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    The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume Two
    The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume Two
    The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume Two
    Ebook678 pages13 hours

    The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume Two

    By H. P. Lovecraft and M.J. Elliott

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    With an Introduction by M.J. Elliott.

    ‘My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion…’

    A wax museum in London boasts a new exhibit, which no man has seen and remained sane… A businessman is trapped in a train carriage with a madman who claims to have created a new and efficient method of capital punishment… A doctor plans a horrible revenge, using as his murder weapon an insect believed capable of consuming the human soul… Within these pages, some of H P Lovecraft's more obscure works of horror and science fiction can be found, including several fantastic tales from his celebrated Cthulhu Mythos. No true Lovecraft aficionado dare be without this volume.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703995
    The Horror in the Museum: Collected Short Stories Volume Two
    Author

    H. P. Lovecraft

    Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

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      The Horror in the Museum - H. P. Lovecraft

      COLLECTED STORIES, VOLUME TWO

      THE HORROR

      IN THE MUSEUM

      AND OTHER STORIES

      H. P. Lovecraft

      Selected and introduced

      by M. J. Elliott

      The Horror in the Museum first published by

      Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

      Published as an ePublication 2011

      ISBN 978 1 84870 399 5

      Wordsworth Editions Limited

      8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

      Wordsworth® is a registered trademark of

      Wordsworth Editions Limited

      All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

      Readers interested in other titles from Wordsworth Editions are invited to visit our website at

      www.wordsworth-editions.com

      For our latest list of printed books, and a full mail-order service contact

      Bibliophile Books, Unit 5 Datapoint,

      South Crescent, London E16 4TL

      Tel: +44 020 74 74 24 74

      Fax: +44 020 74 74 85 89

      orders@bibliophilebooks.com

      www.bibliophilebooks.com

      For my husband

      ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

      with love from your wife, the publisher

      Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

      not just for me but for our children,

      Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

      For Gill

      INTRODUCTION

      H. P. Lovecraft – Prose Revision Rates

      Revision & Copying – per page of 330 words

      Copying on typewriter – double space, 1 carbon. No revision except spelling, punctuation, & grammar – 0.25

      Light revision, no copying (prose improved locally – no new ideas) – 0.25

      Light revision typed, double-spaced with 1 carbon – 0.50

      Extensive revision, no copying (thorough improvement, including structural change, transposition, addition, or excision – possible introduction of new ideas or plot elements. Requires new text or separate MS.) In rough draft longhand – 0.75

      Extensive revision as above, typed, double space, 1 carbon – 1.00

      Rewriting from old MS, synopsis, plot-notes, idea-germ, or mere suggestion – i.e. ‘ghost-writing’. Text in full by reviser – both language & development. Rough draft longhand – 2.25

      Rewriting as above, typed, double space, 1 carbon – 2.50

      Special flat rates quoted for special jobs, depending on estimated consumption of time & energy.

      When one considers his current worldwide reputation as a master of the horror genre, it seems incredible that during his lifetime the American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) relied upon revision work in order to make ends meet. In fact, Lovecraft was a poor businessman who never had a collection of his work professionally published during his lifetime. The advertisement reprinted above represents Lovecraft’s ghosting/revision rates in 1933. He was often prepared to settle for less, when he was paid at all.

      This collection represents Lovecraft’s most significant collaborations, spanning the period from 1918 to 1936. Some of these tales were rewritten by Lovecraft, based upon another author’s earlier draft. Others are entirely his work, though credited to someone else. Rest assured, however, that you will find much in these pages that is indisputably Lovecraftian – not merely his favourite turns of phrase and insistence upon archaic spellings, but also several additions to his famous Cthulhu Mythos, which promoted the theory that in the universe mankind is insignificant and that other beings, vastly more intelligent and powerful, had inhabited the earth long before the advent of man. These beings had left the ruins of their civilisation in inaccessible places.

      ‘The Crawling Chaos’ and ‘The Green Meadow’ were both written for Winifred Virginia Jackson, a poet who possessed – so Lovecraft claimed – no talent for prose. In his 1975 biography of Lovecraft, L. Sprague de Camp suggested that Lovecraft’s romantic poem To Phyllis (1920, credited to L. Theobald) might have been written with Jackson in mind, but no evidence exists to support this notion. Both ‘Chaos’ and ‘Meadow’ appeared in amateur publications credited to Lewis Theobald Jr and Elizabeth Neville Berkeley, and it seems unlikely that HPL was ever paid for his efforts on her behalf. Similarly, his uncharacteristically optimistic collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts entitled ‘Poetry and the Gods’ ran in the September 1920 issue of The United Amateur, attributed to Crofts and one Henry Paget-Lowe. Lovecraft came to loathe the use of pseudonyms: ‘They suggest that the user stands off and thinks of himself as an author, instead of being so wrapped up in his aesthetic vision that he never regards himself as a person at all.’ But as late as 1932, he discussed the creation of a new alias – Etienne Marmaduke de Marginy – who would take credit for any stories written with Edgar Hoffman Price. In fairness to HPL, he was not as serious about the venture as Price appears to have been.

      Lovecraft’s brief relationship with ladies’ fashion designer Sonia Haft Greene began in February 1922, when he visited Boston for a conference of amateur journalists to deliver the modestly-titled paper What Amateurdom and I Have Done For Each Other. They met on the deck of a harbour boat, and Lovecraft persuaded the attractive divorcee to join the United Amateur Press Association, of which he was also a member. They saw each other again in Magnolia, Massachusetts, where Sonia was attending a trade fair. She told Lovecraft that she thought Magnolia the perfect setting for a supernatural story. He encouraged her to write it, and later either rewrote ‘The Horror of Martin’s Beach’ or penned it outright based upon Sonia’s plot outline – certainly the notion of aquatic terror is a common theme in much of Lovecraft’s fiction. In any case, the story was published in the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales with its title changed to the less evocative ‘The Invisible Monster’.

      Early in 1924, the couple decided to marry. Their union would be pitifully short-lived, alas, and even their honeymoon proved hopelessly unromantic, thanks in part to Lovecraft’s writing work on behalf of one of America’s most celebrated showmen. It involved a story which Lovecraft and master magician Harry Houdini were supposed to have worked on together, ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ (aka ‘Under the Pyramids’) which was published in the May 1924 number of Weird Tales. It was credited to the famous escapologist and conjurer Harry Houdini, real-name Erich Weiss, but the story was written entirely by Lovecraft based upon Houdini’s ideas. The work was completed shortly before Lovecraft’s marriage to Sonia, but on his way to New York for the ceremony, he fell asleep on the train and in his haste to disembark, left the typed manuscript behind. The Lovecrafts then spent their first full day of wedded bliss re-typing Pharaohs from Howard’s longhand draft. He later used the entire $100 fee for the story to buy a diamond ring for Sonia.

      Houdini attempted to assist Lovecraft with his fruitless search for work in New York, sending a letter of recommendation to newspaper syndicate owner Brett Page, though nothing came of it. Having never held down a job by the age of thirty-four, he was unable to find a position befitting a man of his great ability and few accomplishments. Lovecraft’s marriage to Sonia disintegrated, and he was eventually reduced to an impoverished existence, living alone in a Brooklyn apartment and surviving on a diet of cold baked beans, bread and cheese, before finally retreating to his beloved Providence. He wrote for Houdini once more, an article regarding astrology. The performer wished Lovecraft to travel to Detroit and work with him on a similar piece about witchcraft, but at this stage of his life the writer had no taste for straying from Providence again, and it seems unlikely that he would have considered making the journey. More promising was a proposed collaboration between Houdini, his booking agent C. M. Eddy and Lovecraft on a book debunking the occult, to be entitled The Cancer of Superstition. Houdini’s name might have sold a good many copies, but after the escapologist’s death from peritonitis in 1926, Lovecraft and Eddy found that publishers had no interest in the volume, now that they could no longer claim a celebrity connection.

      Adolphe de Castro (aka Danziger) was perhaps Lovecraft’s most reliable client, although the author’s opinion of the former dentist, journalist and U.S. Consul ranged from ‘generous and likeable’ to ‘unctuous old hypocrite’. HPL considered that the revision work he did on de Castro’s story ‘The Last Test’ ‘ruined my winter’, but his contribution nevertheless provides readers with the first of many mentions in his writings of Shub-Niggurath, ‘the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named-One.’ It is interesting to note that Lovecraft also inserted the name Yog-Sothoth into ‘The Last Test’, since around this time he was writing his novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which includes the first reference to Yog-Sothoth – ‘the key and guardian of the gate’ according to ‘The Dunwich Horror’. Much against his will, HPL also rewrote another of de Castro’s stories concerning the excessively cruel treatment of convicts. ‘The Electric Executioner’ is a claustrophobic suspense tale with a supernatural twist, enabling Lovecraft to insert some sly Mythos references. He could not, however, be persuaded to work on de Castro’s biography of Ambrose Bierce – with whom he claimed acquaintance – unless payment was made in advance.

      Wilfred Blanch Talman was, like HPL and C. M. Eddy, a contributor to Weird Tales, and even acted as Lovecraft’s agent for a time in 1936. Lovecraft thought him ‘tall, lean, light and aristocratically clean-cut.’ He also seemed to have had far more success than his client in dealing with the problems of the real world. Lovecraft once wrote to Talman: ‘Besides the aesthetic, you have managed to work in the practical – which is always a sealed mystery to me.’ Flattery, as they say, will get you nowhere, and Talman disliked the alterations to his dialogue that occurred during Lovecraft’s rewriting of his ‘Two Black Bottles’, one of two stories in this volume concerning premature burial. No doubt Talman’s objections related to HPL’s phonetic spellings for the speech of all country-folk, which afflicts so much of his celebrated ‘The Dunwich Horror’.

      The story ‘The Thing in the Moonlight’, although written in 1927, did not see print until 1941, four years after Lovecraft’s death, when it appeared in Bizarre Magazine. The story is an embellishment (by J. Chapman Miske) of a vivid dream experienced by Lovecraft and described in a letter to friend and colleague Donald Wandrei. Miske added the opening and closing paragraphs of the narrative, while the remainder of the story is Lovecraft’s work.

      Zealia B. Reed was a young widow, attempting to support her son through her journalistic efforts and short fiction. HPL’s friend Sam Loveman put him in touch with Reed, and the two worked on three stories – ‘The Curse of Yig’, ‘The Mound’ and ‘Medusa’s Coil’. Given the numerous references to his own Cthulhu Mythos in these ‘collaborations’, it would seem that Lovecraft’s contribution was substantial. Although ‘The Curse of Yig’ was credited solely to Reed when it appeared in the November 1929 issue of Weird Tales, the majority appears to have been written by Lovecraft in the January of 1928, working from Reed’s outline. Yig is also mentioned in the second Lovecraft/Reed collaboration, ‘The Mound’, a story rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright because of its great length. Like ‘The Thing in the Moonlight’, it did not appear until after Lovecraft’s death.

      ‘The Mound’ is based upon folk stories Reed heard in Oklahoma, but HPL wrote that his insertion of Mayan and Aztec themes (as well as the Mythos roll-call including the blind idiot daemon sultan god Azathoth) would ‘involve wholly original composition on my part’. Lovecraft’s working relationship with Reed was not a happy one, and ended on a particularly sour note. For one thing, his anti-commercialism was greatly at odds with what she was trying to achieve. For another, she proved difficult to collect payments from, and, following her marriage to Missouri farmer D. W. Bishop, she refused to pay her outstanding debt. Later, she agreed to the sum of $1 a week, hoping that Lovecraft would then write another story for her. When he refused, the payments stopped altogether.

      Given his own atheism, Lovecraft’s friendship with the Rev. Dr Henry St Clair Whitehead, pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Florida, seems an unlikely one. Nevertheless, the two shared a love of fantastic literature, and both contributed stories to Weird Tales. They met in May 1931, when Lovecraft visited Whitehead’s Dunedin home. The story ‘The Trap’ is based upon an idea HPL mentioned to his host. Sadly, Whitehead died on 23 November the following year.

      Lovecraft was introduced to writer Hazel Drake Heald by Clifford Eddy’s wife Muriel. He rewrote her story ‘The Man of Stone’, adding, as usual, Cthulhu Mythos elements, including the Old One Tsathoggua, created not by HPL but by Clark Ashton Smith in his 1929 story ‘The Tale of Satampra Zeiros’. The finished version of ‘The Man of Stone’ appeared in the October 1932 issue of Wonder Stories magazine. Lovecraft rewrote a further four Heald stories: the almost unbearably suspenseful ‘Winged Death’, ‘Out of the Aeons’, ‘The Horror in the Burying-Ground’ (the second premature burial tale, but one very different from ‘Two Black Bottles’), and ‘The Horror in the Museum’. The latter is a genuinely chilling Mythos twist to the age-old tale of a man spending a night in a creepy building – in this case a wax museum – as the result of a bet. The titular ‘Horror’ is one of Lovecraft’s most memorable cryptozoological creations. Both ‘The Horror in the Museum’ and ‘Out of the Aeons’ make mention of several forbidden texts common to the Mythos – The Necronimicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Like Tsathoggua, Unaussprechlichen Kulten did not spring from his own imagination, but from that of fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. ‘Two-Gun Bob’, as Lovecraft liked to call him, devised the hideous tome for his 1931 story ‘The Children of the Night’. A couple of years later, HPL used it once again in ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. Effective though these Heald/Lovecraft tales were, their collaboration was short-lived. It seems that fear of Heald’s romantic intentions – which were clear to Lovecraft after the lady prepared a candlelit dinner for two – caused him to avoid her thereafter, and, in effect, to bring an end to their promising writing partnership.

      In 1937, Lovecraft discussed the possibility of launching a science fiction magazine with author Duane W. Rimel. Lovecraft died on 15 March of that year, and the idea never came to fruition. ‘The Disinterment’ is the sole result of their intended collaboration.

      Rewritten by Lovecraft from an original draft by William Lumley, ‘The Diary of Alonzo Typer’ contains many Mythos elements, including Shub-Niggurath, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon. He also included a reference to Aklo, the secret language invented by Welsh fantasy author Arthur Machen in his story ‘The White People’. Lovecraft wrote that Lumley ‘claims to be an old sailor who has witnessed incredible wonders in all parts of the world.’ Despite the extensive rewrite, Lovecraft insisted that Lumley take all of the $70 fee from Weird Tales, in the belief that it would provide him with encouragement. In return, Lumley gave the author a copy of E. A. Wallace Budge’s translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

      ‘Within the Walls of Eryx’, written in collaboration with Kenneth J. Sterling (who later abandoned writing for a career in medicine) is a rare foray into conventional science fiction for Lovecraft. Even more unusually, the story appeared in the October 1939 issue of Weird Tales under a joint byline. HPL’s contribution was not inconsiderable; in rewriting Sterling’s tale, he doubled its length. He also inserted several disparaging references to writer and magazine pub-lisher Forrest J. Ackerman, whom he variously described as a ‘superficial Smart-Aleck’ and a ‘pompous little joke.’ His inclusion of ‘wriggling akmans’ and ‘efjeh-weeds’ seemed to help get this dislike out of his system; by 1937, he would claim: ‘I haven’t a thing in the world against him.’

      Lovecraft described Robert Hayward Barlow, with whom he collaborated on ‘The Night Ocean’ and the disturbingly prescient global warming dystopian fantasy ‘Till A’ the Seas’, as ‘a really brilliant boy prodigy’. The two began corresponding in 1931, and Lovecraft paid an extended visit to the Barlow family’s Florida home in the spring/summer of 1934. Barlow persuaded the author to lend him the hand-written manuscripts of ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ and ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ so that he might type them up. It is fortunate that Lovecraft agreed, or these two stories, of which he held a low opinion, might today be lost to the world.

      Thanks to the efforts of Barlow and other friends and fans, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft have not been permitted to sink into oblivion. Hopefully, this unique volume, which brings together these rare and intriguing collaborative efforts, will go some way in alerting the reading public to some of Lovecraft’s more obscure but no less worthy literary achievements.

      M. J. ELLIOTT

      M. J. Elliott is a writer and radio dramatist whose articles, fiction and reviews have appeared in the magazines SHERLOCK, Total DVD and Scarlet Street. For the American radio, he has scripted episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles the Gentleman Thief, The Father Brown Mysteries, Kincaid the Strangeseeker, The Adventures of Harry Nile and the Audie Award-nominated New Adventures of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. He is the creator of The Hilary Caine Mysteries, which first aired in 2005. For Wordsworth, he has contributed to The Game’s Afoot and edited The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft, The Right Hand of Doom and The Haunter of the Ring by Robert E. Howard, and A Charlie Chan Omnibus by Earl Derr Biggers.

      THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM AND OTHER STORIES

      The Green Meadow

      Introductory note: The following very singular narrative, or record of impressions, was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913, at about eight-thirty o’clock, the population of the small seaside village of Potowonket, Maine, USA, was aroused by a thunderous report accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near the shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into the sea but a short distance out, sending up a prodigious column of water. The following Sunday a fishing party composed of John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield, caught in their trawl and dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and look-ing (as Mr Canfield said) like a piece of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this heavy body was none other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before; and Dr Richard M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send to an expert Boston analyst, Dr Jones discovered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing tale, which is still in his possession.

      In form the discovery resembles an ordinary notebook, about 5 x 3 inches in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however, it presents marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The writing is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century bc. There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Professor Chambers of Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of the contents was done into modem Greek letters by the palaeographer Rutherford, and in this form submitted to the translators.

      Professor Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Professor Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground, pointing out that certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in large quantities, and warning that no classification is as yet possible.

      The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the hope that some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.

      It was a narrow place, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of vivid waving green, was the sea; blue, bright, and billowy, and sending up vaporous exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were these exhalations, that they gave me an odd impression of a coalescence of sea and sky; for the heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the other side was the forest, ancient almost as the sea itself, and stretching infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the trees were grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow green tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of me, the strange forest extended down to the water’s edge, obliterating the shoreline and completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the trees, I observed, stood in the water itself, as though impatient of any barrier to their progress.

      I saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had ever existed. The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and reached off into regions beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound save of the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.

      As I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for though I knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my name and rank had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could understand what lurked about me. I recalled things I had learned, things I had dreamed, things I had imagined and yearned for in some other distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed up at the stars of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not traverse the vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I conjured up ancient blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papyri of Democritus; but as memories appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear, for I knew that I was alone – horribly alone. Alone, yet close to sentient impulses of vast, vague kind; which I prayed never to comprehend nor encounter. In the voice of the swaying green branches I fancied I could detect a kind of malignant hatred and demoniac triumph. Sometimes they struck me as being in horrible colloquy with ghastly and unthinkable things which the scaly green bodies of the trees half-hid; hid from sight but not from consciousness. The most oppressive of my sensations was a sinister feeling of alienage. Though I saw about me objects which I could name, trees, grass, sea, and sky, I felt that their relation to me was not the same as that of the trees, grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and dimly remembered life. The nature of the difference I could not tell, yet I shook in stark fright as it impressed itself upon me.

      And then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty sea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of blue rippling water with sun-tipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often I would peep fearfully over my right shoulder at the trees, but I preferred to look at the Green Meadow, which affected me oddly.

      It was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first felt the ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of throbbing agitation which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious action, the bit of bank on which I stood detached itself from the grassy shore and commenced to float away, borne slowly onward as if by some current of resistless force. I did not move, astonished and startled as I was by the unprecedented phenomenon, but stood rigidly still until a wide lane of water yawned betwixt me and the land of trees. Then I sat down in a sort of daze, and again looked at the sun-tipped water and the Green Meadow.

      Behind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to radiate infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for as I grew more used to the scene I became less and less dependent upon the five senses that once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green scaly forest hated me, yet now I was safe from it, for my bit of bank had drifted far from the shore.

      But though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of earth were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me, so that death could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I seemed to sense that death would be death to me no more, for I turned again to watch the Green Meadow, imbued with a curious feeling of security in strange contrast to my general horror.

      Then it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of falling water. Not that of any trivial cascade such as I had known, but that which might be heard in the far Scythian lands if all the Medi-terranean were poured down an unfathomable abyss. It was toward this sound that my shrinking island was drifting, yet I was content.

      Far in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which I turned to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous forms hovered fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer the challenge of the waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose from the sea to join the sky-forms, and the shore was erased from my sight. Though the sun – what sun I knew not – shone brightly on the water around me, the land I had left seemed involved in a demoniac tempest where dashed the will of the hellish trees and what they hid, with that of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I saw only the blue sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.

      It was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in the Green Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign of human life; but now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin and nature were apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly undistinguishable, the chant awaked in me a peculiar train of associations; and I was reminded of some vaguely disquieting lines I had once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in turn were taken from a papyrus of ancient Meroe. Through my brain ran lines that I fear to repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in the days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought and moved and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider alive. It was a strange book.

      As I listened, I became gradually conscious of a circumstance which had before puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight distinguished any definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression of vivid homogeneous verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now, however, I saw that the current would cause my island to pass the shore at but a little distance, so that I might learn more of the land and of the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold the singers had mounted high, though it was mingled with apprehension.

      Bits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried me, but I heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with the body (or appearance of a body) which I seemed to possess. That everything about me, even life and death, was illusory; that I had overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal entity, becoming a free, detached thing, impressed me as almost certain. Of my location I knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once so familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror, were those of a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of discovery. For a moment I thought of the lands and persons I had left behind; and of strange ways whereby I might some day tell them of my adventurings, even though I might never return.

      I had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were clear and distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite interpret the words of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I had subtly felt when at a greater distance, but beyond a sensation of vague and awesome remembrance I could make nothing of them. A most extraordinary quality in the voices – a quality which I cannot describe – at once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could now discern several things amidst the omnipresent verdure – rocks, covered with bright green moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less definable shapes of great magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I was so anxious to glimpse, seemed loudest at points where these shapes were most numerous and most vigorously in motion.

      And then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant waterfall grew louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in one horrible instant remembered everything. Of such things I cannot, dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad, even as it almost drove me . . . I knew now the change through which I had passed, and through which certain others who once were men had passed! and I knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me may escape . . . I shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my soul cries out to the gods for the boon of death and oblivion . . . All is before me: beyond the deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old . . . The Green Meadow . . . I will send a message across the horrible immeasurable abyss . . .

      [at this point the text becomes illegible]

      Poetry and the Gods

      A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the spacious twentieth-century drawing room, up the deeps of the air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it issues through the foliage about an antique shrine.

      Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and space, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapour of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.

      Listlessly turning the magazine’s pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.

      Moon over Japan,

      White butterfly moon!

      Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream

      To the sound of the cuckoo’s call . . .

      The white wings of moon butterflies

      Flicker down the streets of the city,

      Blushing into silence the useless wicks

      of sound-lanterns in the hands of girls.

      Moon over the tropics,

      A white-curved bud

      Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven . . .

      The air is full of odours

      And languorous warm sounds . . .

      A flute drones its insect music to the night

      Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.

      Moon over China,

      Weary moon on the river of the sky,

      The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing

      of a thousand silver minnows

      Through dark shoals;

      The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples,

      The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.

      Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars of her delight at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.

      Moon over Japan,

      White butterfly moon!

      Moon over the tropics,

      A white-curved bud

      Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.

      The air is full of odours

      And languorous warm sounds . . .

      Moon over China,

      Weary moon on the river of the sky . . .

      Out of the mists gleamed godlike the form of a youth, in winged helmet and sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded shell of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke.

      ‘O Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song. O Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her, thou hast truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to wake and behold about him the little rose-crowned fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotos gardens beyond the sunset.’

      Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle breezes from the tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they came upon Zeus, holding court upon double-headed Parnassus, his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of Gods had tempered his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe and the Musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer.

      ‘O Daughter – for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter – behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers Gods have sent down that in the words and writing of men there may be still some traces of divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have spoken the language of the Gods. Long have we dreamed in lotos gardens beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awakening and change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have gone forth with the madness of Gods and have returned Deimos and Phobos glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moans with grief, and the faces of men are as the faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our bidding encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos, prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest-born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who shall proclaim our return and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to thee here. Each note shalt thou hear again in the poetry which is to come, the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the crystal Arethusa in remote Sicilia.’

      Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted his hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not fall vainly upon her ears, for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and Gods, and needed no interpreter.

      So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words clave the ether with melodies easy to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents resounded before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a God among men, and still a God among Gods:

      Write, write, that from the bloody course of war

      My dearest master, your dear son, may hie;

      Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far

      His name with zealous fervour sanctify.

      Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal harmony.

      Or let thy lamp at midnight hour

      Be seen in some high lonely tower,

      Where I might oft outwatch the Bear

      With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere

      The spirit of Plato, to unfold

      What worlds or what vast regions hold

      The immortal mind, that hath forsook

      Her mansion in this fleshy nook.

      * * *

      Sometime let gorgeous tragedy

      In sceptred pall come sweeping by,

      Presenting Thebes, or Pelop’s line,

      Or the tale of Troy divine.

      Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous faun-folk:

      Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

      Are sweeter, therefore, you sweet pipes, play on . . .

      * * *

      When old age shall this generation waste,

      Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

      Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

      Beauty is truth – truth beauty – that is all

      Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

      As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, ‘Master, it is time I unlocked the Gates of the East.’ And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from his Caryan throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying: ‘Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be gone and the Gods shall once more walk among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find that which it craveth.’ As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.

      * * *

      Many years have passed since Marcia dreamt of the Gods and of their Parnassus conclave. Tonight she sits in the same spacious drawing-room, but she is not alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is luminous with celebrity: the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world. He is reading from a manuscript words which none has ever heard before, but which when heard will bring to men the dreams and the fancies they lost so many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the great Gods withdrew to sleep in lotos gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden had found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus, notes that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus’s banks. The singer ceases, and with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is ‘fit for the Gods’?

      And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far-off sound of a mighty voice saying, ‘By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth.’

      The Crawling Chaos

      Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so impressive that ‘the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual’, but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either silent or quite mad. I took opium but once – in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose – my physician was worn out with horror and exertion – and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.

      The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was administered. Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure, unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said, there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction, was paramount, though there was subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse nature, but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes.

      For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I noticed tan-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

      Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then, employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The added sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking. Opening a portière at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a cavern door and large oriel window. To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full and devastating force.

      I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land – or what was now a narrow point of land – fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

      Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me, I realised that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once, locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly shining sun. Something about that sun’s nature and position made me shudder, but I could not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it was blue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washed-out bank more nearly white than reddish.

      I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical – a conclusion borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small – hardly more than a cottage – but its material was evidently marble, and its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and often wonder . . . After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before me.

      The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went inland. Ahead and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and escape from the imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path, idly digging with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, ‘Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?’ My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me; I wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented me.

      Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley’s slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me, only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade.

      There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child’s head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: ‘It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.’

      As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, ‘Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is

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