The Fish

 

 

 

Chapter I

 

Traveller's Tales

 

 

It pleased the inscrutable Wisdom of Providence that I should find my health so far undermined by my eleven years as a medical missionary in South-Western China, as to leave me no option but to abandon those fields which my labours and hardships had most deeply endeared to me.

     

I looked back through those seasons, examining conscience, whether I had hidden my talent in a napkin.

     

As to the work nearest my heart—all our hearts, I hope—I could reckon no less than nine converts, three of whom I most confidently believe to have been sincere.

     

The first, Thai Lewis, was the son of an English cotton broker by a Chinese wife. The father died while Thai was an infant, by his own hand as the rumour would have it, and left Thai heir to all he had. I won his gratitude by making a paraffin bridge for his nose, fitting him with a complete set of false teeth, and curing an ulcer of long standing in his leg.

     

He bore up against his suffering from poverty and disease with most exemplary patience and fortitude, and the last year of his life, cut short in early prime by chronic meningo-encephalitis, was sinless as but few even of the most saintly could rival. He uttered scarcely a word but the Name of his Saviours, and that constantly day and night, with almost incredible devotion.

     

The second, Wah Ti Sze, though sore-stricken by Graves' disease, I had intended to train as a native teacher and evangelist. Unfortunately, his powers of expression were inadequate to his soul's development,, and he could not learn to formulate any creed beyond "John Wesley all same God". But his life might put to shame many of far more elaborate theological equipment. His brain weighed only two grammes more than the minimum hitherto recorded of an adult male.

     

The third was my own cook and housekeeper. Ta Chi. To extreme personal beauty she added the most engaging manners, and I refuse absolutely to believe the statement of my successor at the Mission that she has backslidden and become the second wife of a wealthy Pagan.

     

The other six, I fear indeed, were but 'rice' Christians.

     

On the medical side of my work I was more fortunate. My reports on the results of addiction to opium smoking are universally admitted to have contributed most weightily to the substitution of morphine injections for the noxious vice.

     

My heart's hope was to find a cure for leprosy, and in this, too, I was more than a little successful. I found injections of tubercle bacilli uniformly specific, and am convinced that I could have reported every case as cured, had not a mysterious disease, new to science, which I can only describe loosely as Epidemic Phthisis, swept my hospital like a typhoon.

     

One of my chief objects in returning to England was to convince the sceptical Diafoiruses of Harley Street of my two discoveries, and to exchange views with the more open-minded leprographers.

     

I therefore determined to cross the mountains to Burma, and interview Major Rost of the Hospital at Rangoon.

     

This gentleman was most sympathetic, cordial, enthusiastic, and capable; he heartily endorsed my new treatment, which he had tried with similar success to my own. But my "Epidemic Phthisis" he had provisionally called "Rost's Disease", the harmless vanity of a very worthy gentleman.

     

I left Rangoon in early January for Colombo, where I transhipped to one of the biggest of the liners of the P. & O., homeward bound. On board was a famous traveller and hunter returning from a shikar in the jungles of Ceylon.

     

We were mutually attracted, a silent comradeship natural between two men accustomed to live in solitude.

     

The ship's gossip bored us; the bridge players disgusted us; the flirtations were too Australian for us. Shovel-board and deck quoits were to us both puerile and senile.

     

Only one incident is pertinent to my story. At dinner an argument sprang up on philology, and some pompous ass offered an absurd definition for Abyssinia. "It comes from Abyss, bottomless; Latin Abyssus, genitive Abyssi; and 'nia' is the regular adjectival ending for a country; as Roumania, Catania, Albania, and a host of others.

     

After dinner my friend resumed the subject over cigars, and to my amazement took sides with the windbag. This is his story.

     

"Two years ago I was in Somaliland after lions and pygmies. I know how to be intimate with most natives without losing their respect. I can play the heavy father, the arch-patriarch, in a word. Well you know, of course, Abyssinia was almost the first country in all the world to become Christian—Prester John and all that! I don't know whether they have got him and St. John of Patmos mixed, but they are strong and long on the Apocalypse; they told me Abyssinia is just what our mottle-faced friend said at dinner, the country of the Abyss or Bottomless Place, or Pit, and that St. John was talking of an actual geographical fact—and that the Lake of Fire is next door to it, so to speak.

     

"I said that the Apocalypse was only an obscure prophecy.

     

"They excitedly declared that the prophecy had been historically fulfilled, that the damned had actually been cast there two thousand years ago or nearly, and that they lived in torment there to that very hour.

     

"I naturally suggested a visit, and they as naturally expressed the utmost horror and fear.

     

"But the subject came up again; I thought the yarn might be the fag end of a legend which was the smoke of a small fire of fact. I got it; what really happened was that some tribes got leprosy—from eating rotten fish, they thought—and were banished en masse like Israel from Egypt.

     

"Such tales grow to bogey size in no time; they come in handy for scaring babies; they get mixed up quite hopelessly in a pot-pourri of sixty odd."

     

The story half-amused me, half-saddened me; it was so like the garbage-heap of travestied facts and fly-blown fables and swollen corpses of superstition and iridescent scum of romance that I had grown accustomed to, and had to grope in for the lost pearl Truth. But the absurdity of the suggested etymology and the idiot's cunning of the dove-tailed stories made me laugh, a thing I do most rarely. That may be why it stuck in my mind.

     

Or was it this? In England there had been a controversy, with Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson as Athanasius versus practically all his colleagues as 'mundum', in which the eminent syphilographer, flirting with leprosy, gave its ætiology as ichthyophagy. Leprosy—Rotten Fish; yes, that fixed the traveller's tale in my mind, for the moment.

     

In London I hastened to pay my respects to Mr. Hutchinson, who was delighted to collate my Chinese facts with his own. He argued his case again, ably but unconvincingly; when he ended, I expressed a wish to suspend judgement.

     

"But look at the Abyssinian evidence!" he cried, passionately; and expounded, expanded, emphasized it with eloquence and ardour for nearly ten minutes.

     

As I left the Bottomless Pit story jumped in my mind like a jack-in-the-box. I had not thought of it since the night I heard it. It shouted at me; it distracted my mind from its many serious problems; it spoilt my dinner at Scott's. It played jokes on me; I began to murmur Oysters—Ophthalmia, Lobsters—Leprosy, Cod—Consumption, Sole—Scrofula, Turbot—T. B., Mackerel—Meningitis, and so on for all the fish I could think of!

     

And then who should walk into the grill-room but my friend of the ship!

     

He didn't see me; he came in as if the devil were after him, grabbed a chair and a menu, snapped an order, and put his nose to a note-book.

     

His coffee came at the same time as mine did; he relaxed, lifted his eyes, saw me and charged me like a bull at a gate.

     

"You're my man!" He cried; "Fate's in it; what a damned unbelievable square mile of A.1 luck!"

     

"Glad you're glad!"

     

"I was going to set every sleuth in London on your trail tomorrow morning."

     

"Rude to ask why?"

     

"Remember that yarn of the Bottomless Pit, eh?"

    

I started.

     

"I see you do. Well, it's true, and I'm chasing around London buying equipment, and I need a quack who knows tropical diseases and won't jabber round the campfire.

     

Well, there was no room for me in London; my Mission was annoyed with me about one of my converts, a trifle, all of us do it, damn interference; I walked out. I have my own little income, but not enough. I really wanted to know leprosy. My health was better. Five hundred pounds and all expenses paid for a year certain, and a new country with a man I liked.

     

"When do we start?"

     

He shook my hand.

     

"Good. Six weeks from now, if the aero's ready in time."

     

"The aero?"

     

"Only way top find that Old B.P. Natives wouldn't come; ground evidently bad going, even for camels. The air gives us a clear big radius; we can build relay camps. All tout à la joie!"

     

We had no hitch of any kind; Lyell—that's his name, B. Lyell, B for Beale—had letters of recommendation from (he said) 'a boss Bishop and a baronial Brewer—my frivolous friends say I must be out to introduce Beer and Bibles.'

     

But so busy were we, both of us, that we were at sea before he found time to tell me what further facts had turned his gossamer yarn into a veil worth lifting.

     

They were simple enough. At the Traveller's Club he had met an old friend just back from Abyssinia itself. He had gone deep into the country. A singular event had occurred at a village called 'Nti Oc.

     

A man had gone mad, mutilated himself horribly and fallen on all fours. Though writhing with pain, he interspersed his shrieks with pitiful wails whose words contradicted his gestures and his tones, for they expressed pride and pleasure in terms of insane exaggeration. He wallowed abjectly, and reproached and threatened the villagers for maintaining their erect attitude. He flinched, whining, from all offers to help him, and snarled and spat at his own children and wives when they approached him. Presently he slunk away, still on all fours, over the desert. The head men of the village restrained his family, when they would have followed him.

     

So singular did the explorer consider this episode that he inquired strictly into the matter. The man's disease was called Sji Tzu'z, which means "heart leprosy" or perhaps "from-within leprosy" because the bodily symptoms follow the mental.

     

They say it is caused by eating a poisonous fish, which they call Nz'r In. The cure is to eat raw lion's heart, but the victim can rarely bear to approach it. The venom of the serpent Nahash is an absolute antitoxin, and its bite is a certain and immediate cure. Bull's blood is good, but need persistence for a prolonged period. The touch of a young girl gives temporary relief in some cases, but rarely attacks the disease. As in morphinism, the patient's will to be cured is an important factor in the treatment; the tincture of the roots of the oak they call Th' El E'ma is tonic, and specific. Flagellation with gorse or briar-rose assists the cure; so does massage with either the golden oil that is sweated from red rosebuds or peonies. Moss held to the nose defends the patient from his own fœtid breath.

     

A dirt of peaches or apples cleanses the blood, if chewed thoroughly and constantly, even in public. Sodom-apples are the best variety. A decoction of orchids is much recommended, drunk either pure or with peach-juice or apple-juice. Others prescribe a banana on empty stomach every night; others again honey in the comb macerated with milk; a third school orders oysters, or mussels, with white wine. But these are slow, and only too often merely palliative. The drastic remedies are sure and swift, if the patient can endure them, and is willing to risk kill-or-cure measures.

     

Also, he is hard to convince that his is sick and suffering. He does everything by opposites; for example, he rants at his folk for the immodesty of their attire—these tribes dress as decently as archdeacons—and covers every inch of his head and body and limbs, save only just those parts which our archdeacons aforesaid, being surprised in the matutinal tub, would first claim the attention of the archdiaconal sense of propriety.

     

Again, they denounce the most obvious truths as being lies; thus, they deny that the sun is hot; for how can so pretty a thing affect so great a thing as themselves? Also, conversely, they welcome lies, however ridiculous, as truth, most specially when the lies flatter them; tell them that Light shines from them, and that the sun reflects it as a moon actually mirrors the sun's they will tolerate and patronize you, but if you approach may bite you in the leg without provocation or warning.

     

The most curious fact about this disease is that people 'find' it—they do not sat 'get' or 'acquire' or 'take' or 'catch' it, but only 'find' it, 'accept' it, or 'believe in' it, this last phrase suggesting some local brand of Christian Science!

     

All three verbs imply the free will of the person to become diseases. He eats the fish sometimes, the headman explained, by a congenital perversity of taste. Cretinous, scrofulous, luetic, imbecile, impotent, phthisical and anæmic people often 'find' the fish, as it were, naturally. To these people it is not so poisonous; indeed, they often thrive on a daily diet of it, make their living by selling it, and are at least justified in boasting that they are cured of their diseases subjectively, for they take pride in the increase of their symptoms. This man at 'Nti Oc, a case in point, bragged of his distressed heart that it was palpitating with happiness.

     

Many 'find' Dji Tzu'z in a mild form at puberty; unless their general health be very bad, and their constitution tainted, they cannot assimilate the fish. The fumes of its putrefaction usually produce a sort of intoxication in which they caricature the disease, with its symptoms visibly exaggerated and obviously faked, though they take matters very seriously until the effects of the gas wear off. Such an attack protects, almost always, against the disease itself.

     

At the decline of the reproductive powers people hanker for the fish, which, despite the experience of centuries, is still by the vast majority held as a specific for all ills from poverty and ugliness to death and danger from ghosts! This is because of the brilliant organisation of the wealthy Fisheries, their suave smooth salesmen, force the fish on the people, even those who vomit at the smell being supposed to buy it, though they fling it instantly among their other garbage.

     

But these older 'find' it as a desperate clutch at a straw as they drown in the dark seas of despair. Such, when women, become bitter when too thin and maudlin when too fat. The men, if fat, become sensualists and prosers; if thin, viragoes and tyrants. But unless the people 'find' the fish early in life, and digest it completely, the symptoms are not so intolerable to the friends and neighbours of the patient.

     

There is an epidemic form of the sickness which attacks crowds; but this is a mere simulation, transitory as other drunkenness. In a few days at most nearly all are well again.

     

The disease attacks and holds most fiercely those who lack vital power and courage. Fear is the exciting cause in most of those cases which turn out badly.

     

The man at 'Nti Oc was pronounced hopeless by the headmen.

     

"He has mutilated himself; he goes on all fours and eats dirt;" they said: it is bad; he must go to Kree 's 'Ndum."

     

That is the name of the place, they explained later, where the other 'heart-lepers' live. Kree means Bottom' 's, means without' and 'Ndum hole; in all, Bottomless Pit.

     

Lyell's friend asked for the location of this place; but everybody manifested reluctance to talk. How would the sick man get there?

     

Easy, filthily easy, they told him; one only has to follow the stench.

     

Lyell knew he could reach 'Nti Oc without much trouble; if the sick man could crawl thence to the Pit, he could be sure of his goal; to make sure surer he would take an aeroplane with him.

     

Three months and three days after leaving Suez we were camped just outside 'Nti Oc.

 

 

 

Chapter II

 

What Lyell Wanted

 

I forgot to mention that Lyell and I joined the ship at Marseilles, where we found on board our taxidermist, a little Sussex man named Green, and a young-old man who looked halfway between a stockbroker and a pawnbroker shaped from a retired pugilist. His name was Moses Thornley, and it was impossible to imagine what use he could be in our expedition, or what earthly consideration could tear such a man away from his evident pre-occupations with property, ponies and petticoats.

     

I never met a man who looked so coarse and unscrupulous; yet many an ambassador might have envied him his reticence, many a captain of industry has air of responsibility, carried with ease and with confidence. At Port Said, Ali Din Daooud, our dragoman, with a little staff of assistants to look after our cooking, transport and service generally, met us at our hotel; for at Port Said we had to change into a Coaster.

     

We suffered no more than the usual oriental delays, the usual losses or breakages by theft or carelessness, the usual half-hearted threats of mutiny and palpably faked stories of family distress with which one or the other of the native servants worried us when he wanted a night out beyond his means.

     

The Red Sea was as stagnant and close as the Canal itself. The ship was black with flies. At every wretched pretense at a port, we shipped new passengers, each time wilder and dirtier, jostling more excitedly and shouting more ferociously, finally losing themselves more suddenly in the crepitating mob of their fellow travellers.

     

We had so hurried our start that the bulk of my preparation for my bacteriology had to be done on the ship, so that I hardly saw Lyell, except at meals; when he never spoke except to "pass the butter." Any spare time I had I put in wondering why so imperturbable a man should have started on so pointless a journey in such desperate haste. I'm fairly imaginative, many thanks to my lonely days in China, and I furnished myself with many a balloonfull of explanations; but there was a leak in all of them, and that leak answered to the name of Moses. That ineffably tailored sphinx behaved like a polite stranger. He shook hands with Lyell at Marseilles, compared physiological notes and exchanged meteorological observations—I doubt if they spoke again till our first dinner in camp; when, for the first time, we all four dined together. Moses had dined at the purser's table and made an old friend of him in five minutes; we had been with the Captain. Moses had lured three Anglo-Indians from bridge to solo-whist, and whenever they were not eating they were playing. Even at the dinner party in camp, the Hebrew retained his aloofness in a way that would have done honour to a Brahmin, and my wonder goes on me like a boil. I thought, too, that Lyell owed me some explanation of our plans; but I was not the man to ask him. However, on the fourth night, he trotted in at sunset with a baby gazelle on his shoulder. He had gone out strolling alone for an hour, his inveterate habit, ready for anything, like the gun in the advertisement, "from a snipe to a tiger". He got almost physically drunk on that gazelle; and when I remarked how good it was, he almost chanted, "I am back in Africa once more!" It sounded like a school song, and fifteen of his fifty years had gone from his face at the thought. It reminded me of the sea unwrinkling itself after a storm. His dull, grey, cloudy eyes cleared, flashed and laughed. The same image served. The incident seemed to break down his taciturnity. For the first time in my experience, he told a story at the table! It was a story of his early days; how he was chased by a gazelle! He had lost his rifle beyond recovery, and a wounded lion was looking for him everywhere, and it was getting dark, and he started back to camp. When he heard feet in pursuit, re ran like the wind and emerged from the jungle to his camp in the clearing; twenty yards behind him came a gazelle, who had possibly been equally scared of the lion, and possibly thought the flying man was its mother.

     

It did not stop there. After our coffee, he suggested that we smoke our pipes in the moonlight. Thornley, by the way, had a cigar about a foot long, so pipes couldn't mean him. We went out to the top of a little heap of bare grey rock. I had noticed it before dinner. It suggested no particular form, but there was something about it indescribably evil. It was like a pimple on the great green slopes. To my medical mind I suppose the idea of a cancer presented itself.

     

"Know any geology?" said Lyell.

     

"Scraps," I said; "nothing systematic. I can tell chalk from old red sandstone and granite from schist, but not much more."

     

"I'm putting my foot on this rock symbolically," said Lyell. "It was once a splinted, tall, sharp, clean cut, a landmark for miles around—a finger thrust up from the earth; but its own inherent rottenness has crumbled it; as it had fallen it has crushed the life and fertility out of the earth around it, and every shower of rain washes from it a poisonous salt. See what a wide brown circle of death it has made! We don't know how far its putrefaction may spread, killing the life and beauty of the earth, and not even taking thereby any advantage to itself."

     

He made a sort of snarling noise as he stopped short; then he put his hands on my shoulder.

     

"Harry Tone," he spoke very seriously, "I liked you from the first; I liked your quiet ways, your contempt for a humbug, your sense of humour. You have a brain and a heart hidden away somewhere. Environment has buried them pretty deep. God help you! But Africa may cure you. I think I've given you he chance of your life. You're on the trail of a new disease; your quarry is abominable and terrible. That means fame and fortune if you can tan its hide. That's why you came out. But why did I come? And who is our inscrutable Moses? You've been dying to talk, and you've had sense enough to keep your mouth shut. But I can tell you now. I'm not a doctor; but I know more medicine that you think, perhaps, especially about the brain and nerves, and I've studied every kind of poison. I needn't tell you that a new disease may count its dead by millions before you can organize any adequate defence. Think what the silly little bug of influenza did, and is still doing in the teeth of science! It might at any moment develop a more virulent form, and run up another century or so before we got its wicket. The day after I heard that story at the club, I went round to Masters, the pathologist, and he sent for Burton, the bacteriologist at St. Michael's, and our best diagnostician, Bartlett. We talked for over six hours; and then we cabled Johns Hopkins, as well as Rome, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. A fortnight later, we sat in conference, some twenty of us. The danger about this bug is that is doesn't kill these 'heart-lepers', as we may as well continue to call them, till some one rummages in Liddell and Scott for a longer and sillier name. The people have lived and bred for close on two thousand years indirectly, by a man who indulges in the rotten fish inducing another to poison himself. But the world's waking up now. Suppose these trusts that run the fisheries with their own government and God knows with what obscure international influences behind them, should start to make a market in civilization? It seems unlikely, being so localized for so long, but if it did get loose who knows what might happen. Once in another climate, it might become infectious, even epidemic. The whole fabric of civilization might be swept away in a decade. Art, Literature, Science, Philosophy, nay, manhood and sanity themselves might be flung pell-mell into the one huge plague pit of the earth.

     

"Well, to my story. We resolved to send a medical commission. We needed funds. We put the case before our government; none of them understood what we were talking about. We went to bankers, some of them philanthropists, who give thousands away to hospitals every year. They inquired with most acute intelligence into the symptoms of the new disease. They exchanged covert glances. They said they would give us their decision the next morning. They did. It amazed me. They would send out me to find the place, one doctor to report on the alleged disease (note the word 'alleged') and a man to represent their own interests in the matter. That is the mission of Moses. In plain English, they want to see which way the cat jumps—whether the spread of the disease would help or hinder them in their game of piling up pieces of paper with fancy figures painted on them. That is a fair sample of humanity after all this civilization and progress, and our friend Ali seems to me a long sight better stuff."

     

He broke off and spat. There was a silence between us for quite a long while. I finished my pipe and knocked out the ashes on my boot.

     

"Lyell," I said slowly, "I don't yet see why you should want to go, if that's the story."

     

"The cat's out of the bag," he replied; "they would have sent Moses with someone else. I must match my wits against his. He's good at solo whist—watched him; but I once beat Blackburne and I twice beat Pillsbury at chess, and this is going to be chess. I'll cure these lepers or make sure of their continued segregation; and I'll go for the cause and wipe this rotten fish from the pools of the earth. It can only live in stagnant water, so they say; it's amazing that civilization has never yet secured a specimen. We'll find one!"

     

I nodded.

     

"There's another thing," said he; "the more violent the toxin, the stronger the anti-toxin generated in its midst—you know that. I'm just hoping that there may be some born in this bottomless pit of theirs who have refused to taste the fish or happen to be immune

 

 

 

Chapter III

 

Our First Case

 

'Nti Oc is a wretched straggling village—a kind of outpost leading to nowhere in particular. Twenty miles away to the West, across an interminable sea of pebbles and scrubs, rose a range of hills, yellow and red, with a dilapidated air. It reminded one of a gigantic street in process of demolition. No one had ever crossed them, or ever wanted to. The natives seemed to regard them a welcome addition to the scenery, on the ground that no robbers were likely to come from that direction, at any rate. They greeted our caravan apathetically, showed no alarm, no curiosity. They did not seem to want to sell us anything; they instinctively classed us with the masterless stray dogs that slunk about the streets, lean, scrabby, savage and cowardly. I strolled through the village; there seemed to be nothing to eat. Their irrigation was haphazard, and their agriculture at the minimum compatible with living at all. They seemed utterly callous and hopeless; and in many of them I noticed serious symptoms of malnutrition. There was one boy in particular, to whom I stopped to talk. He might have been eighteen of twenty-eight; and he shrank at my approach in a very curious way. He was afraid—but not of me. It was more like stage fright. I offered him a stick of chocolate. His eyes gleamed and every muscle twitched with desire, but somehow he did not seem to be able to make up his mind to take it. In the end, he refused it. I went away toward camp, feeling curiously irritated at the incident.

     

After I had gone some fifty yards I happened to turn around and found him shambling after me in an unusually furtive way. He caught my eye and slunk into a doorway. Just at the end of the village I turned again, and again he had followed me. At this moment, my attention was altogether distracted by a spectacle altogether out of keeping with the forlorn appearance of the village. It was a group; no, a little procession. They were all fat, jolly, dressed in bright colours, and with a head-dress not unlike a mitre. The leader was a sort of one-man-band, playing at the same time a tom-tom, a pair of cymbals and a kind of primitive horn. A lost of clashing tin disks were hung about his person, thus slightly increasing the discord. Behind him marched a tall man with the mask of a sheep over his face, and the tip of a wolf's tail dangling between his legs. He carried a gilt pole with a white banner on which the word for fish (in the local dialect) was inscribed. Behind him again was a woman, very alluringly dressed, and from a strap on her neck was a large tray containing a sort of mayonnaise with all sorts of brightly coloured garnishes. She had a huge hoarse voice, and she brawled unceasingly the virtues of her fish. If you were hungry or thirsty or sad, a portion of fish would put it right; fish was the food for the brain, fish strengthened the nerves, fish took away fear, fish was used by all the leading people of society. Look what fish feeding has done for Us! She bawled with particular emphasis that the fish was absolutely free to anyone who would accept it.

     

The manners of the country even permitted her to offer a further inducement to anyone who would sample her wares, and she indicated the nature of the bonus by a very varied series of gestures.

     

Following her came a figure intended to terrify, but which, to my eyes, appeared merely grotesque. He carried all sorts of arms—more than he could possibly use in any three battles. He wore a mask like a South Sea demon. Behind him, again—the last of the procession—almost hidden in the folds of his cloak, was a tiny dwarf, dressed in the most inconspicuous manner possible. Over his shoulders he carried a bag almost as huge as himself.

     

The attitude of the population to this procession was almost as indifferent as it had been to us. Without exception, they refused the fish. One elder, sitting outside his house, was near enough for me to catch his mutterings.

     

"Bad might be worse," he said, and shook his head.

     

The terrible accoutrements of the tallest man were apparently only for show. He raved and gesticulated, but nobody seemed particularly frightened of him; and he never proceeded to actual assault.

     

All this time my boy had been slinking up very stealthily. He was now not twenty yards away. The lady with the fish seemed to recognize in him a likely candidate, and took special pains to ogle him. He did not seem to care very much, but he wriggled and shuffled and fingered a little bag at his neck. The procession stopped to watch the duel. His nervousness increased, and so did her assurance. She lifted her plate right under his nose. At last he wearily drew his hand across his trembling brow, and then dipped it in the dish. He crammed a morsel into his mouth; and at that instant, the dwarf ran out from the big man's cloak, clambered up the boy with monkey-like agility; and filched the little bag from his neck. He did not notice it. The leader renewed his noise with the vehemence of triumph, and the procession resumed its way.

     

I got the shock of my life—the thing that happened next was incredible. My boy—his face smeared with the grease—staggered up to me and sputtered through his mouth of half-chewed fish:

     

"Begone, thou art unclean!"

     

What could I do but burst out laughing?

     

He broke into a string of abusive words. The situation was peculiarly awkward. It was, of course, the rule of the expedition never to have a row with a native, and at the same time never to stand any nonsense. I wished I had brought one of the Arabs with me. All I could do was speak to him sharply in a tone of authority.

    

"Pull yourself together," I said; "be a man."

     

He shrank back as if I had hit him, covered his face as it with excessive shame, and moaned despairingly: "A man," again and again. Then a new excess of intoxication seemed to seize him. He gave a muffled howl of delight, and dropped on all fours. In his mouth he caught the deep dust of the road like a terrier playing with a bone, and the ensemble of the picture was not unattractive, to my personal taste.

     

Frankly, I must admit that the suddenness of these incidents completely startled my self-command. I had not even offered to inspect the fish which I had come so far to study, and I had utterly failed to associate the boy's conduct with his acceptance of the mayonnaise. I now realized that here was my first case, observed, as luck would have it, even before the poisoning, and the best thing I could do was to try to get him to come with me to the camp.

     

While I pondered, he grovelled, still gloating with ecstasy, still reviling his neighbours (we discovered later that he had no family, thus no one was responsible for him), but I heard the old man say into his beard that he was young and would be better presently.

     

The boy now began to revile me because I was not made as he was, or clothed as he was, or acting as he was. He waxed extraordinarily bitter over my erect position. I think that something in him prevented him from revealing the contempt he expresses, that he was, in fact, enraged at himself for not being perfectly drunk. He changed his note at intervals to praise of the fish, and the exuberance of his newborn enthusiasm really surprised the more polished but more hackneyed phrases of the salesman. I tried to appeal to both sides of his insanity. I told him that the people of the village were quite unworthy of him, and would not heed him; but that in my camp there were plenty to do exactly as he said, but they had had no opportunity of hearing about the wonderful fish, and that he ought to tell them about it, no matter at what personal cost and risk, as a matter of duty. I added the fascination of a silver coin to that of my remarks. I really don't know whether he agreed to this, for he went on with his ravings; but he followed me, crawling on his belly and urging me to assume the only posture worthy of those glorious persons, the fish-eaters. I humoured him by saying that I suffered from stiff knee-joints; and as I turned to go on, he made a quick wriggle at me, and caught me by the heel to pull me down. I snatched my foot away and put ten yards between us, and he crawled pitifully in my wake with his lungs bursting and his mouth now raving, now moaning, now laughing, now extracting the remains of the fish from the pockets of his cheeks and his hollow teeth, and champing it deliriously.

     

In this fashion we arrived at the camp. I called Lyell out. I turned, and saw, to my surprise, no less a personage than Mr. Moses Thornley. He displayed the usual cigar, and a rapt expression on his countenance. I started in surprise, but all he said was: "The man that staged that procession had half an idea."

     

I pointed sternly to the boy, who had momentarily collapsed from exhaustion. He said:

     

"It depends what you want him for. He's all right if you want to rob him or eat him, not if you want him for your partner in business. It's the point of view."

     

I snapped back at him: "The boy happens to be my partner in the business of life," and I turned and walked into the tent without another word.

     

I came out again with a case of instruments. I wanted to examine the boy. He had recovered, and at the sight of Moses turned loose his tongue in that direction, but the "point of view" did it again. Moses rose to the occasion and gave a combination of concerted action between a boot and a riding whip that was really admirable in its technique. The boy cringed and shrank and sobbed, but the extraordinary action of the fish upon the brain entered a new phase. He kept on repeating:

     

"How fortunate I am! How favoured! How superior! No one in any village a week's march all around could say that anything of the sort had ever happened to him."

     

If you make the experiment of determining beforehand that you will use a form of inappropriate words in conjunction with almost any given gesture, you may be surprised at the difficulty of doing it. There was something unspeakably awful in the contradiction between the boy's words and his action. It suggested something so hideously wrong with the automatic machinery that underlies our limited conscious controls.

     

Meanwhile Lyell had rushed forward and thrust back the angry Jew.

     

"Don't you know, you fool," he shouted, "that it's a blood insult? That boy will have your life, or all your lives. If he doesn't his family will, or his village will."

     

"He doesn't look very revengeful," sneered Moses.

     

"These chaps have the spirit of wild horses."

     

"Bah," said the other, with a mocking grin; "I know more in a week of using my eyes than you've learnt in all your years of travel."

     

But Lyell had turned aside, and was ruminating.

     

"How the devil can we pacify him without insulting him?" he muttered. He started as the boy moved and writhed towards his tormentor.

     

"Look out! He's got a knife," roared Lyell. But Thornley stood like a rock. Lyell turned to me, almost staggered against me as he put his hand on my shoulder; and all his face went greyer than his eyes. I had myself been better prepared for what shocked Lyell. The boy was fumbling with his hands at Moses' knee. He timidly touched the whip and put it to his lips. Then in a gush of excitement, he caught at the man's free hand and kissed it rapturously while the tears streamed from his eyes. Thornley drew his hand away slowly, and then turned it palm upwards. The lad fell into an agony of distress, and beat his head repeatedly into the dust. When he glanced up at last, he saw the fore-finger of that hand steadily pointed at the ground. His eyes followed it in a rapture of glee; he picked up the little silver coin that I had given him, and pressed it into the palm of the Jew.

     

Moses slapped it into his pocket; and, with a kick in the chest, sent the lad over backwards. Lyell had mastered himself; his face was grim and deadly. Moses did not even look at him.

     

"Excuse me, gentlemen," he purred; "I should like to write up my diary."

     

"So that's what we're up against," said Lyell, half to himself.

     

I was bending over the boy, who no longer repulsed me. He had gone off into a dead sleep, but I heard the muttered phrase

 

 

 

Chapter IV

 

The Salesmen

 

At dinner that evening, Lyell was even more taciturn than his wont. He smoke a pipe of strong black shag between the courses, as a Russian smokes his cigarettes. Thornley had excused himself from dinner, and would not even have refreshments sent into his tent. We could hear his pen scratching furiously. One of his most curious habits was that he stuck to the old goose-quill and sharpened his own nibs with a penknife. He used a peculiar ink of his own, too, singularly rich and black. He had a series of folio ledgers made for him, of very thick cream ivory paper; and he even carried a supply of sand to serve instead of blotting paper. He had dozens of little affectations and eccentricities of this sort, which he seemed to use for the purpose of asserting his personality, just as a more vulgar type of Hebrew sports ostentatious jewelry. Such trifles undoubtedly contributed to emphasize the aggressive individuality of the man, and incidentally to frighten weak spirits away from him. I had noticed on the boat how the average passenger instinctively distrusted and avoided him; yet there was not one of these stigmata which was intrinsically offensive or even obtrusive.

     

I thought I detected that his galloping quill was morally vivisecting Lyell. I thought of a very tired man with insomnia worried by mosquitoes. I could understand it well enough; Thornley's actions showed at what capital importance he rated the incidents of the afternoon; that it seemed to him urgent to all disregard of personal comfort that he should record his impressions while they were fresh, and record them in most meticulous detail.

     

Lyell, on the other hand, was evidently both shocked and puzzled, and his pride gushed from a hundred wounds as he thought with what contemptuous ease his enemy had outwitted and outfought him at every point of the duel. His distress increased visibly through the meal, and his appetite completely failed halfway through it. I thought that my bedside manner might interfere advantageously; and I remarked that, despite the obvious debility of the boy before his poisoning, and the disgusting and degrading symptoms, physical and moral, which followed it, it might well be that the prophylactic malaise caused by vaccination might be taken as a fair analogy. I pointed out that the salespeople were quite clearly in enjoyment of robust health, and carried on their business with vigour, efficiency and enthusiasm, and that they were clearly on the best of terms with themselves and the rest of the world. Lyell replied by reminding me that these facts did not agree with his earlier information. I had hoped he would not have remembered that, and I pressed my argument by the illustration of a boy with his first cigar. He waved his hand impatiently, and knocked out a burning plug from his pipe on the edge of an untasted plate of kous-kous.

     

"I grant you everything," he growled; "but Friend Moses knows where he is, and friend Moses is perfectly happy. I know less than I did at first; but when my enemy triumphs, I must put ashes on my head."

     

"We are well on the way to know," cried I; "we have a case to inform us, and we can cross-examine that procession, and buy some of that fish and turn the search-light on it. Don't worry; in another twenty-four hours I will bring up artillery to support you. Moses, after all, has only bow and arrows."

     

The explorer seemed to pluck up courage at this.

     

"Science always wins," he said; "knowledge is always power, but you know better than I what tempests savage the flame."

    

"When the flame is too weak," was my riposte. "But history is in the witness box. A spark lurked somewhere in the darkest ages; presently the tongue of flame leapt forth in Florence, in Oxford, in Smithfield, in Geneva—everywhere! The candles of Ridley and Latimer were never put out. The flame survived; the latter-day tempests have fanned it and spread it—the world is ablaze and the shadows have fled."

     

I picked my clinical thermometer from my waistcoat pocket. "Here is my witness," I said, "we have learnt to measure things. We insist that all things should be measured. We have established the unknown God and made him known, and his name is Geometry. That is the victory of the Free-Masons. Our pastoral staff is Franklin's lightning rod; our chalice a burette; our sword a dividing engine; and our disk a galvanometer. The simplest necessities of life have come to depend on science. To go back to guesswork is as impossible as to go back to the jungle."

     

Lyell shook his head. "I can imagine a lecturer employing similar eloquence in Ninevah, Babylon, Tyre and the ruined cities of Ceylon. Why, man, science itself tells you that all growth has a curve, all action a re-action. What came from nothing must go back to nothing. Our civilization is only a sort of skin disease to which the earth is subject. A boil that swells and bursts and leaves a scar scarce visible!"

     

I sprang to my feet in irritation. "This is simply morbid," I said; "quinine and calomel for you." I mixed him a dose from my pocket case. "Here, swallow that," I said, "and don't let abstract speculations unfit for your daily duties. Come and look at your patient."

     

I had put the boy on a camp bed in my sleeping tent, where he lay in a state resembling coma. The lighting of the lamps seemed to rouse him; his state changed to one of low muttering delirium, in which one could only make out ecstatic phrases, interspersed with groans. It was sleep's imitation of his waking mania. His temperature had dropped, and he had sweated profusely. His eyes were wide open, the pupils fully dilated; in fact, all his reflexes had relaxed. The breath was exceedingly foul, and the nostrils were running profusely. I resolved upon decisive measures; injected a full dose of strychnine and digitalis, plunged him in a cold bath, and resorted to vigorous massage. In the course of an hour, he recovered consciousness, and I was able to administer a cup of strong meat broth fortified with iron and wine.

     

He reacted so admirably to these measures that I determined to continue them throughout the night. By morning he seemed to have shaken off the poison completely, and even to possess greater physical strength and moral stamina than when I had first accosted him.

     

His mind was very confused. He did not seem to remember what he had been through, but in other respects his sanity and balance left nothing to be desired. He was able to take some solid food for breakfast; and I then told him to go home and not to eat any more fish.

     

Now came an incident comically curious which delighted both myself and Lyell, who was outside his tent putting together the parts of our aeroplane. I had said goodbye to the boy, who shook my hand with a manly warmth and vigour which testified to the gratitude which he felt, and had no touch of servility. He turned to go, but had only covered a few yards when he was intercepted by Moses Thornley. The eyes of the latter lighted up with cruel and contemptuous joy. He deliberately dropped his cigar and motioned to the boy to pick it up. My patient took no notice and stepped aside so as to pass by. Thornley, with a look of angry surprise, planted himself again in the boy's way and ordered him gruffly to pick up the cigar for him. He turned back and did so; but with a glance and a gesture that would have warned a less confident bully. He put the cigar in his own mouth, took two quick strides toward his tyrant, and struck him square in the jaw. Thornley went down like a felled tree; the boy walked calmly over his body, and went off to the village with the springy step and high held head of youth. The Jew picked himself up in a dazed fashion, but instead of pursuing his assailant, slunk cringingly into his tent. When I went in to see if he was hurt, I found him crouched behind his bed brandishing a pair of revolvers.

     

He rebuffed my inquiries growlingly, and I went over to Lyell disgusted.

     

Our leader had been watching the scene, radiant. He seemed absolutely renewed by the incident. We exchanged a few sarcasms at the expense of the banker's agent, and Lyell replied emphatically that he had been sure that the boy's blood and race guaranteed his spirit; that the poison could not take hold on anyone that was not already cachectic from some deep constitutional taint. "Leucocytes," he shouted, "fresh air, sunlight, opsonins—there lies our surety."

     

I agreed with him heartily, but pointed out that the incident rather complicated our puzzle than otherwise.

     

"Just so," said he cheerfully, "but you can't hope to put a puzzle together until you have got all the pieces. And up to that point, every new one makes it look more of a muddle."

     

"Come up to the village," said I; "let's try and locate the procession,"

     

But even as I said the words, the air was insulted by the distant pandemonium of the one-man band; and we could see the banner jerked up and down over the mud wall of the village.

     

Three minutes later it was evident that the salesman intended to canvass our expedition. On they came jauntily, swinging with lusty strides, their grotesque braveries gaudy in the raw sunlight against the dusty orange ochre of the horizon.

     

We heard Ali shouting vehement orders to his Arab staff, who ran up with their rifles slung from their shoulders, cracking their rhinoceros-hide whips. The two biggest seized the headman (who was also the contractor) of our gang of carriers, and told him that he should pay with his skin for any breach of discipline among his men.

     

He took this gentle hint as seriously as it was given; he got his men ranged up in first-rate shape, and treated them to a series of barks and yells which we took to mean that he would stand no nonsense. Ali himself headed off the procession as it approached, and his Arabs covered it with their rifles.

     

The salesmen wheeled; then Lyell and I ran up and told Ali that we wished to talk with them. The Arab gave way rather grudgingly; he washed his hands of his mad English masters, as one might say.

     

The procession halted and began to go through their regular performance. I explained to the woman that I did not want to take her fish for nothing, that I would pay her price. It was as if I had not spoken. She merely urged me to eat, and that with the most fantastic eagerness. She actually foamed at the mouth, and the sweat streamed from her face, her wrinkles in spate with rivulets of miry paint. She was obscenely nauseating.

     

I had provided myself with a box of tin lined with glass for the reception of the specimen which I proposed to analyze. This I took from my pocket, and proceeded to fill it from her platter. The action seemed to anger her.

     

"No, no!" she screamed. "You must eat it at once. Eat! Eat!"

     

I told her very politely that I had just had my breakfast, and added a remark, in perfect innocence, whose effect I could hardly have foreseen in a nightmare.

     

"I don't want it to eat," I said; "I only want it for scientific examination."

     

The hag went into convulsions, uttering the most fearful screams, and on the instant the dwarf ran out from under the cloak and addressed his companions in sharp, short tones of command; their malice and fierceness utterly inhuman, and evidently pushed to a pitch of what seemed to me almost insane intensity by some inexplicable but most soul-staggering fear. His manner left no doubt that he was the real leader of the gang; that the others were merely his hirelings.

     

Never in any freak museum have I seen so ghastly a deformity. One asked oneself how nature could have come to a mood of such perverted madness as to dream so grievous an abortion. He was about four feet high, his arms so long as nearly to touch the ground. They seemed immensely strong; and the hands were enormous. I never saw bigger, or as big, on the heftiest lumberman. The nails were strong and sharp, almost like the claws of a hyena or of some carrion bird, and the fingers were gnarled and knotted like an old sailor's. The thumb was extremely short, crooked, and appeared to be of only one phalange. Splayed feet with practically no instep terminated short, thick legs, whose bones were curiously twisted. So broad were the hips and so narrow the shoulders, that the body was shaped like a fig. The paunch was immense and distended; the spine was curved almost to the arc of a circle, and the head was set on the shoulders, or, rather, between them, with no visible neck.

     

The skull was immense and hideously misshapen; ragged wisps of long grey mangy hair were matted on a scalp of parchment-like ochre, with blotches of black scab, that suggested the inscriptions of some dead evil race.

     

A dirty white beard straggles meagrely from the sharply jutting chin; I though of the ram of a warship. The mouth was long and straight, with lips so white, so flat, that they could scarcely be distinguished. The teeth were like a wolf's, but black and rotten; scraps of raw meat, sticking in the gaps, showed red against the brown of the swollen gums, whose edges oozed with pus.

     

The nose was eaten away, apparently by lupus or by rodent ulcer; the cheeks were fallen & wrinkled, their skin dry and dull like a rotten orange.

     

The forehead was receding—the whole face prognathous, in fact, but enormously bulged on the left temple, and caved-in on the right, the dome being thus a sort of skewed cone.

     

The eyelids were raw red. The eyes were blear; they were covered with a film, a whitish-yellowish membrane. Greed, cunning, malice seemed incarnate in the expression.

     

I was able to observe him—or, more accurately, it—with great exactness, for in his furious scurry his black hooded cloak had fallen off, and he pranced naked in the sunshine. Naked, except that about his trunk, beneath his arms, a broad iron ring was welded and to this, by a short heavy chain, was riveted the steel box in which he stored his gains.

     

I only caught one word of his frenzied jabberings, my one word "examination". But his psychology was as obvious as his anatomy; I can perhaps best convey it by saying that it was as if a very pitiful coward had been lulled into security, and then most suddenly confronted with his Fear, an anguish so intense that it surpasses itself, and makes him fight instead of turning tail.

     

The noise, as I suppose, had attracted Moses to our group; I saw him just behind the dwarf. He was standing alert and resolute, quick anxious eyes and nostrils widely dilated. "Look out. Doctor!" he shouted; "get to cover; they mean mischief!"

     

I am so slow and stupid, so unable to grasp unsympathetic psychologies, that I simply failed to understand. I was bewildered utterly by this senseless storm in a teacup.

     

But the dwarf's men took weapons from the surplus of their Bogey-man, and scattered so as to surround me. Even the woman threw down her platter and caught up a rope, painted to represent a snake. While I stood there gaping like a baby, she flung a noose round my legs, and brought me heavily to the ground. The others with whoops of triumph rushed at me; they battered me, they stabbed me; they trampled me. Luckily, it was only for a moment; Thornley, with great presence of mind, threw down a handful of coins, and my assailants turned to scramble for them.

     

"Get to cover, you damned ass!" he yelled; and this time I knew my lesson. I crawled as best I could to my tent and began to count my wounds.

     

By this time Ali had seen what was wrong; he and his Arabs formed line, and charged with drawn scimitars. The salesmen did not wait for the attack; they fled in disorder, leaving most of their apparatus on the field of battle.

     

Their leader had disappeared long since; he was inconceivably quick on his feet, awkward as they looked; and he had the trick of silence in withdrawing. It was as if he had slipped suddenly into the earth, the swift stealth of the scared lizard.

     

In his rage our headman ordered all these things to be piled up and burnt; which was a pity, for some of their finery was really rare and valuable. There were old and irreplaceable things among them; and apart from their intrinsic worth, they would have been of inestimable service to me in certain phases of my investigations.

     

Lyell, by the way, had come off nearly as ill as I; for at the first onset the dwarf had stabbed him in the thigh with a little crooked dagger which proved to have had poison on the blade. It wan an innocent-looking toy, constructed cunningly of glass, cloudy white and very brittle; the hilt was shaped like an owl, perched (so to say) on the guard, which was a crescent moon.

     

It had on it a sacred verse, bitten in with some acid; I may translate this roughly as follows:

 

          Scar thy skin; eat thine heart;

          Fog thy brain; drink thy tears;

          Shrink with shame from all thou art;

          Breathe but lies; feed on fears;

          This is thy duty, man!

          This is God's perfect plan.

 

On the hilt were these words, in a spiral scroll: I translate once more.

 

          Dare not to stand upright;

          Dare not to think or know;

          Dare not to use thy might;

          Dare not to face thy foe;

          Dare not to do thy will;

          Dare not to love thy mate;

          Dare not to live thy fill;

          Be feeble, fool of Fate!

 

These daggers are manufactured wholesale, as we learnt later, in the 'Bottomless Pit', in the section called Akr 'azya, which word means, so they say, 'Innocence' or 'Purity'; but it is evident from the etymology that that it originally meant 'Lack of Power'. (By a similar process among ourselves, the Greek "ascetic". or trained athlete, has come to signify a physically starved and stunted person. The 'self-denial' with an object of the 'man in training' became valued for its own sake, as a 'virtue'. 'Virtue' itself, again, really means the quality of manhood, yet we now use it too often of qualities possibly angelic, but by no means manly.)

     

The poison is the natural juice of a flowerless weed that grows on the slopes above Akr 'azya. They call it, poetically enough, Partth 'Norr 'Ya, "River of Chastity". or etymologically, "The White that flows", and claim that by rubbing the body with it daily, night and morning, they are immune from practically all the ills of life. But I anticipate my story.

     

Lyell was severely infected by this venom; he relapsed constantly in spite of all I could do. The symptoms were nervousness, exhaustion, anæmia, fainting spells, cardiac weakness, headaches, and hypochondria, with delusions of persecution. Only his constitution pulled him through.

     

I had just finished dressing the wounds when I heard the steps of Thornley. He came to enquire how I was. He made himself at home in my tent, with quiet assurance, mixing himself a drink and settling down, apparently for a long conversation.

     

"Doctor," he began, "I don't talk much; but when I do, I have something to say. You don't like me; you don't trust me; you don't understand me. Don't wriggle; I know. What's more, you never will. It doesn't matter. We can get on well enough, that's the point, if we make a little deal. Eh?"

     

"What about?" I said rather shortly, for I ached all over, and wanted to rest.

     

"About your research. Let me say straight off: I'm with you. I never knew harm come of knowing too much; of too little, all the harm there is, in the long run. I'll give you some facts, here and now; not science, perhaps, but useful for all that, or I miss my guess.

     

"Firstly, I've gone into the business side of this Fish graft. Those salesmen are never allowed to touch it, on pain of losing their jobs. They'll give a Fish Addict a job, now and then, when it suits them to advertise the 'Come where the booze is cheaper' attraction of their product, or need to demonstrate sincere enthusiasm, or a marvellous recovery from sickness, and so on. But they cure the new man by slow stages—often he never really got it in his system—and he is taught the art of salesmanship in the regular way.

     

"There's no doubt about the effect of the Fish (I've collected some samples for you, by the way.) It's a foul poison of the dope species. It softens the brain and hardens the heart and corrupts the blood and destroys the reproductive faculty. Its use turns a man into a snivelling lying knavish rogue, without self-respect, courage, wit or any of the generous emotions/"

     

"You certainly seem to have found out a lot."

     

"I came out here to report to my principals. There's more yet which you may as well know. I've found out where the fish is bred, and I'm going to take you to see it. Meanwhile, let me give you a hint. Nothing frightens people so much as inquiry. You've had a lesson to-day. Go on with your work, but let no one know what you're doing. I've a soft spot in my own skin, too. I can't afford to have anyone know that I'm helping you.

    

"That's all, I think; but when you've analyzed the that fish, I should like you to tell me about it."

     

I promised gladly enough, and we shook hands for the first time since our introduction. He went out of my tent, and I sank into a sleep which was peopled by dreams of the most fantastic order. But underneath the whirling images of my fancy, there was a dull ache or resentment against their darkness and confusion. I yearned for the clear light of day, and for a universe ordered and intelligible.

 

 

 

Chapter V

 

Analysis

 

 

Lyell experienced unexpected difficulties in putting together our airship. There was no question of striking camp for a month or more to come. There was no research to be done in the village, for the salesmen had found their first encounter with the Arabs an excellent reason for departure to the Ewigkeit. I was therefore able to devote myself uninterruptedly to examining the fish rescued by Moses from the scene of our skirmish.

     

I have never had a job I fancied less. Talk about French cookery! The meat itself was so covered by sauces and greases and garnished of every kind, that it was almost impossible to isolate even a small fragment of the substratum. It all stank most abominably, and as there was not the tiniest splinter of bone in the whole mess, there was no means whatever of even making a guess of what it was like when alive.

     

The physical examination assured me that the fish used in the preparation of this concoction could hardly have been alive very recently. It was far gone in putrefaction, but I felt almost certain that even before this had set in it had been corrupt with disease. It resembled a mass of cancer almost ebullient; and, at the same time, it was alive with colonies of some bacteria with which I was not familiar. The term is, indeed, not strictly appropriate, for they were not rod-like in shape but vaguely circular. I discovered no nucleus or nucleolus, even with the highest power of my microscope. They multiplied with amazing rapidity, but were themselves devoured and destroyed by the more liquid portions of the cancerous tissue in which they grew.

     

We had brought a few guinea-pigs for experimental purposes. I fed two of them on portions of the fish. It suited them extremely well. They had been in rather poor condition, and after a couple of days they grew so fat and sleek that it seemed almost miraculous.

     

The effect of this diet upon the rats was apparently to make them fiercer, bolder, more active and more cunning; also to increase their appetite in a very marked manner. I bought a goose from the village, and gave it a meal of the stuff. It manifested all the symptoms of silly intoxication; and it ran about aimlessly, quacking at the top of its voice.

    

I tried the effect again on one of the scrabby pariah dogs that haunted the camp in search of offal. The experiment proved dangerous, for the animal slunk more abjectly than before, and then made a sudden and treacherous snap at my hand as I offered it another mouthful.

     

One of the coolies had snared a couple of songbirds, and to these the first mouthful proved immediately fatal. A post-mortem examination showed the vocal chords to have been destroyed as by a strong acid, and the wing-bones had become completely gelatinous.

     

My last experiment of this kind was on a tame gazelle which I had brought from a wandering herdsman. It ate readily of the fish, and became exceedingly languid and affectionate. As far as one could judge, it was inordinately happy, after a dreamy fashion, like an opium smoker; but the following morning it fell into a moping fit—its eyes grew lustreless, its limbs refused to support it, and shortly afterwards it died. The autopsy showed acute inflammation of the brain, especially in the pia mater, but the cause of death was destruction of the walls of the heart.

     

The comparative anatomist, with a really comprehensive knowledge of the subject, might doubtless have found many clues to the truth in these extremely varied symptoms; but in this branch of science I was, unfortunately, of rather less than average attainment. In my theological college, I had learnt much concerning the functions of various choirs of angels. In the pneumatic biology of the schoolmen, I could hold my own with many an archbishop, and I had somewhat neglected the hierarchy which ascends from amœba to homo sapiens. I was a poor man. Hagiology tempted me with the £15,000 a year connected with Canterbury, whereas the profane and grovelling 'ologies' led, at the best, to a tenth of that income. So I furnished the point of my needle with angels instead of bacilli, and, by all accounts, the process of reckoning the former is easier as well as more potentially profitable.

     

The reader will excuse the digression. I trust that he may even excuse the cynicism; which I regret most sincerely and humbly. It was an outburst utterly unworthy of any minister of the gospel, even of one so unworthy as I am of my high calling. It was being unable to use such a wealth of data.

     

As I revised this manuscript, I naturally drew my pen through the passage. And then I paused. "No," said I to myself, "I don't want to appear better or worse than I am. Let the world know my weakness and my wickedness. How can I humble myself, how can I purge myself by penance, how better than by letting my words stand to witness my back-sliding? Shall I pretend to be more faithful than St. Peter? No, let me scourge myself with a whip of my own shame. I have been tempted many a time; I have regretted that I have become a medical missionary instead of a mere medical man. The smiles of the siren, Science, have often seduced me with their serpentine subtlety from the sublime sighs of suffering, wrung from my soul's Saviour. I give most hearty thanks to Providence, who limited my intellectual attainments. Had not my professors unanimously insisted that I could never earn my living as a doctor, but that I could be sure of a job among the teeming millions of the East, I might at this moment have been a professor in some godless university instead of what I am, obscure, no doubt; from the world's point of view, a failure, but a success from Heaven's—a sinner saved by grace. My name is not written in the King's birthday list. What care I? It is written in the Lamb's Book of Life."

     

Once again, excuse the digression. This book is not about myself, it is about that terrible disease, of whose discovery apparent chance, but really divine design, made my unworthy self, in part, an agent.

     

I have given a fairly comprehensive account of my examination of the fish as it was prepared for consumption. One more means of research lay in my power. I could try its effects on myself. I don't mind saying that I had to witness a struggle with Death between my conscience and my cowardice. I had to brace myself with drinks of history. I thought of many a hero, many a martyr, who had given himself to Science in the past. I thought of the discovery of chloroform, of the man who first made arsine and, inhaling the first bubble if the gas, died on the instant. I thought of the men who with full knowledge of the risk of X-ray dermatitis, had doomed themselves to years of torture, to progressive mutilation, to sure, slow, horrible death. Damiens of the clinic. I could not face such men in heaven if I funked it. I made my will. set my affairs in order, knelt for an hour by my bedside, and committed my spirit to those hands which never let anything slip. I rose, went firmly and calmly to my little bench, and took a fragment of the mayonnaise on the tip of a platinum spatula. I touched it on my tongue.

     

The first result of this action seems to have been purely psychological, and independent of any property peculiar to the fish. It was as if I had committed suicide. My brain became miraculously clear, my mind became independent of my body. I seemed to myself like a judge, armed with giant powers of scrutiny, intent on justice but with no interest in the result.

     

I had never been able to observe the smell. It simply nauseated me. I could now appreciate every detail. Disgust prevented me from describing it to myself. I am well aware that I shall fail to express my impression, for language has made practically no endeavour to classify smells. One is limited to some dozen adjectives of quite indeterminate meaning, and for the rest to drawing comparisons with the individual smells of known objects.

     

The first and most volatile element in the stench of this fish seemed a kind of mask over it. It was a faint, sweet, rather sickly smell, if I may say so, not so much in nature as in a fairy story. There was something unreal about it, and at the same time it had the curious effect of making things seem unreal as well.

     

Like a skin, half seen through a film of lace, one became aware of a second element; this had a definitely intoxicating quality. It was fierce, potent, and gave an indescribable suggestion of cold lewdness and mocking malignancy. One felt that without the first element to conceal it, anyone smelling it would have been shocked and repelled. The combination of the two suggested the arts of some obscene old man, his beguilements of a maiden by smooth words and affectations, then, when irrevocably in his power, taking delight in thrusting all his ugliness upon her with the crudest effrontery. Then perhaps, her head already awhirl, the very bestiality of the creature may fling her from horror into the chasm, as if by the fascination of a serpent or the vertigo of the cliff edge. "Come let us wander into the garden of roses," whispered perfume number one; "let us drowse and dream the summer afternoon away." Idleness is never innocent. The morality is sapped, what Freud calls the 'censor' goes to sleep, and all the restless ghosts, savage and ape-like ancestors that we have buried in the churchyard of our minds, are free to brave the sleeping exorcist, our conscience, to prowl like ghouls in search of prey.

     

Then comes the gust of perfume number two, with its unashamed appeal to demon lusts. We are bewitched—we revel at the Sabbath on Walpurgis night, gleefully eat and drink damnation to ourselves, and only wake when we are pledged by an irrevocable oath to Satan.

     

The third element is obviously anaesthetic. It acts directly on the brain, producing a peculiar kind of delirium. It destroys the reasoning faculty at a stroke; in fact; it does more than this, for it produces a state of mind in which the thought of reason becomes abhorrent and despicable. It abolished all apprehension of reality. Objects and facts are perceived merely as images, either of desire or fear. For instance: my eye fell on a bottle of ether which I had been using in my research; I knew, of course, perfectly well what it was, but I was quite unable to think of it as such. My mind surged up at it. I had luscious, slobbering, lip-licking thoughts of indulging in it as an intoxicant, and these were chased away by anguished thought of undergoing operations. I pictured twenty different diseases in as many seconds. These thought again were banished by a new billow. It was the vice once more, but the delight came now from thinking of the sin and secrecy of it. I thought of using it as the agent of all sorts of crimes—from rape and robbery to murder. This was answered by a fourth wave whose form was like gushes of fire. I pictured damnation, the torments of Hell for eternity.

     

Coincidentally with this, destruction of sane appreciation was born a bitter hate of truth as such. I seemed to prefer to believe the most unpleasant, most absurd and most degrading lies rather than truth. Analyzing this state, it seems to me that its root lay in the effects of the last ingredient of the stench, which I will describe in its turn. For the continued action of this third element is to befog the brain. The first sharp contradictions soon subside—it becomes like a water-logged derelict, rolling soggily in the trough of the seas of the senses.

     

I omitted to mention the olfactory characteristics of this element. The smell is heavy and musty, somewhat foul, with a decided suggestion of soot.

     

Element number four is the only one which I could confidently refer to any definite substance. It is the smell of arsenic combines with that of Prussic acid. Its physiological effect seems entirely confirmative of this view. I was conscious of a burning pain in the throat and an overpowering faintness, Vomiting was violent, food firstly and afterwards bloody mucus being thrown up. Purging occurred with tenesmus. I was just able to feel my pulse, which was almost imperceptible but rapid and irregular. There were severe cramps in my calves, and a general collapse seemed to be threatened. My nerves were affected, and I was seized with convulsions and spasms. There seemed to be a tendency for this to pass into a stupor and paralysis. The breathing became a series of gasps and later convulsive, with short, frantic inspirations and expirations, so long drawn out as to exhaust the muscular power.

     

As previously stated, however, death is never directly caused by the action of this fish. The physical symptoms, indeed, despite their apparent violence, possessed a dream-like quality; as if they were merely sympathetic to the real symptoms which attacked the moral nature exclusively. Thus the difficulty of respiration appeared merely to register incompatibility with the environment, the melancholic's fixed idea that the wrath of God and the abhorrence of men are his portion. The vomiting and purging were but the physical reflection of my feeling that I was desperately evil. The pulse bore witness that I had lost all courage, all love, all driving force beyond the tremulous minimum necessary to push the doors of life against the shadowy intruder. The nervous symptoms echoes my complete loss of adjustment in myself and of my organized relations with the Universe. I was reminded of the people in the dark ages who would carry out the most elaborate measure of disinfection against witches and vampires, but did nothing but pray against plague. My moral collapse was practically complete, yet, in its death agony, what convulsions might not occur! Again the thought came to me 'How like the hysterical religious revivals, which so often occur in countries lacking the spiritual enlightenment of England and the United States of America.' I thought of the fanatical outbreaks of Peter the Hermit of the founders of religious orders, of Savonarola, of Joan of Arc, the Mahdi, President Krüger, and many others; I thought of the dancing manias of Germany and Italy, of the collective hysteria of Urban Grandiers nuns, of the Pogroms of Russia, and the periodical Protestant countries where religion flows like a calm deep river, bearing us all upon its noble bosom and never the cause of collision.*

     

There is a fifth element in this much mingled odour. Here, again, I thought I could detect its nature. It was plain putrefaction, the corruption of a corpse, a corpse unmistakenly human. It seemed to me that moist gangrene had been the immediate, and uterine cancer the mediate, cause of death. It recalled instantly to my mind the deathbed of the lady superintendent of the Sunday School in the village where I was born, and where I had gone for a holiday after my final examination for M.D.

     

The last and deepest element in the stench was hard to detect. I got the idea that it had associated itself deliberately with the other effluvia in order to hide itself. It is a smell most utterly abominable, and I felt an absolute conviction that this was the true and original smell of the flesh of the fish. When at last I recognized it, my heart seemed to stop, my blood froze and my skin grew clammy, my flesh lost all its firmness, my mind stood still, craving insanity to relieve it, as a man passing gallstones craves morphia. I caught sight of my face, and in a flash of memory, I was standing once in the Place de la Roquette, one cold grey dawn, after a night's spree. It chanced that a man was to be guillotined. I saw him, fair and square, thrust up the plank to the knife. My face looked now as his did then. I recognized this quintessential truth lurking beneath its mask of other smells. It was stark fear, its eye-lids cut from it so that it could not blink as the Hell of all its real or fancied horrors thrust suddenly its face inexorably forward. It was man's fear from which he has fled through all his ages—the fear which was the dowry of his wife self-consciousness. It was the fear of the unknown. He has spent all his energies in flight from it. He has invented art, religion, love, philosophy—woven all kinds of veils, devised all kinds of drugs, played every monkey trick with his monkey mind. But, like the famous politician, though he can fool part of himself all of the time and all of himself part of the time, now and then he sees himself, he sees his fear, he sees the possibilities of infinite anguish to be infinite for the very reason that he knows himself to be infinite. Those who best know themselves immortal, like James Thomson, most passionately try to persuade themselves that there is 'No fear of waking after death'. But he was too clear-sighted; he could not bear to live undrugged.

     

I do not believe that this element has a definite odour of its own. There is a subtle sourness, it may be, but I suspect that just as ambergris has hardly any perfume of its own but possesses the power to intensify and to select the best of such perfume as is mixed with it; so does this foulness of fish—which, by the way, I believe to be the sexual secretion which is responsible for the breeding of the fish—intensify and select the worst of the person who smells it. I instinctively identified it with myself.

     

Now, then I began to understand the horrible fascination of it. Incorporate that flesh into yourself, the taste will kill the smell. Eat and become insane. That is the only refuge from self-consciousness, from the unbearable fear that goes with it. I must admit that I clung to this thought for one passionate moment. I ceased to be the man of science, coldly aloof, the man who had risked his life and his reason in the course of his duty. I had seen something so fearful that I came back with a jerk to the plane of emotion. I was greedy to forget it in the madness, and I understood well why a man, weakened by disease, should snatch at the bait and the hook. The promise of pleasure and rest would soothe him for a moment, then the fierce lusts would enrage him. Then the fog would settle his mind. Then his moral nature would collapse; and at that moment, the soul of him, stripped of its wardens, would come face to face with itself and fear.

     

I confess that I gulped at the fragment of putrescence on my spatula with the greed of a cocaine fiend after a spell of abstention.

     

The taste came as a surprise. Instantly as my tongue touched the fish, my fear-spectre vanished, and I was conscious of a relaxed exhilaration. I recovered my mental faculties completely, and found myself able to observe my sensations with proper detachment.

     

It was a sweet sickly flavour, with a savour of spice. One longed to roll it about one's palate, like a Fellow of Trinity with '63 port. (My eldest brother won a sizarship, and took a Double First, subsequently becoming a Lecturer in Critical Epistemology and Eschatological Anthropometry; I often dined at the high table; so pardon my choice of metaphor.) But this taste appertains to the wizardry of the kitchen; I soon was aware of the pill beneath the coating.

     

The flesh itself anæsthetized the nerves of the tongue, as cocaine does, but the flavour is rather rancid than bitter, as cocaine is.

     

The palate perceived a certain rottenness as the food passed over it; and there was a decided impulse to vomit as it entered the pharynx.

     

This was partly physical, as I judge; for my soul leapt at me in fierce disgust as if to say: "What is this filth you are eating, you, a man?" It was a physical spasm of shame.

     

Then came the after taste. Gas eructated—it was that Fear once more, bare now of all disguises, and in my mouth what thirst, what bitterness! Time held his breath for a space; I spent uncounted ages of anguish in a few seconds. I knew it instantly—it was again Myself, me desolate ache for Love, the craving of a heart insatiably athirst for some unnamed and unconceived fulfilment. It was man's microcosmic image of the Need of God (I say it in all reverence) that He assuaged by His creation. We dizzy ourselves at first by Calf-love, later by wine, by fashioning new temples where our soul may worship its image, building them either of children or of Art, but soon or late our drunkenness wears off; the Ache returns anon. We end by hoping that where Love has failed us, Death may succeed. We wish for Nothing, even when we call it Everything: we only half hope Heaven; life has taught us that all realized desires are dust as we are dust. Nirvana seems more likely.

     

And this Ache is the other half of the dowry of our bride Self-Consciousness. The aftertaste of the fish might not have been so bitter to another man; Moses Thornley, in fact, whom I induced to make a trial of it, while confirming my observations, substantially so at least, in other ways, called the aftertaste "rather pleasantly metallic," and "somehow like India rubber", and suggestive, I can hardly say why, of Passover cakes."

     

I must now describe the physiological effects of the poison.

     

My exhilaration wore off almost immediately, and was succeeded by a curious feeling of worry, which I quite irrationally connected with my financial position. I had a sudden impulse to eat heartily of the fish; it passed quickly, with the queerly hopeless thought that "it wouldn't work".

     

The blood now congested my brain; I became slightly tipsy in a silly and puerile fashion. I had yawning fits, became restless, wanted to stretch my limbs, and experienced an absurd inclination to giggle. Faint flitting thoughts, vague velleities, chased each other in my mind, which seemed full of rosy laziness. I felt an almost pious satisfaction at having eaten the fish, and a sharp half-shocked annoyance with myself when my mind wandered from the subject. At one moment I had an actual pang—I can only compare it to that of a boy who has idolized and idealized his sister, and comes on her kissing the butler. This was when I had enjoyed a long rapture, almost a swoon of sleepy self-satisfaction with the fish itself, and with myself for having eaten it, and suddenly switched off to remember a peculiarly ribald and degrading episode in Naples, when 'pesce' happened to be the Master's Word of the situation.

     

A similar angry refusal to face the facts of life started up at the intrusion of a thought about the meaning of "Fish" in ancient religions as explained to me once by a contributor to the London "Punchinello" who subsequently disgraced himself in an unspeakably loathsome piece of abomination.

     

During this half-hour of hallucination I was all the while conscious of the efforts of my body to eliminate the poison. I felt an assured confidence that it had no real hold on my system, rather as a man might pick up a woman of a certain class after over-indulgence in the pleasures of the table, and fancy himself fallen in love, yet with another part of him well aware that she was no more to him than an occasion for the sin and delight of the night, and for the repentance and disgust of the morning.

     

Forty minutes after tasting the fish the symptoms had completely disappeared, leaving a slight headache and an inexplicable sense of disappointment, such as a man might have who had backed a winner at 100 to 1 and been paid in notes of the Bank of Engraving.

     

For long after, strange to say, certain psychological effects of the experiment persisted, I found myself constantly on my guard against those weaknesses which it had revealed in myself. I became almost morbidly suspicious about my food, and even cut out whiskey, coffee and tobacco for some weeks. The reason is evident enough; I am a man of science first and last. The fish "drunk" showed me my self's inmost passion for Truth, and my momentary surrender to the siren was as a shame smeared on my past, to be lived down, perhaps, but only by instant intent on the path of the future.

    

I once cheated a gang of knaves for a number of years; I blush less for that than I do for the month in my boyhood when they cheated me into cheating myself, and so cheated me of my myself, that I was cheated into cheating them. How one lie twists and wriggles! But the curve always closes; the lie, with its litter of lies, never fails to come back to the original liar!

     

No thank you, I'll join Socrates in a cup of hemlock, keep my mind clear to the last second, and turn into a nice clean corpse. But no more fish for Harry Tone!

 

 

* We cannot refrain from observing that Dr. Tone's observations seem incomplete and his conclusions more patriotic than judicial. We cannot forbear to mention the persecutions of the Covenanters, the formation of fanatical sects like the Quakers, the followers of Joanna Southcote, and the Plymouth Brethren, the Mormons, the Agapemonites and the Oxford movement, to say nothing of countless forgotten displays of religious fireworks in America, which go on, to this day, with undiminished vigour. And as for religious persecution, it still flourishes in a very slightly modified form wherever we find "Two or three gathered together". They still burn witches in the English countryside. They still send the Peculiar People to people, they still chivy the Quakers. Instead of burning a man outright at the stake, they roast him at the slow fire of ostracism and boycott. There are still prosecutions for blasphemy; the hounds still meet for the heresy hunt. Of course this is no fault of religion—it al lies in the nature of man, and we should not have obtruded these remarks if Dr. Tone had not thanked God so publicly that his fell-Protestants were not as other men are.

 

 

 

Chapter VI

 

At the Breeding Grounds

 

 

We had been delayed again and again by the eccentricities of our airship; Lyell's wound made things worse. Thornley was for pushing on to another camp; he hated inaction; but to shift was to lose all Lyell's labour; and there was nowhere particularly advantageous to go.

     

But Lyell admitting one day that we had at least a week more to stay, Moses proposed to take me on "a little shooting party". Our leader seemed glad to be rid of us, and we started early the next morning.

     

"We are off to the pools where they breed," said my companion. "I didn't tell Lyell; he's afraid of anything I do, merely because I do it."

     

Our goal lay fifty miles to the South; it was marked by a lofty crag that stuck out of the level wastes. The weather had played tricks with it; it was bleached to a ghastly white, and eaten out into the most sinister likeness to a skull. But the amazing thing was that on its top were two huge trees, regular giants. More, in that rainless waste, they bore green leaves massed heavily upon their branches. We approached this freakish hill within five miles at the noon halt on the second day, and camped by the slimy salt of a dried-up lagoon. Halfway through lunch we were attacked by a bunch of brigands, but Moses showed no alarm. He advanced to parlay with them, and when they understood that we were peaceable folk and worth far more to them alive than dead, they became their real selves, madcap children of the sands and the rocks and the sun. They lunched with us and pouched our largesse gleefully, and even offered to escort us. But when we told them our objective, they one and all became uneasy. They urged us not to go. They would not go themselves, at any price. No, there was no danger, they said, so far as they knew; nobody lived about there now. But one might be tempted to climb the rock, and from the summit one might see a thing unlucky to see! What was it? It was a thing unlucky to mention! In what direction did it lie, then? In a most unlucky direction! They were not to be bribed or teased or chaffed or trapped into breaking their absurd taboo, so we gave it up.

     

"After all," said Moses, "that's neither here nor there—"

     

"It seems so from their account," I laughed. "We're here for these pools."

     

On this subject our brigands had no scruple. They were indeed most cheerfully frank. They had dried up years ago, far beyond memory of man; it was a mere tradition that they once had been.

     

Moses quoted his informant. They laughed and chuckled like children do at the clown of their first circus.

     

"You heard it from M't Iu? Isn't that dew upon the beard of the Father of Laughter? Where hast thou dwelt, O bestower of bounty, that thou know'st not the true tale of M't Iu? Of a surety was I sure that all men in the compass of the corners of the earth were informed of this matter. Hear then, and I lie not, I swear by This and by That." (It appears that "This" and "That" are objects too sacred to be named, and so indicated only by gesture.)

     

"This M't Iu," the old man continued, "was in his beginnings employed by the government to rob the people. But of this he wearied and joined a company of idle and dissolute rascals, men and women without shame, who roamed the country and begged food and money. Sometimes they would work by wheedling the ignorant people with empty promises to restore the prosperity of their land—all lies; or of fantastic delights after death, all lies too; I well deem, forged in the same shop!

     

"When this failed, they would threaten and prophesy fearful disasters, all lies as before, or curse men's souls after death, still lies—and one way or other they would get gifts, if'twere only they might be rid of such persistent knaves for a season.

     

"Well their leader got bold with impunity, stepped over the line, raised riots and tried to make himself king; so they took him and, jesting, said that he should die as he had lived. Which thing also came to pass.

     

"Now at that heart of M't Iu waxed faint exceedingly, lest that befall him also. Therefore he became a teller of tales by the fires of the tribes; so, being a natural liar and trained in a good school, he earned his food and his palliasse, and the women gave him cast clouts also, with sweetmeats, maybe as Fate in the Beginning had ordained it. But as for this sheepskin, O thou of majestic demeanour, wherein thou hast read of thy pools and thy fish, how knowest thou not that the lies therein writ are not the old lies told by M't Iu at all long ago? But some other liar, a scribe, gathered lies in the garden of lies for a garland of lies, and bound them round with one lie more, saying: These be the lies of M't Iu.

     

"O thou whose presence is like the oasis at noon, is there not also a sheepskin of lies, some new ones, some varied in form from the old, but ascribed to a liar far better that M't Iu, one 'L Uk? And are not all the staple lies of both filched free from a sheepskin older yet, the lies supposed to have been told by M'k, or some such stroller's name?

     

"You took it all as true? My father, One hath afflicted thee!"

     

Moses replied cheerfully to this tirade that he has not believed a word of the tales, which were indeed mostly fables of impossible events; but that he had trusted his critical faculty to make deductions from their setting. In fact, he had been right, except that time had played him a trick—not the only one, he smiled grimly.

     

Well, there was nothing to do but go back to our head camp. However, we weren't expected for three or four days more, so we both confessed our curiosity to climb the skull rock, and see if we could see that 'unlucky sight' that our brigands had dangled before us. We camped that night at its foot—and fell, both of us, into a series of appalling nightmares, too bad to record or remember.

 

 

 

Chapter VII

 

The Hill

 

 

Long before dawn, I found myself awake beyond hope of further rest. I was bitterly cold and covered with a clammy sweat. Though all moisture had so long disappeared from the surface of the plains, there must have been underground reservoirs—the air was damp and a greenish evil-smelling miasma had risen during the night. I suspected the presence of sulphur and of chlorine.

     

Hearing my companion stirring in his tent, I called to him, thinking it the best plan to snatch an early breakfast, and see whether on the top of the hill the air might not be purer. We accordingly turned out and got on our way.

     

Against the other side of the hill, ages of desert storm had piled the flying sand, and the way to the top was easy except for the heaviness of the going. We reached the top while it was still quite dark. There was no fog; but the effluvia of the soil struck us even more pestilential than in our camp. It was the odour of the charnel. Stooping to examine the ground by the light of my lantern, I was shocked to find that it was apparently caked with blood. The circumstance was so incredible that I took particular pains to secure specimens from several localities for examination. But in so strange a place nothing could startle, especially since I had become inured to the bizarre and the revolting by adventures so continuously unparalleled.

     

But in any part of the planet the two great trees which crowned the summit would have been objects of wonder. That they should flourish in so barren a spot, was only one more detail, for their stature exceeded that of any trees that I had ever seen in California or Australia. The trunks leant away from each other; a circumstance in itself sufficiently remarkable. Their girth was enormous. They were crooked as olives; and, from a botanical point of view most unexpectedly, their branches started at a very short distance from the ground. The foliage was most exuberant. It seems impossible that the age of these trees can be much less than that of the great Bo-tree at Anuradapura, yet their vitality would have put to shame the most ambitious sapling. Heavy clusters of fruit hung among the leaves in great profusion. This fruit closely resembles capers, but its colour was of a rich though unpleasant yellow with a peculiar brassy sheen. The fruit was very hard and slippery to the touch, but when grasped firmly crumbled between the fingers. It was a mere husk containing nothing but an acrid and irritating juice, which not only stained the fingers but caused a painful eruption.

     

On both trees the fruit was identical in character, but the leaves, although precisely similar in structure, showed a striking difference in one particular. These leaves possessed a surface, wrinkled and pallid, which was covered with a fine hair, so rich in resin that it was hard to disengage the leaf from the fingers except by rubbing them against the edge of one's boot. In shape they bore a most remarkable resemblance to the human hand, curling naturally as if to grasp something. The under-surface was indeed sensitive as in the case of many insectivorous plants, and on being touched the leaf curled up suddenly with a nervous and vigorous pressure. I was actually obliged to use my knife to release myself. So far, the two leaves were similar; but in the one case the description above given is complete. In the other, the upper of convex surface of the leaf was covered with a brilliantly shining but sickly smelling oil, which completely concealed it from casual examination; and even, by forming a film between the digits, masked the shape.

     

Both trees bore blossoms in much greater profusion than fruit. The petals of these were of innumerable hues; but in all cases there was a combination of colours which produced the effect of eccentric and meaningless designs. The texture of these blossoms was so flimsy that they tore to rage at the slightest touch, so that I was not able to examine them thoroughly. At the slightest breath of wind they fluttered down, and I noticed that vast numbers of the leaves had become clogged by curling themselves round falling flowers and, strangely enough, that such leaves appeared to be withered and ready to drop from their twigs.

     

I was recalled from my examination by a sharp ejaculation from Moses, who was, I most regretfully admit, worse than careless in his use of expletives. On this occasion he was guilty of the bad taste, not to say sin, of calling upon the name of our blessed Lord and Saviour himself.

     

"Come over here, Doc," he shouted; "this is rum," qualifying the adjective unforgivably by an epithet appropriate only to the Prince of Darkness.

     

Were such expressions excusable by any emergency, this might perhaps have served. Hitherto we had found ourselves in the presence of what one may call, strictly speaking, natural wonders. His eyes were fixed upon a phenomenon which induced the most fantastic speculations with regard to human agency.

     

He was standing halfway between the two trees—in front of him on the ground was literally soaked in blood, and yet it bore evidence of terrific heat, for every inch of the soil had been fused. The effect was rather as of a ladle of molten metal spilt over the furnace. One could only suppose that repeated lightnings had been the agents of this effect.

     

Upon this slag there lay a stump of a tree immensely old. It may perhaps have been of the same species of the trees on either side of it, but this must remain conjectural, for the wood was entirely worm-eaten as well as being infected with, one would imagine, every disease possible to the vegetable kingdom. Yet it had the aspect of a live thing, for it was rotting visibly before our eyes; the scraps that dropped from it, carrying with them some of those swarms of larval creatures whose assiduity had hastened their detachment. These animals were sinister and malignant in appearance, febrile, bloated, and voracious. They had small eyes, but did not seem able to see with them. In colour the animals were of an inky black, somewhat rusty, but the larger specimens possessed sheath-wings, usually of violet or crimson with spots of the same colour on the cephalothorax. Their mouths were large, and furnished with sharp teeth. They emitted a continual hoarse buzzing, sometimes partaking of the character of sing-song, at other times a very cacophonous noise suggesting anger and alarm. They were furnished with large mandibles and antennae furnished with suckers. In their blindness they attacked and devoured each other, apparently unable to perceive any difference between their comrades and the tree of which they were parasites. They appeared capable of concerted action, for they fought and fed in gangs. Moses was evidently in considerable personal fear of them and, indeed, their numbers and ferocity made them formidable though individually so insignificant in size as to inspire disgust rather than apprehension.

     

This log lay in a ragged depression on the exact summit of the hill. It appeared as if it has been uprooted originally by a succession of tempests. A considerable quantity of the blood which covered everything, trees, slag and insects alike, was still liquid and lying in pools at the bottom of the hole. It is impossible to believe that any defibrinating process had been at work, and I was therefore compelled to conclude that at least a small portion of it had been spilled within a few minutes. I determined to investigate the matter more closely, and for this purpose picked up a small gnarled root so as to take up some of the fresh blood on the end. My attention was caught by the butt. I stared; my senses almost left me. It had been cut off clean from the tree. I sat 'cut off', not hacked off, nor torn off. The cut had been made by an instrument of precision, and the surface protected from further decomposition by the application of an antiseptic film over the whole of the root. It had, in fact, been petrified as if for preservation in a museum in spite of the rottenness of the material, though this, by the way, was by no means that of the tree itself. It was hard and solid. On the cut surface were inscribed many lines of exceedingly fine and neat hieroglyphics—a most painstaking and exquisite piece of work. I suggest that the description of the specimen may have been a subject of these characters.

     

My astonishment at this phenomenon was hardly increased when I found that every single root had been similarly treated. The agency of men of the highest order of intelligence was indubitable. But how was I to reconcile their action or even their presence on the scene with its other features?

     

Just at this moment my attention was again distracted by the tropically sudden leap of the sun above the edge of the distant mountains. The spectacle was ineffably gorgeous. I can hardly describe the exhilaration which thrilled me. The relief of my mind from contemplation of the grim and loathesome mysteries of the mountain, the recognition of the glory of nature filled me with transcendent exaltation.

     

"Look at that tree, Doctor," cried Moses. The light of the sun had flooded both trees at the same instant. That tree whose leaves were covered with the shining film previously described was apparently in all respects unchanged. But the case of the other was different. It had performed the arboreal equivalent of going to sleep. The leaves were all curled up into themselves and the petals of the flowers were all folded into the calyx.

     

Thornley and I discussed this curious occurrence for a few moments, when our attention was sharply distracted by a noise behind us. We turned and saw that a ray of the sun had passed through between the lowest boughs of the sleeping tree, as would not have been the case unless the foliage had made way for it. It fell upon the rotten stump, a tiny patch of light, shaped somewhat like a fleur de lys, if so quaint a conceit may be permitted. It struck me very briskly at the moment. At the touch of this ray, the stump smoked and then broke into small ghastly flames. The point of impact was at the junction of one of the few remaining boughs. It was hardly a couple of minutes before this was drilled completely through as if by the oxy-hydrogen blow pipe. The bough broke off and smashed upon the ground into a splash of tinder; while the stump itself, with a sickening heave, settled groaning into a new position. Almost at the same moment, the movement of the earth cut off the ray by the interposition of the great tree through whose boughs it had momentarily passed. A short calculation assured me that the sun could only touch the stump once in the day, and perhaps only on very few days, and that at a season when the spring was well advanced. In this manner we are able to account for the fact that after being dead so long it had not yet been completely destroyed.

     

ON this eventful day, one incident seemed destined to lead directly to another. The change in the position of the stump revealed a strange object which till then had escaped our notice. Moses Thornley laid his hand upon my wrist. The touch communicated to me that tremulous horror which had seized him. His skin was raw with cold sweat. As for me, I closed my eyes and my breath died in my lungs. I knew only too well that we had come unawares upon the thing of all things which I was anxious to investigate. It was lying well outside the shadow of the sleeping tree. The sunlight beat upon it fully: it was impossible not to recognize it at a glance. I had been studying its effects too long not to know what it was. It was not, indeed, the cause of the evil which I had come to anatomize and exterminate, but it was what the anopheles is to malaria and the rat to plague—the carrier of disease. By it the thing was made more virulent, more infectious.

     

It was only remains; nearly a million suns had bleached it. It was the débris of the Fish.

 

 

 

Chapter VIII

 

The Vision

 

 

We looked in silence on the curious mass of bone. It was far from being the characteristic skeleton of a fish, for there was no vertebral column radiating ribs. On the contrary, the centre was hollow, but the definite outlines of a fish were marked by three curved spines joining the head to the tail. The mouth was immense and full of long sharp teeth; but the skull had no holes for eyes. The fish had evidently been blind. Sharp spikes projected irregularly from every portion of the skeleton; but these were not composed of hard bone but of some gristly substance. The surface of the spines themselves was covered with a species of glue.

     

"I must take this back," said I, 'for Friend Green to examine. I have never seen so strange an order of anatomy. Look, there is not even any brain-case!"

     

With great precaution, I lifted the strange object and put it into my collecting box.

     

With great precaution, I lifted the strange object and put it into my collecting box.

     

"Let us go," said Moses. "We have seen enough for the present."

     

He led the way down the slope. But just as we passed beyond the shadow of the trees, the fierceness of the sun struck us like a whip, so that we instinctively turned away our eyes. On the horizon through the dusty air, the red wall of the mountains glowered. Above them hung a vast black cloud, as if it were the exhalation of some dead marsh beyond them. It was the first black cloud that we had seen since we had left the Mediterranean. Moses was struck by the singularity of the phenomenon.

     

"There must be water over there," he said. "I wonder what it can be! Look, look!" he added with a sharp gesture, "it rises!"

     

"Strange," I replied, "it rises vertically. I never saw a cloud do that before."

     

We remained concentrated upon this curious spectacle for several minutes. The cloud still rose; and we were soon able to see its lower surface, distant although it was. That surface was most marvelous smooth. One would have taken it for water. The sun struck strongly under it. It was unruffled as a mirror of ink; and as we gazed, we saw vague images that gleamed like dull fires, flickering at first with the movement of the cloud, which seemed to be shaken by the heat of the sun. I took my field glasses, and clapped them to my eyes. There was evidently some sort of mirage in process of formation. The powerful lenses served my turn: the cloud ceased its vibration, and I saw clearly enough the images reflected on its sombre screen. They rays of the sun had evidently been thrown down on to the earth illuminating what lay below and this, with sudden intensity, that the terrestrial objects in question were able to represent themselves in a shadowy and phantamagoric way. The mirage represented an irregular ring of what might have been volcanic rocks oozing forth smoke and ducky flame. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the cloud was formed by the coagulation of these vapours.

     

Within this species of crater appeared objects whose nature it was difficult to determine. There was a strong suggestion of a monotonous geometrical pattern, the edges of the lines being extremely hard and sharp. Occasionally, one of the areas so cut off threw back a whitish stain, and I could not help being reminded of barracks or prison buildings. Some of the lines were greenish, and cut across in places. I divined the presence of canals. The formation was repeated towards the centre in descending tiers, as if I had been looking from above on a coliseum. The whole area seemed hardly material, if I may be forgiven for using the phrase which sprang in my subconscious. The movement which I perceived was not due to any unsteadiness in my cloud mirror, for the main features in the landscape were stationary and steady. But it swarmed everywhere with the heaving of tiny creatures which I can only compare to ants or perhaps to maggots that feast upon a carcass, their wave-like insistency appearing to convey a crepitation to the thing itself.

     

Moses Thornley was busy with his own telescope.

     

"It reminds me of that poem of Baudelaire's," he said. "What can it be? There must be water there. Is it the waving of a grove of palms, distorted by the haze?"

     

"It looks to me like a group of villages," I replied. "Very likely you were right about the trees."

     

"Whatever it is, it gives me a sickish feeling," replied my friend.

     

"Me too. But I'm ashamed to confess that I have a kind of superstitious horror about it. Do you notice that after a few diminishing tiers, if I may call them so, one can see nothing more. The central part of the picture is mystery, black and bottomless."

     

Moses shut up his telescope and fastened it back in its case.

     

"Doctor," said he, and his voice trembled, "that's the place I thought I knew. Your last word gave it name. That is the bottomless pit. That's the lake of fire. That is the place we have come to see."

     

I kept my eyes fixed on the place.

     

"Of course," said I, "the centre is too deep and dark to throw back light. Those white set squares must be villages or towns, the rest must be the fields and the canals. The ant-like mass must be the people of the pit. Who would have thought there could ever have been so many. I've seen armies from aeroplanes, you know, and half a million men seem only sparse dots on the landscape; as scattered stars in the sky. But these people crowd their whole country like city streets at the lunch hour. It's all fading, Thornley. The sun's getting too high."

     

"Come along," he returned. "We know pretty well where we are. We'd better get back and tell Lyell the news."

     

I took the precaution, before leaving, to note the compass-bearing of the pit. We could not possibly lose our way for a moment. We were assured of absolute success in the attainment of the first part of our objective.

     

We regained our camp in time for breakfast but neither of us enjoyed much appetite and ate more for form's sake than anything. And ten minutes later, the reaction of what we had gone through smote heavily on us; we were both deathly sick. A little brandy restored us but we found ourselves seized with what was almost a panic desire to get back to our friends.

     

Despite the appalling heat we rode all day leaving our servants to follow with the camp. An hour before sunset both our horses dropped under us, dead. We staggered on and reached 'Nti Oc all right. We were both of us more than half dead. We could touch nothing but champagne, and fell almost instantly into a sodden sleep as if we had been drugged.

     

Lyell came in and stripped my clothes from me as I tossed and sweated. He washed my body in cold water, and covered me with a light sheet. Thanks to this care I grew much calmer towards morning. In the early part of the night I had sprung up, screaming with nightmare every few minutes or so. But I woke fairly fresh and was able to attend to Thornley, whom I found muttering in the delirium of low fever, with his hands twitching and clutching at the air. His condition was exceedingly serious; and for the next two days, I was constantly at his bedside. On the third day he was convalescent. I was able to take a little rest, and even to join the others at tiffin. After the meal, Green asked me to come into his tent so as to make a report about the debris of the fish, my servants having brought in my specimen case from the place where our horses had perished.

     

"This is a very extraordinary type of animal," said the naturalist. "it is an entirely new genus; and what's more, it doesn't fit at all into any scheme of evolution, as far as I can see. Perhaps you can help me out?"

     

I strongly resented the irreligious implication of his statement. As a medical missionary, I have a complete contempt for the guesses of profane science, falsely so called. The creator of all things has done all things well, and if His designs were not inscrutable to us, how could He be worthy if our adoration? As some English poet, possibly Wordsworth, has said, "To be intelligible is to be found out." And it is a fact that modern science in attempting to bring Nature within the compass of human understanding, has not hesitated to eliminate God from a scheme in which He is no longer necessary. I was indeed rejoiced to discover a creature which could not be explained by the wicked wiseacres who have presumed to conceive the Universe as a combination of chance circumstances operating without a plan or principle.

     

I had seen, moreover, in medicine, how completely free from rational interpretation are the workings of disease. Take my own work on leprosy, where I had injected al the patients with tuberculosis, so that their cure should have been certain. Yet, as it was the will of God that they should die, they died; and God even favoured me by a chastisement designed to humiliate my false pride. He willed that my patients should die of a disease strongly though superficially resembling the results of that very disease with whose germs I had peopled their blood. Indeed, it was well said "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform."

     

But as representative of a higher type of science than Green, to say nothing of my religious character, I felt it beneath my dignity to rebuke him openly. I merely reminded him that Leviathan and Behemoth, so eloquently and accurately described in the Book of Job, were also somewhat of a puzzle to the cocksure disciple of Darwin.

     

The naturalist grumbled, but added that he had not had the pleasure of stuffing either of the monsters I had mentioned, and called my attention to the model he had made of the fish as he conceived it must have been in life.

     

I have never taken much stock in these imaginative attempts to fill the lacunæ of knowledge. I cannot comprehend how from a single bone a man can divine even the rest of the skeleton; and it seems to me rather blasphemous. If God had wished us to know what one of His creatures was like, He could have arranged for us to find a specimen in perfect preservation. To deduce the unknown from the known is to trench on the prerogatives of divinity. It is the original sin of Eve in a new shape. We should content ourselves with seeing what we are meant to see, and the only lawful deduction from such observation is to fear and admire the manifold wisdom and power of Him who made us.

     

Green's voice broke in upon these meditations.

     

"It isn't properly speaking a fish," he said in his thin hesitating falsetto. "It's more like a mollusk. These bones are not genuine bones; they are merely imitations, assumed perhaps for purposes of protection. There is no trace of brain, no trace of heart. This animal can have been little else but a stomach and an excretory organ. The spines are not true spines but hollow tubes. I found some traces of thick acrid ink in some of them—in others, of a deadly poison. There were no eyes; it must have sought its prey by hearing or by touch, for we perceive very large orifices for ears, and also, attached to the jaws, sockets for what where no doubt long whip-like mandibles. There were no fins of any kind, so that it was probably unable to steer itself. But its tail is tremendously developed. It must have been able to travel at an incredible pace. The skin was evidently very thick and hard. There is still a small portion at the juncture of the head and the body. Notice the remarkable character of the scales. They possess, to a greater extent than any other animal known to me, the power of changing colour to suit its environment. You will observe that it has no weapons of offence, properly speaking. The teeth are sloped steeply inward, and could attack nothing which was not already within its mouth. One might say that it possessed only two emotions—fear and greed. There are numerous indications—of which the absence of fins is one—that its existence depended on its remaining in continual motion. In all probability, it could neither rest nor sleep. Despite the enormous mould of mouth and stomach, the throat is scarce more than a pin-hole. It must have lived chewing its prey to pulp with desperate haste. But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of all is its breathing apparatus, if indeed we may call it such. It is impossible that it should have been provided with gills, still less with lungs. The analysis of these so-called bones reveals the strange circumstance that they contain no oxygen. Yet its circulation was well developed, and if you will take the trouble to look at the inner side of this piece of skin under the magnifying glass, you will probably admit the plausibility of my conjecture, that this part of its physiological system was organized for the absorption of mud through the skin. We are already aware that its habitat was the stagnant salt marshes of the desert after the ocean had retreated."

     

Green had certainly succeeded in producing a most unpleasantly grotesque model of this conjectured creature, and there was not a little of the artist in the life-like way in which we had rendered the expression of the characteristics to which he attributed its consciousness. Blind, ghastly fear glared from the eyeless head, and in the mouth insatiable greed, exaggerated even to craving, the tortured hunger of a soul agonized by the monomaniac intensity of its sole dreadful need. Perhaps unwittingly, by some trick of memory, the naturalist had realized the vague yet striking likeness to the sinister expression that I had seen on our first arrival in the village on the faces of the salesmen in the procession, though it altogether lacked their look of triumphant cunning.

     

This fish was wholly stupid—a mere incarnate shape of agony. I could not believe that God had ever made a thing at once so cruel and so tormented. I told Green so. He gave a little snickering laugh.

    

"Perhaps you hardly realize, Dr. Tone," he said with a tremulous squeak, "that every artist makes whatever he makes the image of himself or part of himself, that the more truly he does this, the better artist he. This model of mine is more or less my child. The hunger and fear are mine. The only difference is that I have eyes. I know the sort of thing man is; I know the secret principle that rules all nature. You see things otherwise, I know. You look at its many qualities, each by each, as if I were to look at this model and concentrate my mind on the exquisite curves of the scales, instead of grasping the animal as a whole. You ought to know, as well as I do, that if we put all the details of life together what the whole thing amounts to.

     

"There have been men, no doubt, whose lives have been all sunshine and whose deaths scarce more than sleep—A pleasant day, and easy night. But see the world with comprehensive, with clear-sighted, with sympathetic vision. Is not the law of every being to live at the expense of other beings? Is not apart from this, a woe far greater? Do we not all admit the supreme agony that our lives, whether we've suffered over much or not, have achieved nothing absolute? All we have done is to rearrange certain relations between things in a way which is of necessity aimless, so that all action is insane."

     

I interrupted him sharply. "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Who are you to probe the purposes of God? Who are you that you should say all this pain and sin is not a brilliantly original and praiseworthy plan for procuring perfection of a kind and on a plane which you and I are totally unfitted to understand? Our very insignificance (which is the crux of your complaint) is on sufficient indication of the absurdity of calling the creator to the bar. Read the Book of Job, my friend. All you have said is said much better there and the answer to it is overwhelming."

     

"No," said the naturalist, his voice changing suddenly and his eyes bright with tears, "there is no answer in the Old Testament, we must go to the New. The cure for all this woe is love, unselfish love, the love which our Saviour came to earth to manifest to us."

     

I will not deny that I was moved by this unexpected revelation of the little man's character. To tell the truth, I always regarded him as a little tame animal; I had forgotten that he had a soul, and I was unspeakably delighted to recognize that it was a soul saved by grace.

     

I shook his hand warmly. "I have wronged you, brother," I said in trembling accents, "somehow I always assumed that you were an infidel. Halleluja! that you too are washed in the blood of the Lamb."

     

Green looked sad. "I fear that I am an infidel after all, in your sense," he replied timidly. "I don't believe that cruelty expiates cruelty. I don't believe in supernatural things. I follow Jesus only as a man as near perfection as is possible to flesh. It is the loving, gentle, pitiful Jesus whose example saves me from despairing of myself."

     

I retorted angrily that he must have been listening to a notorious scoundrel pro-Boer socialist and immoralist, Frank Harris, a man living in open sin, notorious to the world.

     

Green admitted that the evil eloquence of this monster had enchanted him.

     

"My poor lost brother," I sighed. "You must not go to man but to God. Go to the Gospels. They are the only documents we possess on Jesus, and they are packed with passionate pleadings to such sinners as we. You must believe, unquestioningly, else you're damned for ever. The carnal reason is the Devil's lawyer, and as for your sentimental selection of a very few items in a character which includes all possibilities of righteousness, you have emasculated the enormous tragedy of existence into a mild and maudlin melodrama, if I can even call it that. No, Green, Sin, Satan, Hell are all appalling realities. Your own complaints about creation commit you to confess it. You can't cold-cream the face of death; the cure for evil must be equal to it."

     

Green sighed again. The muscles of his face trembled with his emotion.

     

"I don't accept your premisses," he said at last very slowly. "I can't believe in a God who made or allows such abomination as I see all around me."

     

I began to be annoyed. "All this has been argued again and again," I snapped. "I'm merely anxious about your soul, and as soon as I take one tack you go over on the other."

     

"Alas," replied the wretched man, "all philosophical propositions come to a contradiction of terms some time or other. You're quite right—it's a waste of time to argue. If I must go to hell, I'll go with Shelley. I will love all things with compassionate love. I will be love. As the sun shines upon the just and upon the unjust, so I will love; for all things, whether I call them good or bad, are equally pitiful. We are all in the prison of pain. We must do all we can to control our own cries and to console our fellow convicts."

     

I reminded him once more that I personally had been pardoned and released by the atonement of the Cross, and that I had given my life to bring the news of salvation to my fellow man.

     

"You're a decent chap," said Green. "According to your lights, you've done your best. But I wish you could see that it is rather strange that a God who is love and also omnipotent should go to all these pains to pick out a few brands from so very extensive a burning."

     

We should probably have resumed the argument, but just then Lyell came to the tent with news that our aeroplane was at last in good condition, and that he proposed to start at sunrise the next morning for the bottomless pit.

     

The machine would only take two of us, but he naturally chose me to accompany him. Thornley and Green were to start immediately, and establish a camp at the foot of the mountains, beyond which lay our objective.

 

 

 

Chapter IX

 

Mr. Green's Opinions

 

 

As I had unpacked practically nothing since my excursion with Thornley I was able to complete my preparations for the start in a matter of half an hour. I found myself not exactly with what Americans call cold feet, but what oarsmen and actors call "the needle"; a mixture of excitement and nervousness which was probably a compensation for the instinctive fear which I would not admit to myself. I knelt down and threw myself upon God, and it came to me at the close of my prayer that a drink and a chat would be the appropriate material remedies to accentuate the relief of the operation of divine grace. So I took a bottle of brandy and some sparklets into Green's tent. I found him humming to himself and packing with feverish light-heartedness. He was evidently enjoying the anticipation to the height. The phenomenon appeared remarkable in one who lacked such spiritual consolations as were at my disposal, and rallied him on his cheerfulness.

     

"Aha!' said he, with gay tripping tones. "I have my ideas, my dear Doctor. I am not so simple as my shyness makes me seem, While I stuff birds, I think things out. I think I know more about this small adventure of ours than the rest of you put together. You reason that things are pretty much the same everywhere, because you have trained yourself to classify things by their similarities. My specimens tell me that no two things are alike. Consider men themselves. Each one is unique even in trifles like thumb prints. That's why all your theories break down. You insist on trying to class things which cannot be classed.

     

"Now as to the Bottomless Pit. You have made up your minds from the start that the people who feed on this fish must be simply chronic cases of the sickness whose acute onset you witnessed in the case of the boy the other day. But even analogy should have warned you. Arsenic and opium eaters do not have the same symptoms after ten years as followed their first dose. Besides, don't forget that the critical fact in your knowledge is that this colony in the Pit has thriven on this peculiar diet for pretty near 2000 years. We never hear of anyone leaving the Pit. That is denied passionately by public opinion. Yet, we have it on record that a good many people have done so, and of these people we have two strongly conflicting accounts. One group abuses them with almost irrational violence, another acclaims them as men of super-human integrity and talent. To me, at least, this proves that such men are above the average. They are marked men—otherwise why trouble to mark them either with mud or with medals? Their return to the outside world without catastrophe proves also the strength of their constitutions. The colony is therefore biologically and politically sound. Their existence proves it.

     

"Against all this you have nothing to urge but the one positive incident to which you attach undue importance because it happened to come to your eyes. I admit that the boy who partook of the dish was severely affected thereby; but some of his symptoms, particularly on the moral plane, appeared to me somewhat enviable. The natural savagery and carnal pride of his tribe were replaced by nobler dispositions. But, with regard to the less pleasing results, I must point out that your are assuming that the fish which he ate is identical with the diet of the colony in the Bottomless Pit. I deny your postulate.

     

"The dish which was offered to him was concocted with alien substances. It was made deliberately seductive by the salesman, and I have the strongest suspicion that it was drugged in order to induce the habit."

     

He snapped the lock of a box, and stood up as if to challenge me. I filled my fourth glass.

     

"I cannot deny the force of your reasoning," I muttered unwillingly. "You seem to have a good deal of sense in your way."

     

He replied that a man who had spent his life in stuffing beasts and birds, unless he was a perfect fool, was bound to develop a strong logical sense in matters relating to the adaptation of beings to their environment, as also in tracing the incidence of accident in any individual.

     

"There is much to be said on your side," he went on without a flicker of pleasure at my compliment, "but it is the worst drawback to the progress of medicine that doctors are obliged to generalize from an insufficient number of cases. There is no such thing as gout. Every man that you call gouty has a disease of his own, and requires his own private remedy. When you class every man with a swelled toe as gouty, you are only in one degree less quacks than the scoundrels who sell panaceas. The better your specialist is, the more fully he acts on this fact. He studies each case as if he had never seen anything like it before, and is much more concerned to note differences than similarities in his patients."

     

I hummed and hawed a good deal before I could bring myself to grunt "Go on."

     

"I will come to the point in a moment," said Green with brisk boldness.

     

It was evident that his enthusiasm was making something more like a man of him. All fanatics have their fine moments. Their creed acts like a tot of rum on a shivering sailor.

     

"Segregated communities are worth study. Take the biggest—China. Their policy of excluding foreigners and venerating their own teachers kept them in peace and culture for 3000 years.

     

Consider the smallest—the people of Pitcairn Island. They were all of them utter scoundrels; yet as soon as they found themselves free from external pressure, they became a most virtuous community. What corrupts societies is meeting with new conditions to which they cannot properly adjust themselves. No sooner was China open to commerce than corruption attacked it. Until now the catastrophe of its civilization is practically complete. The stranger acted as did small pox in the South Sea islands or did gin in West African kingdoms.

     

"It is notorious that small secluded villages whose contact with their neighbours is rare and casual, are free from all manner of crime. In cities, where conditions are constantly changing, the biological failures take refuge from their weakness in various forms of iniquity.

     

"Our folk in the pit over there have been out of touch with the world's progress for all these centuries. It is evident to me that they must have adjusted themselves to an almost crystallized code of culture. They must have developed in the way most suited to their character without the slightest hindrance from without. They have had no new problems too face; they must have established convention and custom of whose beneficent influence they are absolutely certain. On these grounds, I'm prepared to stake my reputation as a naturalist that they have become almost a separate species of man, as distinguished from us as a cultivated strawberry is from a wild one. Their progress is probably limited to certain narrow lines, but on those lines, believe me, they are what Huxley is to the Hottentot.

     

"Our progress in Europe has been by snatches when people were weary of wars. The civilization which we are going to explore must have become immune from considerations of necessity in its first century of existence. It may well have devoted its energies ever since to a continuous course of well-aimed ambition."

     

I broke in—"You forget about the segregated communities of monks in the middle ages. They don't seem to have got very far."

     

"They did in their way," he retorted. "Besides, they were pledged to a purpose which had nothing to do with the actualities around them, and they were not really a species; for they excluded women and children.

     

"One more point, doctor. These people have lived all this time on a diet extremely restricted. They cannot be familiar with many condiments. No doubt, their staple is this strange fish, of which I freely admit that our knowledge is so imperfect. I quite accept your criticism of my artistic effort when the fires of creation die down in my spirit."

     

I was as generous to his modesty as I had been resentful to his arrogance.

     

"I dare say you have not done so badly," I said. "No doubt but you know your subject as well as any man now living."

     

"Thank you, doctor," he said. "The best in this kind are but shadows, as Bacon says in Hamlet, thinking no doubt how his own fantastic shadow, the mummer, Shakespeare, would dominate the world for generations.

     

"And I have found Nature so ingenuous, so eccentric, so fond of practical jokes both cruel and ugly, that I think I might meet more than my match if I had to compete with a maniac of sadistic and coprophilic tendencies."

     

Again the man's hideous atheism shocked me to the soul, but I said nothing.

     

"To the point," cried Green, "for who knows how long the Hindoos have been confined to a monotonous diet of rice? How amiable, docile, and affectionate has the race become in every part of India where this is the case!

     

"The varied diet of Europe is always posing new problems to a man's digestion. For this reason he never becomes automatic like the cow. Each fresh stimulant to his stomach awakens a fresh passion. The more vicious and corrupt the civilization becomes, the more they seek change of cooking and variety of food. The banquet of what's his name, described by Petronius, was the alimentary parallel to the complicated moral cravings which made their civilization a chaos and flung them at last into irrevocable catastrophe.

     

"You see the same thing going on to-day. French cooking destroyed the Bourbons, killed Napoleon, and smashed the Second Empire.

     

"Our friends over there must long since have adjusted their bodies to their limited staples of food. Indigestion must be a thing unknown among them, for nobody overeats himself for any other reason than the perverse pleasure of titillating his taste. I expect to find these people perfect animals, practically unacquainted with disease, just as I expect to find them mentally and morally the most simple, sincere, sensible, and kind-hearted of all mankind. So much I have argued from considerations of the actual conditions which obtain among them, and which you have never denied.

     

"Other points occur to me, subtler and not so sure. I shall not trouble you with them, but such as they are, they all confirm my conjecture.

     

"I expect to find there the one perfect place upon earth where nature's idiot cruelty has been outwitted by the exceptional conditions. I expect to fund the fulfilment of Shelley's prophesy in Prometheus, the realization of the church which Christ conceived."

     

His eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm. It was evident to me that Green was one of those weak, amiable failures who lacked genuine manhood. He was not strong enough to suffer in silence, accepting the facts of life as they are. He could not endure to live except by persuading himself of a phantom paradise.

     

Also, he was even so slack in the spine that he could not accept the true and actual paradise which our Lord won for the fallen sons of Adam by his own supreme sacrifice on Calvary. The idea of such suffering as the Saviour's was too much for his soft-boiled soul. Nothing would do for him but to hope sentimentally that somewhere or other he might find a sanctuary from sin and sorrow.

     

But he could not realize the awful nature of sin; the terrors of the transgressor stunned his faculties. He could not realize himself as responsible for his own shocking state, but he wanted the soothing syrup of sham humanitarianism when his only chance lay in the drastic surgical operation vicariously undergone for us on Calvary.

     

It was not without spirit, however, that he declaimed a long passage from Prometheus Unbound as the peroration of his rhapsody. And all this time he had been packing with something of a bridegroom's rapture. He finished his job with a half-hesitating laugh.

     

"It's all so stupid," he said. "Here have I been suffering dead things all my life—exactly what all of us do, whatever our manner of life is. We fill an empty husk with rubbish, knowing full well that husk was never more than the illusionary semblance of a living thing. And all our striving is to create the delusion which deludes nobody—that our straw-stuffed stupidity is a living thing. What an ass you are, my poor doctor! You spend your life attacking what you know to be invincible. You have to pretend that life is the most important thing in the world, and yet you can't give any reason why anyone should want to live beyond the petty pleasure of a few meaningless moments, snatched more by luck than anything else, from the great mass of Time whose gifts are mostly pain, anxiety, and boredom. Man has no hope of escape from himself or his environment.

     

"A man can hardly appreciate life unless he believes that his work is worth something, and a man who weighs the facts of Nature from any scientific standpoint soever, knows what an atom is—he cannot even define what he himself calls good except by the more ridiculously childish standards. And you, instead of letting him die sensibly, when his body tells him that his time has come, you stuff his skin with spurious life; you pretend to cherish his health; and your success merely means that you cheat evolution, you save the ailing child for motherhood, you discipline the drunkard till the suppression drives him mad, and the civil was of his soul is perpetuated in peevish and enervated posterity. You prevent the elimination of the unfit, and overcrowd thereby the world until the economic law which you ignore eases the strain by war and takes its toll of the strongest at the price of the weakest of whom you are so proud. You confer artificial immunity against various diseases with similar results.

     

"Your crazy cunning crowds the cities, and depopulates the country. You starve the strongest stocks and coddle the least worthy. In the last century, you have rotted almost the whole human race. The will to live which made it has meant nothing to you.

     

"Natural protection earns you nothing—you despise it. The fittest means, to you, the fittest to pay fees.

     

"You have made all men equal by vaccines and by poison gas. You have destroyed the stamina of men by easing the ordeals that approved the vital aristocrat. The world is full of invalids; you will not let them die. Their children will be cripples past your coddling; and these, if they bear children at all, will bear degenerates, doomed to die out as any other race must die as soon as the conditions under which it throve are replaced by artificial devices.

     

"There was a wise man once who saw that his ass was tired after a hard day's work; and pitying it, cut off its legs."

     

I was thoroughly tired of this interminable tirade that it was one more peg in the bottle of brandy. So I mixed myself another, thankful at least that the foibles of this faddist took my mind off the preoccupation with to-morrow's business.

     

But it was too much to hear him call down doctors in this wanton way. I reminded him of my profession somewhat sharply. He was irritated and took open insult.

     

"I apologize," he said. "The stupidity of choking the healthy by letting the sick strangle them is not the doing of doctors. Men of science made that mischief. With doctors, it's the fittest who survive. Those who are fit to live have more sense than to let the medicine-man mess them about."

     

I rose from my seat with quiet dignity. The spiteful little scoffer had forgotten that I had brought him through a sharp bout of fever not so long before.

     

"You have had no return of ague?" I enquired with polite sarcasm.

     

He saw it.

     

"Oh, hang on—I beg your pardon—I let my tongue run away with me like the hysterical creature I am. But I'll stick to my guns for all that. The theoretical socialist isn't bound to start the process of sharing; but on principle, I shouldn't have let you save me.

     

"Mr. Green is grateful; but his private philosophy is scandalized. If quinine were abolished, only the immune could breed; and in a century or so, there would be no more fever, and the tropical man would have mastered his environment."

     

His stupidity stung me into a retort.

     

"The we should pass all our children through the fire to Moloch and expose them at birth to blizzards? Possibly, it might not be a bad plan to throw any survivors down any convenient cliff."

     

"That's unfair," expostulated the naturalist. "The tests you propose are not naturally imposed by environment. Well, as to blizzards—we are the stalwart race we are because our ancestors did stick it out."

     

"Not one baby in 5000 could stand a day in a snow storm," I objected.

     

"But once they did," cried Green. "You are proving my principal point, We are already degenerate, dependent creatures, and we thought to try the other trick and gradually regain our grip."

     

I had finished my brandy. "As a true Christian, I forgive you for the way you have insulted me and my profession," I said in a low clear decisive voice. "As a man of science, I pity your ignorance and your prejudices. As a colleague in this desperate venture, I trust that, fit or unfit, you will survive the arduous perils that confront us, so that I may shake you by the hand very soon on the shores of our Christian civilized cultured and cherished country. Let's have a peg and drink to 'Dear Old England' and 'God save the King.'

     

"I'm sorry," said Green, "you know I'm a teetotaller. I shall never go back to England—I hate the beastly place—all snobs and snatchers. I'd rather go to the Bottomless Pit in Revelations (if this place here is what I think it, I shall settle there and never hear the word "home" without a shudder)—than back to the murderous hypocrisy and respectability of 'Dear Old England' and to be torn by wolves that think a pigeon's feather in the ear disguises them sufficiently as demure doves of Venus. As for 'God save the King'—I'm a Tolstian.

     

"It's nice to have you forgive me, though I wish you hadn't done it as a Christian. My sin is to exist in this atrocious universe. I gladly accept your pity, though I wish it wasn't that from a man of science who usually shows it by cutting up dogs alive or testing theories on pauper patients. As a colleague, I reciprocate the good will of your wish by my survival, although it seems a doubtful pleasure to survive at the price of being more cruel, more cunning, more selfish, more unprincipled than those about me."

     

His emotion was perfectly genuine. Perhaps owing to the brandy, I was inclined to catch the infection.

     

"My dear old chap," I said, patting his shoulder, "you do collect the crumpet for contradicting yourself, every two bally minutes. You called me down just now for helping chaps with nice weak characters and constitutions to outlast the gorilla types, old gent."

     

"O damn it," said Green, "the worst of all my troubles is that you are so infernally reasonable, so hellishly right, so filthily irrefutable. I'm bound to contradict myself. If I tell the truth all the time, that is the climax of the curse. If I refuse to be the big blond beast with brains, savage and strong, subtle and supple, crafty and conscienceless and clever, as I must be to survive, that very pity, sympathy, or even social sense or the belief that solidarity is safe, my morally superior act does not save suffering in the long run; each individual is weakened by my loyal support. And the more we love, the more we injure those we love. What devil posed this hideous dilemma?"

     

The poor little man was shaking all over with suppressed sobs.

     

"Curse your quinine!" he almost screamed. "Why didn't you let me die? I'm not fit to face the facts as I see them, and my weakness infects everyone within the sphere of my influence. I hate myself—I hate my life—I hate all life! How can you bear life? You are not blind or heartless."

     

The reply was of course absolutely simple. I was able to point out in a few pungent phrases that the horns of his dilemma were the horns of the Devil who made it; that sin was the cause of all suffering; and the way to salvation free to all, opened wide at the most timid knocks of the weakest and weariest wayfarer.

     

I confessed with calm solemn sincerity that I was a sinner as he was, but by one simple act of will I had believed; that I was now a sinner saved by grace. I pleaded with him with all the passionate pathos of which I was capable. I told him how Satan and sin had been conquered by the Saviour; how there was no more sorrow possible but only joy for me and such as I.

     

He looked bewildered; and yet I thought I had put it in the plainest language. At last he stammered out with puzzled pain in his weak watery eyes that seemed entirely innocent of lust or laughter, incapable of taking his own side against the world or any one in it:—

     

"But—But, I still don't understand, You have been saved yourself from all this sin, but what about the others? What of your brothers and sisters who aren't saved?

     

I smiled proudly, remembering the blessing on my labours for the Lord in China.

     

"I spend my life in seeking to save others," I replied, dropping my eyes modestly, but with a smile that would not be suppressed stealing about my lips.

     

"But still, there must be some not saved," he urged.

     

"No doubt. What else should hell be for?"

     

"Oh well," said he, "it may be their own fault to disagree with such a man as you, and be damned for doing it, but for my part, I elect to go with them, and do what may be done to ease their pain."

     

Such morbid sentiments, reprehensible as they may appear, are evidently little more than the ravings of a disturbed mind. I saw that he was excited, and forbore to answer.

     

"I'm pretty strong to suffer pain," he growled. "I've had a lot of illness in my life. I've known stark poverty in boyhood when my parents, who had always lived in ease, were thrust suddenly to sweat for every sixpence. I've known what it is to bear contempt from the one woman I ever loved or ever shall; and worse than that, as I crept like a cast-off cur as near as I dared to her skirts, to find my ideal so worthless that it were flattery to call her wicked. And this, after I had seen my father dragged off to the workhouse where he died two days later; my mother sick in our slum, starved slowly because my sister was not pretty or clever enough to earn more than the minimum of food and fuel, though she went on the streets secretly in order to do it. When I was twelve, slaving for a pawnbroker, she died in the Lock hospital. Yet I was strong enough to fight my way to freedom, to keep myself, to educate myself, till now, not yet turned forty, I am famous in a sort of way. But I get no good from my success. I rarely forget myself enough to smile, for I have seen what suffering is; how necessary it is to the stupid scheme in whose spider-web we are caught.

     

"But you are not even content with all the suffering you see—nothing will suit you but you must multiply it by the limitless possibilities of your inquisitor's imagination. You must make it infinite, eternal, undiluted!

     

"You deprive physical pain of the deliverance of death. You tear the hoodwink of hope from our eyes. You are not content with the woes of the world which may be borne and may be accidents. You insist on the truth of your inhuman nightmare that every man is doomed deliberately to the destiny of damnation.

     

"And then you ask me to abhor, not the omnipotent power that has decreed these things, but him you call the Devil—who may be as bad as you say, but could never be worse than the infinitely iniquitous being that you worship. You have yourselves defined his cruelty as calculated, for one thing, and for another, without limit either in time or intensity."

     

Of course the whole thing was now clear to me. My unhappy colleague was a sensitive boy of good family, whom chance had caused to be brought up in an environment of a highly unsuitable character. He had no doubt associated with atheists and anarchists, and picked up these appalling blasphemies from their lying and lawless lips. I had no doubt that a few more years of experience of the advantages of the company of Christian gentlemen would wean him from these incoherent and infantile paradoxes.

     

I hastened, however, to change the subject. I reminded him of the time. "Boot and Saddle," I said with brusque bonhomie, "friend Thornley is getting impatient."

     

Green clapped his cap on his head and pressed my hand.

     

"You poor, poor man," he said. "How I pity a man who is not tortured to the limit of endurance by the fact of his being a man!"

     

A meek, mild, morbid fellow! I fear he had not a good mother. How shamelessly he spoke of his sister! I shook hands again. Quitting the tent I found Moses in the saddle. The servants brought drinks, and we gave him a hearty goodbye. His mood was merry almost to grossness, and he jeered quite openly at his companion. He warned us that he wouldn't stand for Green's telling smoking-room stories round the camp fire, or spending the night in trying to sneak into somebody's harem.

     

Green explained quite nicely that there would not be houses of any sort where hey were going, and that he didn't smoke and never told stories, because they seemed to him a kind of drug which, by diverting the mind from the agony of existence, only made one less able to discover a real remedy for the disease. Thornley shook his head very waggishly—Green had never made such an outburst before. The Banker's agent evidently thought that a touch of the sun was to blame.

     

He stuck his spurs into his horse, and Green's nag accepted the challenge. Two minutes later they were scarce to be seen in the distance.

     

Lyell and I watched them in silence till their forms dissolved in the dust.

     

"I wonder," he said, "if we shall see them again."

     

"What do you make of Green?" I said earnestly, for the miserable creature had impressed me despite myself.

     

"I have heard him talk," replied Lyell. "There is one part of my mind that agrees with every word he says; but that is only one part of my mind, and his presentation of facts is only one facet of them."

     

"Apart from Christianity," I ventured to observe, "I confess I see no solution, if you accept his statements as correct."

     

"Follow my previous remarks," returned our leader. "His complaint is simply that suffering exists, and he claims that this suffering is universal; that existence is evil and aimless.

     

"But this thought which expresses his suffering is a state of consciousness. If he doesn't believe in immortality, suicide would end at least his share in the mischief. If he does, he must figure out some way out on the lines which Buddha did.

     

"But if his state of consciousness aforesaid were valid, it would be universal, for it is absurd to insist that a man is suffering when he is evidently enjoying himself to the utmost. And if this consciousness were even a common experience, it would put an end to all activity, which we observe not to be the case. Like most philosophers, even professionals, he assumes that everybody is more or less like himself. With his alleged unselfishness, he is the First Prize Gold Medal egoist of the planet, for he will not even admit any existence which is not fantastic illusion.

     

"But even admitting all he says: why should there not be individuals so constituted by nature that they can say 'I'm willing to endure an eternity of senseless suffering as the price of writing this book or carving this rock'—or kissing this girl, if you like.

     

"The majority of men do say something of the sort when the mood is upon them.

     

"Green insists that they are disillusioned afterwards; but the death of anything in no way alters the fact that it has lived, and that which has lived has lived, though it be but a gnat. It exists eternally in its soul, for time is merely one of the conditions of our apprehension, and really conceals truth from us because we have added this element arbitrarily to a thing which is in reality quite independent of it.

    

"An illustration is our method of staining specimens under the microscope. Such and such a germ is invisible. We stain it with some dye which it never saw before; and having thus disguised it, we announce proudly that we see it. Almost the whole of our knowledge is dependent on similar dodges. No one knows what a straight line really is. All definitions of it are merely statements of its relation to certain other equally incomprehensible ideas. We must trust to the infinite variety of nature even as we see it by means of these dyes and lenses of ours by which we colour and distort it in order to give ourselves the trouble of deceiving ourselves as to its nature.

     

"We know the psychology of joy. It is the free expansion of what desires to expand; the release of a strain; and so on.

     

"In this universe there is so much room to use, so much conscious freedom which ignores the complex laws which determine its action in reality, that joy must be the rule. There is very little motion which our experience does not tell us to be associated with pleasure, and nature is made of Matter in Movement. What does not move can hardly be said to exist; at least we know of nothing that is not in motion.

     

"Thornley has just as much right to his picture of things as poor Green has. There is just one corner of me which agrees with Thornley. If it were not so, he couldn't exist for me. Poor little Green, with his single-track mind, is incapable of knowing you or me as we are. He insists on regarding us as melancholic altruists who (for some obscure reason) are not quire awake to the fact. That at least seems universal; and part of the cruelty of which he complains is that the foreigner—who may be, of course, one's own brother—is impossible to understand; so that we deny him the common rights of humanity, and starve him or shoot him—unless he happens to be beforehand with us."

     

"I think I see your point, Lyell. Has Green told you his theories about the people we are going to visit tomorrow?"

     

"Oh yes, by the hour. It's all excellent logic. Utopists are always the same. Their reasoning is invariably faultless. But in this irrational world it is rare for reason to be right! They are all good men; they believe in themselves; they can't believe in the existence of any one less noble than they are unfortunate enough to be. They have so much humanity that they know nothing of human nature. Contact with externals educates and exercises our faculties. Green's outlook on life implies the distrust of al action. He assumes that an atrophied organ is best. I anticipate finding our friends, the fish-eaters, an interesting study, an example of how to go wrong. To my mind it is quite clear that they are bound to be bigoted, ignorant, narrow, petty, prejudiced, with neither desire nor power of development. They may be organized automatically like insects. They may be merely approximations to the vegetable. I think the study of them will throw considerable light on the development of the human race in the matter of comparative anatomy; and of course, the ethnologists will dote on the data we bring back. Beyond that, though I admit that I dreamed a good deal when I was still a long way off, I imagined the whole business was going to be as dull and decorous as a scientific gathering in London."

     

I turned to go to my tent for one little drink before dinner.

     

"Your idea," I said over my shoulder, "seems to be that they will just have stagnated."

     

"That's it," he returned with a laugh. "Don't you know how it is with yourself after only a month or two cooped up in some corner of China?"

     

"I see what you mean," I said, and I disappeared under the flap of the canvas. No doubt he thought I agreed with him; but a little bird said in my ear that he was as wrong in his way as my meek little manling in his. I wasn't going to commit myself to any prophecy about the people we were going to see. I knew in my heart that there is one unaccountable factor which both men had left out of their calculations. Man is not the creature of circumstances beyond a certain point. His secret is a perversity dearer than life itself, which makes it impossible to predict what he will do.

 

 

 

A Transcription of Aleister Crowley's Notes

for the Uncompleted Chapters of The Fish.

 

 

Chapter X.

The aeroplane starts.

 

Eagle seen to fall dead in crater. Aornos.

 

Then own engine trouble.

 

They fall. Reach Moses' camp.

 

Moses knows way through sewer—he is cleaning himself ([illegible]).

 

Green likes dirt. Science and [illegible] choke in sewer: L & T return.

Chapter XI.

Aero repaired. Lake of Fire—Lucifer's spirit avails mankind to fly above Xndom.

 

They land on crater-edge.

 

The chained poet thrust out—explains laws of Xndom. They induce him to return as guide—disguised.

 

 

Part II  - The Pit

 

 

Chapter I.

First impressions of Xndom by L & T.

 

Their private diet Truth Will Love—concd  [concentrated] Food brought with them, no food in Xndom.

—

Various features described—Victory of L & T.

—

Xndom destroyed by L & T's survival.

 

 

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