* * * * *

That same evening at six I paid, for the first time, a visit to my old self in Harley Street. It was getting dark, and a bleak storm that hooted like whooping-cough swept the world. At once I saw that even I had been invaded: for my door swung open, banging, a lowered catch preventing it from slamming; in the passage the car-lamp shewed me a young man who seemed a Jew, sitting as if in sleep with dropped head, a back-tilted silk-hat pressed down upon his head to the ears; and lying on face, or back, or side, six more, one a girl with Arlesienne head-dress, one a negress, one a Deal lifeboat's-man, and three of uncertain race; the first room—the waiting-room—is much more numerously occupied, though there still, on the table, lies the volume of Punch, the Gentlewoman, and the book of London views in heliograph. Behind this, descending two steps, is the study and consulting-room, and there, as ever, the revolving-cover oak writing-desk: but on my little shabby-red sofa, a large lady much too big for it, in shimmering brown silk, round her left wrist a trousseau of massive gold trinkets, her head dropped right back, almost severed by an infernal gash from the throat. Here were two old silver candle-sticks, which I lit, and went upstairs: in the drawing-room sat my old house-keeper, placidly dead in a rocking-chair, her left hand pressing down a batch of the open piano-keys, among many strangers. But she was very good: she had locked my bedroom against intrusion; and as the door stands across a corner behind a green-baize curtain, it had not been seen, or, at least, not forced. I did not know where the key might be, but a few thumps with my back drove it open: and there lay my bed intact, and everything tidy. This was a strange coming-back to it, Adam.

But what intensely interested me in that room was a big thing standing at the maroon-and-gold wall between wardrobe and dressing-table—that gilt frame—and that man painted within it there. It was myself in oils, done by—I forget his name now: a towering celebrity he was, and rather a close friend of mine at one time. In a studio in St. John's Wood, I remember, he did it; and many people said that it was quite a great work of art. I suppose I was standing before it quite thirty minutes that night, holding up the bits of candle, lost in wonder, in amused contempt at that thing there. It is I, certainly: that I must admit. There is the high-curving brow—really a King's brow, after all, it strikes me now—and that vacillating look about the eyes and mouth which used to make my sister Ada say: 'Adam is weak and luxurious.' Yes, that is wonderfully done, the eyes, that dear, vacillating look of mine; for although it is rather a staring look, yet one can almost see the dark pupils stir from side to side: very well done. And there is the longish face; and the rather thin, stuck-out moustache, shewing both lips which pout a bit; and there is the nearly black hair; and there is the rather visible paunch; and there is, oh good Heaven, the neat pink cravat—ah, it must have been that—the cravat—that made me burst out into laughter so loud, mocking, and uncontrollable the moment my eye rested there! 'Adam Jeffson,' I muttered reproachfully when it was over, 'could that poor thing in the frame have been you?'

I cannot quite state why the tendency toward Orientalism—Oriental dress—all the manner of an Oriental monarch—has taken full possession of me: but so it is: for surely I am hardly any longer a Western, 'modern' mind, but a primitive and Eastern one. Certainly, that cravat in the frame has receded a million, million leagues, ten thousand forgotten aeons, from me! Whether this is a result due to my own personality, of old acquainted with Eastern notions, or whether, perhaps, it is the natural accident to any mind wholly freed from trammels, I do not know. But I seem to have gone right back to the very beginnings, and resemblance with man in his first, simple, gaudy conditions. My hair, as I sit here writing, already hangs a black, oiled string down my back; my scented beard sweeps in two opening whisks to my ribs; I have on the izar, a pair of drawers of yomani cloth like cotton, but with yellow stripes; over this a soft shirt, or quamis, of white silk, reaching to my calves; over this a short vest of gold-embroidered crimson, the sudeyree; over this a khaftan of green-striped silk, reaching to the ankles, with wide, long sleeves divided at the wrist, and bound at the waist with a voluminous gaudy shawl of Cashmere for girdle; over this a warm wide-flowing torrent of white drapery, lined with ermine. On my head is the skull-cap, covered by a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel; and on my feet is a pair of thin yellow-morocco shoes, covered over with thick red-morocco babooshes. My ankles—my ten fingers—my wrists—are heavy with gold and silver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I bored three days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes for rings.

* * * * *

O Liberty! I am free....

* * * * *

While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, at the very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square, this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seething in me: 'If now I should lift my eyes, and see a man walking yonder—just yonder—at the corner there—turning from Harewood Place into Oxford Street—what, my good God, should I do?—I without even a knife to run and plunge into his heart?'

And I turned my eyes—ogling, suspicious eyes of furtive horror—reluctantly, lingeringly turned—and I peered deeply with lowered brows across the murky winds at that same spot: but no man was there.

Hideously frequent is this nonsense now become with me—in streets of towns—in deep nooks of the country: the invincible assurance that, if I but turn the head, and glance there—at a certain fixed spot—I shall surely see—I must see—a man. And glance I must, glance I must, though I perish: and when I glance, though my hairs creep and stiffen like stirring amobse, yet in my eyes, I know, is monarch indignation against the intruder, and my neck stands stiff as sovereignty itself, and on my brow sits more than all the lordship of Persepolis and Iraz.

To what point of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, and far-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers and faddists. That the whole world should have been made for me alone—that London should have been built only in order that I might enjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning—that all history, and all civilisation should have existed only in order to accumulate for my pleasures its inventions and facilities, its stores of purple and wine, of spices and gold—no more extraordinary does it all seem to me than to some little unreflecting Duke of my former days seemed the possessing of lands which his remote forefathers seized, and slew the occupiers: nor, in reality, is it even so extraordinary, I being alone. But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that the present condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem the common-place and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem so common-place and natural—in nine months. The mind of Adam Jeffson is adaptable.

* * * * *

I sat a long time thinking such things by my bed that night, till finally I was disposed to sleep there. But I had no considerable number of candle-sticks, nor was even sure of candles. I remembered, however, that Peter Peters, three doors away on the other side of the street, had had four handsome silver candelabra in his drawing-room, each containing six stems; and I said to myself: 'I will search for candles in the kitchen, and if I find any, I will go and get Peter Peters' candelabra, and sleep here.'

I took then the two lights which I had, my good God; went down to the passage; then down to the basement; and there had no difficulty in finding three packets of large candles, the fact being, I suppose, that the cessation of gas-lighting had compelled everyone to provide themselves in this way, for there were a great many wherever I looked. With these I re-ascended, went into a little alcove on the second-floor where I had kept some drugs, got a bottle of carbolic oil, and for ten minutes went dashing all the corpses in the house. I then left the two lighted bits of candle on the waiting-room table, and, with the car-lamp, passed along the passage to the front-door, which was very violently banging. I stepped out to find that the storm had increased to a mighty turbulence (though it was dry), which at once caught my clothes, and whirled them into a flapping cloud about and above me; also, I had not crossed the street when my lamp was out. I persisted, however, half blinded, to Peters door. It was locked: but immediately near the pavement was a window, the lower sash up, into which, with little trouble, I lifted myself and passed. My foot, as I lowered it, stood on a body: and this made me angry and restless. I hissed a curse, and passed on, scraping the carpet with my soles, that I might hurt no one: for I did not wish to hurt any one. Even in the almost darkness of the room I recognised Peters' furniture, as I expected: for the house was his on a long lease, and I knew that his mother had had the intention to occupy it after his death. But as I passed into the passage, all was mere blank darkness, and I, depending upon the lamp, had left the matches in the other house. I groped my way to the stairs, and had my foot on the first step, when I was stopped by a vicious shaking of the front-door, which someone seemed to be at with hustlings and the most urgent poundings: I stood with peering stern brows two or three minutes, for I knew that if I once yielded to the flinching at my heart, no mercy would be shown me in this house of tragedy, and thrilling shrieks would of themselves arise and ring through its haunted chambers. The rattling continued an inordinate time, and so instant and imperative, that it seemed as if it could not fail to force the door. But, though horrified, I whispered to my heart that it could only be the storm which was struggling at it like the grasp of a man, and after a time went on, feeling my way by the broad rail, in my brain somehow the thought of a dream which I had had in the Boreal of the woman Clodagh, how she let drop a fluid like pomegranate-seeds into water, and tendered it to Peter Peters: and it was a mortal purging draught; but I would not stop, but step by step went up, though I suffered very much, my brows peering at the utter darkness, and my heart shocked at its own rashness. I got to the first landing, and as I turned to ascend the second part of the stair, my left hand touched something icily cold: I made some quick instinctive movement of terror, and, doing so, my foot struck against something, and I stumbled, half falling over what seemed a small table there. Immediately a horrible row followed, for something fell to the ground: and at that instant, ah, I heard something—a voice—a human voice, which uttered words close to my ear—the voice of Clodagh, for I knew it: yet not the voice of Clodagh in the flesh, but her voice clogged with clay and worms, and full of effort, and thick-tongued: and in that ghastly speech of the grave I distinctly heard the words:

'Things being as they are in the matter of the death of Peter ...'

And there it stopped dead, leaving me so sick, my God, so sick, that I could hardly snatch my robes about me to fly, fly, fly, soft-footed, murmuring in pain, down the steps, down like a sneaking thief, but quick, snatching myself away, then wrestling with the cruel catch of the door which she would not let me open, feeling her all the time behind me, watching me. And when I did get out, I was away up the length of the street, trailing my long jubbah, glancing backward, panting, for I thought that she might dare to follow, with her daring evil will. And all that night I lay on a common bench in the wind-tossed and dismal Park.

* * * * *

The first thing which I did when the sun was up was to return to that place: and I returned with hard and masterful brow.

Approaching Peters' house I saw now, what the darkness had hidden from me, that on his balcony was someone—quite alone there. The balcony is a slight open-work wrought-iron structure, connected to a small roof by three slender voluted pillars, two at the ends, one in the middle: and at the middle one I saw someone, a woman—kneeling—her arms clasped tight about the pillar, and her face rather upward-looking. Never did I see aught more horrid: there were the gracious curves of the woman's bust and hips still well preserved in a clinging dress of red cloth, very faded now; and her reddish hair floated loose in a large flimsy cloud about her; but her face, in that exposed position, had been quite eaten away by the winds to a noseless skeleton, which grinned from ear to ear, with slightly-dropped under-jaw—most horrid in contrast with the body, and frame of hair. I meditated upon her a long time that morning from the opposite pavement. An oval locket at her throat contained, I knew, my likeness: for eight years previously I had given it her. It was Clodagh, the poisoner.

I thought that I would go into that house, and walk through it from top to bottom, and sit in it, and spit in it, and stamp in it, in spite of any one: for the sun was now high. I accordingly went in again, and up the stairs to the spot where I had been frightened, and had heard the words. And here a great rage took me, for I at once saw that I had been made the dupe of the malign wills that beset me, and the laughing-stock of Those for whom I care not a fig. From a little mahogany table there I had knocked sideways to the ground, in my stumble, a small phonograph with a great 25-inch japanned-tin horn, which, the moment that I now noticed it, I took and flung with a great racket down the stairs: for that this it was which had addressed me I did not doubt; it being indeed evident that its clock-work mechanism had been stopped by the volcanic scoriae in the midst of the delivery of a record, but had been started into a few fresh oscillations by the shock of the fall, making it utter those thirteen words, and stop. I was sufficiently indignant at the moment, but have since been glad, for I was thereby put upon the notion of collecting a number of cylinders with records, and have been touched with indescribable sensations, sometimes thrilled, at hearing the silence of this Eternity broken by those singing and speaking voices, so life-like, yet most ghostly, of the old dead.

* * * * *

Well, the most of that same day I spent in a high chamber at Woolwich, dusting out, and sometimes oiling, time-fuses: a work in which I acquired such facility in some hours, that each finally occupied me no more than ninety to a hundred seconds, so that by evening I had, with the previous day's work, close on 600. The construction of these little things is very simple, and, I believe, effective, so that I should have no difficulty in making them myself in large numbers, if it were necessary. Most contain a tiny dry battery, which sends a current along a bell or copper wire at the running-down moment, the clocks being contrived to be set for so many days, hours, and minutes, while others ignite by striking. I arranged in rows in the covered van those which I had prepared, and passed the night in an inn near the Barracks. I had brought candle-sticks from London in the morning, and arranged the furniture—a settee, chest-of-drawers, basin-stand, table, and a number of chairs—in three-quarter-circle round the bed, so getting a triple-row altar of lights, mixed with vases of the house containing small palms and evergreens; with this I mingled a smell of ambergris from the scattered contents of some Turkish sachets which I had; in the bed a bottle of sweet Chypre-wine, with bonbons, nuts, and Havannas. As I lay me down, I could not but reflect, with a smile which I knew to be evil, upon that steady, strong, smouldering lust within me which was urging me through all those pains at the Arsenal, I who shirked every labour as unkingly. So, however, it was: and the next morning I was at it again after an early breakfast, my fingers at first quite stiff with cold, for it blew a keen and January gale. By nine I had 820 fuses; and judging those sufficient to commence with, got into the motor, and took it round to a place called the East Laboratory, a series of detached buildings, where I knew that I should find whatever I wanted: and I prepared my mind for a day's labour. In this place I found incredible stores: mountains of percussion-caps, more chambers of fuses, small-arm cartridges, shells, and all those murderous explosive mixtures, a-making and made, with which modern savagery occupied its leisure in exterminating itself: or, at least, savagery civilised in its top-story only: for civilisation was apparently from the head downwards, and never once grew below the neck in all those centuries, those people being certainly much more mental than cordial, though I doubt if they were genuinely mental either—reminding one rather of that composite image of Nebuchadnezzar, head of gold, breast brazen, feet of clay—head man-like, heart cannibal, feet bestial—like aegipeds, and mermaids, and puzzling undeveloped births. However, it is of no importance: and perhaps I am not much better than the rest, for I, too, after all, am of them. At any rate, their lyddites, melanites, cordites, dynamites, powders, jellies, oils, marls, and civilised barbarisms and obiahs, came in very well for their own destruction: for by two o'clock I had so worked, that I had on the first cart the phalanx of fuses; on the second a goodly number of kegs, cartridge-cases and cartridge-boxes, full of powder, explosive cottons and gelatines, and liquid nitro-glycerine, and earthy dynamite, with some bombs, two reels of cordite, two pieces of tarred cloth, a small iron ladle, a shovel, and a crow-bar; the cab came next, containing a considerable quantity of loose coal; and lastly, in the private carriage lay four big cans of common oil. And first, in the Laboratory, I connected a fuse-conductor with a huge tun of blasting-gelatine, and I set the fuse on the ground, timed for the midnight of the twelfth day thence; and after that I visited the Main Factory, the Carriage Department, the Ordnance Store Department, the Royal Artillery Barracks, and the Powder Magazines in the Marshes, traversing, as it seemed to me, miles of building; and in some I laid heaps of oil-saturated coal with an explosive in suitable spots on the ground-floor near wood-work, and in some an explosive alone: and all I timed for ignition at midnight of the twelfth day. Hot now, and black as ink, I proceeded through the town, stopping with perfect system at every hundredth door: and I laid the faggots of a great burning: and timed them all for ignition at midnight of the twelfth day.

* * * * *

Whatever door I found closed against me I drove at it with a maniac malice.

* * * * *

Shall I commit the whole dark fact to paper?—that deep, deep secret of the human organism?

As I wrought, I waxed wicked as a demon! And with lowered neck, and forward curve of the lower spine, and the blasphemous strut of tragic play-actors, I went. For here was no harmless burning which I did—but the crime of arson; and a most fiendish, though vague, malevolence, and the rage to burn and raven and riot, was upon me like a dog-madness, and all the mood of Nero, and Nebuchadnezzar: and from my mouth proceeded all the obscenities of the slum and of the gutter, and I sent up such hisses and giggles of challenge to Heaven that day as never yet has man let out. But this way lies a spinning frenzy....

* * * * *

I have taken a dead girl with wild huggings to my bosom; and I have touched the corrupted lip, and spat upon her face, and tossed her down, and crushed her teeth with my heel, and jumped and jumped upon her breast, like the snake-stamping zebra, mad, mad...!

* * * * *

I was desolated, however, that first day of the faggot-laying, even in the midst of my sense of omnipotence, by one thing, which made me give some kicks to the motor: for it was only crawling, so that a good part of the way I was stalking by its side; and when I came to that hill near the Old Dover Road, the whole thing stopped, and refused to move, the weight of the train being too great for my horse-power traction. I did not know what to do, and stood there in angry impotence a full half-hour, for the notion of setting up an electric station, with or without automatic stoking-gear, presented so hideous a picture of labour to me, that I would not entertain it. After a time, however, I thought that I remembered that there was a comparatively new power station in St. Paneras driven by turbines: and at once, I uncoupled the motor, covered the drays with the tarpaulins, and went driving at singing speed, choosing the emptier by-streets, and not caring whom I crushed. After some trouble I found, in fact, the station in an obscure by-street made of two long walls, and went in by a window, a rage upon me to have my will quickly accomplished. I ran up some stairs, across two rooms, into a gallery containing a switch-board, and in the room below saw the works, all very neat-looking, but, as I soon found, very dusty. I went down, and fixed upon a generating set—there were three—that would give a decent load, and then saw that the switch-gear belonging to this particular generator was in order. I then got some cloths and thoroughly cleaned the dust off the commutators; ran next—for I was in a strange fierce haste—and turned the water into the turbines, and away went the engine; I hurried to set the lubricators running on the bearings, and in a couple of minutes had adjusted the speed, and the brushes of the generators, and switched the current on to the line. By this time, however, I saw that it was getting dark, and feared that little could be done that day; still, I hurried out, the station still running, got into the car, and was off to look for a good electric one, of which there are hosts in the streets, in order at least to clean up and adjust the motor that night. I drove down three by-streets, till I turned into Euston Road: but I had no sooner reached it than I pulled up—with sudden jerk—with a shout of astonishment.

That cursed street was all lighted up and gay! and three shimmering electric globes, not far apart, illuminated every feature of a ghastly battle-field of dead.

And there was a thing there, the grinning impression of which I shall carry to my grave: a thing which spelled and spelled at me, and ceased, and began again, and ceased, and spelled at me. For, above a shop which faced me was a flag, a red flag with white letters, fluttering on the gale the words: 'Metcalfe's Stores'; and beneath the flag, stretched right across the house, was the thing which spelled, letter by letter, in letters of light: and it spelled two words, deliberately, coming to the end, and going back to recommence:

Drink ROBORAL.

And that was the last word of civilised Man to me, Adam Jeffson—its final counsel—its ultimate gospel and message—to me, my good God! Drink Roboral!

I was put into such a passion of rage by this blatant ribaldry, which affected me like the laughter of a skeleton, that I rushed from the car, with the intention, I believe, of seeking stones to stone it: but no stones were there: and I had to stand impotently enduring that rape of my eyes, its victoriously-dogged iteration, its taunting leer, its Drink Roboral—D, R, I, N, K R, O, B, O, R, A, L.

It was one of those electrical spelling-advertisements, worked by a small motor commutator driven by a works-motor, and I had now set it going: for on some night before that Sabbath of doom the chemist must have set it to work, but finding the works abandoned, had not troubled to shut it down again. At any rate, this thing stopped my work for that day, for when I went to shut down the works it was night; and I drove to the place which I had made my home in sullen and weary mood: for I knew that Roboral would not cure the least of all my sores.

* * * * *

The next morning I awoke in quite another frame of mind, disposed to idle, and let things go. After rising, dressing, washing in cold diluted rose-water, and descending to the salle-a-manger, where I had laid my morning-meal the previous evening, I promenaded an hour the only one of these long sombrous tufted corridors in which there were not more than two dead, though behind the doors on either hand, all of which I had locked, I knew that they lay in plenty. When I was warmed, I again went down, looked into my motor, got three cylinders from one of a number of motors standing near, lit up, and drove away—to Woolwich, as I thought at first: but instead of crossing the river by Blackfriars, I went more eastward; and having passed from Holborn into Cheapside, which was impassable, unless I crawled, was about to turn, when I noticed a phonograph-shop: into this I got by a side-door, suddenly seized by quite a curiosity to hear what I might hear. I took a good one with microphone diaphragm, and a number of record-cylinders in a brass-handled box, and I put them into the car, for there was still a very strong peach-odour in this closed shop, which displeased me. I then proceeded southward and westward through by-streets, seeking some probable house into which to go from the rough cold winds, when I saw the Parliament-house, and thither, turning river-ward by Westminster Hall to Palace Yard, I went, and with my two parcels, one weighting each arm, walked into this old place along a line of purple-dusted busts; I deposited my boxes on a table beside a massive brass thing lying there, which, I suppose, must be what they called the Mace; and I sat to hear.

Unfortunately, the phonograph was a clock-work one, and when I wound it, it would not go: so that I got very angry at my absurdity in not bringing an electric mechanism, as I could with much less trouble have put in a chemical than cleaned the clock-work; and this thing put me into such a rage, that I nearly tore it to pieces, and was half for kicking it: but there was a man sitting in an old straight-backed chair quite near me, which they called the Speaker's Chair, who was in such a pose, that he had, every time I glanced suddenly at him, precisely the air of bending forward with interest to watch what I was doing, a Mohrgrabim kind of man, almost black, with Jewish nose, crinkled hair, keffie, and flowing robe, probably, I should say, an Abyssinian Galla; with him were only five or six people about the benches, mostly leaning forward with rested head, so that this place had quite a void sequestered mood. At all events, this Galla, or Bedouin, with his grotesque interest in my doings, restrained my hands: and, finally, by dint of peering, poking, dusting, and adjusting, in an hour's time I got the phonograph to go very well.

And all that morning, and far into late afternoon, forgetful of food, and of the cold which gradually possessed me, I sat there listening, musing—cylinder after cylinder: frivolous songs, orchestras, voices of famous men whom I had spoken with, and shaken their solid hands, speaking again to me, but thick-tongued, with hoarse effort and gurgles, from out the vague void beyond the grave: most strange, most strange. And the third cylinder that I put on, ah, I knew, with a fearful start, that voice of thunder, I knew it well: it was the preacher, Mackay's; and many, many times over I heard those words of his that day, originally spoken, it seems, when the cloud had just passed the longitude of Vienna; and in all that torrent of speech not one single word of 'I told you so': but he cries:

'...praise Him, O Earth, for He is He: and if He slay me, I will laugh raillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword is sharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, little flock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweets to your tongue: for though ye have sinned, and hardened yourselves as brass, and gone far, far astray in these latter wildernesses, yet He is infinitely greater than your sin, and will lead you back. Break not, break not, poor broken heart of Earth: for from Him I run herald to thee this night with the sweet and secret message, that of old He chose thee, and once mixed conjugally with thee in an ancient sleep, O Afflicted: and He is thou, and thou art He, flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone; and if thou perish utterly, it is that He has perished utterly, too: for thou art He. Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His Parthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, and the last end of this Earth shall be no poison-cloud, I say to you, but Carnival and Harvest-home ... though ye have sinned, poor hearts ...'

* * * * *

So Mackay, with thick-tongued metallic effort. I found this brown room of the Commons-house, with its green benches, and grilled galleries, so agreeable to my mood, that I went again the next morning, and listened to more records, till they tired me: for what I had was a prurient itch to hear secret scandals, and revelations of the festering heart, but these cylinders, gathered from a shop, divulged nothing. I then went out to make for Woolwich, but in the car saw the poet's note-book in which I had written: and I took it, went back, and was writing an hour, till I was tired of that, too; and judging it too late for Woolwich that day, wandered about the dusty committee-rooms and recesses of this considerable place. In one room another foolishness suddenly seized upon me, shewing how my slightest whim has become more imperious within me than all the Jaws of the Medes and Persians: for in that room, Committee Room No. 15, I found an apparently young policeman lying flat on his back, who pleased me: his helmet tilted under his head, and near one white-gloved hand a blue official envelope; the air of that stagnant quiet room was still perceptibly peach-scented, and he gave not the slightest odour that I could detect, though he had been corporal and stalwart, his face now the colour of dark ashes, in each hollow cheek a ragged hole about the size of a sixpence, the flimsy vaulted eye-lids well embedded in their caverns, from under whose fringe of eye-lash seemed whispered the word: 'Eternity.' His hair seemed very long for a policeman, or perhaps it had grown since death; but what interested me about him, was the envelope at his hand: for 'what,' I asked myself, 'was this fellow doing here with an envelope at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon?' This made me look closer, and then I saw by a mark at the left temple that he had been shot, or felled; whereupon I was thrown into quite a great rage, for I thought that this poor man was killed in the execution of his duty, when many of his kind perhaps, and many higher than he, had fled their post to pray or riot. So, after looking at him a long time, I said to him: 'Well, D. 47, you sleep very well: and you did well, dying so: I am pleased with you, and to mark my favour, I decree that you shall neither rot in the common air, nor burn in the common flames: for by my own hand shall you be distinguished with burial.' And this wind so possessed me, that I at once went out: with the crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger's in Parliament Street, got a spade, and went into Westminster Abbey. I soon prised up a grave-slab of some famous man in the north transept, and commenced to shovel: but, I do not know how, by the time I had digged a foot the whole impulse passed from me: I left off the work, promising to resume it: but nothing was ever done, for the next day I was at Woolwich, and busy enough about other matters.

* * * * *

During the next nine days I worked with a fever on me, and a map of London before me.

There were places in that city!—secrets, vastnesses, horrors! In the wine-vaults at London Docks was a vat which must certainly have contained between twenty and thirty thousand gallons: and with dancing heart I laid a train there; the tobacco-warehouse must have covered eighty acres: and there I laid a fuse. In a house near Regent's Park, standing in a garden, and shut from the street by a high wall, I saw a thing...! and what shapes a great city hid I now first know.

* * * * *

I left no quarter unremembered, taking a train, no longer of four, but of eight, vehicles, drawn by an electric motor which I re-charged every morning, mostly from the turbine station in St. Pancras, once from a steam-station with very small engine and dynamo, found in the Palace Theatre, which gave little trouble, and once from a similar little station in a Strand hotel. With these I visited West Ham and Kew, Finchley and Clapham, Dalston and Marylebone; I exhausted London; I deposited piles in the Guildhall, in Holloway Gaol, in the new pillared Justice-hall of Newgate, in the Tower, in the Parliament-house, in St. Giles' Workhouse, in the Crypt and under the organ of St. Paul's, in the South Kensington Museum, in the Royal Agricultural Society, in Whiteley's place, in the Trinity House, in Liverpool Street, in the Office of Works, in the secret recesses of the British Museum; in a hundred inflammable warehouses, in five hundred shops, in a thousand private dwellings. And I timed them all for ignition at midnight of the 23rd April.

By five in the afternoon of the 22nd, when I left my train in Maida Vale, and drove alone to the solitary house on high ground near Hampstead Heath which I had chosen, the work was well finished.

* * * * *

The great morning dawned, and I was early a-stir: for I had much to do that day.

I intended to make for the sea-shore the next morning, and had therefore to choose a good petrol motor, store it, and have it in a place of safety; I had also to drag another vehicle after me, stored with trunks of time-fuses, books, clothes, and other little things.

My first journey was to Woolwich, whence I took all that I might ever require in the way of mechanism; thence to the National Gallery, where I cut from their frames the 'Vision of St. Helena,' Murillo's 'Boy Drinking,' and 'Christ at the Column'; and thence to the Embassy to bathe, anoint myself, and dress.

As I had anticipated, and hoped, a blustering spring gale was blowing from the north.

Even as I set out from Hampstead, about 9 A.M., I had been able to guess that some of my fuses had somehow anticipated the appointed hour: for I saw three red hazes at various points in the air, and heard the far vague booming of an occasional explosion; and by 11 A.M. I felt sure that a large region of north-eastern London must be in flames. With the solemn feelings of bridegrooms and marriage-mornings—with a flinching, a flinching heart, God knows, yet a heart up-buoyed on thrilling joys—I went about making preparations for the Gargantuan orgy of the night.

* * * * *

The house at Hampstead, which no doubt still stands, is of rather pleasing design in quite a stone and rural style, with good breadths of wall-surface, two plain coped gables, mullioned windows, and oversailing slate verge roofs, but, rather spoiling it, a high square three-storied tower at the south-east angle, on the topmost floor of which I had slept the previous night. There I had provided myself with a jar of pale tobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house in Seymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the best wines, nuts, and so on, and a gold harp of the musician Krasinski, stamped with his name, taken from his house in Portland Street.

But so much did I find to do that day, and so many odd things turned up which I thought that I would take with me, that it was not till near six that I drove finally northward through Camden Town. And now an ineffable awe possessed my soul at the solemn noise which everywhere encompassed me, an ineffable awe, a blissful terror. Never, never could I have dreamed of aught so great and potent. All above my head there rushed southward with wide-spread wing of haste a sparkling smoke; and mixed with the immense roaring I heard mysterious hubbubs of tumblings and rumblings, which I could not at all comprehend, like the moving-about of furniture in the houses of Titans; while pervading all the air was a most weird and tearful sound, as it were threnody, and a wild wail of pain, and dying swan-songs, and all lamentations and tribulations of the world. Yet I was aware that, at an hour so early, the flames must be far from general; in fact, they had not well commenced.

* * * * *

As I had left a good semicircular region of houses, with a radius of four hundred yards, without combustibles to the south of the isolated house which I was to occupy, and as the wind was so strongly from the north, I simply left my two vehicles at the door of the house, without fear of any injury: nor did any occur. I then went up to the top of the tower, lit the candles, and ate voraciously of the dinner which I had left ready, for since the morning I had taken nothing; and then, with hands and heart that quivered, I arranged the clothes of the low spring-bed upon which to throw my frame in the morning hours. Opposite the wall, where lay the bed, was a Gothic window, pretty large, with low sill, hung with poppy-figured muslin, and looking directly south, so that I could recline at ease in the red-velvet easy-chair, and see. It had evidently been a young lady's room: for on the toilette were cut-glass bottles, a plait of brown hair, powders, rouge-aux-levres, one little bronze slipper, and knick-knacks, and I loved her and hated her, though I did not see her anywhere. About half-past eight I sat at the window to watch, all being arranged and ready at my right hand, the candles extinguished in the red room: for the theatre was opened, was opened: and the atmosphere of this earth seemed turned into Hell, and Hell was in my soul.

* * * * *

Soon after midnight there was a sudden and very visible increase in the conflagration. On all hands I began to see blazing structures soar, with grand hurrahs, on high. In fives and tens, in twenties and thirties, all between me and the remote limit of my vision, they leapt, they lingered long, they fell. My spirit more and more felt, and danced—deeper mysteries of sensation, sweeter thrills. I sipped exquisitely, I drew out enjoyment leisurely. Anon, when some more expansive angel of flame would arise from the Pit with steady aspiration, and linger with outspread arms, and burst, I would lift a little from the chair, leaning forward to clap, as at some famous acting; or I would call to them in shouts of cheer, giving them the names of Woman. For now I seemed to see nothing but some bellowing pandemonic universe through crimson glasses, and the air was wildly hot, and my eye-balls like theirs that walk staring in the inner midst of burning fiery furnaces, and my skin itched with a fierce and prickly itch. Anon I touched the chords of the harp to the air of Wagner's 'Walkueren-ritt.'

Near three in the morning, I reached the climax of my guilty sweets. My drunken eye-lids closed in a luxury of pleasure, and my lips lay stretched in a smile that dribbled; a sensation of dear peace, of almighty power, consoled me: for now the whole area which through streaming tears I surveyed, mustering its ten thousand thunders, and brawling beyond the stars the voice of its southward-rushing torment, billowed to the horizon one grand Atlantic of smokeless and flushing flame; and in it sported and washed themselves all the fiends of Hell, with laughter, shouts, wild flights, and holiday; and I—first of my race—had flashed a signal to the nearer planets....

* * * * *

* * * * *

Those words: 'signal to the nearer planets' I wrote nearly fourteen months ago, some days after the destruction of London, I being then on board the old Boreal, making for the coast of France: for the night was dark, though calm, and I was afraid of running into some ship, yet not sleepy, so I wrote to occupy my fingers, the ship lying still. The book in which I wrote has been near me: but no impulse to write anything has visited me, till now I continue; not, however, that I have very much to put down.

I had no intention of wearing out my life in lighting fires every morning to warm myself in the inhospitable island of Britain, and set out to France with the view of seeking some palace in the Riviera, Spain, or perhaps Algiers, there, for the present at least, to make my home.

I started from Calais toward the end of April, taking my things along, the first two days by train, and then determining that I was in no hurry, and a petrol motor easier, took one, and maintained a generally southern and somewhat eastern direction, ever-anew astonished at the wildness of the forest vegetation which, within so short a space since the disappearance of man, chokes this pleasant land, even before the definite advent of summer.

After three weeks of very slow travelling—for though I know several countries very well, France with her pavered villages, hilly character, vines, forests, and primeval country-manner, is always new and charming to me—after three weeks I came unexpectedly to a valley which had never entered my head; and the moment that I saw it, I said: 'Here I will live,' though I had no idea what it was, for the monastery which I saw did not look at all like a monastery, according to my ideas: but when I searched the map, I discovered that it must be La Chartreuse de Vauclaire in Perigord.

It is my belief that this word 'Vauclaire' is nothing else than a corruption of the Latin Vallis Clara, or Bright Valley, for l's and u's did interchange about in this way, I remember: cheval becoming chevau(x) in the plural, like 'fool' and 'fou,' and the rest: which proves the dear laziness of French people, for the 'l' was too much trouble for them to sing, and when they came to two 'l's' they quite succumbed, shying that vault, or voute, and calling it some y. But at any rate, this Vauclaire, or Valclear, was well named: for here, if anywhere, is Paradise, and if anyone knew how and where to build and brew liqueurs, it was those good old monks, who followed their Master with entrain in that Cana miracle, and in many other things, I fancy, but aesthetically shirked to say to any mountain: 'Be thou removed.'

* * * * *

The general hue of the vale is a deep cerulean, resembling that blue of the robes of Albertinelli's Madonnas; so, at least, it strikes the eye on a clear forenoon of spring or summer. The monastery consists of an oblong space, or garth, around three sides of which stand sixteen small houses, with regular intervals between, all identical, the cells of the fathers; between the oblong space and the cells come the cloisters, with only one opening to the exterior; in the western part of the oblong is a little square of earth under a large cypress-shade, within which, as in a home of peace, it sleeps: and there, straight and slanting, stand little plain black crosses over graves....

To the west of the quadrangle is the church, with the hostelry, and an asphalted court with some trees and a fountain; and beyond, the entrance-gate.

All this stands on a hill of gentle slope, green as grass; and it is backed close against a steep mountain-side, of which the tree-trunks are conjectural, for I never saw any, the trees resembling rather one continuous leafy tree-top, run out high and far over the extent of the mountain.

* * * * *

I was there four months, till something drove me away. I do not know what had become of the fathers and brothers, for I only found five, four of whom I took in two journeys in the motor beyond the church of Saint Martial d'Artenset, and left them there; and the fifth remained three weeks with me, for I would not disturb him in his prayer. He was a bearded brother of forty years or thereabouts, who knelt in his cell robed and hooded in all his phantom white: for in no way different from whatever is most phantom, visionary and eerie must a procession of these people have seemed by gloaming, or dark night This particular brother knelt, I say, in his small chaste room, glaring upward at his Christ, who hung long-armed in a little recess between the side of three narrow bookshelves and a projection of the wall; and under the Christ a gilt and blue Madonna; the books on the three shelves few, leaning different ways. His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed: a bed all enclosed in dark boards, a broad perpendicular board along the foot, reaching the ceiling, a horizontal board at the side over which he got into bed, another narrower one like it at the ceiling for fringe and curtain, and another perpendicular one hiding the pillow, making the clean bed within a very shady and cosy little den, on the wall of this den being another smaller Christ and a little picture. On the perpendicular board at the foot hung two white garments, and over a second chair at the bed-side another: all very neat and holy. He was a large stern man, blond as corn, but with some red, too, in his hairy beard; and appalling was the significance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity of those saffron cheeks. I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence for this man; but I had it, certainly. Many of the others, it is clear, had fled: but not he: and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross, holding one real as the other—he alone among many. For Christianity was an elite religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within their reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's, it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.

It was my way to plant at the portal the big, carved chair from the chancel on the hot days, and rest my soul, refusing to think of anything, drowsing and smoking for hours. All down there in the plain waved gardens of delicious fruit about the prolonged silver thread of the river Isle, whose course winds loitering quite near the foot of the monastery-slope. This slope dominates a tract of distance that is not only vast, but looks immense, although the horizon is bounded by a semicircle of low hills, rather too stiff and uniform for perfect beauty; the interval of plain being occupied by yellow ploughed lands which were never sown, weedy now, and crossed and recrossed by vividly-green ribbons of vine, with stretches of pale-green lucerne, orchards, and the white village of Monpont near the railway, all embowered, the Isle drawing its mercurial streams through the village-meadow, which is dark with shades of oaks: and to have played there a boy, and used it familiarly from birth as one's own hand or foot, must have been very sweet and homely; after this, the river divides, and takes the shape of a heart; and very far away are visible the grey banks of the Gironde. On the semicircle of hills, when there was little distance-mist, I saw the ruins of some seigneurial chateau, for the seigneurs, too, knew where to build; and to my left, between a clump of oaks and an avenue of poplars, the bell-tower of the village—church of Saint Martial d'Artenset—a very ancient type of tower, I believe, and common in France, rather ponderous, consisting of a square mass with a smaller square mass stuck on, the latter having large Gothic windows; and behind me the west face of the monastery-church, over the door being the statue of Saint Bruno.

Well, one morning after four months, I opened my eyes in my cell to the piercing consciousness that I had burned Monpont over-night: and so overcome was I with regret for this poor inoffensive little place, that for two days, hardly eating, I paced between the oak and walnut pews of the nave, massive stalls they are, separated by grooved Corinthian pilasters, wondering what was to become of me, and if I was not already mad; and there are some little angels with extraordinarily human Greuze-like faces, supporting the nerves of the apse, which, after a time, every time I passed them, seemed conscious of me and my existence there; and the wood-work which ornaments the length of the nave, and of the choir also, elaborate with carved marguerites and roses, here and there took in my eyes significant forms from certain points of view; and there is a partition—for the nave is divided into two chapels, one for the brothers and one for the fathers, I conclude—and in this partition a massive door, which yet looks quite light and graceful, carved with oak and acanthus leaves, and every time I passed through I had the impression that the door was a sentient thing, subconscious of me; and the delicate Italian-Renaissance brick vault which springs from the vast nave seemed to look upon me with a gloomy knowledge of me, and of the heart within me; and at about four in the afternoon of the second day, after pacing the church for hours, I fell down at one of the two altars near that carved door of the screen, praying God to have mercy upon my soul; and in the very midst of my praying, I was up and away, the devil in me, and I got into the motor, and did not come back to Vauclaire for another month, and came leaving great tracts of burned desolation behind me, towns and forests, Bordeaux burned, Lebourne burned, Bergerac burned.

* * * * *

I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there I experienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before my Maker. And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of the monastery-gate, something said to me: 'You will never be a good man, nor permanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life, devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exact all your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modern things, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand: otherwise you are bound to succumb. Do this, therefore, beginning, not to-morrow nor this afternoon, but now: for though no man will see your work, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in His way: and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan: and perhaps, seeing, He may have mercy upon you.'

* * * * *

In this way arose the idea of the Palace—an idea, indeed, which had entered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcome of my raving moods: now, however, in a very different way, soberly, and soon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations, and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which, one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, over-borne by the vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessed me. After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes: and I said: I will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace worthy the King of Earth.

* * * * *

After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a very different man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble, making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole, drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and the rule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at a little over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weight and bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the sort, deciding as to the size and structure of the crane, forge, and work-shop, and the necessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list of over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.

* * * * *

I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn streets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults, etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris, and then lying in the Speranza at Dover; nor had I sufficient familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the aid of Bottins, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now catalogued. My ship was the Speranza, which brought me from Havre, for at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all purposes, the Speranza being an American yacht, very palatially fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000 tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amid-ships that enables me to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days' work at the water-line and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw out her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on the quai, took in the twenty-three hundred-weight bags of gold, and the half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London: meaning to make Dover my depot, and the London rails my thoroughfare from all parts of the country.

Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: a harrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: for the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake. However, all's well that ends well, though if I had it to go through again, certainly I should not. The Speranza is now lying seven miles off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th of June at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and I pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When the thirty-three ...

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

Those words: 'when the thirty-three' were written by me over seventeen years since—long years—seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of the Speranza, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.

I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen, seventeen ... ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if the spelling of some of them is queer. My brain has been thinking inarticulately perhaps, all these years: and the English words and letters, as they now stand written, have rather an improbable and foreign air to me, as a Greek or Russian book might look to a man who has not so long been learning those languages as to forget the impossibly foreign impression received from them on the first day of tackling them. Or perhaps it is only my fancy: for that I have fancies I know.

But what to write? The history of those seventeen years could not be put down, my good God: at least, it would take me seventeen more to do it. If I were to detail the building of the palace alone, and how it killed me nearly, and how I twice fled from it, and had to return, and became its bounden slave, and dreamed of it, and grovelled before it, and prayed, and raved, and rolled; and how I forgot to make provision on the west side for the contraction and expansion of the gold in the colder weather and the heats of summer, and had to break down nine months' work, and how I cursed Thee, how I cursed Thee; and how the lake of wine evaporated faster than the conduits replenished it, and the three journeys which I had to take to Constantinople for shiploads of wine, and my frothing despairs, till I had the thought of placing the reservoir in the platform; and how I had then to break down the south side of the platform to the very bottom, and of the month-long nightmare of terror that I had lest the south side of the palace would undergo subsidence; and how the petrol failed, and of the three-weeks' search for petrol along the coast; and how, after list-rubbing all the jet, I found that I had forgotten the necessary rouge for polishing; and how, in the third year, I found the fluate, which I had for water-proofing the pores of the platform-stone, nearly all leaked away in the Speranza's hold, and I had to get silicate of soda at Gallipoli; and how, after two years' observation, I had to come to the conclusion that the lake was leaking, and discovered that this Imbros sand was not suitable for mixing with the skin of Portland cement which covered the cement concrete, and had to substitute sheet-bitumen in three places; and how I did all, all for the sake of God, thinking: 'I will work, and be a good man, and cast Hell from me: and when I see it stand finished, it will be an Altar and a Testimony to me, and I shall find peace, and be well': and how I have been cheated—seventeen years, long years of my life—for there is no God; and how my plasterers'-hair failed me, and I had to use flock, hessian, scrym, wadding, wood-street paving-blocks, and whatever I could find, for filling the interspaces between the platform cross-walls; and of the espagnolette bolts, how a number of them mysteriously disappeared, as if snatched to Hell by harpies, and I had to make them; and how the crane-chain would not reach two of the silver-panel castings when they were finished, and they were too heavy for me to lift, and the wringing of the hands of my despair, and my biting of the earth, and the transport of my fury; and how, for a whole wild week, I searched in vain for the text-book which describes the ambering process; and how, when all was nearly over, in the blasting away of the forge and crane with dynamite, a long crack appeared down the gold of the east platform-steps, and how I would not be consoled, but mourned and mourned; and how, in spite of all my tribulations, it was sweetly interesting to watch my power slowly grow from the first feeble beginnings of the landing of materials and unloading them from the motor, a hundred-weight at a time, till I could swing four tons—see the solid metals flow—enjoy the gliding sounds of the handle, crank-shaft, and system of levers, forcing inwards the mould-end, and the upper and lower plungers, for pressing the material—build at ease in a travelling-cage—and watch from my hut-door through sleepless hours, under the electric moonlight of this land, the three piles of gold stones, the silver panels, the two-foot squares of jet, and be comforted; and how the putty-wash—but it is past, it is past: and not to live over again that vulgar nightmare of means and ends have I taken to this writing again—but to put down something else, if I dare.

Seventeen years, my good God, of that delusion! I could write down no sort of explanation for all those groans and griefs, at which a reasoning being would not shriek with laughter. I should have lived at ease in some palace of the Middle-Orient, and burned my cities: but no, I must be 'a good man'—vain thought. The words of a wild madman, that preaching man in England who prophesied what happened, were with me, where he says: 'the defeat of Man is His defeat'; and I said to myself: 'Well, the last man shall not be quite a fiend, just to spite That Other.' And I worked and groaned, saying: 'I will be a good man, and burn nothing, nor utter aught unseemly, nor debauch myself, but choke back the blasphemies that Those Others shriek through my throat, and build and build, with moils and groans.' And it was Vanity: though I do love the house, too, I love it well, for it is my home on the waste earth.

I had calculated to finish it in twelve years, and I should undoubtedly have finished it in fourteen, instead of in sixteen and seven months, but one day, when the south, north, and east platform-steps were already finished—it was in the July of the third year, and near sunset—as I left off work, instead of going to the tent where my dinner lay ready, I walked down to the ship—most strangely—in a daft, mechanical sort of way, without saying a word to myself, an evil-meaning smile of malice on my lips; and at midnight I was lying off Mitylene, thirty miles to the south, having bid, as I thought, a last farewell to all those toils. I was going to burn Athens.

I did not, however: but kept on my way westward round Cape Matapan, intending to destroy the forests and towns of Sicily, if I found there a suitable motor for travelling, for I had not been at the pains to take the motor on board at Imbros; otherwise I would ravage parts of southern Italy. But when I came thereabouts, I was confronted with an awful horror: for no southern Italy was there, and no Sicily was there, unless a small new island, probably not five miles long, was Sicily; and nothing else I saw, save the still-smoking crater of Stromboli. I cruised northward, searching for land, and for a long time would not believe the evidence of the instruments, thinking that they wilfully misled me, or I stark mad. But no: no Italy was there, till I came to the latitude of Naples, it, too, having disappeared, engulfed, engulfed, all that stretch. From this monstrous thing I received so solemn a shock and mood of awe, that the evil mind in me was quite chilled and quelled: for it was, and is, my belief that a wide-spread re-arrangement of the earth's surface is being purposed, and in all that drama, O my God, how shall I be found?

However, I went on my way, but more leisurely, not daring for a long time to do anything, lest I might offend anyone; and, in this foolish cowering mind, coasted all the western coast of Spain and France during five weeks, in that prolonged intensity of calm weather which now alternates with storms that transcend all thought, till I came again to Calais: and there, for the first time, landed.

Here I would no longer contain myself, but burned; and that magnificent stretch of forest that lay between Agincourt and Abbeville, covering five square miles, I burned; and Abbeville I burned; and Amiens I burned; and three forests between Amiens and Paris I burned; and Paris I burned; burning and burning during four months, leaving behind me smoking districts, a long tract of ravage, like some being of the Pit that blights where pass his flaming wings.

* * * * *

This of city-burning has now become a habit with me more enchaining—and infinitely more debased—than ever was opium to the smoker, or alcohol to the drunkard. I count it among the prime necessaries of my life: it is my brandy, my bacchanal, my secret sin. I have burned Calcutta, Pekin, and San Francisco. In spite of the restraining influence of this palace, I have burned and burned. I have burned two hundred cities and countrysides. Like Leviathan disporting himself in the sea, so I have rioted in this earth.

* * * * *

After an absence of six months, I returned to Imbros: for I was for looking again upon the work which I had done, that I might mock myself for all that unkingly grovelling: and when I saw it, standing there as I had left it, frustrate and forlorn, and waiting its maker's hand, some pity and instinct to build took me—for something of God was in Man—and I fell upon my knees, and spread my arms to God, and was converted, promising to finish the palace, with prayers that as I built so He would build my soul, and save the last man from the enemy. And I set to work that day to list-rub the last few dalles of the jet.

* * * * *

I did not leave Imbros after that during four years, except for occasional brief trips to the coast—to Kilid-Bahr, Gallipoli, Lapsaki, Gamos, Rodosto, Erdek, Erekli, or even once to Constantinople and Scutari—if I happened to want anything, or if I was tired of work: but without once doing the least harm to anything, but containing my humours, and fearing my Maker. And full of peaceful charm were those little cruises through this Levantic world, which, truly, is rather like a light sketch in water-colours done by an angel than like the dun real earth; and full of self-satisfaction and pious contentment would I return to Imbros, approved of my conscience, for that I had surmounted temptation, and lived tame and stainless.

I had set up the southern of the two closed-lotus pillars, and the platform-top was already looking as lovely as heaven, with its alternate two-foot squares of pellucid gold and pellucid jet, when I noticed one morning that the Speranza's bottom was really now too foul, and the whim took me then and there to leave all, and clean her as far as I could. I at once went on board, descended to the hold, took off my sudeyrie, and began to shift the ballast over to starboard, so as to tilt up her port bottom to the scraper. This was wearying labour, and about noon I was sitting on a bag, resting in the almost darkness, when something seemed to whisper to me these words: 'You dreamed last night that there is an old Chinaman alive in Pekin.' Horridly I started: I had dreamed something of the sort, but, from the moment of waking, till then, had forgotten it: and I leapt livid to my feet.

I cleaned no Speranza that day, nor for four days did I anything, but sat on the cabin-house and mused, my supporting palm among the hairy draperies of my chin: for the thought of such a thing, if it could by any possibility be true, was detestable as death to me, changing the colour of the sun, and the whole aspect of the world: and anon, at the outrage of that thing, my brow would flush with wrath, and my eyes blaze: till, on the fourth afternoon, I said to myself: 'That old Chinaman in Pekin is likely to get burned to death, I think, or blown to the clouds!'

So, a second time, on the 4th March, the poor palace was left to build itself. For, after a short trip to Gallipoli, where I got some young lime-twigs in boxes of earth, and some preserved limes and ginger, I set out for a long voyage to the East, passing through the Suez Canal, and visiting Bombay, where I was three weeks, and then destroyed it.

* * * * *

I had the thought of going across Hindustan by engine, but did not like to leave my ship, to which I was very attached, not sure of finding anything so suitable and good at Calcutta; and, moreover, I was afraid to abandon my petrol motor, which I had taken on board with the air-windlass, since I was going to uncivilised land. I therefore coasted down western Hindustan.

All that northern shore of the Arabian Sea has at the present time an odour which it wafts far over the water, resembling odours of happy vague dream-lands, sweet to smell in the early mornings as if the earth were nothing but a perfume, and life an inhalation.

On that voyage, however, I had, from beginning to end, twenty-seven fearful storms, or, if I count that one near the Carolines, then twenty-eight. But I do not wish to write of these rages: they were too inhuman: and how I came alive through them against all my wildest hope, Someone, or Something, only knows.

I will write down here a thing: it is this, my God—something which I have observed: a definite obstreperousness in the mood of the elements now, when once roused, which grows, which grows continually. Tempests have become very very far more wrathful, the sea more truculent and unbounded in its insolence; when it thunders, it thunders with a venom new to me, cracking as though it would split the firmament, and bawling through the heaven of heavens, as if roaring to devour all things; in Bombay once, and in China thrice, I was shaken by earthquakes, the second and third marked by a certain extravagance of agitation, that might turn a man grey. Why should this be, my God? I remember reading very long ago that on the American prairies, which from time immemorial had been swept by great storms, the storms gradually subsided when man went to reside permanently there. If this be true, it would seem that the mere presence of man had a certain subduing or mesmerising effect upon the native turbulence of Nature, and his absence now may have removed the curb. It is my belief that within fifty years from now the huge forces of the earth will be let fully loose to tumble as they will; and this planet will become one of the undisputed playgrounds of Hell, and the theatre of commotions stupendous as those witnessed on the face of Saturn.

* * * * *

The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth: and I, poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. Upon her I brood, and do not cease, but brood and brood—the habit, if I remember right, first becoming fixed and fated during that long voyage eastward: for what is in store for her God only knows, and I have seen in my broodings long visions of her future, which, if a man should see with the eye of flesh, he would spread the arms, and wheel and wheel through the mazes of a hiccuping giggling frenzy, for the vision only is the very verge of madness. If I might cease but for one hour that perpetual brooding upon her! But I am her child, and my mind grows and grows to her like the off-shoots of the banyan-tree, that take root downward, and she sucks and draws it, as she draws my feet by gravitation, and I cannot take wing from her: for she is greater than I, and there is no escaping her; and at the last, I know, my soul will dash itself to ruin, like erring sea-fowl upon pharos-lights, against her wild and mighty bosom. Often a whole night through I lie open-eyed in the dark, with bursting brain, thinking of that hollow Gulf of Mexico, how identical in shape and size with the protuberance of Africa just opposite, and how the protuberance of the Venezuelan and Brazilian coast fits in with the in-curve of Africa: so that it is obvious to me—it is quite obvious—that they once were one; and one night rushed so far apart; and the wild Atlantic knew that thing, and ran gladly, hasting in between: and how if eye of flesh had been there to see, and ear to hear that cruel thundering, my God, my God—what horror! And if now they meet again, so long apart ...but that way fury lies. Yet one cannot help but think: I lie awake and think, for she fills my soul, and absorbs it, with all her moods and ways. She has meanings, secrets, plans. Strange, strange, for instance, that similarity between the scheme of Europe and the scheme of Asia: each with three southern peninsulas pointing south: Spain corresponding with Arabia, Italy with India, the Morea and Greece, divided by the Gulf of Corinth, corresponding with the Malay Peninsula and Annam, divided by the Gulf of Siam; each with two northern peninsulas pointing south, Sweden and Norway, and Korea and Kamschatka; each with two great islands similarly placed, Britain and Ireland, and the Japanese Hondo and Yezo; the Old World and the New has each a peninsula pointing north—Denmark and Yucatan: a forefinger with long nail—and a thumb—pointing to the Pole. What does she mean? What can she mean, O Ye that made her? Is she herself a living being, with a will and a fate, as sailors said that ships were living entities? And that thing that wheeled at the Pole, wheels it still yonder, yonder, in its dark ecstasy? Strange that volcanoes are all near the sea: I don't know why; I don't think that anyone ever knew. This fact, in connection with submarine explosions, used to be cited in support of the chemical theory of volcanoes, which supposed the infiltration of the sea into ravines containing the materials which form the fuel of eruptions: but God knows if that is true. The lofty ones are intermittent—a century, two, ten, of silent waiting, and then their talk silenced for ever some poor district; the low ones are constant in action. Who could know the dark way of the world? Sometimes they form a linear system, consisting of several vents which extend in one direction, near together, like chimneys of some long foundry beneath. In mountains, a series of serrated peaks denotes the presence of dolomites; rounded heads mean calcareous rocks; and needles, crystalline schists. The preponderance of land in the northern hemisphere denotes the greater intensity there of the causes of elevation at a remote geologic epoch: that is all that one can say about it: but whence that greater intensity? I have some knowledge of the earth for only ten miles down: but she has eight thousand miles: and whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same furnace of her fiery heart. She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated, and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise, and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday, old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like viharah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock; and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo, and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my cheeks: for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man 'passeth away.' These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only that these are round, and mine are square: for I chose it so: but the same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court, then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are crowned with boldly-projecting cornices, surmounted by an abacus. And here, till the pressing want of food drove me back, I remained: for more and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I ask myself this question: 'Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic—morose and turbulent—fitful, and deranged, and sad—like her?'

* * * * *

A whole month of that voyage, from May the 15th to June the 13th, I wasted at the Andaman Islands near Malay: for that any old Chinaman could be alive in Pekin began, after some time, to seem the most quixotic notion that ever entered a human brain; and these jungled islands, to which I came after a shocking vast orgy one night at Calcutta, when I fired not only the city but the river, pleased my fancy to such an extent, that at one time I intended to abide there. I was at the one called in the chart 'Saddle Hill,' the smallest of them, I think: and seldom have I had such sensations of peace as I lay a whole burning day in a rising vale, deeply-shaded in palm and tropical ranknesses, watching thence the Speranza at anchor: for there was a little offing here at the shore whence the valley arose, and I could see one of its long peaks lined with cocoanut-trees, and all cloud burned out of the sky except the flimsiest lawn-figments, and the sea as absolutely calm as a lake roughened with breezes, yet making a considerable noise in its breaking on the shore, as I have noticed in these sorts of places: I do not know why. These poor Andaman people seem to have been quite savage, for I met a number of them in roaming the island, nearly skeletons, yet with limbs and vertebrae still, in general, cohering, and in some cases dry-skinned and mummified relics of flesh, and never anywhere a sign of clothes: a very singular thing, considering their nearness to high old civilisations all about them. They looked small and black, or almost; and I never found a man without finding on or near him a spear and other weapons: so that they were eager folk, and the wayward dark earth was in them, too, as she should be in her children. They had in many cases some reddish discoloration, which may have been the traces of betel-nut stains: for betel-nuts abound there. And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on board with the gig one of their little tree-canoes: which was my foolishness: for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from the decks into the middle of the sea.

* * * * *

I passed down the Straits of Malacca, and in that short distance between the Andaman Islands, and the S.W. corner of Borneo I was thrice so mauled, that at times it seemed quite out of the question that anything built by man could escape such unfettered cataclysms, and I resigned myself, but with bitter reproaches, to perish darkly. The effect of the third upon me, when it was over, was the unloosening afresh of all my evil passion: for I said: 'Since they mean to slay me, death shall find me rebellious'; and for weeks I could not sight some specially happy village, or umbrageous spread of woodland, that I did not stop the ship, and land the materials for their destruction; so that nearly all those spicy lands about the north of Australia will bear the traces of my hand for many a year: for more and more my voyage became dawdling and zigzaged, as the merest whim directed it, or the movement of the pointer on the chart; and I thought of eating the lotus of surcease and nepenthe in some enchanted nook of this bowering summer, where from my hut-door I could see through the pearl-hues of opium the sea-lagoon slaver lazily upon the old coral atol, and the cocoanut-tree would droop like slumber, and the bread-fruit tree would moan in sweet and weary dream, and I should watch the Speranza lie anchored in the pale atol-lake, year after year, and wonder what she was, and whence, and why she dozed so deep for ever, and after an age of melancholy peace and burdened bliss, I should note that sun and moon had ceased revolving, and hung inert, opening anon a heavy lid to doze and drowse again, and God would sigh 'Enough,' and nod, and Being would swoon to sleep: for that any old Chinaman should be alive in Pekin was a thing so fantastically maniac, as to draw from me at times sudden fits of wild red laughter that left me faint.

During a space of four months, from the 18th June to the 23rd October, I visited the Fijis, where I saw skulls still surrounded with remnants of extraordinary haloes of stiff hair, women clad in girdles made of thongs fixed in a belt, and, in Samoa near, bodies crowned with coronets of nautilus-shell, and traces of turmeric-paint and tattooing, and in one townlet a great assemblage of carcasses, suggesting by their look some festival, or dance: so that I believe that these people were overthrown without the least fore-knowledge of anything. The women of the Maoris wore an abundance of green-jade ornaments, and I found a peculiar kind of shell-trumpet, one of which I have now, also a tattooing chisel, and a nicely-carved wooden bowl. The people of New Caledonia, on the other hand, went, I should think, naked, confining their attention to the hair, and in this resembling the Fijians, for they seemed to wear an artificial hair made of the fur of some creature like a bat, and also they wore wooden masks, and great rings—for the ear, no doubt—which must have fallen to the shoulders: for the earth was in them all, and made them wild, perverse and various like herself. I went from one to the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the world. But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.

* * * * *

One evening, the 29th November, I dined rather late—at eight—sitting, as was my custom in calm weather, cross-legged on the cabin-rug at the port aft corner, a small semicircle of Speranza gold-plate before me, and near above me the red-shaded lamp with green conical reservoir, whose creakings never cease in the stillest mid-sea, and beyond the plates the array of preserved soups, meat-extracts, meats, fruit, sweets, wines, nuts, liqueurs, coffee on the silver spirit-tripod, glasses, cruet, and so on, which it was always my first care to select from the store-room, open, and lay out once for all in the morning on rising. I was late, seven being my hour: for on that day I had been engaged in the occasionally necessary, but always deferred, task of overhauling the ship, brushing here a rope with tar, there a board with paint, there a crank with oil, rubbing a door-handle, a brass-fitting, filling the three cabin-lamps, dusting mirrors and furniture, dashing the great neat-joinered plains of deck with bucketfulls, or, high in air, chopping loose with its rigging the mizzen top-mast, which since a month was sprained at the clamps, all this in cotton drawers under loose quamis, bare-footed, my beard knotted up, the sun a-blaze, the sea smooth and pale with the smooth pallor of strong currents, the ship still enough, no land in sight, yet great tracts of sea-weed making eastward—I working from 11 A.M. till near 7, when sudden darkness interrupted: for I wished to have it all over in one obnoxious day. I was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain-lever lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner in the dining-hall corner. I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual, pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan manner, and drinking pretty freely. Still I was tired, and went upon deck, where I had the threadbare blue-velvet easy-chair with the broken left arm before the wheel, and in it sat smoking cigar after cigar from the Indian D box, half-asleep, yet conscious. The moon came up into a pretty cloudless sky, and she was bright, but not bright enough to out-shine the enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic current. I could hear it, in my slumbrous lassitude, struggling and gurgling at the tied rudder, and making wet sloppy noises under the sheer of the poop; and I was aware that the Speranza was gliding along pretty fast, drawn into that procession, probably at the rate of four to six knots: but I did not care, knowing very well that no land was within two hundred miles of my bows, for I was in longitude 173 deg., in the latitude of Fiji and the Society Islands, between those two: and after a time the cigar drooped and dropped from my mouth, and sleep overcame me, and I slept there, in the lap of the Infinite.

* * * * *

So that something preserves me, Something, Someone: and for what? ... If I had slept in the cabin, I must most certainly have perished: for lying there on the poop, I dreamed a dream which once I had dreamed on the ice, far, far yonder in the forgotten hyperborean North: that I was in an Arabian paradise, a Garden of Peaches; and I had a very long vision of it, for I walked among the trees, and picked the fruit, and pressed the blossoms to my nostrils with breathless inhalations of love: till a horrible sickness woke me: and when I opened my eyes, the night was black, the moon gone down, everything wet with dew, the sky arrayed with most glorious stars like a thronged bazaar of tiaraed rajahs and begums with spangled trains, and all the air fragrant with that mortal scent; and high and wide uplifted before me—stretching from the northern to the southern limit—a row of eight or nine inflamed smokes, as from the chimneys of some Cyclopean foundry a-work all night, most solemn, most great and dreadful in the solemn night: eight or nine, I should say, or it might be seven, or it might be ten, for I did not count them; and from those craters puffed up gusts of encrimsoned material, here a gust and there a gust, with tinselled fumes that convolved upon themselves, and sparks and flashes, all veiled in a garish haze of light: for the foundry worked, though languidly; and upon a rocky land four miles ahead, which no chart had ever marked, the Speranza drove straight with the current of the phosphorus sea.

As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream. I must at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory, or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face as I moved the regulator in the engine-room: but any recollection of going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not. Happily, the wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in sight, and morning breaking.

This made me so sick, that for either two or three days I lay without eating in the chair near the wheel, only rarely waking to sufficient sense to see to it that she was making westward from that place; and on the morning when I finally roused myself I did not know whether it was the second or the third morning: so that my calendar, so scrupulously kept, may be a day out, for to this day I have never been at the pains to ascertain whether I am here writing now on the 5th or the 6th of June.

* * * * *

Well, on the fourth, or the fifth, evening after this, just as the sun was sinking beyond the rim of the sea, I happened to look where he hung motionless on the starboard bow: and there I saw a clean-cut black-green spot against his red—a most unusual sight here and now—a ship: a poor thing, as it turned out when I got near her, without any sign of mast, heavily water-logged, some relics of old rigging hanging over, even her bowsprit apparently broken in the middle (though I could not see it), and she nothing more than a hirsute green mass of old weeds and sea-things from bowsprit-tip to poop, and from bulwarks to water-line, stout as a hedgehog, only awaiting there the next high sea to founder.

It being near my dinner-hour and night's rest, I stopped the Speranza some fifteen yards from her, and commenced to pace my spacious poop, as usual, before eating; and as I paced, I would glance at her, wondering at her destiny, and who were the human men that had lived on her, their Christian names, and family names, their age, and thought, and way of life, and beards; till the desire arose within me to go to her, and see; and I threw off my outer garments, uncovered and unroped the cedar cutter—the only boat, except the air-pinnace, left to me intact—and got her down by the mizzen five-block pulley-system. But it was a ridiculous nonsense, for having paddled to her, I was thrown into paroxysms of rage by repeated failures to scale her bulwarks, low as they were; my hands, indeed, could reach, but I found no hold upon the slimy mass, and three rope-ends which I caught were also untenably slippery: so that I jerked always back into the boat, my clothes a mass of filth, and the only thought in my blazing brain a twenty-pound charge of guncotton, of which I had plenty, to blow her to uttermost Hell. I had to return to the Speranza, get a half-inch rope, then back to the other, for I would not be baulked in such a way, though now the dark was come, only slightly tempered by a half-moon, and I getting hungry, and from minute to minute more fiendishly ferocious. Finally, by dint of throwing, I got the rope-loop round a mast-stump, drew myself up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and all for what? the imperiousness of a whim. The faint moonlight shewed an ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of seaweed. She was a ship of probably 1,500 tons, three-masted, and a sailer. I got aft (for I had on thick outer babooshes), and saw that only four of the companion-steps remained; by a small leap, however, I could descend into that desolation, where the stale sea-stench seemed concentrated into a very essence of rankness. Here I experienced a singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary cabin, with some fungoids, skulls, bones and rags, but not one cohering skeleton. In the second starboard berth was a small table, and on the floor a thick round ink-pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down; and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved half-open of itself, for it had been wet and stained. This I took, and went back to the Speranza: for that ship was nothing but an emptiness, and a stench of the crude elements of life, nearly assimilated now to the rank deep to which she was wedded, and soon to be absorbed into its nature and being, to become a sea in little, as I, in time, my God, shall be nothing but an earth in little.