CHAPTER XXVKLORIOLE

THE gauntlet of stenches that we had run stifled us into deep and long sleep. The sun was far up the sky when we awakened, and its heat seemed somehow to have subdued the traces of Awdyoo to a faint, though pungent and offensive, odour. We looked ahead and astern. The current was much slower; some undercurrent in the opposite direction must have been dragging it back. All trace of land had vanished behind us. But there was either a cloud or the top of some hill on the sky-rim to which the canoe was drifting. We fell into stupor again; and, when I stirred to life, the stars were keen as stiletto points above us. I lay staring at them till they became eyes that spoke to me of the deep night and the infinite abysses wherein they were moved to tears. A warm breath softened the distance between us and soothed my senses.

I must have been asleep again, dreaming that they had a language of their own full of intensity of meaning, and that they bade me approach them without fear; for the sunlight was around me, as I seemed to fall from them with prosaic suddenness into the still fetid reminiscences of Awdyoo.

At the moment of awakening there dropped upon me as I lay what seemed at first almost an emanation from the gleam of heaven. I raised my head and found that a white, bird-shaped float was lightly resting on the bottom of the canoe. I lifted it and saw that it was covered with written or printed characters. I handed it to my companion, who was also awake, and, as he read, he burst into a derisive laugh. It was a love-poem, he explained, written in the fulsome conventional language of Kloriole, as he called the island we were approaching. He translated a few lines into Aleofanian with a sneer:

Deity and sex combined,Godlike despot of the mind!Look on our eternal fate,Ere the ages antedateAll that we shall be in death,Mingling souls in fleeting breath.God and woman, make me god;With thy glances starlight-shodSlay me; for I would be slain;Slay me once and yet again;Slay me with thy deadly kiss;Sweet such apotheosis!Let not mercy stay thy hand!We shall never understandAll the god that in us liesTill from death our spirits rise,Never know what might we ownTill through space we wing aloneOn from orb to orb of night,Shedding our creative light;Whilst our mortal worshippersWatch from world to universe.Free my spirit from afar,Thou my love’s own avatar!

Deity and sex combined,

Godlike despot of the mind!

Look on our eternal fate,

Ere the ages antedate

All that we shall be in death,

Mingling souls in fleeting breath.

God and woman, make me god;

With thy glances starlight-shod

Slay me; for I would be slain;

Slay me once and yet again;

Slay me with thy deadly kiss;

Sweet such apotheosis!

Let not mercy stay thy hand!We shall never understandAll the god that in us liesTill from death our spirits rise,Never know what might we ownTill through space we wing aloneOn from orb to orb of night,Shedding our creative light;Whilst our mortal worshippersWatch from world to universe.Free my spirit from afar,Thou my love’s own avatar!

Let not mercy stay thy hand!

We shall never understand

All the god that in us lies

Till from death our spirits rise,

Never know what might we own

Till through space we wing alone

On from orb to orb of night,

Shedding our creative light;

Whilst our mortal worshippers

Watch from world to universe.

Free my spirit from afar,

Thou my love’s own avatar!

I was bewildered by the strange medley of love and religion and mysticism. Sneekape saw the perplexity in my eyes, and with a gross laugh tore the kite of love to pieces and flung them into the sea. He expressed the greatest contempt for such feeble mystifications of the delights of the senses. I confessed that I had not much sympathy or admiration for such performances; they were, like buffoonery and wit, a mere trick of the mind; it was generally lame thought that needed such rhyme and verses as crutches; learn the hobbling gait early enough, and you could go on to infinity. It was not at his contempt, then, that I felt disgusted; it was perhaps at the petty sneer that accompanied its expression.

In order to cast out the loathing, I began to wonder whence the missive came. I looked back, and right above us loomed a great hill crowned with a massive building, and up to the gigantic porch climbed innumerable flights of steps cut into the living rock. Scattered over the balustrades and niches and recesses that ornamented the upward course of the stair stood or sat many beings fantastically dressed and looking up either to the sky or to the edifice that broke the azure. Some were floating what seemed paper kites; others were watching their flight, as they rushed before the wind or fell like falling stars into the sea or behind the hill, or vanished into the blue distance. I knew then whence had come the amatory lyric that had butterflied into our canoe.

It was the marvellous ascension of the steps that struck me most. They seemed to dwarf by their broad spacing and their number the enormous building that crowned the height up which they clambered. How puny seemed the men and women that moved about their upper flights. I could see that they were human beings; but that was all. Even half-way up it seemed a lark’s flight into the blue. It wearied the imagination to count the gradings between; still more to think of the ascent, or the long years that must have passed in chiselling out this daring work of ambition.

The lowest flight had its knees in the ocean, and as we approached we could see the verdant sea-hair float and fall across the rising wave or shimmer in the ripple. For a hundred steps or more the sea in its tides or its passions claimed dominance and left the record of its conquests. We moored our canoe between two pillars cut in the rock, and attempted to ascend. But it was a work of extreme difficulty and danger. Each step had been smoothed into a slope by the feet of ages of climbers and by the action of the waters; and the lubricant green, wherewith the waves velveted them, made footing almost impossible. We slid and tumbled back into the sea a dozen times, and each time we made effort to scale the flight it became harder from the growing burden of water in our clothes. At last one of the native climbers farther up indicated the sides of the steps, where they were but roughly cut out of the rock. Swimming along to the right side, we found there was almost the sierraed roughness of nature. We could just catch some of the sharp points, and, by means of these, and at first almost prostrate, we hauled ourselves over the sleek garden of the tide. Then, finding the weed less silken and the rock less jagged, we crept on our knees up many steps; and when we looked back we saw traces of our own blood upon them. Then we looked into the notched rock before us and saw the dark bloodmark of generations that had gone before us stained deep into its texture. This lower portion of the marvellous staircase was indeed hieroglyphed and pictured with human lifeblood.

The thought made me shudder, as I looked back into the flood, for there doubtless had been the grave of myriads. How could any merely human fingers cling here when the waves were high, or the wind lashed them into fury? Out in the open I could see the fins of sea-monsters glance in the sun; there was the fate of the fallen climbers; there were the scavengers and mortuary vaults of the feebly ambitious dead that yielded to their destiny and fell; there was the reason why the sea around was not one vast gehenna.

We were strong with exposure and exercise, our cuticle hardened and thick; and yet we were wounded and torn by our upward efforts. We were now almost sea-creatures from our life in the briny air and the splash of the billows; and so, perhaps, it was that the man-eaters below let us alone when we fell back into the waters; at any rate they swam far off from us, as if they would have no dealings with such strangers.

At length we reached the upper margin of the sea’s domain, and sat down, weary and faint, to let our blood harden on our wounds in the sun. Around us stood a crowd of pale and shadowy forms, their long hair matted or tressed over their shoulders, vague distance in their eyes, and something that looked like a pen in their right hands. They fingered our clothes and hair in a dreamy way, and sighed, and looked, and sighed again. Then one or another would retire into the background and seat himself on one of the steps, where others too, I now saw, were seated in an attitude of meditation. They gazed into the sky, and then looked intense; they ran their thin white fingers through their long hair; then they consulted slips of paper, on which were evidently printed rules for their guidance; they threw their heads wildly about; their eyes seemed ready to burst from their sockets; they rose and flung their arms aloft; they whirled around and danced at imminent risk of falling back into the sea. Then I saw them settle into a stupor; their lips moved and mumbled as if in sleep; they awoke, and over a sheet that they held in their left hands their pens flew. These performances went on for almost an hour till everyone around us had settled down to his pen and paper.

Sneekape whispered with a contemptuous smile that this was inspiration. They had been waiting, probably months, for a new subject, and our arrival had set them all poetically adrift. They had each hope of rising another flight up the steps of fame, borne on the pinions of a new ecstasy.

We rose to look at the frenzied bevy of poets. And now I saw that across the head of the flight, on which we were, ran a lofty arabesque fence of adamant with a narrow gate in the middle most elaborately bolted and padlocked. Inside it stood in an attitude of attack a serried array of lank forms, clothed in vestures that were splendidly formal, some holding scissors on the end of long poles, others bearing in one hand dirty, long-handled brushes, and, in the other, pots streaked with some black and greasy fluid, a third set swinging censers alight, and a fourth carrying huge inflated bags on their backs. They looked, a scowl or a sneer on their villainous low brows, upon the writhing romancers on the other side of the adamant scrollwork. Half of them were boys with a low type of face that indicated more bravado than intelligence, more flippancy than wit; of the others some had more years and more truculence, and a look of envy and malice in their eye; the rest were men bowed by years and despair of life, and on their faces was a look as of pity and reminiscence.

This was the lower ring of acolytes of the great temple of Literary Fame, Sneekape whispered to me; there were four divisions of them, as I could see by their implements, and these were the snippers, the defacers, the burners, and the windbaggers, as their Kloriolean names might be translated. They had a mean and somewhat soiled shrine of Fame on the left side of their rocky platform, and here relays of them kept up continual worship, burning on the altar imaginative productions that they caught.

My attention was drawn to the other side by negotiations going on there. Some of the wild-haired youths, who had evidently finished the result of their frenzy, had come up to the scroll-fence and were haggling and bargaining with one or other of a group of sleek business-like men within it. These were called the propagators, my companion said, and their function was to supply the means for floating any new product of the fancy towards the priests and the worshippers of the temple of Fame. I saw that most of the pale youths returned to their seats on the steps with a look of baffled eagerness in their eyes. They touched and retouched their sheets and wearily erased and inserted with their pens. A few succeeded in getting paper-floats with their complement of gossamer thread and other apparatus from the propagators. And with the gleam of proud achievement in their looks they prepared to attach their writings to them and set them afloat. But most of the literary kites refused to rise, and when thrown up into the air fell heavily back into the sea and either sank or were torn under by the devouring monsters. A few of more prosperous and cheerful appearance approached the windbaggers; I watched one of them: aided by his propagator, he got some coin or valuable transferred through the interstices of the fence into the hidden palm of one of the sack-bearing acolytes, and before long he had his kite afloat, dancing upon the puff of wind that issued from the nozzle of his ally’s bag. The other acolytes made fierce lunges at it with their scissors, or brush, or censer. Amongst those that managed to float, one had its thread early snipped and fell over the parapet; another sank, heavy from the foul effacement from an ink-brush; another caught fire and was burned in a censer. Two succeeded in running the gauntlet and floating higher; but at the next enclosure they succumbed to the attacks from behind it. The owners of these were admitted within the fence by which we stood; and I saw the proud smile on their faces. One of them was persuaded to join the group of acolytes, and, when he donned the vestments, he seemed to lose his old and picturesque personality and take on the truculence of his new companions. The other turned away from them with a weary but ambitious face and climbed up the long flight towards the next barrier.

As I looked upwards I now perceived that there was a barrier, with a crowd of acolytes and propagators on the one side and a diminishing crowd of suppliants on the other, at the head of every flight. The strange thing was that, as the distance increased, the size and sleekness of each fence-divided bevy increased too, till up at the porch of the temple, priests, propagators, and poets looked fat and almost bloated; they reclined on rich couches, and were surrounded with the luxuries that would fit an outdoor tropical existence. It was little wonder that the thin, pale faces of the candidates below looked up with such longing to that Olympus and Elysium in one. Sneekape pointed out to me on each adamant barricade the meaning of the scrollwork; he translated the letters; the announcement ran: “None enter the mighty temple as gods but by this ascent.”

In the middle of the explanation we were startled by a wild cry and a rush of the crowd around us to the right-hand parapet. We ran in the same direction, and, hearing a fierce, gruntling noise, looked over and saw one of the long-haired tribe being devoured by jackals. To keep candidates for fame back from the land approach to the great stairs, an iron-barred enclosure ran its whole length on both sides, and in this lived a number of wild beasts, fed upon young poets and other seekers of glory. The priests and propagators saw that the supply was kept up. It was not long before the victim had completely vanished and his comrades sat down with a new and stirring topic in this suicide for fame. Perchance their wild sympathy with him might produce such a poem as would open the gate for them. They were soon all absorbed in their new inspiration.

In looking from one to another bowed figure, I saw a sheet flutter near the parapet; I took it up and handed it to my companion. He laughed and said it was evidently the young suicide’s bid for fame; the verses had rhythm and meaning like this:

Sea-borne strangers, whence are ye?We have nought but sorrow here;Fate hath made you fancy free;Fly this fame-envenomed sphere!Hell-born torture would be bliss,Soul-ecstatic, matched with this.Ye have never known the careLives within a heart like mine;Spirit palsied with despair,Anguish past all anodyne,Follow me where’er I flee.Who can quench my agony?Through the dawn-flushed arch ye came;Bright new worlds are shining there,Worlds dispassionate of fame,Gloryless as they are fair.Oh! to tenant freshly bornSome new star beyond the morn!Ah! new life is stale as old,Outlook dull as memory,Death an idiot’s tale half-told,Hell’s own caravansary.God, if thou hast in thy breastLove or pity, let me rest!Nothingness, I thee implore,Rid me of this vacuous dream,Let me fade and be no more,Be the phantom that I seem!Sweet Oblivion, let me lightIn annihilative night!

Sea-borne strangers, whence are ye?We have nought but sorrow here;Fate hath made you fancy free;Fly this fame-envenomed sphere!Hell-born torture would be bliss,Soul-ecstatic, matched with this.

Sea-borne strangers, whence are ye?

We have nought but sorrow here;

Fate hath made you fancy free;

Fly this fame-envenomed sphere!

Hell-born torture would be bliss,

Soul-ecstatic, matched with this.

Ye have never known the careLives within a heart like mine;Spirit palsied with despair,Anguish past all anodyne,Follow me where’er I flee.Who can quench my agony?

Ye have never known the care

Lives within a heart like mine;

Spirit palsied with despair,

Anguish past all anodyne,

Follow me where’er I flee.

Who can quench my agony?

Through the dawn-flushed arch ye came;Bright new worlds are shining there,Worlds dispassionate of fame,Gloryless as they are fair.Oh! to tenant freshly bornSome new star beyond the morn!

Through the dawn-flushed arch ye came;

Bright new worlds are shining there,

Worlds dispassionate of fame,

Gloryless as they are fair.

Oh! to tenant freshly born

Some new star beyond the morn!

Ah! new life is stale as old,Outlook dull as memory,Death an idiot’s tale half-told,Hell’s own caravansary.God, if thou hast in thy breastLove or pity, let me rest!

Ah! new life is stale as old,

Outlook dull as memory,

Death an idiot’s tale half-told,

Hell’s own caravansary.

God, if thou hast in thy breast

Love or pity, let me rest!

Nothingness, I thee implore,Rid me of this vacuous dream,Let me fade and be no more,Be the phantom that I seem!Sweet Oblivion, let me lightIn annihilative night!

Nothingness, I thee implore,

Rid me of this vacuous dream,

Let me fade and be no more,

Be the phantom that I seem!

Sweet Oblivion, let me light

In annihilative night!

There was a loud, coarse laugh behind the barrier over this pessimistic effusion and its baptism of blood, and what made it sound stranger was that it rose from the midst of pæans and hosannahs over the poem that had borne the other aspirant up to the second arabesque. The echo sounded even to the porch; for the priests seemed to move and listen as in a dream. I was eager to see the production that had stirred such a commotion in the ranks of the guardians of fame; and Sneekape managed to get a copy for me, and translated it into Aleofanian; it must have suffered in the change; for it was difficult to see the superiority. It ran in rhythm and sentiment thus:

Ye are only the vanOf the army of manThat is marching over the sea.Ye would seek to attainThe immortal faneOf the glory that is to be.No mightier godHas ever trodThe crust of the quaking earth.He has come to assistIn dispelling the mistThat clings to thought at its birth.

Ye are only the vanOf the army of manThat is marching over the sea.Ye would seek to attainThe immortal faneOf the glory that is to be.

Ye are only the van

Of the army of man

That is marching over the sea.

Ye would seek to attain

The immortal fane

Of the glory that is to be.

No mightier godHas ever trodThe crust of the quaking earth.He has come to assistIn dispelling the mistThat clings to thought at its birth.

No mightier god

Has ever trod

The crust of the quaking earth.

He has come to assist

In dispelling the mist

That clings to thought at its birth.

Through a long series of such doggerel verses the composition proceeded; and I thought, how meaningless the pæans, if this were all that opened the gates of literary Fame! I turned away from the sight of this sordid injustice and looked for the first time out upon the level shores of the island that stretched on either side of these sanguinary stairs. And I was surprised to find them full of men and women of look and figure and dress nearer the normal; they were evidently toilers with the hands; for they were muscular in frame and tanned by the weather. They formed, indeed, a wholesome contrast to these priests and worshippers of fame.

A longing to be amongst them seized me, a kind of homesickness to be with the toilers of the field again. Sneekape could scarcely restrain me from trying to leap the parapet; he showed me the jackal-haunted chasm that I would fall into and the impossibility of crossing it. He got the canoe in to the lowest step; nor had we so far to slither down; for the tide had risen; and in a few minutes we were seeking a place to land. At the risk of our lives we managed to get on the beach and were soon in the midst of the crowd.

They were the slaves and artisans of Kloriole; and, as it was now evening, they had finished their day’s labour and were engaged in the usual recreation of the country, listening to or making songs and ballads. It was a babel rippled with snatches of melody. I could catch no intelligible phrase, nor could Sneekape help me much; for they did not write or print their productions, and they composed them in the popular dialect.

Just as the westering sun was tinging the zenith with gold, one ballad seemed to run like wildfire through the clustering singers, and at last was caught up and chanted by the whole multitude. It had a fine symphonic oscillation, and the bodies of the group and the movements of the great sea of heads swayed with the waves of its sound. At last a cry rose above it and spread until it extinguished the fire of song: “To the temple!” and I saw raised on the shoulders of two stalwart artisans a feeble-looking child with an over-developed head and outstanding eyes. The multitude began to move round a cliff and then along a path that wound hither and thither up the hill. They kept chanting the song till they reached another and far greater porch of the temple on its landward side. With huge crowbars they pried open the doors and burst into the vast edifice. It was niched from floor to dome with innumerable shell-formed recesses, gaily painted and ornamented; and into most of these were thrust, often jammed, a dozen or more mummies with labels and printed sheets liberally stuck over them; peering to the back of them I could see that most of those behind the front row were falling to dust, their sheets all yellow with age. It was often difficult to distinguish mummy from mummy or dust from dust; and there was throughout the building, large though it was, a smell as of a charnel-house; the movements and breath of the crowd seemed to shake out the forgotten atoms of the famous dead.

These, Sneekape explained, were the embalmed bodies and productions of the successful worshippers of fame, preserved to immortality. I saw in some of the niches dusty forms of priests move, most of them greybeards, and read the yellow sheets in the dusk, or rake for them in the commingled dust. These, I was told, were the scholar-priests who tried to arrange and furbish the fretwork of dusty death. But it seemed to me that they helped even more than the trampling multitude to distribute the remains of mortality into the atmosphere and the lungs.

The priests and their followers shot scornful glances at the rudely surging mob; but without effect. Then they raised their paper lashes that had made the worshippers on the stairs writhe with pain; but they sounded feeble and childish against the noise of the chanting crowd; and their strokes seemed to have no more effect than if applied to the billows of the sea. The singing multitude swept on up the long aisles of the edifice, and with a crash the adamant arabesque that hedged in the shrine of the deity fell before it. The brawny arms of the bearers perched the child on the altar, and the priests, cowed and silent, had to accept him as one destined to be sustained at the expense of the temple and at death to be placed in the niches of immortality. Under the goad of fear, they had to leave their obeisances and fulsome adulation before their favourites who had been admitted up the flights from the sea into the precincts of the deity, and give all their ceremonial eulogy to this illegitimate bantling of fame. In comparing the new object of their adoration with those from whom they now turned, I could see little difference either in grace or intelligence. Those who had been admitted by the recognised ascent were most of them flabby boys or youths, fattened by luxury and robbed by vanity of the little native intelligence they had had; a few were old men in their dotage, whose every foolish word and act was caught up by acolytes and recorded.

I turned to Sneekape for an explanation. We had kept close together, lest the jostling crowd should do us harm in the worship of their bantling. His face was puckered up in a derisive smile. “This is the result of their devotion to what they think fame. Their literary art has become child’s play, an exercise in what they call style. These priests and acolytes, who have wrung out of the anguished labour of the common people this gorgeous temple and its endowments, have gradually formulated into exact rule all the points of poem or prose that would admit a writer to the shrine as a sharer in its sustenance and glory. It can be almost automatically decided what is worthy of eternal fame and what is not. They pride themselves on this mathematical precision. Of course this means the exclusion of all idea or fact or utility from the literature; all that is required is the form, and if that comes up to the recognised standard and conforms to the rules which we saw the candidates at the bottom of the stairs continually consulting, then the writer is raised flight by flight to the shrine. The compositions have come to be empty and meaningless; their chief merit is that they have a kind of melody. They must be according to the received convention.

“Through the ages, then, the stage of life at which the talent for such work is found has been growing lower and lower; and now mothers watch anxiously in the cradles for the lisping of numbers; they record the most infantile chatterings and send them forth as mystic compositions; and these priests, who are also interpreters, profess to find in them the most profound wisdom. I have not heard yet of a babe in arms being admitted to full literary fame; but the day is evidently near when only sucklings and idiots will have any chance of success amongst guardians who adopt such ideals and such mechanical rules, and who profess to find depth of thought in what comes only from the lips. The truth is that the priests and propagators desire to keep the whole emoluments of the temple for their own benefit. Mere children will never interfere with their power or their allotment of fame. When they grow up into youth, they either vanish or are absorbed into the priestly ranks, and the guardians, those that have the fame of old age, vote themselves the most lucrative and elevated posts. For themselves they keep their loftiest eulogies, their wildest devotion; they form mutually admiring and advancing groups; they have no praise for those who will not praise them or be likely to praise them. This habit has spread as a contagion right down the flights of the ascent. No wind is lent to raise a float unless the service is sure to be repaid. All the middle-aged about the temple or the steps are priests, acolytes, or propagators. Children and old men are the subdeities of fame, almost as easily managed as unseen gods, and as easily disposed of. The literature has reached the level of first or second childhood; it is an exercise in the art of saying nothing in the most melodious or mystic way, and in the conventional form. Creation and criticism have both become ceremonial, automatic arts, that have been switched off from the influence of the imagination and every other faculty of the soul. Vacuity veiled in mystery is what those long-haired candidates we left on the sea-flight have not learned and cannot learn, and they must remain there or leave; unless they acquire the other great art, that of interflation or mutual windbagging.

“It is the natural development of a community in which one half are creators and the other half critics by profession. The latter absorb the reality of power and luxury and fame; the former get the shadow. The critics pretend to worship creation; they are the gods, for they have the omniscience; they give the rules and the ideals that are thought divine; to their fiat the others have to bow. They have enslaved the intelligence of the island and are gradually stifling it, that there may be as little chance of outbreak as might come from beasts. Such popular riots as we have seen to-day make them tremble for their power and privileges. The uneducated people, trained in nothing but to worship what the priests of fame profess to adore, feel at times the old musical and imaginative instincts surge up in them, and they rush in rhythmic passion to immortalise the singer who has resuscitated the old nature in them. They are supposed not to know what literature or song is; but they have caught the contagion from the singing in the temple and on the stairs, and they encourage their offspring to attempt ambitious literary flight from the cradle upwards; for is it not something to be the parent of a subdeity of Fame? Amongst them alone is the true sense of natural song unobliterated; and occasionally in their dialect some native, untaught genius gathers its music round an old memory or emotion, and the result is a lyric that sets their whole buried natures on fire; no priestly power can repress the volcanic outburst, and a new idol is set up in the temple.”

We saw the people retire and find their way down to the lower levels as the night fell. We followed and found shelter till the morning. Not long after daybreak they filed away to their tasks in the fields and the workshops, and the incident of the previous day was evidently forgotten.

After a meal Sneekape led me over a spur of the hill to a rising ground that commanded a deep valley into which the sun never seemed to come, so filled with shadow and gloom was it, so walled off from the world of light.

We serpentined down half-way into it till our eyes grew accustomed to the obscurity; and then I could discern figures like the scholar-priests moving about at the bottom of a fissure filled with bones and yellow shreds of parchment or some other stuff that could withstand the weather. Some were turning over and raking this graveyard and some were intent upon yellow fragments they had found.

This was the valley of dead ambitions and dead literature. Into this the literary kites that had their threads cut by the snippers generally fell. Hither were brought the dusty remains of the mummies that had decayed with their writings past recognition in the niches of the temple. It was the charnel-house of the great sanctuary. Here were half the scholar-priests trying to find intelligible relics of the past, that they might by resuscitating them place their treasure and themselves in some higher niche.

And Sneekape closed his explanation with a sneer. “Here they toss most of the infants of fame who are not astute or worldly enough to enter the ranks of the ecclesiastics. The child we saw enthroned on the altar yesterday will be starved out, and, if he does not escape and return to his slave-mother to sink into happy obscurity, his bones will soon be found in this gehenna. The people, though they continue to sing his songs, will utterly forget him; and this the priests knew well, when they ceased their resistance yesterday.”

I looked down to the ghouls that battened below us on the hideous past; I looked up to the great edifice that dominated the island; and I remembered the vaunting inscriptions that decorated its interior. “Here dwell the immortals”; “Who enter here never die”; “The gaze of all men is upon us”; “The centre of the universe.” The valley of death and oblivion was the natural complement of this hill of arrogance and self-righteousness.

My companion laughed at the sharp antithesis, and wished to go down into the valley of dry bones to enjoy the folly of the rakers and the readers. In gloom and dejection I climbed the spur again and fled down to the beach. It was too ghastly a comment on the whole civilised world to linger over. If only I could wipe it from the mind! The mortal dust of the immortals clung to my nostrils and throat. Heedless of the danger I plunged into the sea, and was soon on board the canoe. Sneekape did not wish to lose me, and was beside me before I could raise the paddle. As we got into the current again and swept past and away from the islet, we could see the stairs still crowded with the candidates and the priests absorbed in their pursuit of fame; and not one of them turned to see us drifting away. It was almost the time of stars before we had our last glimpse of Kloriole. The cupolas of the temple still threw its glory back upon the sun from beneath the horizon till it was difficult to tell them from the golden light on the domed billows.

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