! _The White_ does not admit defeat: he would recommence the
+Race again! At the last, the eleventh hour--in spite of all--he would
+turn defeat into victory, and outwit that Other.
+
+However, if this be so--and I seem to see it quite clearly--then in that
+White scheme is a singular flaw: at _one point_, it is obvious, that
+elaborate Forethought fails: for I have a free will--and I refuse, I
+refuse.
+
+Certainly, in this matter I am on the side of the Black: and since it
+depends absolutely upon me, this time Black wins.
+
+No more men on the earth after me, ye Powers! To _you_ the question may
+be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of
+your aërial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs,
+Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard
+earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness--the deep, deep pain--of that
+bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ...
+she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed
+the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king
+named Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, Gilles de Raiz:
+and the rest were all much the same, much the same. Oh no, it was not a
+good race, that small infantry which called itself Man: and here,
+falling on my knees before God and Satan as I write, I swear, I swear:
+Never through me shall it spring and fester again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cannot realise her! Not at all, at all, at all! If she is out of my
+sight and hearing ten minutes, I fall to doubting her reality. If I lose
+her for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, come
+back, that I have only been dreaming--that this appearance cannot be an
+actual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.
+
+Seventeen long years, seventeen long years, of madness....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-morrow I start for Imbros: and whether this girl chooses to follow
+me, or whether she stays behind, I will see her from the moment I land
+no more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She must rise very early. I who am now regularly on the palace-roof at
+dawn, sometimes from between the pavilion-curtains of the galleries, or
+from the steps of the telescope-kiosk, may spy her far down below, a
+dainty microscopic figure, generally running about the sward, or gazing
+up in wonder at the palace from the lake-edge.
+
+It is now three months since she came with me to Imbros.
+
+I left her the first night in that pale-yellow house with the two green
+jalousies facing the beach, where there was everything that she would
+need; but I knew that, like all the houses there now, it leaked
+profusely, and the next day I went down to the curving stair, cut
+through the rock at the back and south of the village, climbed, and half
+a mile beyond found that park and villa with gables, which I had noted
+from the sea. The villa is almost intact, very strongly built of
+purplish marble, though small, and very like a Western house, with
+shingles, and three gables, so that I think it must have been the yali
+of some Englishman, for it contains a number of English books, though
+the only body I saw there was what looked like an Aararat Kurd, with
+spiral string wound down his turban, yellow ankle-pantaloons, and flung
+red shoulder-cloak; and all in the heavily-wooded park, and all about
+the low rock-steps up the hill, profusions of man-dragora; and from the
+rock-steps to the house a narrow long avenue of acacias, mossy
+underfoot, that mingle overhead, the house standing about four yards
+from the edge of the perpendicular sea-cliff, whence one can see the
+_Speranzas_ main top-mast, and broken mizzen-mast-head, in her quiet
+haven. After examining the place I went down again to the village, and
+her house: but she was not there: and two hours long I paced about among
+the weeds of these amateur little alleys and flat-roofed windowless
+houses (though some have terrace-roofs, and a rare aperture), whose
+once-raw yellows, greens, and blues look now like sunset tints when the
+last flush is gone, and they fade dun. When at last she came running
+with open mouth, I took her up the rock-steps, and into the house, and
+there she has lived, one of the gable-tips, I now find (that overlooking
+the sea), being just visible from the north-east corner of the
+palace-roof, two miles from it.
+
+That night again, when I was leaving her, she made an attempt to follow
+me. But I was resolved to end it, then: and cutting a sassafras-whip I
+cut her deep, three times, till she ran, crying.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So, then, what is my fate henceforth?--to think always, from sun to
+moon, and from moon to sun, of one only thing--and that thing an object
+for the microscope?--to become a sneaking Paul Pry to spy upon the silly
+movements of one little sparrow, like some fatuous motiveless gossip of
+old, his occupation to peep, his one faculty to scent, his honey and his
+achievement to unearth the infinitely unimportant? I would kill her
+first!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am convinced that she is no stay-at-home, but roams continually over
+the island: for thrice, wandering myself, I have come upon her.
+
+The first time she was running with flushed face, intent upon striking
+down a butterfly with a twig held in the left hand (for both hands she
+uses with dexterity). It was at about nine in the morning, in her park,
+near the bottom where there are high grass-growths and ferny luxuriance
+between the close tree-trunks, and shadow, and the broken wall of an old
+funeral-kiosk sunk aslant under moss, creepers, and wild flowers, behind
+which I peeped hidden and wet with dew. She has had the assurance to
+modify the dress I put upon her, and was herself a butterfly, for
+instead of the shintiyan, she had on a zouave, hardly reaching to the
+waist, of saffron satin, no feredjé, but a scarlet fez with violet
+tassel, and baggy pantaloons of azure silk; down her back the long
+auburn plait, quite neat, but all her front hair loose and wanton, the
+fez cocked backward, while I caught glimpses of her fugitive heels
+lifting out of the dropping slipper-sole. She is pretty clever, but not
+clever enough, for that butterfly escaped, and in one instant I saw her
+change into weary and sad, for on this earth is nothing more fickle than
+that Proteus face, which resembles a landscape swept with cloud-shadows
+on a bright day. Fast beat my heart that morning, owing to the
+consciousness that, while I saw, I was unseen, yet might be seen.
+
+Another noontide, three weeks afterwards, I came upon her a good way up
+yonder to the west of the palace, sleeping on her arm in an alley
+between overgrown old trellises, where rioting wild vine buried her in
+gloom: but I had not been peeping through the bushes a minute, when she
+started up and looked wildly about, her quick consciousness, I imagine,
+detecting a presence: though I think that I managed to get away unseen.
+She keeps her face very dirty: all about her mouth was dry-stained with
+a polychrome of grape, _mûrs_, and other coloured juices, like
+slobbering _gamins_ of old. I could also see that her nose and cheeks
+are now sprinkled with little freckles.
+
+Four days since I saw her a third time, and then found that the
+primitive instinct to represent the world in pictures has been working
+in her: for she was drawing. It was down in the middle one of the three
+east-and-west village streets, for thither I had strolled toward
+evening, and coming out upon the street from between an old wall and a
+house, saw her quite near. I pulled up short--and peered. She was lying
+on her face all among grasses, a piece of yellow board before her, and
+in her fingers a chalk-splinter: and very intently she drew, her
+tongue-tip travelling along her short upper-lip from side to side,
+regularly as a pendulum, her fez tipped far back, and the left foot
+swinging upward from the knee. She had drawn her yali at the top, and
+now, as I could see by peering well forward, was drawing underneath the
+palace--from memory, for where she lay it is all hidden: yet the palace
+it was, for there were the waving lines meant for the steps, the two
+slanting pillars, the slanting battlements of the outer court, and
+before the portal, with turban reaching above the roof, and my two
+whisks of beard sweeping below the knees--myself.
+
+Something spurred me, and I could not resist shouting a sudden "Hi!"
+whereupon she scrambled like a spring-bok to her feet, I pointing to the
+drawing, smiling.
+
+This creature has a way of mincing her pressed lips, while she shakes
+the head, intensely cooing a fond laugh: and so she did then.
+
+"You are a clever little wretch, you know," said I, she cocking her eye,
+trying to divine my meaning with vague smile.
+
+'Oh, yes, a clever little wretch,' I went on in a gruff voice, 'clever
+as a serpent, no doubt: for in the first case it was the Black who used
+the serpent, but now it is the White. But it will not do, you know. Do
+you know what you are to me, you? You are my Eve!--a little fool, a
+little piebald frog like you. But it will not do at all, at all! A nice
+race it would be with you for mother, and me for father, wouldn't
+it?--half-criminal like the father, half-idiot like the mother: just
+like the last, in short. They used to say, in fact, that the offspring
+of a brother and sister was always weak-headed: and from such a wedlock
+certainly came the human race, so no wonder it was what it was: and so
+it would have to be again now. Well no--unless we have the children, and
+cut their throats at birth: and _you_ would not like that at all, I
+know, and, on the whole, it would not work, for the White would be
+striking a poor man dead with His lightning, if I attempted that. No,
+then: the modern Adam is some eight to twenty thousand years wiser than
+the first--you see? less instinctive, more rational. The first disobeyed
+by commission: I shall disobey by omission: only his disobedience was a
+sin, mine is a heroism. I have not been a particularly ideal sort of
+beast so far, you know: but in me, Adam Jeffson--I swear it--the human
+race shall at last attain a true nobility, the nobility of
+self-extinction. I shall turn out trumps: I shall prove myself stronger
+than Tendency, World-Genius, Providence, Currents of Fate, White Power,
+Black Power, or whatever is the name for it. No more Clodaghs, Lucrezia
+Borgias, Semiramises, Pompadours, Irish Landlords, Hundred-Years'
+Wars--you see?'
+
+She kept her left eye obliquely cocked like a little fool, wondering, no
+doubt, what I was saying.
+
+'And talking of Clodagh,' I went on, 'I shall call you that henceforth,
+to keep me reminded. So that is your name--not Eve--but Clodagh, who was
+a Poisoner, you see? She poisoned a poor man who trusted her: and that
+is your name now--not Eve, but Clodagh--to remind me, you most dangerous
+little speckled viper! And in order that I may no more see your foolish
+little pretty face, I decree that, for the future, you wear a _yashmak_
+to cover up your lips, which, I can see, were meant to be seductive,
+though dirty; and you can leave the blue eyes, and the little
+white-skinned freckled nose uncovered, if you like, they being
+commonplace enough. Meantime, if you care to see how to draw a palace--I
+will show you.'
+
+Before I stretched my hand, she was presenting the board--so that she
+had guessed something of my meaning! But some hard tone in my talk had
+wounded her, for she presented it looking very glum, her under-lip
+pushing a little obliquely out, very pathetically, I must say, as always
+when she is just ready to cry.
+
+In a few strokes I drew the palace, and herself standing at the portal
+between the pillars: and now great was her satisfaction, for she pointed
+to the sketched figure, and to herself, interrogatively: and when I
+nodded 'yes,' she went cooing her fond murmurous laugh, with pressed
+and mincing lips: and it is clear that, in spite of my beatings, she is
+in no way afraid of me.
+
+Before I could move away, I felt some rain-drops, and down in some
+seconds rushed a shower. I looked, saw that the sky was rapidly
+darkening, and ran into the nearest of the little cubical houses,
+leaving her glancing sideways upward, with the quaintest artlessness of
+interest in the downpour: for she is not yet quite familiarised with the
+operations of nature, and seems to regard them with a certain amiable
+inquisitive seriousness, as though they were living beings, comrades as
+good as herself. She presently joined me, but even then stretched her
+hand out to feel the drops.
+
+Now there came a thunder-clap, the wind was rising, and rain spattering
+about me: for the panes of these houses, made, I believe, of paper
+saturated in almond-oil, have long disappeared, and rains, penetrating
+by roof and rare window, splash the bones of men. I gathered up my
+skirts to run toward other shelter, but she was before me, saying in her
+strange experimental voice that word of hers: "_Come_."
+
+She ran in advance, and I, with the outer robe over my head, followed,
+urging flinching way against the whipped rain-wash. She took the way by
+the stone horse-pond, through an alley to the left between two blind
+walls, then down a steep path through wood to the rock-steps, and up we
+ran, and along the hill, to her yali, which is a mile nearer the village
+than the palace, though by the time we pelted into its dry shelter we
+were wet to the skin.
+
+Sudden darkness had come, but she quickly found some matches, lit one,
+looking at it with a certain meditative air, and applied it to a candle
+and to a bronze Western lamp on the table, which I had taught her to oil
+and light. Near a Western fire-place was a Turkish mangal, like one
+which she had seen me light to warm bath-waters in Constantinople, and
+when I pointed to it, she ran to the kitchen, returned with some chopped
+wood, and very cleverly lit it. And there for several hours I sat that
+night, reading (the first time for many years): it was a book by the
+poet Milton, found in a glazed book-case on the other side of the
+fire-place: and most strange, most novel, I found those august words
+about warring angels that night, while the storm raved: for this man had
+evidently taken no end of pains with his book, and done it gallantly
+well, too, making the thing hum: and I could not conceive why he should
+have been at that trouble--unless it were for the same reason that I
+built the palace, because some spark bites a man, and he would be
+like--but that is all vanity, and delusion.
+
+Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which really
+transcends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheets
+before: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hour
+after hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, and
+listening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air,
+shrinking from it, fearing even for the _Speranza_ by her quay in the
+sequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars. But what astonished me
+was that girl: for, after sitting on the ottoman to my left some time,
+she fell sideways asleep, not the least fear about her, though I should
+have thought that nervousness at such a turmoil would be so natural to
+her: and whence she has this light confidence in the world into which
+she has so abruptly come I do not know, for it is as though someone
+inspired her with the mood of nonchalance, saying: 'Be of good cheer,
+and care not a pin about anything: for God is God.'
+
+I heard the ocean swing hoarse like heavy ordnance against the cliffs
+below, where they meet the outer surface of the southern of the two
+claws of land that form the harbour: and the thought came into my mind:
+'If now I taught her to speak, to read, I could sometimes make her read
+a book to me.'
+
+The winds seemed wilfully struggling for the house to snatch and wing it
+away into the drear Eternities of the night: and I could not but heave
+the sigh: 'Alas for us two poor waifs and castaways of our race, little
+bits of flotsam and seaweed-hair cast up here a moment, ah me, on this
+shore of the Ages, soon to be dragged back, O turgid Eternity, into thy
+abysmal gorge; and upon what strand--who shall say?--shall she next be
+flung, and I, divided then perhaps by all the stretch of the
+trillion-distanced astral gulf?' And such a pity, and a wringing of the
+heart, seemed in things, that a tear fell from my eyes that ominous
+midnight.
+
+She started up at a gust of more appalling volume, rubbing her eyes,
+with dishevelled hair (it must have been about midnight), listening a
+minute, with that demure, droll interest of hers, to the noise of the
+elements, and then smiled to me; rose then, left the room, and presently
+returned with a pomegranate and some almonds on a plate, also some
+delicious old sweet wine in a Samian cruche, and an old silver cup, gilt
+inside, standing in a zarf. These she placed on the table near me, I
+murmuring: 'Hospitality.'
+
+She looked at the book, which I read as I ate, with lowered left
+eye-lid, seeking to guess its use, I suppose. Most things she
+understands at once, but this must have baffled her: for to see one
+looking fixedly at a thing, and not know what one is looking at it for,
+must be very disconcerting.
+
+I held it up before her, saying:
+
+"Shall I teach you to read it? If I did, how would you repay me, you
+Clodagh?"
+
+She cocked her eyes, seeking to comprehend. God knows, at that moment I
+pitied the poor dumb waif, alone in all the whole round earth with me.
+The candle-flame, moved by the wind like a slow-painting brush,
+flickered upon her face, though every cranny was closed.
+
+"Perhaps, then," I said, "I will teach you. You are a pitiable little
+derelict of your race, you know: and two hours every day I will let you
+come to the palace, and I will teach you. But be sure, be careful. If
+there be danger, I will kill you: assuredly--without fail. And let me
+begin with a lesson now: say after me: 'White.'"
+
+I took her hand, and got her to understand that I wanted her to repeat
+after me.
+
+"White," said I.
+
+"Hwhite," said she.
+
+'Power,' said I.
+
+'Pow-wer,' said she.
+
+'White Power,' said I.
+
+'Hwhite Pow-wer,' said she.
+
+'Shall not,' said I.
+
+'Sall not,' said she.
+
+'White Power shall not,' said I.
+
+'Hwhite Pow-wer sall not,' said she.
+
+'Prevail,' said I.
+
+'Fffail,' said she, pronouncing the 'v' with a long fluttering
+'f'-sound.
+
+'Pre-vail,' said I.
+
+'Pe-vvvail,' said she.
+
+'White Power shall not prevail,' said I.
+
+'Hwhite Pow-wer sall not--fffail,' said she.
+
+A thunder which roared as she said it seemed to me to go laughing
+through the universe, and a minute I looked upon her face with positive
+shrinking fear; till, starting up, I thrust her with violence from my
+path, and dashed forth to re-seek the palace and my bed.
+
+Such was the ingratitude and fatality which my first attempt, four
+nights since, to teach her met with. It remains to be seen whether my
+pity for her dumbness, or some servile tendency toward fellowship in
+myself, will result in any further lesson. Certainly, I think not: for
+though I have given my word, the most solemnly-pledged word may be
+broken.
+
+Surely, surely, her presence in the world with me--for I suppose it is
+that--has wrought some profound changes in my mood: for gone now
+apparently are those turbulent hours when, stalking like a peacock, I
+flaunted my monarchy in the face of the Eternal Powers, with hissed
+blasphemies; or else dribbled, shaking my body in a lewd dance; or was
+off to fire some vast city and revel in redness and the chucklings of
+Hell; or rolled in the drunkenness of drugs. It was mere frenzy!--I see
+it now--it was 'not good,' 'not good.' And it rather looks as if it were
+past--or almost. I have clipped my beard and hair, removed the earrings,
+and thought of modifying my attire. I will just watch to see whether she
+comes loitering down there about the gate of the lake.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her progress is like....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is nine months since I have written, on these sheets, those words,
+'Her progress is like....' being the beginning of some narrative in
+which something interrupted me: and since then I have had no impulse to
+write.
+
+But I was thinking just now of the curious tricks and uncertainties of
+my memory, and seeing the sheets, will record it here. I have lately
+been trying to recall the name of a sister of mine--some perfectly
+simple name, I know--and the name of my old home in England: and they
+have completely passed out of my cognizance, though she was my only
+sister, and we grew up closely together: some quite simple name, I
+forget it now. Yet I can't say that my memory is bad: there are
+things--quite unexpected, unimportant things--which come up in my mind
+with considerable clearness. For instance, I remember to have met in
+Paris (I think), long before the poison-cloud, a little Brazilian boy of
+the colour of weak coffee-and-milk, of whom she now constantly reminds
+me. He wore his hair short like a convict's, so that one could spy the
+fish-white flesh beneath, and delighted to play solitary about the
+stairs of the hotel, dressed up in the white balloon-dress of a Pierrot.
+I have the impression now that he must have had very large ears. Clever
+as a flea he was, knowing five or six languages, as it were by nature,
+without having any suspicion that that was at all extraordinary. She has
+that same light, unconscious, and nonchalant cleverness, and easy way of
+life. It is little more than a year since I began to teach her, and
+already she can speak English with a quite considerable vocabulary, and
+perfect correctness (except that she does not pronounce the letter 'r');
+she has also read, or rather devoured, a good many books; and can write,
+draw, and play the harp. And all she does without effort: rather with
+the flighty naturalness with which a bird takes to the wing.
+
+What made me teach her to read was this: One afternoon, fourteen months
+or so ago, I from the roof-kiosk saw her down at the lake-rim, a book in
+hand; and as she had seen me looking steadily at books, so she was
+looking steadily at it, with pathetic sideward head: so that I burst
+into laughter, for I saw her clearly through the glass, and whether she
+is the simplest little fool, or the craftiest serpent that ever
+breathed, I am not yet sure. If I thought that she has the least design
+upon my honour, it would be ill for her.
+
+I went to Gallipoli for two days in the month of May, and brought back a
+very pretty little caique, a perfect slender crescent of the colour of
+the moon, though I had two days' labour in cutting through bush-thicket
+for the passage of the motor in bringing it up to the lake. It has
+pleased me to see her lie among the silk cushions of the middle, while
+I, paddling, taught her her first words and sentences between the hours
+of eight and ten in the evening, though later they became 10 A.M. to
+noon, when the reading began, we sitting on the palace-steps before the
+portal, her mouth invariably well covered with the yashmak, the
+lesson-book being a large-lettered old Bible found at her yali. _Why_
+she must needs wear the yashmak she has never once asked; and how much
+she divines, knows, or intends, I have no idea, continually questioning
+myself as to whether she is all simplicity, or all cunning.
+
+That she is conscious of some profound difference in our organisation I
+cannot doubt: for that I have a long beard, and she none at all, is
+among the most patent of facts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have thought that a certain _Western-ness_--a growing modernity of
+tone--may be the result, as far as I am concerned, of her presence with
+me? I do not know....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is the gleam of a lake-end just visible in the north forest from
+the palace-top, and in it a good number of fish like carp, tench, roach,
+etc., so in May I searched for a tackle-shop in the Gallipoli
+Fatmeh-bazaar, and got four 12-foot rods, with reels, silk-line,
+quill-floats, a few yards of silk-worm gut, with a packet of No. 7 and
+8 hooks, and split-shot for sinkers; and since red-worms, maggots and
+gentles are common on the island, I felt sure of a great many more fish
+than the number I wanted, which was none at all. However, for the mere
+amusement, I fished several times, lying at my length in a patch of
+long-grass over-waved by an enormous cedar, where the bank is steep, and
+the water deep. And one mid-afternoon she was suddenly there with me,
+questioned me with her eyes, and when I consented, stayed: and presently
+I said I would teach her bottom-angling, and sent her flying up to the
+palace for another rod and tackle.
+
+That day she did nothing, for after teaching her to thread the worm, and
+put the gentles on the smaller hooks, I sent her to hunt for worms to
+chop up for ground-baiting the pitch for the next afternoon; and when
+this was done it was dinner-time, and I sent her home, for by then I was
+giving the reading-lessons in the morning.
+
+The next day I found her at the bank, taught her to take the sounding
+for adjusting the float, and she lay down not far from me, holding the
+rod. So I said to her:
+
+'Well, this is better than living in a dark cellar twenty years, with
+nothing to do but walk up and down, sleep, and consume dates and Ismidt
+wine.'
+
+'Yes!' says she.
+
+'Twenty years!' said I: 'How did you bear it?'
+
+'I was not closs,' says she.
+
+'Did you never suspect that there was a world outside that cellar?' said
+I.
+
+'Never,' says she, 'or lather, yes: but I did not suppose that it was
+_this_ world, but another where he lived.'
+
+'He who?'
+
+'He who spoke with me.'
+
+'Who was that?'
+
+'Oh! a bite!' she screamed gladly.
+
+I saw her float bob under, and started up, rushed to her, and taught her
+how to strike and play it, though it turned out when landed to be
+nothing but a tiny barbel: but she was in ecstasies, holding it on her
+palm, murmuring her fond coo.
+
+She re-baited, and we lay again. I said:
+
+'But what a life: no exit, no light, no prospect, no hope--'
+
+'Plenty of _hope_!' says she.
+
+'Good Heavens! hope of what?'
+
+'I knew vely well that something was lipening over the cellar, or under,
+or alound it, and would come to pass at a certain fixed hour, and that I
+should see it, and feel it, and it would be vely nice.'
+
+'Ah, well, you had to wait for it, at any rate. Didn't those twenty
+years seem _long_?'
+
+'No--at least sometimes--not often. I was always so occupied.'
+
+'Occupied in doing what?'
+
+'In eating, or dlinking, or lunning, or talking.'
+
+'Talking to your_self_?'
+
+'Not myself.'
+
+'To whom, then?'
+
+'To the one who told me when I was hungly, and put the dates to satisfy
+my hunger.'
+
+'I see. Don't wriggle about in that way, or you will never catch any
+fish. The maxim of angling is: "Study to be quiet"--'
+
+'O! another bite!' she called, and this time, all alone, very agilely
+landed a good-sized bream.
+
+'But do you mean that you were never sad?' said I when she was
+re-settled.
+
+'Sometimes I would sit and cly,' says she--'I did not know why. But if
+that was "sadness," I was never miserlable, never, never. And if I
+clied, it did not last long, and I would soon fall to sleep, for he
+would lock me in his lap, and kiss me, and wipe all my tears away.'
+
+'He who?'
+
+'Why, what a question! he who told me when I was hungly, and of the
+thing that was lipening outside the cellar, which would be so nice.'
+
+'I see, I see. But in all that dingy place, and thick gloom, were you
+never at all afraid?'
+
+'Aflaid! _I_! of what?'
+
+'Of the unknown.'
+
+'I do not understand you. How could I be _aflaid_? The known was the
+very opposite of tellible: it was merely hunger and dates, thirst and
+wine, the desire to lun and space to lun in, the desire to sleep and
+sleep: there was nothing tellible in that: and the unknown was even less
+tellible than the known: for it was the nice thing that was lipening
+outside the cellar. I do not understand--'
+
+'Ah, yes,' said I, 'you are a clever little being: but your continual
+fluttering about is fatal to all angling. Isn't it in your nature to
+keep still a minute? And with regard now to your habits in the
+cellar--?'
+
+'_Another!_' she cried with happy laugh, and landed a young chub. And
+that afternoon she caught seven, and I none.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Another day I took her from the pitch to one of the kitchens in the
+village with some of the fish, till then always thrown away, and taught
+her cooking: for the only cooking-implement in the palace is the silver
+alcohol-lamp for coffee and chocolate. We both scrubbed the utensils,
+and boil and fry I taught her, and the making of a sauce from vinegar,
+bottled olives, and the tinned American butter from the _Speranza_, and
+the boiling of rice mixed with flour for ground-baiting our pitch. And
+she, at first astonished, was soon all deft housewifeliness, breathless
+officiousness, and behind my back, of her own intuitiveness, grated some
+dry almonds found there, and with them sprinkled the fried tench. And we
+ate them, sitting on the floor together: the first new food, I suppose,
+tasted by me for twenty-one years: nor did I find it disagreeable.
+
+The next day she came up to the palace reading a book, which turned out
+to be a cookery-book in English, found at her yali; and a week later,
+she appeared, out of hours, presenting me a yellow-earthenware dish
+containing a mess of gorgeous colours--a boiled fish under red peppers,
+bits of saffron, a greenish sauce, and almonds: but I turned her away,
+and would have none of her, or her dish.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About a mile up to the west of the palace is a very old ruin in the
+deepest forest, I think of a mosque, though only three truncated
+internal pillars under ivy, and the weedy floor, with the courtyard and
+portal-steps remain, before it being a long avenue of cedars, gently
+descending from the steps, the path between the trees choked with
+long-grass and wild rye reaching to my middle. Here I saw one day a
+large disc of old brass, bossed in the middle, which may have been
+either a shield or part of an ancient cymbal, with concentric rings
+graven round it, from centre to circumference. The next day I brought
+some nails, a hammer, a saw, and a box of paints from the _Speranza_;
+and I painted the rings in different colours, cut down a slim
+lime-trunk, nailed the thin disc along its top, and planted it well,
+before the steps: for I said I would make a bull's-eye, and do rifle and
+revolver practice before it, from the avenue. And this the next evening
+I was doing at four hundred feet, startling the island, it seemed, with
+that unusual noise, when up she came peering with enquiring face: at
+which I was very angry, because my arm, long unused, was firing wide:
+but I was too proud to say anything, and let her look, and soon she
+understood, laughing every time I made a considerable miss, till at last
+I turned upon her saying: 'If you think it so easy, you may try.'
+
+She had been wanting to try, for she came eagerly to the offer, and
+after I had opened and showed her the mechanism, the cartridges, and how
+to shoot, I put into her hands one of the _Speranza_ Colt's. She took
+her bottom-lip between her teeth, shut her left eye, vaulted out the
+revolver like an old shot to the level of her intense right eye, and
+sent a ball through the geometrical centre of the boss.
+
+However, it was a fluke-shot, for I had the satisfaction of seeing her
+miss every one of the other five, except the last, which hit the black.
+That, however, was three weeks since, and now my hitting record is forty
+per cent., and hers ninety-six--most extraordinary: so that it is clear
+that this creature is the _protégée_ of someone, and favouritism is in
+the world.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her book of books is the Old Testament. Sometimes, at noon or afternoon,
+I may look abroad from the roof or galleries, and see a remote figure
+sitting on the sward under the shade of plane or black cypress: and I
+always know that the book she cons there is the Bible--like an old
+Rabbi. She has a passion for stories: and there finds a store.
+
+Three nights since when it was pretty late, and the moon very splendid,
+I saw her passing homewards close to the lake, and shouted down to her,
+meaning to say 'Good-night'; but she thought that I had called her, and
+came: and sitting out on the top step we talked for hours, she without
+the yashmak.
+
+We fell to talking about the Bible. And says she: 'What did Cain to
+Abel?'
+
+'He knocked him over,' I replied, liking sometimes to use such idioms,
+with the double object of teaching and perplexing her.
+
+'Over what?' says she.
+
+'Over his heels,' said I.
+
+'I do not complehend!'
+
+'He killed him, then.'
+
+'That I know. But how did Abel feel when he was killed? What is it to be
+_killed_?'
+
+'Well,' said I, 'you have seen bones all around you, and the bones of
+your mother, and you can feel the bones in your fingers. Your fingers
+will become mere bone after you are dead, as die you must. Those bones
+which you see around you, are, of course, the bones of the men of whom
+we often speak: and the same thing happened to them which happens to a
+fish or a butterfly when you catch them, and they lie all still.'
+
+'And the men and the butterfly feel the same after they are dead?'
+
+'Precisely the same. They lie in a deep drowse, and dream a
+nonsense-dream.'
+
+'That is not dleadful. I thought that it was much more dleadful. I
+should not mind dying.'
+
+'Ah!... so much the better: for it is possible that you may have to die
+a great deal sooner than you think.'
+
+'I should not mind. Why were men so vely aflaid to die?'
+
+'Because they were all such shocking cowards.'
+
+'Oh, not all! not all!'
+
+(This girl, I know not with what motive, has now definitely set herself
+up against me as the defender of the dead race. With every chance she is
+at it.)
+
+'Nearly all,' said I: 'tell me one who was not afraid--'
+
+'There was Isaac,' says she: 'when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill
+him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.'
+
+'Isaac was a great exception,' said I: 'in the Bible and such books, you
+understand, you read of only the best sorts of people; but there were
+millions and millions of others--especially about the time of the
+poison-cloud--on a very much lower level--putrid wretches--covetous,
+false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the
+earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes.'
+
+This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back
+half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the
+ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw
+her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She
+turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had
+brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it.
+Then, the little hairs at her lip-corners still wet, says she:
+
+'Vices and climes, climes and vices. Always the same. What were these
+climes and vices?'
+
+'Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred--'
+
+'But what made them _do_ them?'
+
+'Their evil nature--their base souls.'
+
+'But _you_ are one of them, _I_ am another: yet you and I live here
+together, and we do no vices and climes.'
+
+Her astounding shrewdness! Right into the inmost heart of a matter does
+her simple wit seem to pierce!
+
+'No,' I said, 'we do no vices and crimes, because we lack _motive_.
+There is no danger that we should hate each other, for we have plenty to
+eat and drink, dates, wines, and thousands of things. (Our danger is
+rather the other way.) But _they_ hated and schemed, because they were
+very numerous, and there arose a question among them of dates and wine.'
+
+'Was there not, then, enough land to grow dates and wine for all?'
+
+'There was--yes: much more than enough, I fancy. But some got hold of a
+vast lot of it, and as the rest felt the pinch of scarcity, there arose,
+naturally, a pretty state of things--including the vices and crimes.'
+
+'Ah, but then,' says she, 'it was not to their bad souls that the vices
+and climes were due, but only to this question of land. It is certain
+that if there had been no such question, there would have been no vices
+and climes, because you and I, who are just like them, do no vices and
+climes here, where there is no such question.'
+
+The clear limelight of her intelligence! She wriggled on her seat in her
+effort of argument.
+
+'I am not going to argue the matter,' I said. 'There _was_ that question
+of dates and wine, you see. And there always must be on an earth where
+millions of men, with varying degrees of cunning, reside.'
+
+'Oh, not at all necessalily!' she cries with conviction: 'not at all, at
+all: since there are much more dates and wine than are enough for all.
+If there should spling up more men now, having the whole wisdom,
+science, and expelience of the past at their hand, and they made an
+allangement among themselves that the first man who tlied to take more
+than he could work for should be killed, and sent to dleam a
+nonsense-dleam, the question could never again alise!'
+
+'It arose before--it would arise again.'
+
+'But no! I can guess clearly how it alose before: it alose thlough the
+sheer carelessness of the first men. The land was at first so vely, vely
+much more than enough for all, that the men did not take the tlouble to
+make an allangement among themselves; and afterwards the habit of
+carelessness was confirmed; till at last the vely oliginal carelessness
+must have got to have the look of an allangement; and so the stleam
+which began in a little long ended in a big long, the long glowing more
+and more fixed and fatal as the stleam lolled further flom the source. I
+see it clearly, can't you? But now, if some more men would spling, they
+would be taught--'
+
+'Ah, but no more men will _spling_, you see--!'
+
+'There is no telling. I sometimes feel as if they must, and shall. The
+tlees blossom, the thunder lolls, the air makes me lun and leap, the
+glound is full of lichness, and I hear the voice of the Lord God walking
+all among the tlees of the folests.'
+
+As she said this, I saw her under-lip push out and tremble, as when she
+is near to crying, and her eyes moisten: but a moment after she looked
+at me full, and smiled, so mobile is her face: and as she looked, it
+suddenly struck me what a noble temple of a brow the creature has,
+almost pointed at the uplifted summit, and widening down like a
+bell-curved Gothic arch, draped in strings of frizzy hair which anon she
+shakes backward with her head.
+
+'Clodagh,' I said after some minutes--'do you know why I called you
+Clodagh?'
+
+'No? Tell me?'
+
+'Because once, long ago before the poison-cloud, I had a lover called
+Clodagh: and she was a....'
+
+'But tell me first,' cries she: 'how did one know one's lover, or one's
+wife, flom all the others?'
+
+'Well, by their faces....'
+
+'But there must have been many faces--all alike--'
+
+'Not all alike. Each was different from the rest.'
+
+'Still, it must have been vely clever to tell. I can hardly conceive
+any face, except yours and mine.'
+
+'Ah, because you are a little goose, you see.'
+
+'What was a goose like?'
+
+'It was a thing like a butterfly, only larger, and it kept its toes
+always spread out, with a skin stretched between.'
+
+'Leally? How caplicious! And am I like that?--but what were you saying
+that your lover, Clodagh, was?'
+
+'She was a Poisoner.'
+
+'Then why call me Clodagh, since _I_ am not a poisoner?'
+
+'I call you so to remind me: lest you--lest you--should become
+my--lover, too.'
+
+'I am your lover already: for I love you.'
+
+'What, girl?'
+
+'Do I not love you, who are mine?'
+
+'Come, come, don't be a little maniac!' I went. 'Clodagh was a
+_poisoner_....'
+
+'Why did she poison? Had she not enough dates and wine?'
+
+'She had, yes: but she wanted more, more, more, the silly idiot.'
+
+'So that the vices and climes were not confined to those that lacked
+things, but were done by the others, too?'
+
+'By the others chiefly.'
+
+'Then I see how it was!'
+
+'How was it?'
+
+'The others had got _spoiled_. The vices and climes must have
+begun with those who lacked things, and then the others, always seeing
+vices and climes alound them, began to do them, too--as when one rotten
+olive is in a bottle, the whole mass soon becomes collupted: but
+originally they were not rotten, but only became so. And all though a
+little carelessness at the first. I am sure that if more men could
+spling now--'
+
+'But I _told_ you, didn't I, that no more men will spring? You
+understand, Clodagh, that originally the earth produced men by a long
+process, beginning with a very low type of creature, and continually
+developing it, until at last a man stood up. But that can never happen
+again: for the earth is old, old, and has lost her producing vigour now.
+So talk no more of men _splinging_, and of things which you do not
+understand. Instead, go inside--stop, I will tell you a secret: to-day
+in the wood I picked some musk-roses and wound them into a wreath,
+meaning to give them you for your head when you came to-morrow: and it
+is inside on the pearl tripod in the second room to the left: go,
+therefore, and put it on, and bring the harp, and play to me, my dear.'
+
+She ran quick with a little cry, and coming again, sat crowned,
+incarnadine in the blushing depths of the gold. Nor did I send her home
+to her lonely yali, till the pale and languished moon, weary of
+all-night beatitudes, sank down soft-couched in quilts of curdling opals
+to the Hesperian realms of her rest.
+
+So sometimes we speak together, she and I, she and I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That ever I should write such a thing! I am driven out from Imbros!
+
+I was walking up in a wood yesterday to the west--it was a calm clear
+evening about seven, the sun having just set. I had the book in which I
+have written so far in my hand, for I had thought of making a sketch of
+an old windmill to the north-west to show her. Twenty minutes before she
+had been with me, for I had chanced to meet her, and she had come, but
+kept darting on ahead after peeping fruit, gathering armfuls of
+amaranth, nenuphar, and red-berried asphodel, till, weary of my life, I
+had called to her: 'Go away! out of my sight'--and she, with suddenly
+pushed under-lip, had walked off.
+
+Well, I was continuing my stroll, when I seemed to feel some quaking of
+the ground, and before one could count twenty, it was as if the island
+was bent upon wracking itself to pieces. My first thought was of her,
+and in great scare I went running, calling in the direction which she
+had gone, staggering as on the deck of some labouring ship, falling,
+picking myself up, running again. The air was quite full of uproar, and
+the land waving like the sea: and as I went plunging, not knowing
+whither, I saw to my right some three or four acres of forest droop and
+sink into a gulf which opened to receive them. Up I flung my arms,
+crying out: 'Good God! save the girl!' and a minute later rushed out, to
+my surprise, into open space on a hill-side. On the lower ground I could
+see the palace, and beyond it, a small space of white sea which had the
+awful appearance of being higher than the land. Down the hill-side I
+staggered, driven by the impulse to fly somewhither, but about half way
+down was startled afresh by a shrill pattering like musical hail, and
+the next moment saw the entire palace rush with the jangling clatter of
+a thousand bells into the heaving lake.
+
+Some seconds after this, the earthquake, having lasted fully ten
+minutes, began to lull, and soon ceased. I found her an hour later
+standing among the ruins of her little yali.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, what a thing! Probably every building on the island has been
+destroyed; the palace-platform, all cracked, leans half-sunken askew
+into the lake, like a huge stranded ark, while of the palace itself no
+trace remains, except a mound of gold stones emerging above the lake to
+the south. Gone, gone--sixteen years of vanity and vexation. But from a
+practical point of view, what is a worst calamity of all is that the
+_Speranza_ now lies high-and-dry in the village: for she was bodily
+picked up from the quay by the tidal wave, and driven bow-foremost into
+a street not half her width, and there now lies, looking huge enough in
+the little village, wedged for ever, smashed in at the nip like a frail
+match-box, a most astonishing spectacle: her bows forty feet up the
+street, ten feet above the ground at the stem, rudder resting on the
+inner edge of the quay, foremast tilted forward, the other two masts all
+right, and that bottom, which has passed through seas so far, buried in
+every sort of green and brown seaweed, the old _Speranza_. Her steps
+were there, and by a slight leap I could catch them underneath and go up
+hand-over-hand, till I got foothold; this I did at ten the same night
+when the sea-water had mostly drained back from the land, leaving
+everything very swampy, however; she there with me, and soon following
+me upon the ship. I found most things cracked into tiny fragments,
+twisted, disfigured out of likeness, the house-walls themselves
+displaced a little at the nip, the bow of the cedar skiff smashed in to
+her middle against the aft starboard corner of the galley; and were it
+not for the fact that the air-pinnace had not broken from her heavy
+ropings, and one of the compasses still whole, I do not know what I
+should have done: for the four old water-logged boats in the cove have
+utterly disappeared.
+
+I made her sleep on the cabin-floor amid the _débris_ of berth and
+everything, and I myself slept high up in the wood to the west. I am
+writing now lying in the long-grass the morning after, the sun rising,
+though I cannot see him. My plan for to-day is to cut three or four logs
+with the saw, lay them on the ground by the ship, lower the pinnace upon
+them, so get her gradually down into the water, and by evening bid a
+long farewell to Imbros, which drives me out in this way. Still, I look
+forward with pleasure to our hour's run to the Mainland, when I shall
+teach her to steer by the compass, and manipulate liquid-air, as I have
+taught her to dress, to talk, to cook, to write, to think, to live. For
+she is my creation, this creature: as it were, a 'rib from my side.'
+
+But what is the design of this expulsion? And what was it that she
+called it last night?--'this new going out flom Halan'! 'Haran,' I
+believe, being the place from which Abraham went out, when 'called' by
+God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We apparently felt only the tail of the earthquake at Imbros: for it has
+ravaged Turkey! And we two poor helpless creatures put down here in the
+theatre of all these infinite violences: it is too bad, too bad. For the
+rages of Nature at present are perfectly astonishing, and what it may
+come to I do not know. When we came to the Macedonian coast in good
+moonlight, we sailed along it, and up the Dardanelles, looking out for
+village, yali, or any habitation where we might put up: but everything
+has apparently been wrecked. We saw Kilid-Bahr, Chanak-Kaleh, Gallipoli,
+Lapsaki in ruins; at the last place I landed, leaving her in the boat,
+and walked a little way, but soon went back with the news that there was
+not even a bazaar-arch left standing whole, in most parts even the line
+of the streets being obliterated, for the place had fallen like a house
+of dice, and had then been shaken up and jumbled. Finally we slept in a
+forest on the other side of the strait, beyond Gallipoli, taking our few
+provisions, and having to wade at some points through morass a foot deep
+before we reached dry woodland.
+
+Here, the next morning, I sat alone--for we had slept separated by at
+least half a mile--thinking out the question of whither I should go: my
+choice would have been to remain either in the region where I was, or to
+go Eastward: but the region where I was offered no dwelling that I could
+see; and to go any distance Eastward, I needed a ship. Of ships I had
+seen during the night only wrecks, nor did I know where to find one in
+all these latitudes. I was thus, like her 'Ablaham,' urged Westward.
+
+In order, then, to go Westward, I first went a little further Eastward,
+once more entered the Golden Horn, and once more mounted the scorched
+Seraglio steps. Here what the wickedness of man had spared, the
+wickedness of Nature had destroyed, and the few houses which I had left
+standing round the upper part of Pera I now saw low as the rest; also
+the house near the Suleimanieh, where we had lived our first days, to
+which I went as to a home, I found without a pillar standing; and that
+night she slept under the half-roof of a little funeral-kiosk in the
+scorched cypress-wood of Eyoub, and I a mile away, at the edge of the
+forest where first I saw her.
+
+The next morning, having met, as agreed, at the site of the Prophet's
+mosque, we traversed together the valley and cemetery of Kassim by the
+quagmires up to Pera, all the landscape having to me a rather twisted
+unfamiliar aspect. We had determined to spend the morning in searching
+for supplies among the earthquake-ruins of Pera; and as I had decided to
+collect sufficient in one day to save us further pains for some time, we
+passed a good many hours in this task, I confining myself to the great
+white house in the park overlooking Kassim, where I had once slept,
+losing myself in the huge obliquities of its floors, roofs and
+wall-fragments, she going to the old Mussulman quarter of Djianghir
+near, on the heights of Taxim, where were many shops, and thence round
+the brow of the hill to the great French Embassy-house, overlooking
+Foundoucli and the sea, both of us having large Persian carpet-bags, and
+all in the air of that wilderness of ruin that morning a sweet, strong,
+permanent odour of maple-blossom.
+
+We met toward evening, she quivering under such a load, that I would not
+let her carry it, but abandoned my day's labour, which was lighter, and
+took hers, which was quite enough: we went back Westward, seeking all
+the while some shelter from the saturating night-dews of this place: and
+nothing could we find, till we came again, quite late, to her broken
+funeral-kiosk at the entrance to the immense cemetery-avenue of Eyoub.
+There without a word I left her among the shattered catafalques, for I
+was weary; but having gone some distance, turned back, thinking that I
+might take some more raisins from the bag; and after getting them, said
+to her, shaking her little hand where she sat under the roof-shadow on a
+stone:
+
+'Good-night, Clodagh.'
+
+She did not answer promptly: and her answer, to my surprise, was a
+protest against her name: for a rather sulky, yet gentle, voice came
+from the darkness, saying:
+
+'I am _not_ a Poisoner!'
+
+'Well,' said I, 'all right: tell me whatever you like that I should call
+you, and henceforth I will call you that.'
+
+'Call me Eve,' says she.
+
+'Well, no,' said I, 'not Eve, anything but that: for _my_ name is Adam,
+and if I called you Eve, that would be simply absurd, and we do not want
+to be ridiculous in each other's eyes. But I will call you anything else
+that you like.'
+
+'Call me Leda,' says she.
+
+'And why Leda?' said I.
+
+'Because Leda sounds something like Clodagh,' says she, 'and you are
+al-leady in the habit of calling me Clodagh; and I saw the name Leda in
+a book, and liked it: but Clodagh is most hollible, most bitterly
+hollible!'
+
+'Well, then,' said I, 'Leda it shall be, and I shan't forget, for I like
+it, too, and it suits you, and you ought to have a name beginning with
+an "L." Good-night, my dear, sleep well, and dream, dream.'
+
+'And to you, too, my God give dleams of peace and pleasantness,' says
+she; and I went.
+
+And it was only when I had lain myself upon leaves for my bed, my head
+on my caftan, a rill for my lullaby, and two stars, which alone I could
+see out of the heavenful, for my watch-lights; and only when my eyes
+were already closed toward slumber, that a sudden strong thought pierced
+and woke me: for I remembered that Leda was the name of a Greek woman
+who had borne twins. In fact, I should not be surprised if this Greek
+word Leda is the same word etymologically as the Hebrew Eve, for I have
+heard of _v's_, and _b's_, and _d's_ interchanging about in this way,
+and if _Di_, meaning God, or Light, and _Bi_, meaning Life, and Io_v_e,
+and Iho_v_ah and Go_d_, meaning much the same, are all one, that would
+be nothing astonishing to me, as wi_d_ow, and veu_v_e, are one: and
+where it says, 'truly the Light is Good (_tob, b_on),' this is as if it
+said, 'truly the Di is Di.' Such, at any rate, is the fatality that
+attends me, even in the smallest things: for this Western Eve, or Greek
+Leda, had twins.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, the next morning we crossed by the ruins of old Greek Phanar
+across the triple Stamboul-wall, which still showed its deep-ivied
+portal, and made our way, not without climbing, along the Golden Horn to
+the foot of the Old Seraglio, where I soon found signs of the railway.
+And that minute commenced our journey across Turkey, Bulgaria, Servia,
+Bosnia, Croatia, to Trieste, occupying no day or two as in old times,
+but four months, a long-drawn nightmare, though a nightmare of rich
+happiness, if one may say so, leaving on the memory a vague vast
+impression of monstrous ravines, ever-succeeding profundities, heights
+and greatnesses, jungles strange as some moon-struck poet's fantasy,
+everlasting glooms, and a sound of mighty unseen rivers, cataracts, and
+slow cumbered rills whose bulrushes never see the sun, with largesse
+everywhere, secrecies, profusions, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, a
+savagery most lush and fierce and gaudy, and vales of Arcadie, and
+remote mountain-peaks, and tarns shy as old-buried treasure, and
+glaciers, and we two human folk pretty small and drowned and lost in
+all that amplitude, yet moving always through it.
+
+We followed the lines that first day till we came to a steam train, and
+I found the engine fairly good, and everything necessary to move it at
+my hand: but the metals in such a condition of twisted, broken, vaulted,
+and buried confusion, due to the earthquake, that, having run some
+hundreds of yards to examine them, I saw that nothing could be done in
+that way. At first this threw me into a condition like despair, for what
+we were to do I did not know: but after persevering on foot for four
+days along the deep-rusted track, which is of that large-gauge type
+peculiar to Eastern Europe, I began to see that there were considerable
+sound stretches, and took heart.
+
+I had with me land-charts and compass, but nothing for taking
+altitude-observations: for the _Speranza_ instruments, except one
+compass, had all been broken-up by her shock. However, on getting to the
+town of Silivri, about thirty miles from our start, I saw in the ruins
+of a half-standing bazaar-shop a number of brass objects, and there
+found several good sextants, quadrants, and theodolites. Two mornings
+later, we came upon an engine in mid-country, with coals in it, and a
+stream near; I had a goat-skin of almond-oil in the bag, and found the
+machinery serviceable after an hour's careful inspection, having
+examined the boiler with a candle through the manhole, and removed the
+autoclaves of the heaters. All was red with rust, and the shaft of the
+connecting-rod in particular seemed so frail, that at one moment I was
+very dubious: I decided, however, and, except for a slight leakage at
+the tubulure which led the steam to the valve-chest, all went very well;
+at a pressure never exceeding three-and-a-half atmospheres, we travelled
+nearly a hundred and twenty miles before being stopped by a head-to-head
+block on the line, when we had to abandon our engine; we then continued
+another seven miles a-foot, I all the time mourning my motor, which I
+had had to leave at Imbros, and hoping at every townlet to find a whole
+one, but in vain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was wonderful to see the villages and towns going back to the earth,
+already invaded by vegetation, and hardly any longer breaking the
+continuity of pure Nature, the town now as much the country as the
+country, and that which is not-Man becoming all in all with a certain
+_furore_ of vigour. A whole day in the southern gorges of the Balkan
+Mountains the slow train went tearing its way through many a mile of
+bind-weed tendrils, a continuous curtain, flaming with large flowers,
+but sombre as the falling shades of night, rather resembling jungles of
+Ceylon and the Filipinas; and she, that day, lying in the single car
+behind, where I had made her a little yatag-bed from Tatar Bazardjik,
+continually played the kittur, barely touching the strings, and crooning
+low, low, in her rich contralto, eternally the same air, over and over
+again, crooning, crooning, some melancholy tune of her own dreaming,
+just audible to me through the slow-travailing monotony of the engine;
+till I was drunken with so sweet a woe, my God, a woe that was sweet as
+life, and a dolour that lulled like nepenthe, and a grief that soothed
+like kisses, so sweet, so sweet, that all that world of wood and gloom
+lost locality and realness for me, and became nothing but a charmed and
+pensive Heaven for her to moan and lullaby in; and from between my
+fingers streamed plenteous tears that day, and all that I could keep on
+mourning was 'O Leda, O Leda, O Leda,' till my heart was near to break.
+
+The feed-pump eccentric-shaft of this engine, which was very poor and
+flaky, suddenly gave out about five in the afternoon, and I had to stop
+in a hurry, and that sweet invisible mechanism which had crooned and
+crooned about my ears in the air, and followed me whithersoever I went,
+stopped too. Down she jumped, calling out:
+
+'Well, I had a plesentiment that something would happen, and I am so
+glad, for I was tired!'
+
+Seeing that nothing could be done with the feed-water pump, I got down,
+took the bag, and parting before us the continuous screen, we went
+pioneering to the left between a rock-cleft, stepping over large stones
+that looked black with moss-growths, no sky, but hundreds of feet of
+impenetrable leafage overhead, and everywhere the dew-dabbled profusion
+of dim ferneries, dishevelled maidenhairs mixed with a large-leaved
+mimosa, wild vine, white briony, and a smell of cedar, and a soft
+rushing of perpetual waters that charmed the gloaming. The way led
+slightly upwards three hundred feet, and presently, after some windings,
+and the climbing of five huge steps almost regular, yet obviously
+natural, the gorge opened in a roundish space, fifty feet across, with
+far overhanging edges seven hundred feet high; and there, behind a
+curtain which fell from above, its tendrils defined and straight like a
+Japanese bead-hanging, we spread the store of foods, I opening the
+wines, fruits, vegetables and meats, she arranging them in order with
+the gold plate, and lighting both the spirit-lamp and the lantern: for
+here it was quite dark. Near us behind the curtain of tendrils was a
+small green cave in the rock, and at its mouth a pool two yards wide, a
+black and limpid water that leisurely wheeled, discharging a little
+rivulet from the cave: and in it I saw three owl-eyed fish, a finger
+long, loiter, and spur themselves, and gaze. Leda, who cannot be still
+in tongue or limb, chattered in her glib baby manner as we ate, and
+then, after smoking a cigarette, said that she would go and 'lun,' and
+went, and left me darkling, for she is the sun and the moon and the host
+of the stars, I occupying myself that night in making a calendar at the
+end of this book in which I have written, for my almanack and many
+things that I prized were lost with the palace--making a calendar,
+counting the days in my head--but counting them across my thoughts of
+her.
+
+She came again to tell me good-night, and then went down to the train to
+sleep; and I put out the lantern, and stooped within the cave, and made
+my simple couch beside the little rivulet, and slept.
+
+But a fitful sleep, and soon again I woke; and a long time I lay so,
+gradually becoming conscious of a slow dripping at one spot in the
+cave: for at a minute's interval it darkly splashed, regularly, very
+deliberately; and it seemed to grow always louder and sadder, and the
+splash at first was 'Leesha,' but it became 'Leda' to my ears, and it
+sobbed her name, and I pitied myself, so sad was I. And when I could no
+longer bear the anguished melancholy of its spasm and its sobbing, I
+arose and went softly, softly, lest she should hear in that sounding
+silence of the hushed and darksome night, going more slow, more soft, as
+I went nearer, a sob in my throat, my feet leading me to her, till I
+touched the carriage. And against it a long time I leant my clammy brow,
+a sob aching in my poor throat, and she all mixed up in my head with the
+suspended hushed night, and with the elfin things in the air that made
+the silence so musically a-sound to the vacant ear-drum, and with the
+dripping splash in the cave. And softly I turned the door-handle, and
+heard her breathe in Asleep, her head near me; and I touched her hair
+with my lips, and close to her ear I said--for I heard her breathe as if
+in sleep--'Little Leda, I have come to you, for I could not help it,
+Leda: and oh, my heart is full of the love of you, for you are mine, and
+I am yours: and to live with you, till we die, and after we are dead to
+be near you still, Leda, with my broken heart near your heart, little
+Leda--'
+
+I must have sobbed, I think; for as I spoke close at her ears, with
+passionately dying eyes of love, I was startled by an irregularity in
+her breathing; and with cautious hurry I shut the door, and quite back
+to the cave I stole in haste.
+
+And the next morning when we met I thought--but am not now sure--that
+she smiled singularly: I thought so. She may, she _may_, have heard--But
+I cannot tell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Twice I was obliged to abandon engines on account of forest-tree
+obstructions right across the line, which, do what I might, I could not
+move, and these were the two bitterest incidents of the pilgrimage; and
+at least thirty times I changed from engine to engine, when other trains
+blocked. As for the extent of the earthquake, it is pretty certain that
+it was universal over the Peninsula, and at many points exhibited
+extreme violence, for up to the time that we entered upon Servian
+territory, we occasionally came upon stretches of the lines so
+dislocated, that it was impossible to proceed upon them, and during the
+whole course I never saw one intact house or castle; four times, where
+the way was of a nature to permit of it, I left the imbedded metals and
+made the engine travel the ground till I came upon other metals, when I
+always succeeded in driving it upon them. It was all very leisurely, for
+not everywhere, nor every day, could I get a nautical observation, and
+having at all times to go at low pressures for fear of tube and boiler
+weakness, crawling through tunnels, and stopping when total darkness
+came on, we did not go fast, nor much cared to. Once, moreover, for
+three days, and once for four, we were overtaken by hurricanes of such
+vast inclemency, that no thought of travelling entered our heads, our
+only care being to hide our poor cowering bodies as deeply and darkly as
+possible. Once I passed through a city (Adrianople) doubly devastated,
+once by the hellish arson of my own hand, and once by the earthquake:
+and I made haste to leave that place behind me.
+
+Finally, three months and twenty-seven days from the date of the
+earthquake, having traversed only 900 odd English miles, I let go in the
+Venice lagoon, in the early morning of the 10th September, the lateen
+sail and stone anchor of a Maltese _speronare_, which I had found, and
+partially cleaned, at Trieste; and thence I passed up the Canalazzo in a
+gondola. For I said to Leda: 'In Venice will I pitch my Patriarch tent.'
+
+But to will and to do are not the same thing, and still further
+Westward was I driven. For the stagnant upper canals of this place are
+now mere miasmas of pestilence: and within two days I was rolling with
+fever in the Old Procurazie Palace, she standing in pale wonderment at
+my bed-side, sickness quite a novel thing to her: and, indeed, this was
+my first serious illness since my twentieth year or thereabouts, when I
+had over-worked my brain, and went a voyage to Constantinople. I could
+not move from bed for some weeks, but happily did not lose my senses,
+and she brought me the whole pharmacopoeia from the shops, from which to
+choose my medicines. I guessed the cause of this illness, though not a
+sign of it came near her, and as soon as my trembling knees could bear
+me, I again set out--always Westward--enjoying now a certain luxury in
+travelling compared with that Turkish difficulty, for here were no
+twisted metals, more and better engines, in the cities as many good
+petrol motors as I chose, and Nature markedly less savage.
+
+I do not know why I did not stop at Verona or Brescia, or some other
+neighbourhood of the Italian lakes, since I was fond of water: but I
+had, I think, the thought in my head to return to Vauclaire in France,
+where I had lived, and there live: for I thought that she might like
+those old monks. At all events, we did not remain long in any place till
+we came to Turin, where we spent nine days, she in the house opposite
+mine, and after that, at her own suggestion, went on still, passing by
+train into the valley of the Isère, and then into that of the Western
+Rhone, till we came to the old town of Geneva among some very great
+mountains peaked with snow, the town seated at the head of a long lake
+which the earth has made in the shape of the crescent moon, and like the
+moon it is a thing of much beauty and many moods, suggesting a creature
+under the spell of charms and magics. However, with this idea of
+Vauclaire still in my head, we left Geneva in the motor which had
+brought us at four in the afternoon of the 17th May, I intending to
+reach the town called Bourg that night about eight, and there sleep, so
+to go on to Lyons the next morning by train, and so, by the Bordeaux
+route, make Vauclaire. But by some chance for which I cannot to this
+hour account (unless the rain was the cause), I missed the chart-road,
+which should have been fairly level, and found myself on mountain
+tracks, unconscious of my whereabouts, while darkness fell, and a
+windless downpour that had a certain sullen venom in its superabundance
+drenched us. I stopped several times, looking about for château,
+chalet, or village, but none did I see, though I twice came upon railway
+lines; and not till midnight did we run down a rather steep pass upon
+the shore of a lake, which, from its apparent vastness in the moonless
+obscurity, I could only suppose to be the Lake of Geneva once again.
+About two hundred yards to the left we saw through the rain a large
+pile, apparently risen straight out of the lake, looking ghostly livid,
+for it was of white stone, not high, but an old thing of complicated
+white little turrets roofed with dark red candle extinguishers, and
+oddities of Gothic nooks, window slits, and outline, very like a
+fanciful picture. Round to this we went, drowned as rats, Leda sighing
+and bedraggled, and found a narrow spit of low land projecting into the
+lake, where we left the car, walked forward with the bag, crossed a
+small wooden drawbridge, and came upon a rocky island with a number of
+thick-foliaged trees about the castle. We quickly found a small open
+portal, and went throughout the place, quite gay at the shelter,
+everywhere lighting candles which we found in iron sconces in the rather
+queer apartments: so that, as the castle is far seen from the shores of
+the lake, it would have appeared to one looking thence a place suddenly
+possessed and haunted. We found beds, and slept: and the next day it
+turned out to be the antique Castle of Chillon, where we remained five
+long and happy months, till again, again, Fate overtook us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The morning after our coming, we had breakfast--our last meal
+together--on the first floor in a pentagonal room approached from a
+lower level by three little steps. In it is a ponderous oak table
+pierced with a multitude of worm eaten tunnels, also three mighty high
+backed chairs, an old oak desk covered still with papers, arras on the
+walls, and three dark religious oil paintings, and a grandfathers clock:
+it is at about the middle of the château, and contains two small, but
+deep, three faced oriels, in each face four compartments with white
+stone shafts between, these looking south upon shrubs and the rocky edge
+of the island, then upon the deep blue lake, then upon another tiny
+island containing four trees in a jungle of flowers, then upon the shore
+of the lake interrupted by the mouths of a river which turned out to be
+the Rhone, then upon a white town on the slopes which turned out to be
+Villeneuve, then upon the great mountains back of Bouveret and St.
+Gingolph, all having the surprised air of a resurrection just
+completed, everything new washed in dyes of azure, ultramarine, indigo,
+snow, emerald, that fresh morning: so that one had to call it the best
+and holiest place in the world. These five old room walls, and oak
+floor, and two oriels, became specially mine, though it was really
+common ground to us both, and there I would do many little things. The
+papers on the desk told that it had been the _bureau_ of one R.E. Gaud,
+'_Grand Bailli_,' whose residence the place no doubt had been.
+
+She asked me while eating that morning to stay here, and I said that I
+would see, though with misgiving: so together we went all about the
+house, and finding it unexpectedly spacious, I consented to stop. At
+both ends are suites, mostly small rooms, infinitely quaint and cosy,
+furnished with heavy Henri Quatre furniture and bed draperies; and there
+are separate, and as it were secret, spiral stairs for exit to each: so
+we decided that she should have the suite overlooking the length of the
+lake, the mouths of the Rhone, Bouveret and Villeneuve; and I should
+have that overlooking the spit of land behind and the little drawbridge,
+shore cliffs, and elmwood which comes down to the shore, giving at one
+point a glimpse of the diminutive hamlet of Chillon; and, that decided,
+I took her hand in mine, and I said:
+
+'Well, then, here we stay, both under the same roof--for the first time.
+Leda, I will not explain why to you, but it is dangerous, so much so
+that it _may_ mean the death of one or other of us: deadly, deadly
+dangerous, my poor girl. You do not understand, but that is the fact,
+believe me, for I know it very well, and I would not tell you false.
+Well, then, you will easily comprehend, that this being so, you must
+never on any account come near my part of the house, nor will I come
+near yours. Lately we have been very much together, but then we have
+been active, full of purpose and occupation: here we shall be nothing of
+the kind, I can see. You do not understand at all--but things are so. We
+must live perfectly separate lives, then. You are nothing to me, really,
+nor I to you, only we live on the same earth, which is nothing at all--a
+mere chance. Your own food, clothes, and everything that you want, you
+will procure for yourself: it is perfectly easy: the shores are crowded
+with mansions, castles, towns and villages; and I will do the same for
+myself. The motor down there I set apart for your private use: if I want
+another, I will get one; and to-day I will set about looking you up a
+boat and fishing tackle, and cut a cross on the bow of yours, so that
+you may know yours, and never use mine. All this is very necessary: you
+cannot dream how much: but I know how much. Do not run any risks in
+climbing, now, or with the motor, or in the boat ... little Leda ...'
+
+I saw her under-lip push, and I turned away in haste, for I did not care
+whether she cried or not. In that long voyage, and in my illness at
+Venice, she had become too near and dear to me, my tender love, my dear
+darling soul; and I said in my heart: 'I will be a decent being: I will
+turn out trumps.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under this castle is a sort of dungeon, not narrow, nor very dark, in
+which are seven stout dark-grey pillars, and an eighth, half-built into
+the wall; and one of them which has an iron ring, as well as the ground
+around it, is all worn away by some prisoner or prisoners once chained
+there; and in the pillar the word 'Byron' engraved. This made me
+remember that a poet of that name had written something about this
+place, and two days afterwards I actually came upon three volumes of the
+poet in a room containing a great number of books, many of them English,
+near the Grand Bailli's _bureau_: and in one I read the poem, which is
+called 'The Prisoner of Chillon.' I found it very affecting, and the
+description good, only I saw no seven rings, and where he speaks of the
+'pale and livid light,' he should speak rather of the dun and brownish
+gloom, for the word 'light' disconcerts the fancy, and of either pallor
+or blue there is there no sign. However, I was so struck by the horror
+of man's cruelty to man, as depicted in this poem, that I determined
+that she should see it; went up straight to her rooms with the book,
+and, she being away, ferreted among her things to see what she was
+doing, finding all very neat, except in one room where were a number of
+prints called _La Mode_, and _débris_ of snipped cloth, and medley.
+When, after two hours, she came in, and I suddenly presented myself,
+'Oh!' she let slip, and then fell to cooing her laugh; and I took her
+down through a big room stacked with every kind of rifle, with
+revolvers, cartridges, powder, swords, bayonets--evidently some official
+or cantonal magazine--and then showed her the worn stone in the dungeon,
+the ring, the narrow deep slits in the wall, and I told the tale of
+cruelty, while the splashing of the lake upon the rock outside was heard
+with a strange and tragic sound, and her mobile face was all one sorrow.
+
+'How cruel they must have been!' cries she with tremulous lip, her face
+at the same time reddened with indignation.
+
+'They were mere beastly monsters,' said I: 'it is nothing surprising if
+monsters were cruel.'
+
+And in the short time while I said that, she was looking up with a
+new-born smile.
+
+'Some others came and set the plisoner flee!' cries she.
+
+'Yes,' said I, 'they did, but--'
+
+'That was good of them,' says she.
+
+'Yes,' said I, 'that was all right, so far as it went.'
+
+'And it was a time when men had al-leady become cluel,' says she: 'if
+those who set him flee were so good when all the lest were cluel, what
+would they have been at a time when all the lest were kind? They would
+have been just like Angels....!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this place fishing, and long rambles, were the order of the day, both
+for her and for me, especially fishing, though a week rarely passed
+which did not find me at Bouveret, St. Gingolph, Yvoire, Messery, Nyon,
+Ouchy, Vevay, Montreux, Geneva, or one of the two dozen villages,
+townlets, or towns, that crowd the shores, all very pretty places, each
+with its charm, and mostly I went on foot, though the railway runs right
+round the forty odd miles of the lake's length. One noon-day I was
+walking through the main-street of Vevay going on to the Cully-road when
+I had a fearful shock, for in a shop just in front of me to the right I
+heard a sound--an unmistakable indication of life--as of clattering
+metals shaken together. My heart leapt into my mouth, I was conscious of
+becoming bloodlessly pale, and on tip-toe of exquisite caution I stole
+up to the open door--peeped in--and it was she standing on the counter
+of a jeweller's shop, her back turned to me, with head bent low over a
+tray of jewels in her hands, which she was rummaging for something. I
+went _'Hoh!'_ for I could not help it, and all that day, till sunset, we
+were very dear friends, for I could not part from her, we walking
+together by vor-alpen, wood, and shore all the way to Ouchy, she just
+like a creature crazy that day with the bliss of living, rolling in
+grasses and perilous flowery declines, stamping her foot defiantly at
+me, arrogant queen that she is, and then running like mad for me to
+catch her, with laughter, _abandon_, carolling railleries, and the
+levity of the wild ass's colt on the hills, entangling her loose-flung
+hair with Bacchic tendril and blossom, and drinking, in the passage
+through Cully, more wine, I thought, than was good: and the flaming
+darts of lightning that shot and shocked me that day, and the inner
+secret gleams and revelations of Beauty which I had, and the pangs of
+white-hot honey that tortured my soul and body, and were too much for
+me, and made me sick, oh Heaven, what tongue could express all that deep
+world of things? And at Ouchy with a backward wave of my arm I silently
+motioned her from me, for I was dumb, and weak, and I left her there:
+and all that long night her power was upon me, for she is stronger than
+gravitation, which may be evaded, and than all the forces of life
+combined, and the sun and the moon and the earth are nothing compared
+with her; and when she was gone from me I was like a fish in the air, or
+like a bird in the deep, for she is my element of life, made for me to
+breathe in, and I drown without her: so that for many hours I lay on
+that grassy hill leading to the burial-ground outside Ouchy that night,
+like a man sore wounded, biting the grass.
+
+What made things worse for me was her adoption of European clothes since
+coming to this place: I believe that, in her adroit way, she herself
+made some of her dresses, for one day I saw in her apartments a number
+of coloured fashion-plates, with a confusion like dress-making; or she
+may have been only modifying finished things from the shops, for her
+Western dressing is not quite like what I remember of the modern female
+style, but is really, I should say, quite her own, rather resembling the
+Greek, or the eighteenth century. At any rate, the airs and graces are
+as natural to her as feathers to parrots; and she has changes like the
+moon; never twice the same, and always transcending her last phase and
+revelation: for I could not have conceived of anyone in whom _taste_ was
+a faculty so separate as in her, so positive and salient, like smelling
+or sight--more like _smelling_: for it is the faculty, half Reason, half
+Imagination, by which she fore-scents precisely what will suit
+exquisitely with what; so that every time I saw her, I received the
+impression of a perfectly novel, completely bewitching, work of Art: the
+special quality of works of Art being to produce the momentary
+conviction that anything else whatever could not possibly be so good.
+
+Occasionally, from my window I would see her in the wood beyond the
+drawbridge, cool and white in green shade, with her Bible probably,
+training her skirt like a court-lady, and looking much taller than
+before. I believe that this new dressing produced a separation between
+us more complete than it might have been; and especially after that day
+between Vevay and Ouchy I was very careful not to meet her. The more I
+saw that she bejewelled herself, powdered herself, embalmed herself like
+sachets of sweet scents, chapleted her Greek-dressed head with gold
+fillets, the more I shunned her. Myself, somehow, had now resumed
+European dress, and, ah me, I was greatly changed, greatly changed, God
+knows, from the portly inflated monarch-creature that strutted and
+groaned four years previously in the palace at Imbros: so that my manner
+of life and thought might once more now have been called modern and
+Western.
+
+All the more was my sense of responsibility awful: and from day to day
+it seemed to intensify. An arguing Voice never ceased to remonstrate
+within me, nor left me peace, and the curse of unborn hosts appeared to
+menace me. To strengthen my fixity I would often overwhelm myself, and
+her, with muttered opprobriums, calling myself 'convict,' her
+'lady-bird'; asking what manner of man was I that I should dare so great
+a thing; and as for her, what was she to be the Mother of a world?--a
+versatile butterfly with a woman's brow! And continually now in my
+fiercer moods I was meditating either my death--or hers.
+
+Ah, but the butterfly did not let me forget her brow! To the south-west
+of Villeneuve, between the forest and the river is a well-grown gentian
+field, and returning from round St. Gingolph to the Château one day in
+the third month after an absence of three days, I saw, as I turned a
+corner in the descent of the mountain, some object floating in the air
+above the field. Never was I more startled, and, above all, perplexed:
+for, beside the object soaring there like a great butterfly, I could see
+nothing to account for it. It was not long, however, before I came to
+the conclusion that she has re-invented _the kite_--for she had almost
+certainly never seen one--and I presently sighted her holding the string
+in the midfield. Her invention resembles the kind called 'swallow-tail'
+of old.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But mostly it was on the lake that I saw her, for there we chiefly
+lived, and occasionally there were guilty approaches and _rencontres_,
+she in her boat, I in mine, both being slight clinker-built Montreux
+pleasure-boats, which I had spent some days in overhauling and
+varnishing, mine with jib, fore-and-aft mainsail, and spanker, hers
+rather smaller, one-masted, with an easy-running lug-sail. It was no
+uncommon thing for me to sail quite to Geneva, and come back from a
+seven-days' cruise with my soul filled and consoled with the lake and
+all its many moods of bright and darksome, serene and pensive, dolorous
+and despairing and tragic, at morning, at noon, at sunset, at midnight,
+a panorama that never for an instant ceased to unroll its
+transformations, I sometimes climbing the mountains as high as the
+goat-herd region of hoch-alpen, once sleeping there. And once I was made
+very ill by a two-weeks' horror which I had: for she disappeared in her
+skiff, I being at the Château, and she did not come back; and while she
+was away there was a tempest that turned the lake into an angry ocean,
+and, ah my good God, she did not come. At last, half-crazy at the vacant
+days of misery which went by and by, and she did not come, I set out
+upon a wild-goose quest, of her--of all the hopeless things the most
+hopeless, for the world is great--and I sought and did not find her; and
+after three days I turned back, recognising that I was mad to search the
+infinite, and coming near the Château, I saw her wave her handkerchief
+from the island-edge, for she divined that I had gone to seek her, and
+she was watching for me: and when I took her hand, what did she say to
+me, the Biblical simpleton?--'Oh you of little Faith!' says she. And she
+had adventures to lisp, with all the _r_'s liquefied into _l_'s, and I
+was with her all that day again.
+
+Once a month perhaps she would knock at my outermost door, which I
+mostly kept locked when at home, bringing me a sumptuously-dressed,
+highly-spiced red trout or grayling, which I had not the heart to
+refuse, and exquisitely she does them, all hot and spiced, applying
+apparently to their preparation the taste which she applies to dress;
+and her extraordinary luck in angling did not fail to supply her with
+the finest specimens, though, for that matter, this lake, with its old
+fish-hatcheries and fish-ladders, is not miserly in that way, swarming
+now with the best lake trout, river trout, red trout, and with salmon,
+of which last I have brought in one with the landing-net of, I should
+say, thirty-five to forty pounds. As the bottom goes off very rapidly
+from the two islands to a depth of eight to nine hundred feet, we did
+not long confine ourselves to bottom-fishing, but gradually advanced to
+every variety of manoeuvre, doing middle-water spinning with
+three-triangle flights and sliding lip-hook for jack and trout, trailing
+with the sail for salmon, live-baiting with the float for pike, daping
+with blue-bottles, casting with artificial flies, and I could not say in
+which she became the most carelessly adept, for all soon seemed as old
+and natural to her as an occupation learned from birth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the 21st October I attained my forty-sixth birthday in excellent
+health: a day destined to end for me in bloodshed and tragedy, alas. I
+forget now what circumstance had caused me to mention the date long
+beforehand in, I think, Venice, not dreaming that she would keep any
+count of it, nor was I even sure that my calendar was not faulty by a
+day. But at ten in the morning of what I called the 21st, descending by
+my private spiral in flannels with some trout and par bait, and
+tackle--I met her coming up, my God, though she had no earthly right to
+be there. With her cooing murmur of a laugh, yet pale, pale, and with a
+most guilty look, she presented me a large bouquet of wild flowers.
+
+I was at once thrown into a state of great agitation. She was dressed in
+rather a frippery of _mousseline de soie_, all cream-laced, with
+wide-hanging short sleeves, a large diamond at the low open neck, the
+ivory-brown skin there contrasting with the powdered bluish-white of her
+face, where, however, the freckles were not quite whited out; on her
+feet little pink satin slippers, without any stockings--a divinely pale
+pink; and well back on her hair a plain thin circlet of gold; and she
+smelled like heaven, God knows.
+
+I could not speak. She broke an awkward silence, saying, very faint and
+pallid:
+
+'It is the day!'
+
+'I--perhaps--' I said, or some incoherency like that.
+
+I saw the touch of enthusiasm which she had summoned up quenched by my
+manner.
+
+'I have not done long again?' she asked, looking down, breaking another
+silence.
+
+'No, no, oh no,' said I hurriedly: 'not done wrong again. Only, I could
+not suppose that you would count up the days. You are ... considerate.
+Perhaps--but--'
+
+'Tell Leda?'
+
+'Perhaps.... I was going to say ... you might come fishing with me....'
+
+'O luck!' she went softly.
+
+I was pierced by a sense of my base cowardice, my incredible weakness:
+but I could not at all help it.
+
+I took the flowers, and we went down to the south side, where my boat
+lay; I threw out some of the fish from the well; arranged the tackle,
+and then the stern cushions for her; got up the sails; and out we went,
+she steering, I in the bows, with every possible inch of space between
+us, receiving delicious intermittent whiffs from her of ambergris,
+frangipane, or some blending of perfumes, the morning being bright and
+hot, with very little breeze on the water, which looked mottled, like
+colourless water imperfectly mixed with indigo-wash, we making little
+headway; so it was some time before I moved nearer her to get the par
+for fixing on the three-triangle flight, for I was going to trail for
+salmon or large lake-trout; and during all that time we spoke not a word
+together.
+
+Afterwards I said:
+
+'Who told you that flowers are proper to birthdays? or that birthdays
+are of any importance?'
+
+'I suppose that nothing can happen so important as birth,' says she:
+'and perfumes must be ploper to birth, because the wise men blought
+spices to the young Jesus.'
+
+This _naïveté_ was the cause of my immediate recovery: for to laugh is
+to be saved: and I laughed right out, saying:
+
+'But you read the Bible too much! all your notions are biblical. You
+should read the quite modern books.'
+
+'I have tlied,' says she: 'but I cannot lead them long, nor often. The
+whole world seems to have got so collupted. It makes me shudder.'
+
+'Ah, well now, you see, you quite come round to my point of view,' said
+I.
+
+'Yes, and no,' says she: 'they had got so _spoiled_, that is all.
+Everlybody seems to have become quite dull-witted--the plainest tluths
+they could not see. I can imagine that those faculties which aided them
+in their stlain to become lich themselves, and make the lest more poor,
+must have been gleatly sharpened, while all the other faculties
+withered: as I can imagine a person with one eye seeing double thlough
+it, and quite blind on the other side.'
+
+'Ah,' said I, 'I do not think they even _wanted_ to see on the other
+side. There were some few tolerably good and clear-sighted ones among
+them, you know: and these all agreed in pointing out how, by changing
+one or two of their old man-in-the-moon Bedlam arrangements, they could
+greatly better themselves: but they heard with listless ears: I don't
+know that they ever made any considerable effort. For they had become
+more or less unconscious of their misery, so miserable were they: like
+the man in Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," who, when his deliverers came,
+was quite indifferent, for he says:
+
+  "It was at length the same to me
+  Fettered or fetterless to be:
+    I had learned to love Despair."'
+
+'Oh my God,' she went, covering her face a moment, 'how dleadful! And
+it is tlue, it seems tlue:--they had learned to love Despair, to be even
+ploud of Despair. Yet all the time, I feel _sure_ flom what I have lead,
+flom what I scent, that the individual man was stluggling to see, to
+live light, but without power, like one's leg when it is asleep: that is
+so pletty of them all! that they meant well--everly one. But they were
+too tloubled and sad, too awfully burdened: they had no chance at all.
+Such a queer, unnatulal feeling it gives me to lead of all that world: I
+can't desclibe it; all their motives seem so tainted, their life so
+lopsided. Tluely, the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint.'
+
+'Quite so,' said I: 'and observe that this was no new thing: in the very
+beginning of the Book we read how God saw that the wickedness of man was
+great on the earth, and every imagination of his heart evil....'
+
+'Yes,' she interrupted, 'that is tlue: but there must have been some
+_cause!_ We can be quite _sure_ that it was not natulal, because you and
+I are men, and our hearts are not evil.'
+
+This was her great argument which she always trotted out, because she
+found that I had usually no answer to give to it. But this time I said:
+
+'Our hearts not evil? Say yours: but as to mine you know nothing,
+Leda.'
+
+The semicircles under her eyes had that morning, as often, a certain
+moist, heavy, pensive and weary something, as of one fresh from a revel,
+very sweet and tender: and, looking softly at me with it, she answered:
+
+'I know my own heart, and it is not evil: not at all: not even in the
+very least: and I know yours, too.'
+
+'You know _mine!_' cried I, with a half-laugh of surprise.
+
+'Quite well,' says she.
+
+I was so troubled by this cool assurance, that I said not a word, but
+going to her, handed her the baited flight, swivel-trace, and line,
+which she paid out; then I got back again almost into the bows.
+
+After a ten-minutes I spoke again:
+
+'So this is news to me: you know all about my heart. Well, come, tell me
+what is in it!'
+
+Now she was silent, pretending to be busy with the trail, till she said,
+speaking with low-bent face, and a voice that I could only just hear:
+
+'I will tell you what is in it: in it is a lebellion which you think
+good, but is not good. If a stleam will just flow, neither tlying to
+climb upward, nor over-flowing its banks, but lunning modestly in its
+fated channel just wherever it is led, then it will finally leach the
+sea--the mighty ocean--and lose itself in fulness.'
+
+'Ah,' said I, 'but that counsel is not new. It is what the philosophers
+used to call "yielding to Destiny," and "following Nature." And Destiny
+and Nature, I give you my word, often led mankind quite wrong--'
+
+'Or _seemed_ to,' says she--'for a time: as when a stleam flows north a
+little, and the sea is to the south: but it is bound for the sea all the
+time, and will turn again. Destiny never could, and cannot yet, be
+judged, for it is not finished: and our lace should follow blindly
+whither it points, sure that thlough many curves it leads the world to
+our God.'
+
+'Our God indeed!' I cried, getting very excited: 'girl! you talk
+speciously, but falsely! whence have you these thoughts in that head of
+yours? Girl! you talk of "our race"! But there are only two of us left?
+Are you talking _at_ me, Leda? Do not _I_ follow Destiny?'
+
+'You?' she sighed, with down-bent face: 'ah, poor me!'
+
+'What should I do if I followed it?' said I, with a crazy curiosity.
+
+Her face hung lower, paler, in trouble: and she said:
+
+'You would come now and sit near me here. You would not be there where
+you are. You would be always and for ever near me....'
+
+My good God! I felt my face redden.
+
+'Oh, I could not _tell_ you...!' I cried: 'you talk the most disastrous...!
+you lack all responsibility...! Never, never...!'
+
+Her face now was covered with her left hand, her right on the tiller:
+and bitingly she said, with a touch of venom:
+
+'I could _make_ you come--_now_, if I chose: but I will not: I will wait
+upon my God....'
+
+'_Make_ me!' I cried: 'Leda! How make me?'
+
+'I could cly before you, as I cly often and often ... in seclet ... for
+my childlen....'
+
+'_You_ cry in secret? This is news--'
+
+'Yes, yes, I cly. Is not the burden of the world heavy upon me, too? and
+the work I have to do _vely, vely_ gleat? And often and often I cly in
+seclet, thinking of it: and I could cly now if I chose, for you love
+your little girl so much, that you could not lesist me one minute....'
+
+Now I saw the push and tortion and trembling of her poor little
+under-lip, boding tears: and at once a flame was in me which was
+altogether beyond control; and crying out: 'why, my poor dear,' I found
+myself in the act of rushing through the staggering boat to take her to
+me.
+
+Mid-way, however, I was saved: a whisper, intense as lightning, arrested
+me: 'Forward is no escape, nor backward, but _sideward_ there may be a
+way!' And at a sudden impulse, before I knew what I was doing, I was in
+the water swimming.
+
+The smaller of the islands was two hundred yards away, and thither I
+swam, rested some minutes, and thence to the Castle. I did not once look
+behind me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, from 11 A.M. till five in the afternoon, I thought it all out,
+lying in the damp flannels on my face on the sofa in the recess beside
+my bed, where it was quite dark behind the tattered piece of arras: and
+what things I suffered that day, and what deeps I sounded, and what
+prayers I prayed, God knows. What infinitely complicated the awful
+problem was this thought in my head: that to kill her would be far more
+merciful to her than to leave her alone, having killed myself: and,
+Heaven knows, it was for her alone that I thought, not at all caring for
+myself. To kill her was better: but to kill her with my own hands--that
+was too hard to expect of a poor devil like me, a poor common son of
+Adam, after all, and never any sublime self-immolator, as two or three
+of them were. And hours I lay there with brows convulsed in an agony,
+groaning only those words: 'To kill her! to kill her!' thinking
+sometimes that I should be merciful to myself too, and die, and let her
+live, and not care, since, after my death, I would not see her suffer,
+for the dead know not anything: and to expect me to kill her with my own
+hand was a little too much. Yet that one or other of us must die was
+perfectly certain, for I knew that I was just on the brink of failing in
+my oath, and matters here had reached an obvious crisis: unless we could
+make up our minds to part...? putting the width of the earth between
+us? That conception occurred to me: and in the turmoil of my thoughts it
+seemed a possibility. Finally, about 5 P.M., I resolved upon something:
+and first I leapt up, went down and across the house into the arsenal,
+chose a small revolver, fitted it with cartridge, took it up-stairs,
+lubricated it with lamp-oil, went down and out across the drawbridge,
+walked two miles beyond the village, shot the revolver at a tree, found
+its action accurate, and started back. When I came to the Castle, I
+walked along the island to the outer end, and looked up: there were her
+pretty cream Valenciennes, put up by herself, waving inward before the
+light lake-breeze at one open oriel; and I knew that she was in the
+Castle, for I felt it: and always, always, when she was within, I knew,
+for I felt her with me; and always when she was away, I knew, I felt,
+for the air had a dreadful drought, and a barrenness, in it. And I
+looked up for a time to see if she would come to the window, and then I
+called, and she appeared. And I said to her: 'Come down here.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Just here there is a little rock-path to the south, going down to the
+water between rocks mixed with shrub-like little trees, three yards
+long: a path, or a lane, one might call it, for at the lower end the
+rocks and trees reach well over a tall man's head. There she had tied my
+boat to a slender linden-trunk: and sadder now than Gethsemane that
+familiar boat seemed to my eyes, for I knew very well that I should
+never enter it more. I walked up and down the path, awaiting her: and
+from the jacket-pocket in which lay the revolver I drew a box of Swedish
+matches, from it took two matches, and broke off a bit from the plain
+end of one; and the two I held between my left thumb and forefinger
+joint, the phosphorus ends level and visible, the other ends invisible:
+and I awaited her, pacing fast, and my brow was as stern as Azrael and
+Rhadamanthus.
+
+She came, very pale, poor thing, and flurried, breathing fast. And
+'Leda,' I said, meeting her in the middle of the lane, and going
+straight to the point, 'we are to part, as you guess--for ever, as you
+guess--for I see very well by your face that you guess. I, too, am very
+sorry, my little child, and heavy is my heart. To leave you ... alone
+... in the world ... is--death for me. But it must, ah it must, be
+done.'
+
+Her face suddenly turned as sallow as the dead were, when the shroud was
+already on, and the coffin had become a stale added piece of
+room-furniture by the bed-side; but in recording that fact, I record
+also this other: that, accompanying this mortal sallowness, which
+painfully shewed up her poor freckles, was a steady smile, a little
+turned-down: a smile of steady, of slightly disdainful--Confidence.
+
+She did not say anything: so I went on.
+
+'I have thought long,' said I, 'and I have made a plan--a plan which
+cannot be effective without _your_ consent and co-operation: and the
+plan is this: we go from this place together--this same night--to some
+unknown spot, some town, say a hundred miles hence--by train. There I
+get two motors, and I in one, and you in the other, we separate, going
+different ways. We shall thus never be able, however much we may want
+to, to rediscover each other in all this wide world. That is my plan.'
+
+She looked me in the face, smiling her smile: and the answer was not
+long in coming.
+
+'I will go in the tlain with you,' says she with slow decisiveness: 'but
+where you leave me, there I will stay, till I die; and I will patiently
+wait till my God convert you, and send you back to me.'
+
+'That means that you refuse to do what I say?'
+
+'Yes,' said she, bowing the head with great dignity.
+
+'Well, you speak, not like a girl, Leda,' said I, 'but like a full woman
+now. But still, reflect a minute.... O reflect! If you stayed where I
+left you, I _should_ go back to you, and pretty soon, too: I know that I
+should. Tell me, then--reflect well, and tell me--do you definitely
+refuse to part with me?'
+
+The answer was pretty prompt, cool, and firm:
+
+'Yes; I lefuse.'
+
+I left her then, took a turn down the path, and came back.
+
+'Then,' said I, 'here are two matches in my grasp: be good enough to
+draw one.'
+
+_Now_ she was hit to the heart: I saw her eyes widen to the width of
+horror, with a glassy stare: she had read of the drawing of lots in the
+Bible: she knew that it meant death for me, or for her.
+
+But she obeyed without a word, after one backward start and then a brief
+hovering in decision of thumb and forefinger over my held-out hand. I
+had fixed it in my mind that if she drew the shorter of the matches,
+then she should die; if the longer, then I should die.
+
+She drew the shorter....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This was only what I should have expected: for I knew that God loved
+her, and hated me.
+
+But instantly upon the first shock of the enormity that I should be her
+executioner, I made my resolve: to drop shot, too, at the moment after
+she dropped shot, so disposing my body, that it would fall half upon
+her, and half by her, so that we might be close always: and that would
+not be so bad, after all.
+
+With a sudden movement I snatched the revolver from my pocket: she did
+not move, except her white lips, which, I think, whispered:
+
+'_Not yet_....'
+
+I stood with hanging arm, forefinger on trigger, looking at her. I saw
+her glance once at the weapon, and then she fixed her eyes upwards upon
+my face: and now that same smile, which had disappeared, was on her lips
+again, meaning confidence, meaning disdain.
+
+I waited for her to open her mouth to say something--to stop that
+smile--that I might shoot her quick and sudden: and she would not,
+knowing that I could not kill her while she was smiling; and suddenly,
+all my pity and love for her changed into a strange resentment and rage
+against her, for she was purposely making hard for me what I was doing
+for her sake: and the bitter thought was in my mind: 'You are nothing to
+me: if you want to die, you do your own killing; and I will do my own
+killing.' And without one word to her, I strode away, and left her
+there.
+
+I see now that this whole drawing of lots was nothing more than a farce:
+I never could have killed her, smiling, or no smiling: for to each thing
+and man is given a certain strength: and a thing cannot be stronger than
+its strength, strive as it may: it is so strong, and no stronger, and
+there is an end of the matter.
+
+I walked up to the Grand Bailli's _bureau_, a room about twenty-five
+feet from the ground. By this time it was getting pretty dark, but I
+could see, by peering, the face of a grandfather's-clock which I had
+long since set going, and kept wound. It is on the north side of the
+room, over the writing-desk opposite the oriels. It then pointed to
+half-past six, and in order to fix some definite moment for the bitter
+effort of the mortal act, I said: 'At Seven.' I then locked the door
+which opens upon three little steps near the desk, and also the
+stair-door; and I began to pace the chamber. There was not a breath of
+air here, and I was hot; I seemed to be stifling, tore open my shirt at
+the throat, and opened the lower half of the central mullion-space of
+one oriel. Some minutes later, at twenty-five to seven, I lit two
+candles on the desk, and sat to write to her, the pistol at my right
+hand; but I had hardly begun, when I thought that I heard a sound at the
+three-step door, which was only four feet to my left: a sound which
+resembled a scraping of her slipper; I stole to the door, and crouched,
+listening: but I could hear nothing further. I then returned to the
+desk, and set to writing, giving her some last directions for her life,
+telling her why I died, how I loved her, much better than my own soul,
+begging her to love me always, and to live on to please me, but if she
+_would_ die, then to be sure to die near me. Tears were pouring down my
+face, when, turning, I saw her standing in a terrified pose hardly two
+feet behind me. The absolute stealth which had brought and put her
+there, unknown to me, was like miracle: for the ladder, whose top I saw
+intruding into the open oriel, I knew well, having often seen it in a
+room below, and its length was quite thirty feet, nor could its weight
+be trifling: yet I had heard not one hint of its impact upon the window.
+But there, at all events, she was, wan as a ghost.
+
+Immediately, as my consciousness realised her, my hand instinctively
+went out to secure the weapon: but she darted upon it, and was an
+instant before me. I flew after her to wrench it away, but she flew,
+too: and before I caught her, had thrown it cleanly through two rungs of
+the ladder and the window. I dashed to the window, and after a hurried
+peer thought that I saw it below at the foot of a rock; away I flew to
+the stair-door, wrung open the lock, and down the stairs, three at a
+time, I ran to recover it. I remember being rather surprised that she
+did not follow, forgetting all about the ladder.
+
+But with a horrid shock I was reminded of it the moment I reached the
+bottom, before ever I had passed from the house: for I heard the report
+of the weapon--that crack, my God! and crying out: 'Well, Lord, she has
+died for me, then!' I tottered forward, and tumbled upon her, where she
+lay under the incline of the ladder in her blood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night! what a night it was! of fingers shivering with haste, of
+harum-scarum quests and searches, of groans, and piteous appeals to God.
+For there were no surgical instruments, lint, anaesthetics, nor
+antiseptics that I knew of in the Château; and though I knew of a house
+in Montreux where I could find them, the distance was quite infinite,
+and the time an eternity in which to leave her all alone, bleeding to
+death; and, to my horror, I remembered that there was barely enough
+petrol in the motor, and the store usually kept in the house exhausted.
+However, I did it, leaving her there unconscious on her bed: but _how_ I
+did it, and lived sane afterwards, that is another matter.
+
+If I had not been a medical man, she must, I think, have died: for the
+bullet had broken the left fifth rib, had been deflected, and I found
+it buried in the upper part of the abdominal wall. I did not go from her
+bed-side: I did not sleep, though I nodded and staggered: for all things
+were nothing to me, but her: and for a frightfully long time she
+remained comatose. While she was still in this state I took her to a
+chalet beyond Villeneuve, three miles away on the mountain-side, a
+homely, but very salubrious place which I knew, imbedded in verdures,
+for I was desperate at her long collapse, and had hope in the higher
+air. And there after three more days, she opened her eyes, and smiled
+with me.
+
+It was then that I said to myself: 'This is the noblest, sagest, and
+also the most loveable, of the creatures whom God has made in heaven or
+earth. She has won my life, and I will live.... But at least, to save
+myself, I will put the broadest Ocean that there is between her and me:
+for I wish to be a decent being, for the honour of my race, being the
+last, and to turn out trumps ... though I do love my dear, God
+knows....'
+
+And thus, after only fifty-five days at the chalet, were we forced still
+further Westward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wished her to remain at Chillon, intending, myself, to start for the
+Americas, whence any sudden impulse to return to her could not be
+easily accomplished: but she refused, saying that she would come with me
+to the coast of France: and I could not say her no.
+
+And at the coast, after thirteen days we arrived, three days before the
+New Year, traversing France by steam, air, and petrol traction.
+
+We came to Havre--infirm, infirm of will that I was: for in my deep
+heart was the secret, hidden away from my own upper self, that, she
+being at Havre, and I at Portsmouth, we could still speak together.
+
+We came humming into the dark town of Havre in a four-seat motor-car
+about ten in the evening of the 29th December: a raw bleak night, she,
+it was clear, poor thing, bitterly cramped with cold. I had some
+recollection of the place, for I had been there, and drove to the quays,
+near which I stopped at the _Maire's_ large house, a palatial place
+overlooking the sea, in which she slept, I occupying another near.
+
+The next morning I was early astir, searched in the _mairie_ for a map
+of the town, where I also found a _Bottin_: I could thus locate the
+Telephone Exchange. In the _Maire's_ house, which I had fixed upon to be
+her home, the telephone was set up in an alcove adjoining a very stately
+_salon_ Louis Quinze; and though I knew that these little dry batteries
+would not be run down in twenty odd years, yet, fearing any weakness, I
+broke open the box, and substituted a new one from the Company's stores
+two streets away, at the same time noting the exchange-number of the
+instrument. This done, I went down among the ships by the wharves, and
+fixed upon the first old green air-boat that seemed fairly sound, broke
+open a near shop, procured some buckets of oil, and by three o'clock had
+tested and prepared my ship. It was a dull and mournful day, drizzling,
+chilly. I returned then to the _mairie_, where for the first time I saw
+her, and she was heavy of heart that day: but when I broke the news that
+she would be able to speak to me, every day, all day, first she was all
+incredulous astonishment, then, for a moment, her eyes turned white to
+Heaven, then she was skipping like a kid. We were together three
+precious hours, examining the place, and returning with stores of
+whatever she might require, till I saw darkness coming on, and we went
+down to the ship.
+
+And when those long-dead screws awoke and moved, bearing me toward the
+Outer Basin, I saw her stand darkling, lonely, on the Quai through
+heart-rending murk and drizzly inclemency: and oh my God, the gloomy
+under-look of those red eyes, and the piteous out-push of that little
+lip, and the hurried burying of that face! My heart broke, for I had not
+given her even one little, last kiss, and she had been so good, quietly
+acquiescing, like a good wife, not attempting to force her presence upon
+me in the ship; and I left her there, all widowed, alone on the
+Continent of Europe, watching after me: and I went out to the bleak and
+dreary fields of the sea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Arriving at Portsmouth the next morning, I made my residence in the
+first house in which I found an instrument, a spacious dwelling facing
+the Harbour Pier. I then hurried round to the Exchange, which is on the
+Hard near the Docks, a large red building with facings of Cornish
+moor-stone, a bank on the ground-floor, and the Exchange on the first.
+Here I plugged her number on to mine, ran back, rang--and, to my great
+thanksgiving, heard her speak. (This instrument, however, did not prove
+satisfactory: I broke the box, and put in another battery, and still the
+voice was muffled: finally, I furnished the middle room at the Exchange
+with a truckle-bed, stores, and a few things, and here have taken up
+residence.)
+
+I believe that she lives and sleeps under the instrument, as I here
+live and sleep, sleep and live, under it. My instrument is quite near
+one of the harbour-windows, so that, hearing her, I can gaze out toward
+her over the expanse of waters, yet see her not; and she, too, looking
+over the sea toward me, can hear a voice from the azure depths of
+nowhere, yet see me not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I this morning early to her:
+
+'Good morning! Are you there?'
+
+'Good morning! No: I am there,' says she.
+
+'Well, that was what I asked--"are you there"?'
+
+'But I not here, I am there,' says she.
+
+'I know very well that you are not "here,"' said I, 'for I do not see
+you: but I asked if you were there, and you say "No," and then "Yes."'
+
+'It is the paladox of the heart,' says she.
+
+'The what?'
+
+'The paladox,' says she.
+
+'But still I do not understand: how can you be both there and not
+there?'
+
+'If my ear is here, and I elsewhere?' says she.
+
+'An operation?'
+
+'Yes!' says she.
+
+'What doctor?'
+
+'A specialist!' says she.
+
+'An ear-specialist?'
+
+'A heart!' says she.
+
+'And you let a heart-specialist operate on your ear?'
+
+'On myself he operlated, and left the ear behind!' says she.
+
+'Well, and how are you after it?'
+
+'Fairly well. Are you?' says she.
+
+'Quite well. Did you sleep well?'
+
+'Except when you lang me up at midnight. I have had such a dleam ...'
+
+'What?'
+
+'I dleamed that I saw two little boys of the same age--only I could not
+see their faces, I never can see anybody's face, only yours and mine,
+mine and yours always--of the same age--playing in a wood....'
+
+'Ah, I hope that one of them was not called Cain, my poor girl.'
+
+'Not at all! neither of them! Suppose I tell a stoly, and say that one
+was called Caius and the other Tibelius, or one John and the other
+Jesus?'
+
+'Ah. Well, tell me the _dleam_....'
+
+'Now you do not deserve.'
+
+'Well, what will you do to-day?'
+
+'I? It is a lovely day ... have you nice weather in England?'
+
+'Very.'
+
+'Well, between eleven and twelve I will go out and gather Spling-flowers
+in the park, and cover the salon deep, deep. Wouldn't you like to be
+here?'
+
+'Not I.'
+
+'You would!'
+
+'Why should I? I prefer England.'
+
+'But Flance is nice too: and Flance wants to be fliends with England,
+and is waiting, oh waiting, for England to come over, and be fliends.
+Couldn't some _lapplochement_ be negotiated?'
+
+'Good-bye. This talking spoils my morning smoke....'
+
+So we speak together across the sea, my God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the morning of the 8th April, when I had been separated thirteen
+weeks from her, I boarded several ships in the Inner Port, a lunacy in
+my heart, and selected what looked like a very swift boat, one of the
+smaller Atlantic air-steamers called the _Stettin_, which seemed to
+require the least labour in oiling, &c., in order to fit her for the
+sea: for the boat in which I had come to England was a mere tub, though
+sound, and I pined for the wings of a dove, that I might fly away to
+her, and be at rest.
+
+I toiled with fluttering hands that day, and I believe that I was of the
+colour of ashes to my very lips. By half-past two o'clock I was
+finished, and by three was coasting down Southampton Water by Netley
+Hospital and the Hamble-mouth, having said not one word about anything
+at the telephone, or even to my own guilty heart not a word. But in the
+silent depths of my being I felt this fact: that this must be a 35-knot
+boat, and that, if driven hard, hard, in spite of the heavy garment of
+seaweed which she trailed, she would do 30; also that Havre was 120
+miles away, and at 7 P.M. I should be on its quay.
+
+And when I was away, and out on the bright and breezy sea, I called to
+her, crying out: '_I am coming!_' And I knew that she heard me, and that
+her heart leapt to meet me, for mine leapt, too, and felt her answering.
+
+The sun went down: it set. I was tired of the day's work, and of
+standing at the high-set wheel; and I could not yet see the coast of
+France. And a thought smote me, and after another ten minutes I turned
+the ship's head back, my face screwed with pain, God knows, like a man
+whose thumbs are ground between the screws, and his body drawn out and
+out on the rack to tenuous length, and his flesh massacred with pincers:
+and I fell upon the floor of the bridge contorted with anguish: for I
+could not go to her. But after a time that paroxysm passed, and I rose
+up sullen and resentful, and resumed my place at the wheel, steering
+back for England: for a fixed resolve was in my breast, and I said: 'Oh
+no, no more. If I could bear it, I would, I would ... but if it is
+impossible, how can I? To-morrow night as the sun sets--without fail--so
+help me God--I will kill myself.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So it is finished, my good God.
+
+On the early morning of the next day, the 9th, I having come back to
+Portsmouth about eleven the previous night, when I bid her 'Good
+morning' through the telephone, she said 'Good morning,' and not another
+word. I said:
+
+'I got my hookah-bowl broken last night, and shall be trying to mend it
+to-day.'
+
+No answer.
+
+'Are you there?' said I.
+
+'Yes,' says she.
+
+'Then why don't you answer?' said I.
+
+'Where were you all yesterday?' says she.
+
+'I went for a little cruise in the basin,' said I.
+
+Silence for three minutes: then she says:
+
+'What is the matter?'
+
+'Matter?' said I, 'nothing!'
+
+'_Tell me!_' she says--with such an intensity and rage, as to make me
+shudder.
+
+'There is nothing to tell, Leda!'
+
+'Oh, but how can you be so _cluel_ to me?' she cries, and ah, there was
+anguish in that voice! 'There is something to tell--there _is!_ Don't I
+know it vely well by your voice?'
+
+Ah, the thought took me then, how, on the morrow, she would ring, and
+have no answer; and she would ring again, and have no answer; and she
+would ring all day, and ring, and ring; and for ever she would ring,
+with white-flowing hair and the staring eye-balls of frenzy, battering
+reproaches at the doors of God, and the Universe would cry back to her
+howls and ravings only one eternal answer of Silence, of Silence. And as
+I thought of that--for very pity, for very pity, my God--I could not
+help sobbing aloud:
+
+'May God pity you, woman!'
+
+I do not know if she heard it: she _must_, I think, have heard: but no
+reply came; and there I, shivering like the sheeted dead, stood waiting
+for her next word, waiting long, dreading, hoping for, her voice,
+thinking that if she spoke and sobbed but once, I should drop dead,
+dead, where I stood, or bite my tongue through, or shriek the high laugh
+of distraction. But when at last, after quite thirty or forty minutes
+she spoke, her voice was perfectly firm and calm. She said:
+
+'Are you there?'
+
+'Yes,' said I, 'yes, Leda.'
+
+'What was the color,' says she, 'of the poison-cloud which destroyed the
+world?'
+
+'Purple, Leda,' said I.
+
+'And it had a smell like almonds or peach blossoms, did it not?' says
+she.
+
+'Yes,' said I, 'yes.'
+
+'Then,' says she, 'there is _another_ eruption. Every now and again I
+seem to scent strange whiffs like that ... and there is a purple vapour
+in the East which glows and glows ... just see if you can see it....'
+
+I flew across the room to an east window, threw up the grimy sash, and
+looked. But the view was barred by the plain brick back of a tall
+warehouse. I rushed back, gasped to her to wait, rushed down the two
+stairs, and out upon the Hard. For a minute I ran dodging wildly about,
+seeking a purview to the East, and finally ran up the dockyard, behind
+the storehouses to the Semaphore, and reached the top, panting for life.
+I looked abroad. The morning sky, but for a bank of cloud to the
+north-west, was cloudless, the sun blazing in a region of clear azure
+pallor. And back again I flew.
+
+'I cannot see it...!' I cried.
+
+'Then it has not tlavelled far enough to the north-west yet,' she said
+with decision.
+
+'My wife!' I cried: 'you are my wife now!'
+
+'Am I?' says she: 'at last? Are you glad?... But shall I not soon die?'
+
+'No! You can escape! My home! My heart! If only for an hour or two, then
+death--just think, together--on the same couch, for ever, heart to
+heart--how sweet!'
+
+'Yes! how sweet! But how escape?'
+
+'It travelled slowly before. Get quick--will you?--into one of the
+smaller boats by the quay--there is one just under the crane that is an
+air-boat--you have seen me turn on the air, haven't you?--that handle on
+the right as you descend the steps under the dial-thing--get first a
+bucket of oil from the shop next to the clock-tower in the quay-street,
+and throw it over everything that you see rusted. Only, spend no
+time--for me, my heaven! You can steer by the tiller and compass: well,
+the wheel is quite the same, only just the opposite. First unmoor, then
+to the handle, then to the wheel. The course is directly North-East by
+North. I will meet you on the sea--go now--'
+
+I was wild with bliss. I thought that I should take her between my arms,
+and have the little freckles against my face, and taste her short
+firm-fleshed upper-lip, and moan upon her, and whimper upon her, and
+mutter upon her, and say 'My wife.' And even when I knew that she was
+gone from the telephone, I still stood there, hoarsely calling after
+her: 'My wife! My wife!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I flew down to where the steamer lay moored that had borne me the
+previous day. Her joint speed with the speed of Leda's boat would be
+forty knots: in three hours we must meet. I had not the least fear of
+her dying before I saw her: for, apart from the deliberate movement of
+the vapour that first time, I fore-tasted and trusted my love, that she
+would surely come, and not fail: as dying saints fore-tasted and trusted
+Eternal Life.
+
+I was no sooner on board the _Stettin_ than her engines were straining
+under what was equivalent to forced draught. On the previous day it
+would have little surprised me at any moment, while I drove her, to be
+carried to the clouds in an explosion from her deep-rusted steel tanks:
+but this day such a fear never crossed my mind: for I knew very well
+that I was immortal till I saw her.
+
+The sea was not only perfectly smooth, but placid, as on the previous
+day: only it seemed far placider, and the sun brighter, and there was a
+levity in the breezes that frilled the sea in fugitive dark patches,
+like _frissons_ of tickling; and I thought that the morning was a true
+marriage-morning, and remembered that it was a Sabbath; and sweet odours
+our wedding would not lack of peach and almond, though, looking
+eastward, I could see no faintest sign of any purple cloud, but only
+rags of chiffon under the sun; and it would be an eternal wedding, for
+one day in our sight would be as a thousand years, and our thousand
+years of bliss would be but one day, and in the evening of all that
+eternity death would come and sweetly lay its finger upon our languid
+lids, and we should die of weary bliss; and all manner of dancings and
+singings--fandango and light galliard, corantoes and the solemn
+gavotte--were a-tune in my heart that happy day; and running by the
+chart-house to the wheel, I saw under the table a great roll of old
+flags, and presently they were flying in a long curve of gala from the
+main; and the sea rumpled in a long tract of tumbling milk behind me;
+and I hasted homeward, to meet my heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No purple cloud could I see as, on and on, for two hours, I tore
+southward: but at hot noon, on the weather beam I spied through the
+glass across the water something else which moved, and it was you who
+came to me, Oh Leda, my spirit's breath!
+
+I bore down upon her, waving: and soon I saw her stand like an ancient
+mariner, but in white muslins that fluttered, at her wheel on the
+bridge--it was one of those little old Havre-Antwerp craft very high in
+the bows--and she waved a little white thing. And we came nearer, till I
+could spy her face, her smile, and I shouted her to stop, and in a
+minute stopped myself, and by happy steering came with slowing headway
+to a slight crash by her side, and ran down the trellised steps to her,
+and led her up; and on the deck, without saying a word, I fell to my
+knees before her, and I bowed my brow to the floor, with obeisance, and
+I worshipped her there as Heaven.
+
+And we were wedded: for she, too, bowed the knee with me under the
+jovial blue sky; and under her eyes were the little moist semicircles of
+dreamy pensive fatigue, so dear and wifish: and God was there, and saw
+her kneel: for He loves the girl.
+
+And I got the two ships apart, and they rested there some yards divided
+all the day, and we were in the main-deck cabin, where I had locked a
+door, so that no one might come in to be with my love and me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I said to her:
+
+'We will fly west to one of the Somersetshire coal-mines, or to one of
+the Cornwall tin-mines, and we will barricade ourselves against the
+cloud, and provision ourselves for six months--for it is perfectly
+feasible, and we have plenty of time, and no crowds to break down our
+barricades--and there in the deep earth we will live sweetly together,
+till the danger is overpast.'
+
+And she smiled, and drew her hand across my face, and said:
+
+'No, no: don't you tlust in my God? do you think He would leally let me
+die?'
+
+For she has appropriated the Almighty God to herself, naming Him '_my_
+God'--the impudence: though she generally knows what she is saying, too.
+And she would not fly the cloud.
+
+And I am now writing three weeks later at a little place called
+Château-les-Roses, and no poison-cloud, and no sign of any poison-cloud,
+has come. And this I do not understand.
+
+It may be that she divined that I was about to destroy myself ... she
+may be quite capable.... But no, I do not understand, and shall never
+ask her.
+
+But _this_ I understand: that it is _the White_ who is Master here: that
+though he wins but by a hair, yet he wins, he wins: and since he wins,
+dance, dance, my heart.
+
+I look for a race that shall resemble its Mother: nimble-witted,
+light-minded, pious--like her; all-human, ambidextrous, ambicephalous,
+two-eyed--like her; and if, like her, they talk the English language
+with all the r's turned into l's, I shall not care.
+
+They will be vegetable-eaters, I suppose, when all the meat now extant
+is eaten up: but it is not certain that meat is good for men: and if it
+is really good, then they will _invent_ a meat: for they will be _her_
+sons, and she, to the furthest cycle in which the female human mind is
+permitted to orbit, is, I swear, all-wise.
+
+There was a preaching man--a Scotchman he was, named Macintosh, or
+something like that--who said that the last end of Man shall be well,
+and very well: and she says the same: and the agreement of these two
+makes a Truth. And to that I now say: Amen, Amen.
+
+For I, Adam Jeffson, second Parent of the world, hereby lay down,
+ordain, and decree for all time, clearly perceiving it now: That the one
+Motto and Watch-word essentially proper to each human individual, and to
+the whole Race of Man, as distinct from other races in heaven or in
+earth, was always, and remains, even this: 'Though He slay me, yet will
+I trust in Him.'
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
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