The Horror in the Museum is a work of fiction.Names, characters, places, and incidents are theproducts of the authors’ imaginations or areused fictitiously. Any resemblance to actualevents, locales, or persons, living or dead, is en-tirely coincidental.

2007 Del Rey Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1970, 1989 by Arkham HousePublishers, Inc. “A Note on the Texts” copyright© 1970 by S. T. Joshi “Lovecraft’s ‘Revisions’ ”copyright © 1970 by August Derleth Introduc-tion copyright © 2007 by Stephen Jones

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del ReyBooks, an imprint of The Random House Pub-lishing Group, a division of Random House,Inc., New York.

Translated by Elizabeth NevilleBerkeley and Lewis Theobald,

Jun.

The Green Meadow

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The fol-lowing very singular narrative orrecord of impressions was dis-covered under circumstances soextraordinary that they deservecareful description. On the even-ing of Wednesday, August 27,1913, at about 8:30 o’clock, thepopulation of the small seasidevillage of Potowonket, Maine,U.S.A., was aroused by a

thunderous report accompaniedby a blinding flash; and personsnear the shore beheld a mammothball of fire dart from the heavensinto the sea but a short distanceout, sending up a prodigiouscolumn of water. The followingSunday a fishing party composedof John Richmond, Peter B. Carr,and Simon Canfield caught intheir trawl and dragged ashore amass of metallic rock, weighing360 pounds, and looking (as Mr.Canfield said) like a piece of slag.Most of the inhabitants agreedthat this heavy body was noneother than the fireball which hadfallen from the sky four days be-fore; and Dr. Richmond M. Jones,the local scientific authority, al-lowed that it must be an aeroliteor meteoric stone. In chipping off

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specimens to send to an expertBoston analyst, Dr. Jones dis-covered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass the strange bookcontaining the ensuing tale, whichis still in his possession.

In form the discovery resemblesan ordinary notebook, about 5 ×3 inches in size, and containingthirty leaves. In material,however, it presents marked pecu-liarities. The covers are appar-ently of some dark stony sub-stance unknown to geologists, andunbreakable by any mechanicalmeans. No chemical reagentseems to act upon them. Theleaves are much the same, savethat they are lighter in colour, andso infinitely thin as to be quiteflexible. The whole is bound bysome process not very clear to

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those who have observed it; a pro-cess involving the adhesion of theleaf substance to the cover sub-stance. These substances cannotnow be separated, nor can theleaves be torn by any amount offorce. The writing is Greek of thepurest classical quality, and severalstudents of palaeography declarethat the characters are in a cursivehand used about the second cen-tury B. C. There is little in the textto determine the date. The mech-anical mode of writing cannot bededuced beyond the fact that itmust have resembled that of themodern slate and slate-pencil.During the course of analytical ef-forts made by the late Prof. Cham-bers of Harvard, several pages,mostly at the conclusion of thenarrative, were blurred to the

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point of utter effacement beforebeing read; a circumstance form-ing a well-nigh irreparable loss.What remains of the contents wasdone into modern Greek letters bythe palaeographer Rutherford andin this form submitted to thetranslators.

Prof. Mayfield of the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, whoexamined samples of the strangestone, declares it a true meteorite;an opinion in which Dr. von Win-terfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in1918 as a dangerous enemy alien)does not concur. Prof. Bradley ofColumbia College adopts a lessdogmatic ground; pointing outthat certain utterly unknown in-gredients are present in largequantities, and warning that noclassification is as yet possible.

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The presence, nature, and mes-sage of the strange book form somomentous a problem, that no ex-planation can even be attempted.The text, as far as preserved, ishere rendered as literally as ourlanguage permits, in the hope thatsome reader may eventually hitupon an interpretation and solveone of the greatest scientific mys-teries of recent years.

—E.N.B.—L.T., Jun.

(THE STORY)

It was a narrow place, and I was alone.On one side, beyond a margin of vividwaving green, was the sea; blue, bright,and billowy, and sending up vaporousexhalations which intoxicated me. Soprofuse, indeed, were these exhalations,

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that they gave me an odd impression ofa coalescence of sea and sky; for theheavens were likewise bright and blue.On the other side was the forest, an-cient almost as the sea itself, andstretching infinitely inland. It was verydark, for the trees were grotesquelyhuge and luxuriant, and incredibly nu-merous. Their giant trunks were of ahorrible green which blended weirdlywith the narrow green tract whereon Istood. At some distance away, on eitherside of me, the strange forest extendeddown to the water’s edge; obliteratingthe shore line and completely hemmingin the narrow tract. Some of the trees, Iobserved, stood in the water itself; asthough impatient of any barrier to theirprogress.

I saw no living thing, nor sign thatany living thing save myself had everexisted. The sea and the sky and the

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wood encircled me, and reached off in-to regions beyond my imagination. Norwas there any sound save of the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.

As I stood in this silent place, I sud-denly commenced to tremble; forthough I knew not how I came there,and could scarce remember what myname and rank had been, I felt that Ishould go mad if I could understandwhat lurked about me. I recalled thingsI had learned, things I had dreamed,things I had imagined and yearned forin some other distant life. I thought oflong nights when I had gazed up at thestars of heaven and cursed the godsthat my free soul could not traverse thevast abysses which were inaccessible tomy body. I conjured up ancient blas-phemies, and terrible delvings into thepapyri of Democritus; but as memoriesappeared, I shuddered in deeper fear,

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for I knew that I was alone—horriblyalone. Alone, yet close to sentient im-pulses of vast, vague kind; which Iprayed never to comprehend nor en-counter. In the voice of the swayinggreen branches I fancied I could detecta kind of malignant hatred and daemo-niac triumph. Sometimes they struckme as being in horrible colloquy withghastly and unthinkable things whichthe scaly green bodies of the trees halfhid; hid from sight but not from con-sciousness. The most oppressive of mysensations was a sinister feeling of ali-enage. Though I saw about me objectswhich I could name—trees, grass, sea,and sky; I felt that their relation to mewas not the same as that of the trees,grass, sea, and sky I knew in anotherand dimly remembered life. The natureof the difference I could not tell, yet I

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shook in stark fright as it impressed it-self upon me.

And then, in a spot where I had be-fore discerned nothing but the mistysea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separ-ated from me by a vast expanse of bluerippling water with sun-tipped wave-lets, yet strangely near. Often I wouldpeep fearfully over my right shoulder atthe trees, but I preferred to look at theGreen Meadow, which affected meoddly.

It was while my eyes were fixed uponthis singular tract, that I first felt theground in motion beneath me. Begin-ning with a kind of throbbing agitationwhich held a fiendish suggestion ofconscious action, the bit of bank onwhich I stood detached itself from thegrassy shore and commenced to floataway; borne slowly onward as if bysome current of resistless force. I did

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not move, astonished and startled as Iwas by the unprecedented phenomen-on; but stood rigidly still until a widelane of water yawned betwixt me andthe land of trees. Then I sat down in asort of daze, and again looked at thesun-tipped water and the GreenMeadow.

Behind me the trees and the thingsthey may have been hiding seemed toradiate infinite menace. This I knewwithout turning to view them, for as Igrew more used to the scene I becameless and less dependent upon the fivesenses that once had been my sole reli-ance. I knew the green scaly foresthated me, yet now I was safe from it,for my bit of bank had drifted far fromthe shore.

But though one peril was past, anoth-er loomed up before me. Pieces of earthwere constantly crumbling from the

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floating isle which held me, so thatdeath could not be far distant in anyevent. Yet even then I seemed to sensethat death would be death to me nomore, for I turned again to watch theGreen Meadow, imbued with a curiousfeeling of security in strange contrast tomy general horror.

Then it was that I heard, at a dis-tance immeasurable, the sound of fall-ing water. Not that of any trivial cas-cade such as I had known, but thatwhich might be heard in the far Scythi-an lands if all the Mediterranean werepoured down an unfathomable abyss. Itwas toward this sound that my shrink-ing island was drifting, yet I wascontent.

Far in the rear were happening weirdand terrible things; things which Iturned to view, yet shivered to behold.For in the sky dark vaporous forms

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hovered fantastically, brooding overtrees and seeming to answer the chal-lenge of the waving green branches.Then a thick mist arose from the sea tojoin the sky-forms, and the shore waserased from my sight. Though thesun—what sun I knew not—shonebrightly on the water around me, theland I had left seemed involved in adaemoniac tempest where clashed thewill of the hellish trees and what theyhid, with that of the sky and the sea.And when the mist vanished, I saw onlythe blue sky and the blue sea, for theland and the trees were no more.

It was at this point that my attentionwas arrested by the singing in the GreenMeadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I hadencountered no sign of human life; butnow there arose to my ears a dull chantwhose origin and nature were appar-ently unmistakable. While the words

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were utterly undistinguishable, thechant awaked in me a peculiar train ofassociations; and I was reminded ofsome vaguely disquieting lines I hadonce translated out of an Egyptianbook, which in turn were taken from apapyrus of ancient Meroë. Through mybrain ran lines that I fear to repeat;lines telling of very antique things andforms of life in the days when our earthwas exceeding young. Of things whichthought and moved and were alive, yetwhich gods and men would not con-sider alive. It was a strange book.As I listened, I became gradually con-scious of a circumstance which had be-fore puzzled me only subconsciously.At no time had my sight distinguishedany definite objects in the Green Mead-ow, an impression of vivid homogen-eous verdure being the sum total of myperception. Now, however, I saw that

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the current would cause my island topass the shore at but a little distance; sothat I might learn more of the land andof the singing thereon. My curiosity tobehold the singers had mounted high,though it was mingled withapprehension.

Bits of sod continued to break awayfrom the tiny tract which carried me,but I heeded not their loss; for I feltthat I was not to die with the body (orappearance of a body) which I seemedto possess. That everything about me,even life and death, was illusory; that Ihad overleaped the bounds of mortalityand corporeal entity, becoming a free,detached thing; impressed me as almostcertain. Of my location I knew nothing,save that I felt I could not be on theearth-planet once so familiar to me. Mysensations, apart from a kind of haunt-ing terror, were those of a traveller just

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embarked upon an unending voyage ofdiscovery. For a moment I thought ofthe lands and persons I had left behind;and of strange ways whereby I mightsome day tell them of my adventurings,even though I might never return.

I had now floated very near theGreen Meadow, so that the voices wereclear and distinct; but though I knewmany languages I could not quite inter-pret the words of the chanting. Familiarthey indeed were, as I had subtly feltwhen at a greater distance, but beyonda sensation of vague and awesome re-membrance I could make nothing ofthem. A most extraordinary quality inthe voices—a quality which I cannotdescribe—at once frightened and fas-cinated me. My eyes could now discernseveral things amidst the omnipresentverdure—rocks, covered with brightgreen moss, shrubs of considerable

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height, and less definable shapes ofgreat magnitude which seemed to moveor vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a pe-culiar way. The chanting, whose au-thors I was so anxious to glimpse,seemed loudest at points where theseshapes were most numerous and mostvigorously in motion.

And then, as my island drifted closerand the sound of the distant waterfallgrew louder, I saw clearly the source ofthe chanting, and in one horrible in-stant remembered everything. Of suchthings I cannot, dare not tell, fortherein was revealed the hideous solu-tion of all which had puzzled me; andthat solution would drive you mad,even as it almost drove me.… I knewnow the change through which I hadpassed, and through which certain oth-ers who once were men had passed!and I knew the endless cycle of the

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future which none like me may es-cape.… I shall live forever, be con-scious forever, though my soul cries outto the gods for the boon of death andoblivion.… All is before me: beyond thedeafening torrent lies the land of Steth-elos, where young men are infinitelyold.… The Green Meadow … I willsend a message across the horrible im-measurable abyss.…

[At this point the text becomes illegible.]

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Elizabeth Berkeley and LewisTheobald, Jun.

The Crawling Chaos

Of the pleasures and pains of opiummuch has been written. The ecstasiesand horrors of De Quincey and theparadis artificiels of Baudelaire are pre-served and interpreted with an artwhich makes them immortal, and theworld knows well the beauty, the ter-ror, and the mystery of those obscurerealms into which the inspired dreameris transported. But much as has beentold, no man has yet dared intimate thenature of the phantasms thus unfolded

to the mind, or hint at the direction ofthe unheard-of roads along whose or-nate and exotic course the partaker ofthe drug is so irresistibly borne. DeQuincey was drawn back into Asia, thatteeming land of nebulous shadowswhose hideous antiquity is so impress-ive that “the vast age of the race andname overpowers the sense of youth inthe individual”, but farther than that hedared not go. Those who have gonefarther seldom returned; and evenwhen they have, they have been eithersilent or quite mad. I took opium butonce—in the year of the plague, whendoctors sought to deaden the agoniesthey could not cure. There was an over-dose—my physician was worn out withhorror and exertion—and I travelledvery far indeed. In the end I returnedand lived, but my nights are filled withstrange memories, nor have I ever

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permitted a doctor to give me opiumagain.

The pain and pounding in my headhad been quite unendurable when thedrug was administered. Of the future Ihad no heed; to escape, whether bycure, unconsciousness, or death, was allthat concerned me. I was partly deliri-ous, so that it is hard to place the exactmoment of transition, but I think the ef-fect must have begun shortly before thepounding ceased to be painful. As Ihave said, there was an overdose; somy reactions were probably far fromnormal. The sensation of falling, curi-ously dissociated from the idea of grav-ity or direction, was paramount; thoughthere was a subsidiary impression ofunseen throngs in incalculable profu-sion, throngs of infinitely diversenature, but all more or less related tome. Sometimes it seemed less as though

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I were falling, than as though the uni-verse or the ages were falling past me.Suddenly my pain ceased, and I beganto associate the pounding with an ex-ternal rather than internal force. Thefalling has ceased also, giving place to asensation of uneasy, temporary rest;and when I listened closely, I fanciedthe pounding was that of the vast, in-scrutable sea as its sinister, colossalbreakers lacerated some desolate shoreafter a storm of titanic magnitude. ThenI opened my eyes.

For a moment my surroundingsseemed confused, like a projected im-age hopelessly out of focus, but gradu-ally I realised my solitary presence in astrange and beautiful room lighted bymany windows. Of the exact nature ofthe apartment I could form no idea, formy thoughts were still far from settled;but I noticed varicoloured rugs and

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draperies, elaborately fashioned tables,chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delic-ate vases and ornaments which con-veyed a suggestion of the exoticwithout being actually alien. Thesethings I noticed, yet they were not longuppermost in my mind. Slowly but in-exorably crawling upon my conscious-ness, and rising above every other im-pression, came a dizzying fear of theunknown; a fear all the greater becauseI could not analyse it, and seeming toconcern a stealthily approaching men-ace—not death, but some nameless,unheard-of thing inexpressibly moreghastly and abhorrent.

Presently I realised that the directsymbol and excitant of my fear was thehideous pounding whose incessant re-verberations throbbed maddeninglyagainst my exhausted brain. It seemedto come from a point outside and below

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the edifice in which I stood, and to as-sociate itself with the most terrifyingmental images. I felt that some horriblescene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancingthrough the arched, latticed windowsthat opened so bewilderingly on everyhand. Perceiving shutters attached tothese windows, I closed them all, avert-ing my eyes from the exterior as I didso. Then, employing a flint and steelwhich I found on one of the smalltables, I lit the many candles reposingabout the walls in Arabesque sconces.The added sense of security brought byclosed shutters and artificial lightcalmed my nerves to some degree, but Icould not shut out the monotonouspounding. Now that I was calmer, thesound became as fascinating as it wasfearful, and I felt a contradictory desireto seek out its source despite my still

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powerful shrinking. Opening a portiereat the side of the room nearest thepounding, I beheld a small and richlydraped corridor ending in a carvendoor and large oriel window. To thiswindow I was irresistibly drawn,though my ill-defined apprehensionsseemed almost equally bent on holdingme back. As I approached it I could seea chaotic whirl of waters in the dis-tance. Then, as I attained it and glancedout on all sides, the stupendous pictureof my surroundings burst upon me withfull and devastating force.

I beheld such a sight as I had neverbeheld before, and which no living per-son can have seen save in the deliriumof fever or the inferno of opium. Thebuilding stood on a narrow point ofland—or what was now a narrow pointof land—fully 300 feet above whatmust lately have been a seething vortex

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of mad waters. On either side of thehouse there fell a newly washed-outprecipice of red earth, whilst ahead ofme the hideous waves were still rollingin frightfully, eating away the landwith ghastly monotony and delibera-tion. Out a mile or more there rose andfell menacing breakers at least fifty feetin height, and on the far horizon ghoul-ish black clouds of grotesque contourwere resting and brooding like un-wholesome vultures. The waves weredark and purplish, almost black, andclutched at the yielding red mud of thebank as if with uncouth, greedy hands.I could not but feel that some noxiousmarine mind had declared a war of ex-termination upon all the solid ground,perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

Recovering at length from the stuporinto which this unnatural spectacle hadthrown me, I realised that my actual

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physical danger was acute. Even whilstI gazed the bank had lost many feet,and it could not be long before thehouse would fall undermined into theawful pit of lashing waves. AccordinglyI hastened to the opposite side of theedifice, and finding a door, emerged atonce, locking it after me with a curiouskey which had hung inside. I now be-held more of the strange region aboutme, and marked a singular divisionwhich seemed to exist in the hostileocean and firmament. On each side ofthe jutting promontory different condi-tions held sway. At my left as I facedinland was a gently heaving sea withgreat green waves rolling peacefully inunder a brightly shining sun. So-mething about that sun’s nature andposition made me shudder, but I couldnot then tell, and cannot tell now, whatit was. At my right also was the sea, but

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it was blue, calm, and only gently un-dulating, while the sky above it wasdarker and the washed-out bank morenearly white than reddish.

I now turned my attention to theland, and found occasion for fresh sur-prise; for the vegetation resemblednothing I had ever seen or read about.It was apparently tropical or at leastsub-tropical—a conclusion borne out bythe intense heat of the air. Sometimes Ithought I could trace strange analogieswith the flora of my native land, fancy-ing that the well-known plants andshrubs might assume such forms undera radical change of climate; but the gi-gantic and omnipresent palm treeswere plainly foreign. The house I hadjust left was very small—hardly morethan a cottage—but its material wasevidently marble, and its architecturewas weird and composite, involving a

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quaint fusion of Western and Easternforms. At the corners were Corinthiancolumns, but the red tile roof was likethat of a Chinese pagoda. From thedoor inland there stretched a path ofsingularly white sand, about four feetwide, and lined on either side withstately palms and unidentifiable flower-ing shrubs and plants. It lay toward theside of the promontory where the seawas blue and the bank rather whitish.Down this path I felt impelled to flee,as if pursued by some malignant spiritfrom the pounding ocean. At first it wasslightly uphill, then I reached a gentlecrest. Behind me I saw the scene I hadleft; the entire point with the cottageand the black water, with the green seaon one side and the blue sea on the oth-er, and a curse unnamed and unnam-able lowering over all. I never saw itagain, and often wonder.… After this

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last look I strode ahead and surveyedthe inland panorama before me.

The path, as I have intimated, ranalong the right-hand shore as one wentinland. Ahead and to the left I nowviewed a magnificent valley comprisingthousands of acres, and covered with aswaying growth of tropical grass higherthan my head. Almost at the limit ofvision was a colossal palm tree whichseemed to fascinate and beckon me. Bythis time wonder and escape from theimperilled peninsula had largely dissip-ated my fear, but as I paused and sankfatigued to the path, idly digging withmy hands into the warm, whitish-golden sand, a new and acute sense ofdanger seized me. Some terror in theswishing tall grass seemed added tothat of the diabolically pounding sea,and I started up crying aloud and dis-jointedly, “Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger?

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Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I amafraid of?” My mind wandered back toan ancient and classical story of tigerswhich I had read; I strove to recall theauthor, but had difficulty. Then in themidst of my fear I remembered that thetale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor didthe grotesqueness of deeming him anancient author occur to me. I wishedfor the volume containing this story,and had almost started back toward thedoomed cottage to procure it when mybetter sense and the lure of the palmprevented me.

Whether or not I could have resistedthe backward beckoning without thecounter-fascination of the vast palmtree, I do not know. This attraction wasnow dominant, and I left the path andcrawled on hands and knees down thevalley’s slope despite my fear of thegrass and of the serpents it might

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contain. I resolved to fight for life andreason as long as possible against allmenaces of sea or land, though I some-times feared defeat as the maddeningswish of the uncanny grasses joined thestill audible and irritating pounding ofthe distant breakers. I would frequentlypause and put my hands to my ears forrelief, but could never quite shut outthe detestable sound. It was, as itseemed to me, only after ages that I fi-nally dragged myself to the beckoningpalm tree and lay quiet beneath its pro-tecting shade.

There now ensued a series of incid-ents which transported me to the op-posite extremes of ecstasy and horror;incidents which I tremble to recall anddare not seek to interpret. No soonerhad I crawled beneath the overhangingfoliage of the palm, than there droppedfrom its branches a young child of such

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beauty as I never beheld before.Though ragged and dusty, this beingbore the features of a faun or demigod,and seemed almost to diffuse a radiancein the dense shadow of the tree. Itsmiled and extended its hand, but be-fore I could arise and speak I heard inthe upper air the exquisite melody ofsinging; notes high and low blent witha sublime and ethereal harmoniousness.The sun had by this time sunk belowthe horizon, and in the twilight I sawthat an aureola of lambent light en-circled the child’s head. Then in a toneof silver it addressed me: “It is the end.They have come down through thegloaming from the stars. Now all isover, and beyond the Arinurian streamswe shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.” Asthe child spoke, I beheld a soft radiancethrough the leaves of the palm tree,and rising greeted a pair whom I knew

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to be the chief singers among those Ihad heard. A god and goddess theymust have been, for such beauty is notmortal; and they took my hands, say-ing, “Come, child, you have heard thevoices, and all is well. In Teloe beyondthe Milky Way and the Arinurianstreams are cities all of amber andchalcedony. And upon their domes ofmany facets glisten the images ofstrange and beautiful stars. Under theivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of li-quid gold bearing pleasure-bargesbound for blossomy Cytharion of theSeven Suns. And in Teloe and Cythari-on abide only youth, beauty, and pleas-ure, nor are any sounds heard, save oflaughter, song, and the lute. Only thegods dwell in Teloe of the goldenrivers, but among them shalt thoudwell.”

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As I listened, enchanted, I suddenlybecame aware of a change in my sur-roundings. The palm tree, so latelyovershadowing my exhausted form,was now some distance to my left andconsiderably below me. I was obviouslyfloating in the atmosphere; compan-ioned not only by the strange child andthe radiant pair, but by a constantly in-creasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens withwind-blown hair and joyful counten-ance. We slowly ascended together, asif borne on a fragrant breeze whichblew not from the earth but from thegolden nebulae, and the childwhispered in my ear that I must lookalways upward to the pathways oflight, and never backward to the sphereI had just left. The youths and maidensnow chaunted mellifluous choriambicsto the accompaniment of lutes, and I

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felt enveloped in a peace and happinessmore profound than any I had in lifeimagined, when the intrusion of asingle sound altered my destiny andshattered my soul. Through the ravish-ing strains of the singers and the lutan-ists, as if in mocking, daemoniac con-cord, throbbed from gulfs below thedamnable, the detestable pounding ofthat hideous ocean. And as those blackbreakers beat their message into myears I forgot the words of the child andlooked back, down upon the doomedscene from which I thought I hadescaped.

Down through the aether I saw theaccursed earth turning, ever turning,with angry and tempestuous seas gnaw-ing at wild desolate shores and dashingfoam against the tottering towers ofdeserted cities. And under a ghastlymoon there gleamed sights I can never

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describe, sights I can never forget;deserts of corpse-like clay and junglesof ruin and decadence where oncestretched the populous plains and vil-lages of my native land, and mael-stroms of frothing ocean where oncerose the mighty temples of my forefath-ers. Around the northern pole steameda morass of noisome growths and mias-mal vapours, hissing before the on-slaught of the ever-mounting wavesthat curled and fretted from the shud-dering deep. Then a rending reportclave the night, and athwart the desertof deserts appeared a smoking rift. Stillthe black ocean foamed and gnawed,eating away the desert on either side asthe rift in the centre widened andwidened.

There was now no land left but thedesert, and still the fuming ocean ateand ate. All at once I thought even the

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pounding sea seemed afraid ofsomething, afraid of dark gods of theinner earth that are greater than theevil god of waters, but even if it was itcould not turn back; and the desert hadsuffered too much from those night-mare waves to help them now. So theocean ate the last of the land andpoured into the smoking gulf, therebygiving up all it had ever conquered.From the new-flooded lands it flowedagain, uncovering death and decay; andfrom its ancient and immemorial bed ittrickled loathsomely, uncoveringnighted secrets of the years when Timewas young and the gods unborn. Abovethe waves rose weedy, rememberedspires. The moon laid pale lilies of lighton dead London, and Paris stood upfrom its damp grave to be sanctifiedwith star-dust. Then rose spires andmonoliths that were weedy but not

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remembered; terrible spires and mono-liths of lands that men never knewwere lands.

There was not any pounding now,but only the unearthly roaring and hiss-ing of waters tumbling into the rift. Thesmoke of that rift had changed tosteam, and almost hid the world as itgrew denser and denser. It seared myface and hands, and when I looked tosee how it affected my companions Ifound they had all disappeared. Thenvery suddenly it ended, and I knew nomore till I awaked upon a bed of con-valescence. As the cloud of steam fromthe Plutonic gulf finally concealed theentire surface from my sight, all thefirmament shrieked at a sudden agonyof mad reverberations which shook thetrembling aether. In one delirious flashand burst it happened; one blinding,deafening holocaust of fire, smoke, and

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thunder that dissolved the wan moon asit sped outward to the void.

And when the smoke cleared away,and I sought to look upon the earth, Ibeheld against the background of cold,humorous stars only the dying sun andthe pale mournful planets searching fortheir sister.

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Adolphe de Castro

The Last Test

I.

Few persons know the inside of theClarendon story, or even that there isan inside not reached by the newspa-pers. It was a San Francisco sensationin the days before the fire, both be-cause of the panic and menace thatkept it company, and because of itsclose linkage with the governor of thestate. Governor Dalton, it will be re-called, was Clarendon’s best friend, andlater married his sister. Neither Dalton

nor Mrs. Dalton would ever discuss thepainful affair, but somehow the factshave leaked out to a limited circle. Butfor that, and for the years which havegiven a sort of vagueness and imperson-ality to the actors, one would still pausebefore probing into secrets so strictlyguarded at the time.

The appointment of Dr. Alfred Clar-endon as medical director of SanQuentin Penitentiary in 189- wasgreeted with the keenest enthusiasmthroughout California. San Franciscohad at last the honour of harbouringone of the greatest biologists and physi-cians of the period, and solid patholo-gical leaders from all over the worldmight be expected to flock thither tostudy his methods, profit by his adviceand researches, and learn how to copewith their own local problems. Califor-nia, almost over night, would become a

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centre of medical scholarship withearth wide influence and reputation.

Governor Dalton, anxious to spreadthe news in its fullest significance, sawto it that the press carried ample anddignified accounts of his new ap-pointee. Pictures of Dr. Clarendon andhis new home near old Goat Hill,sketches of his career and manifoldhonours, and popular accounts of hissalient scientific discoveries were allpresented in the principal Californiadailies, till the public soon felt a sort ofreflected pride in the man whose stud-ies of pyemia in India, of the pest inChina, and of every sort of kindred dis-order elsewhere would soon enrich theworld of medicine with an antitoxin ofrevolutionary importance—a basic anti-toxin combating the whole febrile prin-ciple at its very source, and ensuring

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the ultimate conquest and extirpationof fever in all its diverse forms.

Back of the appointment stretched anextended and not wholly unromantichistory of early friendship, long separa-tion, and dramatically renewed ac-quaintance. James Dalton and the Clar-endon family had been friends in NewYork ten years before—friends andmore than friends, since the doctor’sonly sister, Georgina, was the sweet-heart of Dalton’s youth, while the doc-tor himself had been his closest associ-ate and almost his protégé in the daysof school and college. The father of Al-fred and Georgina, a Wall Street pirateof the ruthless elder breed, had knownDalton’s father well; so well, indeed,that he had finally stripped him of allhe possessed in a memorable after-noon’s fight on the stock exchange.Dalton Senior, hopeless of recuperation

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and wishing to give his one adoredchild the benefit of his insurance, hadpromptly blown out his brains; butJames had not sought to retaliate. Itwas, as he viewed it, all in the game;and he wished no harm to the father ofthe girl he meant to marry and of thebudding young scientist whose admirerand protector he had been throughouttheir years of fellowship and study. In-stead, he turned to the law, establishedhimself in a small way, and in duecourse of time asked “Old Clarendon”for Georgina’s hand.

Old Clarendon had refused veryfirmly and loudly, vowing that no pau-per and upstart lawyer was fit to be hisson-in-law; and a scene of considerableviolence had occurred. James, tellingthe wrinkled freebooter at last what heought to have been told long before,had left the house and the city in a high

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temper; and was embarked within amonth upon the California life whichwas to lead him to the governorshipthrough many a fight with ring andpolitician. His farewells to Alfred andGeorgina had been brief, and he hadnever known the aftermath of thatscene in the Clarendon library. Only bya day did he miss the news of Old Clar-endon’s death from apoplexy, and by somissing it, changed the course of hiswhole career. He had not written Geor-gina in the decade that followed; know-ing her loyalty to her father, and wait-ing till his own fortune and positionmight remove all obstacles to thematch. Nor had he sent any word to Al-fred, whose calm indifference in theface of affection and hero-worship hadalways savoured of conscious destinyand the self-sufficiency of genius. Se-cure in the ties of a constancy rare even

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then, he had worked and risen withthoughts only of the future; still a bach-elor, and with a perfect intuitive faiththat Georgina also was waiting.

In this faith Dalton was not deceived.Wondering perhaps why no messageever came, Georgina found no romancesave in her dreams and expectations;and in the course of time became busywith the new responsibilities broughtby her brother’s rise to greatness. Al-fred’s growth had not belied the prom-ise of his youth, and the slim boy haddarted quietly up the steps of sciencewith a speed and permanence almostdizzying to contemplate. Lean and as-cetic, with steel-rimmed pince-nez andpointed brown beard, Dr. Alfred Claren-don was an authority at twenty-fiveand an international figure at thirty.Careless of worldly affairs with the neg-ligence of genius, he depended vastly

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on the care and management of his sis-ter, and was secretly thankful that hermemories of James had kept her fromother and more tangible alliances.

Georgina conducted the business andhousehold of the great bacteriologist,and was proud of his strides toward theconquest of fever. She bore patientlywith his eccentricities, calmed his occa-sional bursts of fanaticism, and healedthose breaches with his friends whichnow and then resulted from his uncon-cealed scorn of anything less than asingle-minded devotion to pure truthand its progress. Clarendon was undeni-ably irritating at times to ordinary folk;for he never tired of depreciating theservice of the individual as contrastedwith the service of mankind as a whole,and in censuring men of learning whomingled domestic life or outside in-terests with their pursuit of abstract

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science. His enemies called him a bore;but his admirers, pausing before thewhite heat of ecstasy into which hewould work himself, became almostashamed of ever having any standardsor aspirations outside the one divinesphere of unalloyed knowledge.

The doctor’s travels were extensiveand Georgina generally accompaniedhim on the shorter ones. Three times,however, he had taken long, lone jauntsto strange and distant places in hisstudies of exotic fevers and half-fab-ulous plagues; for he knew that it is outof the unknown lands of cryptic andimmemorial Asia that most of theearth’s diseases spring. On each of theseoccasions he had brought back curiousmementoes which added to the eccent-ricity of his home, not least amongwhich was the needlessly large staff ofThibetan servants picked up somewhere

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in U-tsang during an epidemic of whichthe world never heard, but amidstwhich Clarendon had discovered andisolated the germ of black fever. Thesemen, taller than most Thibetans andclearly belonging to a stock but littleinvestigated in the outside world, wereof a skeletonic leanness which madeone wonder whether the doctor hadsought to symbolise in them the ana-tomical models of his college years.Their aspect, in the loose black silkrobes of Bonpa priests which he choseto give them, was grotesque in thehighest degree; and there was an un-smiling silence and stiffness in theirmotions which enhanced their air offantasy and gave Georgina a queer,awed feeling of having stumbled intothe pages of Vathek or the ArabianNights.

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But queerest of all was the generalfactotum or clinic-man, whom Claren-don addressed as Surama, and whomhe had brought back with him after along stay in Northern Africa, duringwhich he had studied certain odd inter-mittent fevers among the mysteriousSaharan Tuaregs, whose descent fromthe primal race of lost Atlantis is an oldarchaeological rumour. Surama, a manof great intelligence and seemingly in-exhaustible erudition, was as morbidlylean as the Thibetan servants; withswarthy, parchment-like skin drawn sotightly over his bald pate and hairlessface that every line of the skull stoodout in ghastly prominence—thisdeath’s-head effect being heightened bylustrelessly burning black eyes set witha depth which left to common visibilityonly a pair of dark, vacant sockets. Un-like the ideal subordinate, he seemed

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despite his impassive features to spendno effort in concealing such emotionsas he possessed. Instead, he carriedabout an insidious atmosphere of ironyor amusement, accompanied at certainmoments by a deep, guttural chucklelike that of a giant turtle which has justtorn to pieces some furry animal and isambling away toward the sea. His raceappeared to be Caucasian, but couldnot be classified more closely than that.Some of Clarendon’s friends thought helooked like a high-caste Hindoo not-withstanding his accentless speech,while many agreed with Geor-gina—who disliked him—when shegave her opinion that a Pharaoh’smummy, if miraculously brought tolife, would form a very apt twin for thissardonic skeleton.

Dalton, absorbed in his uphill politic-al battles and isolated from Eastern

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interests through the peculiar self-suffi-ciency of the old West, had not fol-lowed the meteoric rise of his formercomrade; Clarendon had actually heardnothing of one so far outside his chosenworld of science as the governor. Beingof independent and even of abundantmeans, the Clarendons had for manyyears stuck to their old Manhattanmansion in East Nineteenth Street,whose ghosts must have looked sorelyaskance at the bizarrerie of Surama andthe Thibetans. Then, through the doc-tor’s wish to transfer his base of medic-al observation, the great change hadsuddenly come, and they had crossedthe continent to take up a secluded lifein San Francisco; buying the gloomyold Bannister place near Goat Hill,overlooking the bay, and establishingtheir strange household in a rambling,French-roofed relic of mid-Victorian

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design and gold-rush parvenu display,set amidst high-walled grounds in a re-gion still half suburban.

Dr. Clarendon, though better satisfiedthan in New York, still felt cramped forlack of opportunities to apply and testhis pathological theories. Unworldly ashe was, he had never thought of usinghis reputation as an influence to gainpublic appointment; though more andmore he realised that only the medicaldirectorship of a government or a char-itable institution—a prison, almshouse,or hospital—would give him a field ofsufficient width to complete his re-searches and make his discoveries ofthe greatest use to humanity and sci-ence at large.

Then he had run into James Daltonby sheer accident one afternoon in Mar-ket Street as the governor was swingingout of the Royal Hotel. Georgina had

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been with him, and an almost instantrecognition had heightened the dramaof the reunion. Mutual ignorance of oneanother’s progress had bred long ex-planation and histories, and Clarendonwas pleased to find that he had so im-portant an official for a friend. Daltonand Georgina, exchanging many aglance, felt more than a trace of theiryouthful tenderness; and a friendshipwas then and there revived which ledto frequent calls and a fuller and fullerexchange of confidences.

James Dalton learned of his oldprotégé’s need for political appoint-ment, and sought, true to his protectiverole of school and college days, to de-vise some means of giving “Little Alf”the needed position and scope. He had,it is true, wide appointive powers; butthe legislature’s constant attacks andencroachments forced him to exercise

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these with the utmost discretion. Atlength, however, scarcely three monthsafter the sudden reunion, the foremostinstitutional medical office in the statefell vacant. Weighing all the elementswith care, and conscious that hisfriend’s achievements and reputationwould justify the most substantial re-wards, the governor felt at last able toact. Formalities were few, and on theeighth of November, 189-, Dr. AlfredSchuyler Clarendon became medicaldirector of the California State Peniten-tiary at San Quentin.

II.

In scarcely more than a month thehopes of Dr. Clarendon’s admirers wereamply fulfilled. Sweeping changes inmethods brought to the prison’s

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medical routine an efficiency never be-fore dreamed of; and though the subor-dinates were naturally not without jeal-ousy, they were obliged to admit themagical results of a really great man’ssuperintendence. Then came a timewhere mere appreciation might wellhave grown to devout thankfulness at aprovidential conjunction of time, place,and man; for one morning Dr. Jonescame to his new chief with a grave faceto announce his discovery of a casewhich he could not but identify as thatselfsame black fever whose germ Clar-endon had found and classified.

Dr. Clarendon shewed no surprise,but kept on at the writing before him.

“I know,” he said evenly; “I cameacross that case yesterday. I’m glad yourecognised it. Put the man in a separateward, though I don’t believe this feveris contagious.”

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Dr. Jones, with his own opinion ofthe malady’s contagiousness, was gladof this deference to caution; andhastened to execute the order. Upon hisreturn Clarendon rose to leave, declar-ing that he would himself take chargeof the case alone. Disappointed in hiswish to study the great man’s methodsand technique, the junior physicianwatched his chief stride away towardthe lone ward where he had placed thepatient, more critical of the new regimethan at any time since admiration haddisplaced his first jealous pangs.

Reaching the ward, Clarendonentered hastily, glancing at the bed andstepping back to see how far Dr. Jones’sobvious curiosity might have led him.Then, finding the corridor still vacant,he shut the door and turned to examinethe sufferer. The man was a convict ofa peculiarly repulsive type, and seemed

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to be racked by the keenest throes ofagony. His features were frightfullycontracted, and his knees drawnsharply up in the mute desperation ofthe stricken. Clarendon studied himclosely, raising his tightly shut eyelids,took his pulse and temperature, and fi-nally dissolving a tablet in water,forced the solution between the suffer-er’s lips. Before long the height of theattack abated, as shewn by the relaxingbody and returning normality of ex-pression, and the patient began tobreathe more easily. Then, by a softrubbing of the ears, the doctor causedthe man to open his eyes. There waslife in them, for they moved from sideto side, though they lacked the fine firewhich we are wont to deem the imageof the soul. Clarendon smiled as he sur-veyed the peace his help had brought,feeling behind him the power of an all-

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capable science. He had long known ofthis case, and had snatched the victimfrom death with the work of a moment.Another hour and this man would havegone—yet Jones had seen the symp-toms for days before discovering them,and having discovered them, did notknow what to do.

Man’s conquest of disease, however,cannot be perfect. Clarendon, assuringthe dubious trusty-nurses that the feverwas not contagious, had had the patientbathed, sponged in alcohol, and put tobed; but was told the next morning thatthe case was lost. The man had diedafter midnight in the most intenseagony, and with such cries and distor-tions of face that the nurses were driv-en almost to panic. The doctor took thisnews with his usual calm, whatever hisscientific feelings may have been, andordered the burial of the patient in

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quicklime. Then, with a philosophicshrug of the shoulders, he made theusual rounds of the penitentiary.

Two days later the prison was hitagain. Three men came down at oncethis time, and there was no concealingthe fact that a black fever epidemic wasunder way. Clarendon, having adheredso firmly to his theory of non-conta-giousness, suffered a distinct loss ofprestige, and was handicapped by therefusal of the trusty-nurses to attendthe patients. Theirs was not the soul-free devotion of those who sacrificethemselves to science and humanity.They were convicts, serving only be-cause of the privileges they could nototherwise buy, and when the price be-came too great they preferred to resignthe privileges.

But the doctor was still master of thesituation. Consulting with the warden

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and sending urgent messages to hisfriend the governor, he saw to it thatspecial rewards in cash and in reducedterms were offered to the convicts forthe dangerous nursing service; and bythis method succeeded in getting a veryfair quota of volunteers. He was steeledfor action now, and nothing couldshake his poise and determination. Ad-ditional cases brought only a curt nod,and he seemed a stranger to fatigue ashe hastened from bedside to bedside allover the vast stone home of sadnessand evil. More than forty cases de-veloped within another week, andnurses had to be brought from the city.Clarendon went home very seldom atthis stage, often sleeping on a cot in thewarden’s quarters, and always givinghimself up with typical abandon to theservice of medicine and of mankind.

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Then came the first mutterings ofthat storm which was soon to convulseSan Francisco. News will out, and themenace of black fever spread over thetown like a fog from the bay. Reporterstrained in the doctrine of “sensationfirst” used their imagination without re-straint, and gloried when at last theywere able to produce a case in the Mex-ican quarter which a local physi-cian—fonder perhaps of money than oftruth or civic welfare—pronouncedblack fever.

That was the last straw. Frantic at thethought of the crawling death so closeupon them, the people of San Franciscowent mad en masse, and embarkedupon that historic exodus of which allthe country was soon to hear over busywires. Ferries and rowboats, excursionsteamers and launches, railways andcable cars, bicycles and carriages,

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moving-vans and work carts, all werepressed into instant and frenzied ser-vice. Sausalito and Tamalpais, as lyingin the direction of San Quentin, sharedin the flight; while housing space inOakland, Berkeley, and Alameda roseto fabulous prices. Tent colonies sprangup, and improvised villages lined thecrowded southward highways fromMillbrae to San Jose. Many soughtrefuge with friends in Sacramento,while the fright-shaken residue forcedby various causes to stay behind coulddo little more than maintain the basicnecessities of a nearly dead city.

Business, save for quack doctors with“sure cures” and “preventives” for useagainst the fever, fell rapidly to thevanishing-point. At first the saloonsoffered “medicated drinks”, but soonfound that the populace preferred to beduped by charlatans of more

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professional aspect. In strangely noise-less streets persons peered into one an-other’s faces to glimpse possible plaguesymptoms, and shopkeepers beganmore and more to refuse admission totheir clientele, each customer seemingto them a fresh fever menace. Legal andjudicial machinery began to disinteg-rate as attorneys and county clerks suc-cumbed one by one to the urge forflight. Even the doctors deserted inlarge numbers, many of them pleadingthe need of vacations among the moun-tains and the lakes in the northern partof the state. Schools and colleges,theatres and cafés, restaurants and sa-loons, all gradually closed their doors;and in a single week San Francisco layprostrate and inert with only its light,power, and water service even half nor-mal, with newspapers in skeletonicform, and with a crippled parody on

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transportation maintained by the horseand cable cars.

This was the lowest ebb. It could notlast long, for courage and observationare not altogether dead in mankind;and sooner or later the non-existence ofany widespread black fever epidemicoutside San Quentin became too obvi-ous a fact to deny, notwithstanding sev-eral actual cases and the undeniablespread of typhoid in the unsanitary sub-urban tent colonies. The leaders andeditors of the community conferred andtook action, enlisting in their servicethe very reporters whose energies haddone so much to bring on the trouble,but now turning their “sensation first”avidity into more constructive chan-nels. Editorials and fictitious interviewsappeared, telling of Dr. Clarendon’scomplete control of the disease, and ofthe absolute impossibility of its

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diffusion beyond the prison walls. Reit-eration and circulation slowly did theirwork, and gradually a slim backwardtrickle of urbanites swelled into a vigor-ous refluent stream. One of the firsthealthy symptoms was the start of anewspaper controversy of the approvedacrimonious kind, attempting to fixblame for the panic wherever the vari-ous participants thought it belonged.The returning doctors, jealouslystrengthened by their timely vacations,began striking at Clarendon, assuringthe public that they as well as he wouldkeep the fever in leash, and censuringhim for not doing even more to checkits spread within San Quentin.

Clarendon had, they averred, permit-ted far more deaths than were neces-sary. The veriest tyro in medicine knewhow to check fever contagion; and ifthis renowned savant did not do it, it

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was clearly because he chose for sci-entific reasons to study the final effectsof the disease, rather than to prescribeproperly and save the victims. Thispolicy, they insinuated, might be prop-er enough among convicted murderersin a penal institution, but it would notdo in San Francisco, where life was stilla precious and sacred thing. Thus theywent on, and the papers were glad topublish all they wrote, since the sharp-ness of the campaign, in which Dr.Clarendon would doubtless join, wouldhelp to obliterate confusion and restoreconfidence among the people.

But Clarendon did not reply. He onlysmiled, while his singular clinic-manSurama indulged in many a deep, tes-tudinous chuckle. He was at homemore nowadays, so that reporters beganbesieging the gate of the great wall thedoctor had built around his house,

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instead of pestering the warden’s officeat San Quentin. Results, though, wereequally meagre; for Surama formed animpassable barrier between the doctorand the outer world—even after the re-porters had got into the grounds. Thenewspaper men getting access to thefront hall had glimpses of Clarendon’ssingular entourage and made the bestthey could in a “write-up” of Suramaand the queer skeletonic Thibetans. Ex-aggeration, of course, occurred in everyfresh article, and the net effect of thepublicity was distinctly adverse to thegreat physician. Most persons hate theunusual, and hundreds who could haveexcused heartlessness or incompetencestood ready to condemn the grotesquetaste manifested in the chuckling at-tendant and the eight black-robedOrientals.

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Early in January an especially per-sistent young man from the Observerclimbed the moated eight-foot brickwall in the rear of the Clarendongrounds and began a survey of the var-ied outdoor appearances which treesconcealed from the front walk. Withquick, alert brain he took ineverything—the rose-arbour, the aviar-ies, the animal cages where all sorts ofmammalia from monkeys to guinea-pigs might be seen and heard, the stoutwooden clinic building with barredwindows in the northwest corner of theyard—and bent searching glancesthroughout the thousand square feet ofintramural privacy. A great article wasbrewing, and he would have escapedunscathed but for the barking of Dick,Georgina Clarendon’s gigantic and be-loved St. Bernard. Surama, instant inhis response, had the youth by the

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collar before a protest could be uttered,and was presently shaking him as a ter-rier shakes a rat, and dragging himthrough the trees to the front yard andthe gate.

Breathless explanations and quaver-ing demands to see Dr. Clarendon wereuseless. Surama only chuckled anddragged his victim on. Suddenly a pos-itive fright crept over the dapper scribe,and he began to wish desperately thatthis unearthly creature would speak, ifonly to prove that he really was a beingof honest flesh and blood belonging tothis planet. He became deathly sick,and strove not to glimpse the eyeswhich he knew must lie at the base ofthose gaping black sockets. Soon heheard the gate open and felt himselfpropelled violently through; in anothermoment waking rudely to the things ofearth as he landed wetly and muddily

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in the ditch which Clarendon had haddug around the entire length of thewall. Fright gave a place to rage as heheard the massive gate slam shut, andhe rose dripping to shake his fist at theforbidding portal. Then, as he turned togo, a soft sound grated behind him, andthrough a small wicket in the gate hefelt the sunken eyes of Surama andheard the echoes of a deep-voiced,blood-freezing chuckle.

This young man, feeling perhapsjustly that his handling had beenrougher than he deserved, resolved torevenge himself upon the household re-sponsible for his treatment. Accordinglyhe prepared a fictitious interview withDr. Clarendon, supposed to be held inthe clinic building, during which hewas careful to describe the agonies of adozen black fever patients whom hisimagination ranged on orderly rows of

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couches. His master-stroke was the pic-ture of one especially pathetic sufferergasping for water, while the doctorheld a glass of the sparkling fluid justout of his reach, in a scientific attemptto determine the effect of a tantalisingemotion on the course of the disease.This invention was followed by para-graphs of insinuating comment so out-wardly respectful that it bore a doublevenom. Dr. Clarendon was, the articleran, undoubtedly the greatest and mostsingle-minded scientist in the world;but science is no friend to individualwelfare, and one would not like to haveone’s gravest ills drawn out and aggrav-ated merely to satisfy an investigatoron some point of abstract truth. Life istoo short for that.

Altogether, the article was diabolic-ally skilful, and succeeded in horrifyingnine readers out of ten against Dr.

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Clarendon and his supposed methods.Other papers were quick to copy andenlarge upon its substance, taking thecue it offered, and commencing a seriesof “faked” interviews which fairly ranthe gamut of derogatory fantasy. In nocase, however, did the doctor condes-cend to offer a contradiction. He had notime to waste on fools and liars, andcared little for the esteem of a thought-less rabble he despised. When JamesDalton telegraphed his regrets andoffered aid, Clarendon replied with analmost boorish curtness. He did notheed the barking of dogs, and could notbother to muzzle them. Nor would hethank anyone for messing with a matterwholly beneath notice. Silent and con-temptuous, he continued his dutieswith tranquil evenness.

But the young reporter’s spark haddone its work. San Francisco was

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insane again, and this time as muchwith rage as with fear. Sober judgmentbecame a lost art; and though nosecond exodus occurred, there ensued areign of vice and recklessness born ofdesperation, and suggesting parallelphenomena in mediaeval times of pesti-lence. Hatred ran riot against the manwho had found the disease and wasstruggling to restrain it, and a light-headed public forgot his great servicesto knowledge in their efforts to fan theflames of resentment. They seemed, intheir blindness, to hate him in person,rather than the plague which had cometo their breeze-cleaned and usuallyhealthy city.

Then the young reporter, playing inthe Neronic fire he had kindled, addeda crowning personal touch of his own.Remembering the indignities he hadsuffered at the hands of the cadaverous

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clinic-man, he prepared a masterly art-icle on the home and environment ofDr. Clarendon, giving especial promin-ence to Surama, whose very aspect hedeclared sufficient to scare the healthi-est person into any sort of fever. Hetried to make the gaunt chuckler ap-pear equally ridiculous and terrible,succeeding best, perhaps, in the latterhalf of his intention, since a tide of hor-ror always welled up whenever hethought of his brief proximity to thecreature. He collected all the rumourscurrent about the man, elaborated onthe unholy depth of his reputed schol-arship, and hinted darkly that it couldhave been no godly realm of secret andaeon-weighted Africa wherein Dr. Clar-endon had found him.

Georgina, who followed the papersclosely, felt crushed and hurt by theseattacks upon her brother, but James

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Dalton, who called often at the house,did his best to comfort her. In this hewas warm and sincere; for he wishednot only to console the woman heloved, but to utter some measure of thereverence he had always felt for thestarward-bound genius who had beenhis youth’s closest comrade. He told Ge-orgina how greatness can never be ex-empted from the shafts of envy, andcited the long, sad list of splendidbrains crushed beneath vulgar heels.The attacks, he pointed out, formed thetruest of all proofs of Alfred’s solideminence.

“But they hurt just the same,” she re-joined, “and all the more because Iknow that Al really suffers from them,no matter how indifferent he tries tobe.”

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Dalton kissed her hand in a mannernot then obsolete among well-bornpersons.

“And it hurts me a thousand timesmore, knowing that it hurts you andAlf. But never mind, Georgie, we’llstand together and pull through it!”

Thus it came about that Georginacame more and more to rely on thestrength of the steel-firm, square-jawedgovernor who had been her youthfulswain, and more and more to confide inhim the things she feared. The press at-tacks and the epidemic were not quiteall. There were aspects of the house-hold which she did not like. Surama,cruel in equal measure to man andbeast, filled her with the most unnam-able repulsion; and she could not butfeel that he meant some vague, indefin-able harm to Alfred. She did not likethe Thibetans, either, and thought it

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very peculiar that Surama was able totalk with them. Alfred would not tellher who or what Surama was, but hadonce explained rather haltingly that hewas a much older man than would becommonly thought credible, and thathe had mastered secrets and beenthrough experiences calculated to makehim a colleague of phenomenal valuefor any scientist seeking Nature’s hid-den mysteries.

Urged by her uneasiness, Dalton be-came a still more frequent visitor at theClarendon home, though he saw thathis presence was deeply resented bySurama. The bony clinic-man formedthe habit of glaring peculiarly fromthose spectral sockets when admittinghim, and would often, after closing thegate when he left, chuckle monoton-ously in a manner that made his fleshcreep. Meanwhile Dr. Clarendon

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seemed oblivious of everything save hiswork at San Quentin, whither he wenteach day in his launch—alone save forSurama, who managed the wheel whilethe doctor read or collated his notes.Dalton welcomed these regular ab-sences, for they gave him constant op-portunities to renew his suit for Geor-gina’s hand. When he would overstayand meet Alfred, however, the latter’sgreeting was always friendly despite hishabitual reserve. In time the engage-ment of James and Georgina grew to bea definite thing, and the two awaitedonly a favourable chance to speak toAlfred.

The governor, whole-souled ineverything and firm in his protectiveloyalty, spared no pains in spreadingpropaganda on his old friend’s behalf.Press and officialdom both felt his in-fluence, and he even succeeded in

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interesting scientists in the East, manyof whom came to California to studythe plague and investigate the anti-fever bacillus which Clarendon was sorapidly isolating and perfecting. Thesedoctors and biologists, however, didnot obtain the information they wished;so that several of them left with a veryunfortunate impression. Not a few pre-pared articles hostile to Clarendon, ac-cusing him of an unscientific and fame-seeking attitude, and intimating that heconcealed his methods through a highlyunprofessional desire for ultimate per-sonal profit.

Others, fortunately, were more liber-al in their judgments, and wrote enthu-siastically of Clarendon and his work.They had seen the patients, and couldappreciate how marvellously he heldthe dread disease in leash. His secrecyregarding the antitoxin they deemed

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quite justifiable, since its public diffu-sion in unperfected form could not butdo more harm than good. Clarendonhimself, whom many of their numberhad met before, impressed them moreprofoundly than ever, and they did nothesitate to compare him with Jenner,Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Metchnikoff, andthe rest of those whose whole liveshave served pathology and humanity.Dalton was careful to save for Alfred allthe magazines that spoke well of him,bringing them in person as an excuse tosee Georgina. They did not, however,produce much effect save a contemptu-ous smile; and Clarendon would gener-ally throw them to Surama, whosedeep, disturbing chuckle upon readingformed a close parallel to the doctor’sown ironic amusement.

One Monday evening early in Febru-ary Dalton called with the definite

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intention of asking Clarendon for hissister’s hand. Georgina herself admittedhim to the grounds, and as they walkedtoward the house he stopped to pat thegreat dog which rushed up and laidfriendly fore paws on his breast. It wasDick, Georgina’s cherished St. Bernard,and Dalton was glad to feel that he hadthe affection of a creature which meantso much to her.

Dick was excited and glad, andturned the governor nearly half aboutwith his vigorous pressure as he gave asoft quick bark and sprang off throughthe trees toward the clinic. He did notvanish, though, but presently stoppedand looked back, softly barking againas if he wished Dalton to follow. Geor-gina, fond of obeying her huge pet’splayful whims, motioned to James tosee what he wanted; and they bothwalked slowly after him as he trotted

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relievedly to the rear of the yard wherethe top of the clinic building stood sil-houetted against the stars above thegreat brick wall.

The outline of lights within shewedaround the edges of the dark window-curtains, so they knew that Alfred andSurama were at work. Suddenly fromthe interior came a thin, subdued soundlike a cry of a child—a plaintive call of“Mamma! Mamma!” at which Dickbarked, while James and Georgina star-ted perceptibly. Then Georgina smiled,remembering the parrots that Claren-don always kept for experimental uses,and patted Dick on the head either toforgive him for having fooled her andDalton, or to console him for havingbeen fooled himself.

As they turned slowly toward thehouse Dalton mentioned his resolve tospeak to Alfred that evening about their

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engagement, and Georgina supplied noobjection. She knew that her brotherwould not relish the loss of a faithfulmanager and companion, but believedhis affection would place no barrier inthe way of her happiness.

Later that evening Clarendon cameinto the house with a springy step andaspect less grim than usual. Dalton, see-ing a good omen in this easy buoyancy,took heart as the doctor wrung hishand with a jovial “Ah, Jimmy, how’spolitics this year?” He glanced at Geor-gina, and she quietly excused herself,while the two men settled down to achat on general subjects. Little by little,amidst many reminders of their oldyouthful days, Dalton worked towardhis point; till at last he came out plainlywith the crucial query.

“Alf, I want to marry Georgina. Havewe your blessing?”

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Keenly watching his old friend,Dalton saw a shadow steal over hisface. The dark eyes flashed for a mo-ment, then veiled themselves as wontedplacidity returned. So science or selfish-ness was at work after all!

“You’re asking an impossibility,James. Georgina isn’t the aimless but-terfly she was years ago. She has aplace in the service of truth and man-kind now, and that place is here. She’sdecided to devote her life to mywork—to the household that makes mywork possible—and there’s no room fordesertion or personal caprice.”

Dalton waited to see if he had fin-ished. The same old fanaticism—hu-manity versus the individual—and thedoctor was going to let it spoil his sis-ter’s life! Then he tried to answer.

“But look here, Alf, do you mean tosay that Georgina, in particular, is so

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necessary to your work that you mustmake a slave and martyr of her? Useyour sense of proportion, man! If itwere a question of Surama or some-body in the utter thick of your experi-ments it might be different; but afterall, Georgina is only a housekeeper toyou in the last analysis. She has prom-ised to be my wife and says that sheloves me. Have you the right to cut heroff from the life that belongs to her?Have you the right—”

“That’ll do, James!” Clarendon’s facewas set and white. “Whether or not Ihave the right to govern my own familyis no business of an outsider.”

“Outsider—you can say that to a manwho—” Dalton almost choked as thesteely voice of the doctor interruptedhim again.

“An outsider to my family, and fromnow on an outsider to my home.

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Dalton, your presumption goes just alittle too far! Good evening, Governor!”

And Clarendon strode from the roomwithout extending his hand.

Dalton hesitated for a moment, al-most at a loss what to do, whenpresently Georgina entered. Her faceshewed that she had spoken with herbrother, and Dalton took both herhands impetuously.

“Well, Georgie, what do you say? I’mafraid it’s a choice between Alf and me.You know how I feel—you know how Ifelt before, when it was your father Iwas up against. What’s your answerthis time?”

He paused as she responded slowly.“James, dear, do you believe that I

love you?”He nodded and pressed her hands

expectantly.

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“Then, if you love me, you’ll wait awhile. Don’t think of Al’s rudeness. He’sto be pitied. I can’t tell you the wholething now, but you know how worried Iam—what with the strain of his work,the criticisms, and the staring and cack-ling of that horrible creature Surama!I’m afraid he’ll break down—he shewsthe strain more than anyone outside thefamily could tell. I can see it, for I’vewatched him all my life. He’s chan-ging—slowly bending under his bur-dens—and he puts on his extrabrusqueness to hide it. You can seewhat I mean, can’t you, dear?”

She paused, and Dalton noddedagain, pressing one of her hands to hisbreast. Then she concluded.

“So promise me, dear, to be patient. Imust stand by him; I must! I must!”

Dalton did not speak for a while, buthis head inclined in what was almost a

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bow of reverence. There was more ofChrist in this devoted woman than hehad thought any human being pos-sessed; and in the face of such love andloyalty he could do no urging.

Words of sadness and parting werebrief; and James, whose blue eyes weremisty, scarcely saw the gaunt clinic-man as the gate to the street was at lastopened to him. But when it slammed tobehind him he heard that blood-curd-ling chuckle he had come to recogniseso well, and knew that Surama wasthere—Surama, whom Georgina hadcalled her brother’s evil genius. Walk-ing away with a firm step, Dalton re-solved to be watchful, and to act at thefirst sign of trouble.

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III.

Meanwhile San Francisco, the epi-demic still on the lips of all, seethedwith anti-Clarendon feeling. Actuallythe cases outside the penitentiary werevery few, and confined almost whollyto the lower Mexican element whoselack of sanitation was a standing invita-tion to disease of every kind; but politi-cians and the people needed no morethan this to confirm the attacks madeby the doctor’s enemies. Seeing thatDalton was immovable in his champi-onship of Clarendon, the malcontents,medical dogmatists, and ward-heelersturned their attention to the state legis-lature; lining up the anti-Clarendonistsand the governor’s old enemies withgreat shrewdness, and preparing tolaunch a law—with a veto-proof major-ity—transferring the authority for

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minor institutional appointments fromthe chief executive to the variousboards or commissions concerned.

In the furtherance of this measure nolobbyist was more active than Claren-don’s chief assistant, Dr. Jones. Jealousof his superior from the first, he nowsaw an opportunity for turning mattersto his liking; and he thanked fate forthe circumstance—responsible indeedfor his present position—of his relation-ship to the chairman of the prisonboard. The new law, if passed, wouldcertainly mean the removal of Claren-don and the appointment of himself inhis stead; so, mindful of his own in-terest, he worked hard for it. Jones wasall that Clarendon was not—a naturalpolitician and sycophantic opportunistwho served his own advancement firstand science only incidentally. He waspoor, and avid for salaried position,

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quite in contrast to the wealthy and in-dependent savant he sought to displace.So with a rat-like cunning and persist-ence he laboured to undermine thegreat biologist above him, and was oneday rewarded by the news that the newlaw was passed. Thenceforward thegovernor was powerless to make ap-pointments to the state institutions, andthe medical directorship of San Quentinlay at the disposal of the prison board.

Of all this legislative turmoil Claren-don was singularly oblivious. Wrappedwholly in matters of administration andresearch, he was blind to the treason of“that ass Jones” who worked by hisside, and deaf to all the gossip of thewarden’s office. He had never in his liferead the newspapers, and the banish-ment of Dalton from his house cut offhis last real link with the world of out-side events. With the naiveté of a

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recluse, he at no time thought of his po-sition as insecure. In view of Dalton’sloyalty, and of his forgiveness of eventhe greatest wrongs, as shewn in hisdealings with the elder Clarendon whohad crushed his father to death on thestock exchange, the possibility of agubernatorial dismissal was, of course,out of the question; nor could the doc-tor’s political ignorance envisage a sud-den shift of power which might placethe matter of retention or dismissal invery different hands. Thereupon hemerely smiled with satisfaction whenDalton left for Sacramento; convincedthat his place in San Quentin and hissister’s place in his household werealike secure from disturbance. He wasaccustomed to having what he wanted,and fancied his luck was still holdingout.

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The first week in March, a day or soafter the enactment of the new law, thechairman of the prison board called atSan Quentin. Clarendon was out, butDr. Jones was glad to shew the augustvisitor—his own uncle, incident-ally—through the great infirmary, in-cluding the fever ward made so famousby press and panic. By this time conver-ted against his will to Clarendon’s be-lief in the fever’s non-contagiousness,Jones smilingly assured his uncle thatnothing was to be feared, and encour-aged him to inspect the patients in de-tail—especially a ghastly skeleton, oncea very giant of bulk and vigour, whowas, he insinuated, slowly and pain-fully dying because Clarendon wouldnot administer the proper medicine.

“Do you mean to say,” cried thechairman, “that Dr. Clarendon refuses

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to let the man have what he needs,knowing his life could be saved?”

“Just that,” snapped Dr. Jones, paus-ing as the door opened to admit noneother than Clarendon himself. Claren-don nodded coldly to Jones and sur-veyed the visitor, whom he did notknow, with disapproval.

“Dr. Jones, I thought you knew thiscase was not to be disturbed at all. Andhaven’t I said that visitors aren’t to beadmitted except by specialpermission?”

But the chairman interrupted beforehis nephew could introduce him.

“Pardon me, Dr. Clarendon, but am Ito understand that you refuse to givethis man the medicine that would savehim?”

Clarendon glared coldly, and rejoinedwith steel in his voice.

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“That’s an impertinent question, sir. Iam in authority here, and visitors arenot allowed. Please leave the room atonce.”

The chairman, his sense of dramasecretly tickled, answered with greaterpomp and hauteur than were necessary.

“You mistake me, sir! I, not you, ammaster here. You are addressing thechairman of the prison board. I mustsay, moreover, that I deem your activ-ity a menace to the welfare of the pris-oners, and must request your resigna-tion. Henceforth Dr. Jones will be incharge, and if you wish to remain untilyour formal dismissal you will takeyour orders from him.”

It was Wilfred Jones’s great moment.Life never gave him another such cli-max, and we need not grudge him thisone. After all, he was a small ratherthan a bad man, and he had only

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obeyed a small man’s code of looking tohimself at all costs. Clarendon stoodstill, gazing at the speaker as if hethought him mad, till in another secondthe look of triumph on Dr. Jones’s faceconvinced him that something import-ant was indeed afoot. He was icilycourteous as he replied.

“No doubt you are what you claim tobe, sir. But fortunately my appointmentcame from the governor of the state,and can therefore be revoked only byhim.”

The chairman and his nephew bothstared perplexedly, for they had notrealised to what lengths unworldly ig-norance can go. Then the older man,grasping the situation, explained atsome length.

“Had I found that the current reportsdid you an injustice,” he concluded, “Iwould have deferred action; but the

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case of this poor man and your own ar-rogant manner left me no choice. As itis—”

But Dr. Clarendon interrupted with anew razor-sharpness in his voice.

“As it is, I am the director in chargeat present, and I ask you to leave thisroom at once.”

The chairman reddened andexploded.

“Look here, sir, who do you thinkyou’re talking to? I’ll have you chuckedout of here—damn your impertinence!”

But he had time only to finish thesentence. Transformed by the insult toa sudden dynamo of hate, the slenderscientist launched out with both fists ina burst of preternatural strength ofwhich no one would have thought himcapable. And if his strength was preter-natural, his accuracy of aim was no lessso; for not even a champion of the ring

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could have wrought a neater result.Both men—the chairman and Dr.Jones—were squarely hit; the one fullin the face and the other on the point ofthe chin. Going down like felled trees,they lay motionless and unconscious onthe floor; while Clarendon, now clearand completely master of himself, tookhis hat and cane and went out to joinSurama in the launch. Only whenseated in the moving boat did he at lastgive audible vent to the frightful ragethat consumed him. Then, with faceconvulsed, he called down imprecationsfrom the stars and the gulfs beyond thestars; so that even Surama shuddered,made an elder sign that no book of his-tory records, and forgot to chuckle.

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IV.

Georgina soothed her brother’s hurtas best she could. He had come homementally and physically exhausted andthrown himself on the library lounge;and in that gloomy room, little by little,the faithful sister had taken in the al-most incredible news. Her consolationswere instantaneous and tender, and shemade him realise how vast, though un-conscious, a tribute to his greatness theattacks, persecution, and dismissal allwere. He had tried to cultivate the in-difference she preached, and couldhave done so had personal dignityalone been involved. But the loss of sci-entific opportunity was more than hecould calmly bear, and he sighed againand again as he repeated how threemonths more of study in the prisonmight have given him at last the long-

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sought bacillus which would make allfever a thing of the past.

Then Georgina tried another mode ofcheering, and told him that surely theprison board would send for him againif the fever did not abate, or if it brokeout with increased force. But even thiswas ineffective, and Clarendonanswered only in a string of bitter, iron-ic, and half-meaningless little sentenceswhose tone shewed all too clearly howdeeply despair and resentment hadbitten.

“Abate? Break out again? Oh, it’llabate all right! At least, they’ll think ithas abated. They’d think anything, nomatter what happens! Ignorant eyes seenothing, and bunglers are never dis-coverers. Science never shews her faceto that sort. And they call themselvesdoctors! Best of all, fancy that ass Jonesin charge!”

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Ceasing with a quick sneer, helaughed so daemoniacally that Geor-gina shivered.

The days that followed were dismalones indeed at the Clarendon mansion.Depression, stark and unrelieved, hadtaken hold of the doctor’s usually tire-less mind; and he would even have re-fused food had not Georgina forced itupon him. His great notebook of obser-vations lay unopened on the librarytable, and his little gold syringe of anti-fever serum—a clever device of hisown, with a self-contained reservoir, at-tached to a broad gold finger ring, andsingle-pressure action peculiar to it-self—rested idly in a small leather casebeside it. Vigour, ambition, and the de-sire for study and observation seemedto have died within him; and he madeno inquiries about his clinic, wherehundreds of germ cultures stood in

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their orderly phials awaiting hisattention.

The countless animals held for exper-iments played, lively and well fed, inthe early spring sunshine; and as Geor-gina strolled out through the rose-ar-bour to the cages she felt a strangely in-congruous sense of happiness abouther. She knew, though, how tragicallytransient that happiness must be; sincethe start of new work would soon makeall these small creatures unwilling mar-tyrs to science. Knowing this, sheglimpsed a sort of compensating ele-ment in her brother’s inaction, and en-couraged him to keep on in a rest heneeded so badly. The eight Thibetanservants moved noiselessly about, eachas impeccably effective as usual; andGeorgina saw to it that the order of thehousehold did not suffer because of themaster’s relaxation.

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Study and starward ambition laidaside in slippered and dressing-gownedindifference, Clarendon was content tolet Georgina treat him as an infant. Hemet her maternal fussiness with a slow,sad smile, and always obeyed her mul-titude of orders and precepts. A kind offaint, wistful felicity came over the lan-guid household, amidst which the onlydissenting note was supplied bySurama. He indeed was miserable, andlooked often with sullen and resentfuleyes at the sunny serenity in Georgina’sface. His only joy had been the turmoilof experiment, and he missed theroutine of seizing the fated animals,bearing them to the clinic in clutchingtalons, and watching them with hotbrooding gaze and evil chuckles as theygradually fell into the final coma withwide-opened, red-rimmed eyes, and

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swollen tongue lolling from froth-covered mouth.

Now he was seemingly driven to des-peration by the sight of the carefreecreatures in their cages, and frequentlycame to ask Clarendon if there wereany orders. Finding the doctor apathet-ic and unwilling to begin work, hewould go away muttering under hisbreath and glaring curses uponeverything; stealing with cat-like treadto his own quarters in the basement,where his voice would sometimes as-cend in deep, muffled rhythms of blas-phemous strangeness and uncomfort-ably ritualistic suggestion.

All this wore on Georgina’s nerves,but not by any means so gravely as herbrother’s continued lassitude itself. Theduration of the state alarmed her, andlittle by little she lost the air of cheer-fulness which had so provoked the

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clinic-man. Herself skilled in medicine,she found the doctor’s condition highlyunsatisfactory from an alienist’s pointof view; and she now feared as muchfrom his absence of interest and activityas she had formerly feared from his fan-atical zeal and overstudy. Was lingeringmelancholy about to turn the once bril-liant man of intellect into an innocuousimbecile?

Then, toward the end of May, camethe sudden change. Georgina always re-called the smallest details connectedwith it; details as trivial as the box de-livered to Surama the day before, post-marked Algiers, and emitting a mostunpleasant odour; and the sharp, sud-den thunderstorm, rare in the extremefor California, which sprang up thatnight as Surama chanted his rituals be-hind his locked basement door in a

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droning chest-voice louder and moreintense than usual.

It was a sunny day, and she had beenin the garden gathering flowers for thedining-room. Re-entering the house, sheglimpsed her brother in the library,fully dressed and seated at the table, al-ternately consulting the notes in histhick observation book, and makingfresh entries with brisk assured strokesof the pen. He was alert and vital, andthere was a satisfying resilience abouthis movements as he now and thenturned a page, or reached for a bookfrom the rear of the great table. De-lighted and relieved, Georgina hastenedto deposit her flowers in the dining-room and return; but when she reachedthe library again she found that herbrother was gone.

She knew, of course, that he must bein the clinic at work, and rejoiced to

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think that his old mind and purposehad snapped back into place. Realisingit would be of no use to delay theluncheon for him, she ate alone and setaside a bite to be kept warm in case ofhis return at an odd moment. But hedid not come. He was making up forlost time, and was still in the greatstout-planked clinic when she went fora stroll through the rose-arbour.

As she walked among the fragrantblossoms she saw Surama fetching an-imals for the test. She wished she couldnotice him less, for he always made hershudder; but her very dread hadsharpened her eyes and ears where hewas concerned. He always went hatlessaround the yard, and the total hairless-ness of his head enhanced his skeleton-like aspect horribly. Now she heard afaint chuckle as he took a small mon-key from its cage against the wall and

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carried it to the clinic, his long, bonyfingers pressing so cruelly into its furrysides that it cried out in frightened an-guish. The sight sickened her, andbrought her walk to an end. Her inmostsoul rebelled at the ascendancy thiscreature had gained over her brother,and she reflected bitterly that the twohad almost changed places as masterand servant.

Night came without Clarendon’s re-turn to the house, and Georgina con-cluded that he was absorbed in one ofhis very longest sessions, which meanttotal disregard of time. She hated to re-tire without a talk with him about hissudden recovery; but finally, feeling itwould be futile to wait up, she wrote acheerful note and propped it before hischair on the library table; then startedresolutely for bed.

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She was not quite asleep when sheheard the outer door open and shut. Soit had not been an all-night sessionafter all! Determined to see that herbrother had a meal before retiring sherose, slipped on a robe, and descendedto the library, halting only when sheheard voices from behind the half-opened door. Clarendon and Suramawere talking, and she waited till theclinic-man might go.

Surama, however, shewed no inclina-tion to depart; and indeed, the wholeheated tenor of the discourse seemed tobespeak absorption and promise length.Georgina, though she had not meant tolisten, could not help catching a phrasenow and then, and presently becameaware of a sinister undercurrent whichfrightened her very much without beingwholly clear to her. Her brother’s voice,

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nervous, incisive, held her notice withdisquieting persistence.

“But anyway,” he was saying, “wehaven’t enough animals for anotherday, and you know how hard it is to geta decent supply at short notice. It seemssilly to waste so much effort on com-parative trash when human specimenscould be had with just a little extracare.”

Georgina sickened at the possible im-plication, and caught at the hall rack tosteady herself. Surama was replying inthat deep, hollow tone which seemed toecho with the evil of a thousand agesand a thousand planets.

“Steady, steady—what a child youare with your haste and impatience!You crowd things so! When you’velived as I have, so that a whole life willseem only an hour, you won’t be sofretful about a day or week or month!

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You work too fast. You’ve plenty of spe-cimens in the cages for a full week ifyou’ll only go at a sensible rate. Youmight even begin on the older materialif you’d be sure not to overdo it.”

“Never mind my haste!” the replywas snapped out sharply; “I have myown methods. I don’t want to use ourmaterial if I can help it, for I preferthem as they are. And you’d better becareful of them anyway—you know theknives those sly dogs carry.”

Surama’s deep chuckle came.“Don’t worry about that. The brutes

eat, don’t they? Well, I can get you oneany time you need it. But goslow—with the boy gone, there areonly eight, and now that you’ve lostSan Quentin it’ll be hard to get newones by the wholesale. I’d advise you tostart in on Tsanpo—he’s the least use toyou as he is, and—”

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But that was all Georgina heard.Transfixed by a hideous dread from thethoughts this talk excited, she nearlysank to the floor where she stood, andwas scarcely able to drag herself up thestairs and into her room. What was theevil monster Surama planning? Intowhat was he guiding her brother? Whatmonstrous circumstances lay behindthese cryptic sentences? A thousandphantoms of darkness and menacedanced before her eyes, and she flungherself upon the bed without hope ofsleep. One thought above the rest stoodout with fiendish prominence, and shealmost screamed aloud as it beat itselfinto her brain with renewed force.Then Nature, kinder than she expected,intervened at last. Closing her eyes in adead faint, she did not awake till morn-ing, nor did any fresh nightmare come

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to join the lasting one which the over-heard words had brought.

With the morning sunshine came alessening of the tension. What happensin the night when one is tired oftenreaches the consciousness in distortedforms, and Georgina could see that herbrain must have given strange colour toscraps of common medical conversa-tion. To suppose her brother—only sonof the gentle Frances Schuyler Claren-don—guilty of savage sacrifices in thename of science would be to do an in-justice to their blood, and she decidedto omit all mention of her trip down-stairs, lest Alfred ridicule her fantasticnotions.

When she reached the breakfast tableshe found that Clarendon was alreadygone, and regretted that not even thissecond morning had given her a chanceto congratulate him on his revived

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activity. Quietly taking the breakfastserved by stone-deaf old Margarita, theMexican cook, she read the morningpaper and seated herself with someneedlework by the sitting-room windowoverlooking the great yard. All was si-lent out there, and she could see thatthe last of the animal cages had beenemptied. Science was served, and thelime-pit held all that was left of theonce pretty and lively little creatures.This slaughter had always grieved her,but she had never complained, sinceshe knew it was all for humanity. Beinga scientist’s sister, she used to say toherself, was like being the sister of asoldier who kills to save his country-men from their foes.

After luncheon Georgina resumed herpost by the window, and had beenbusily sewing for some time when thesound of a pistol shot from the yard

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caused her to look out in alarm. There,not far from the clinic, she saw theghastly form of Surama, a revolver inhis hand, and his skull-face twisted intoa strange expression as he chuckled at acowering figure robed in black silk andcarrying a long Thibetan knife. It wasthe servant Tsanpo, and as she recog-nised the shrivelled face Georgina re-membered horribly what she had over-heard the night before. The sun flashedon the polished blade, and suddenlySurama’s revolver spat once more. Thistime the knife flew from the Mongol’shand, and Surama glanced greedily athis shaking and bewildered prey.

Then Tsanpo, glancing quickly at hisunhurt hand and at the fallen knife,sprang nimbly away from the stealthilyapproaching clinic-man and made adash for the house. Surama, however,was too swift for him, and caught him

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in a single leap, seizing his shoulderand almost crushing him. For a momentthe Thibetan tried to struggle, butSurama lifted him like an animal by thescruff of the neck and bore him off to-ward the clinic. Georgina heard himchuckling and taunting the man in hisown tongue, and saw the yellow face ofthe victim twist and quiver with fright.Suddenly realising against her own willwhat was taking place, a great horrormastered her and she fainted for thesecond time within twenty-four hours.

When consciousness returned, thegolden light of late afternoon wasflooding the room. Georgina, pickingup her fallen work-basket and scatteredmaterials, was lost in a daze of doubt;but finally felt convinced that the scenewhich had overcome her must havebeen all too tragically real. Her worstfears, then, were horrible truths. What

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to do about it, nothing in her experi-ence could tell her; and she wasvaguely thankful that her brother didnot appear. She must talk to him, butnot now. She could not talk to anybodynow. And, thinking shudderingly of themonstrous happening behind thosebarred clinic windows, she crept intobed for a long night of anguishedsleeplessness.

Rising haggardly on the followingday, Georgina saw the doctor for thefirst time since his recovery. He wasbustling about pre-occupiedly, circulat-ing between the house and the clinic,and paying little attention to anythingbesides his work. There was no chancefor the dreaded interview, and Claren-don did not even notice his sister’sworn-out aspect and hesitant manner.

In the evening she heard him in thelibrary, talking to himself in a fashion

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most unusual for him, and she felt thathe was under a great strain whichmight culminate in the return of hisapathy. Entering the room, she tried tocalm him without referring to any try-ing subject, and forced a steadying cupof bouillon upon him. Finally she askedgently what was distressing him, andwaited anxiously for his reply, hopingto hear that Surama’s treatment of thepoor Thibetan had horrified and out-raged him.

There was a note of fretfulness in hisvoice as he responded.

“What’s distressing me? Good God,Georgina, what isn’t? Look at the cagesand see if you have to ask again!Cleaned out—milked dry—not a cursedspecimen left; and a line of the mostimportant bacterial cultures incubatingin their tubes without a chance to do anounce of good! Days’ work

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wasted—whole programme setback—it’s enough to drive a man mad!How shall I ever get anywhere if I can’tscrape up some decent subjects?”

Georgina stroked his forehead.“I think you ought to rest a while, Al

dear.”He moved away.“Rest? That’s good! That’s damn

good! What else have I been doing butresting and vegetating and staringblankly into space for the last fifty or ahundred or a thousand years? Just as Imanage to shake off the clouds, I haveto run short of material—and then I’mtold to lapse back again into droolingstupefaction! God! And all the whilesome sneaking thief is probably work-ing with my data and getting ready tocome out ahead of me with the creditfor my own work. I’ll lose by aneck—some fool with the proper

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specimens will get the prize, when oneweek more with even half-adequate fa-cilities would see me through with fly-ing colours!”

His voice rose querulously, and therewas an overtone of mental strain whichGeorgina did not like. She answeredsoftly, yet not so softly as to hint at thesoothing of a psychopathic case.

“But you’re killing yourself with thisworry and tension, and if you’re dead,how can you do your work?”

He gave a smile that was almost asneer.

“I guess a week or a month—all thetime I need—wouldn’t quite finish me,and it doesn’t much matter what be-comes of me or any other individual inthe end. Science is what must beserved—science—the austere cause ofhuman knowledge. I’m like the mon-keys and birds and guinea-pigs I

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use—just a cog in the machine, to beused to the advantage of the whole.They had to be killed—I may have tobe killed—what of it? Isn’t the cause weserve worth that and more?”

Georgina sighed. For a moment shewondered whether, after all, this cease-less round of slaughter really was worthwhile.

“But are you absolutely sure your dis-covery will be enough of a boon to hu-manity to warrant these sacrifices?”

Clarendon’s eyes flasheddangerously.

“Humanity! What the deuce is hu-manity? Science! Dolts! Just individualsover and over again! Humanity is madefor preachers to whom it means theblindly credulous. Humanity is madefor the predatory rich to whom itspeaks in terms of dollars and cents.Humanity is made for the politician to

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whom it signifies collective power to beused to his advantage. What is human-ity? Nothing! Thank God that crude il-lusion doesn’t last! What a grown manworships istruth—knowledge—science—light—therending of the veil and the pushingback of the shadow. Knowledge, thejuggernaut! There is death in our ownritual. We mustkill—dissect—destroy—and all for thesake of discovery—the worship of theineffable light. The goddess Science de-mands it. We test a doubtful poison bykilling. How else? No thought forself—just knowledge—the effect mustbe known.”

His voice trailed off in a kind of tem-porary exhaustion, and Georginashuddered slightly.

“But this is horrible, Al! Youshouldn’t think of it that way!”

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Clarendon cackled sardonically, in amanner which stirred odd and repug-nant associations in his sister’s mind.

“Horrible? You think what I say ishorrible? You ought to hear Surama! Itell you, things were known to thepriests of Atlantis that would have youdrop dead of fright if you heard a hintof them. Knowledge was knowledge ahundred thousand years ago, when ourespecial forbears were shambling aboutAsia as speechless semi-apes! Theyknow something of it in the Hoggar re-gion—there are rumours in the fartheruplands of Thibet—and once I heard anold man in China calling on Yog-Sothoth—”

He turned pale, and made a curioussign in the air with his extended fore-finger. Georgina felt genuinely alarmed,but became somewhat calmer as hisspeech took a less fantastic form.

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“Yes, it may be horrible, but it’s glor-ious too. The pursuit of knowledge, Imean. Certainly, there’s no slovenlysentiment connected with it. Doesn’tNature kill—constantly and remorse-lessly—and are any but fools horrifiedat the struggle? Killings are necessary.They are the glory of science. We learnsomething from them, and we can’t sac-rifice learning to sentiment. Hear thesentimentalists howl against vaccina-tion! They fear it will kill the child.Well, what if it does? How else can wediscover the laws of disease concerned?As a scientist’s sister you ought to knowbetter than to prate sentiment. Youought to help my work instead ofhindering it!”

“But, Al,” protested Georgina, “Ihaven’t the slightest intention ofhindering your work. Haven’t I alwaystried to help as much as I could? I am

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ignorant, I suppose, and can’t help veryactively; but at least I’m proud ofyou—proud for my own sake and forthe family’s sake—and I’ve always triedto smooth the way. You’ve given mecredit for that many a time.”

Clarendon looked at her keenly.“Yes,” he said jerkily as he rose and

strode from the room, “you’re right.You’ve always tried to help as best youknew. You may yet have a chance tohelp still more.”

Georgina, seeing him disappearthrough the front door, followed himinto the yard. Some distance away alantern was shining through the trees,and as they approached it they sawSurama bending over a large objectstretched on the ground. Clarendon, ad-vancing, gave a short grunt; but whenGeorgina saw what it was she rushedup with a shriek. It was Dick, the great

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St. Bernard, and he was lying still withreddened eyes and protruding tongue.

“He’s sick, Al!” she cried. “Dosomething for him, quick!”

The doctor looked at Surama, whohad uttered something in a tongue un-known to Georgina.

“Take him to the clinic,” he ordered;“I’m afraid Dick’s caught the fever.”

Surama took up the dog as he hadtaken poor Tsanpo the day before, andcarried him silently to the building nearthe mall. He did not chuckle this time,but glanced at Clarendon with what ap-peared to be real anxiety. It almostseemed to Georgina that Surama wasasking the doctor to save her pet.

Clarendon, however, made no moveto follow, but stood still for a momentand then sauntered slowly toward thehouse. Georgina, astonished at such cal-lousness, kept up a running fire of

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entreaties on Dick’s behalf, but it wasof no use. Without paying the slightestattention to her pleas he made directlyfor the library and began to read in alarge old book which had lain facedown on the table. She put her hand onhis shoulder as he sat there, but he didnot speak or turn his head. He onlykept on reading, and Georgina, glan-cing curiously over his shoulder,wondered in what strange alphabet thisbrass-bound tome was written.

In the cavernous parlour across thehall, sitting alone in the dark a quarterof an hour later, Georgina came to herdecision. Something was gravelywrong—just what, and to what extent,she scarcely dared formulate to her-self—and it was time that she called insome stronger force to help her. Ofcourse it must be James. He was power-ful and capable, and his sympathy and

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affection would shew him the rightthing to do. He had known Al always,and would understand.

It was by this time rather late, butGeorgina had resolved on action.Across the hall the light still shone fromthe library, and she looked wistfully atthe doorway as she quietly donned ahat and left the house. Outside thegloomy mansion and forbiddinggrounds, it was only a short walk toJackson Street, where by good luck shefound a carriage to take her to theWestern Union telegraph office. Thereshe carefully wrote out a message toJames Dalton in Sacramento, askinghim to come at once to San Franciscoon a matter of the greatest importanceto them all.

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V.

Dalton was frankly perplexed by Ge-orgina’s sudden message. He had hadno word from the Clarendons since thatstormy February evening when Alfredhad declared him an outsider to hishome; and he in turn had studiously re-frained from communicating, evenwhen he had longed to express sym-pathy after the doctor’s summary oust-ing from office. He had fought hard tofrustrate the politicians and keep theappointive power, and was bitterlysorry to watch the unseating of a manwho, despite recent estrangements, stillrepresented to him the ultimate ideal ofscientific competence.

Now, with this clearly frightenedsummons before him, he could not ima-gine what had happened. He knew,though, that Georgina was not one to

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lose her head or send forth a needlessalarm; hence he wasted no time, buttook the Overland which left Sacra-mento within the hour, going at once tohis club and sending word to Georginaby a messenger that he was in townand wholly at her service.

Meanwhile things had been quiescentat the Clarendon home, notwithstand-ing the doctor’s continued taciturnityand his absolute refusal to report on thedog’s condition. Shadows of evilseemed omnipresent and thickening,but for the moment there was a lull.Georgina was relieved to get Dalton’smessage and learn that he was close athand, and sent back word that shewould call him when necessity arose.Amidst all the gathering tension somefaint compensating element seemedmanifest, and Georgina finally decidedthat it was the absence of the lean

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Thibetans, whose stealthy, sinuousways and disturbing exotic aspect hadalways annoyed her. They had vanishedall at once; and old Margarita, the solevisible servant left in the house, toldher they were helping their master andSurama at the clinic.

The following morning—the twenty-eighth of May—long to be re-membered—was dark and lowering,and Georgina felt the precarious calmwearing thin. She did not see her broth-er at all, but knew he was in the clinichard at work at something despite thelack of specimens he had bewailed. Shewondered how poor Tsanpo was gettingalong, and whether he had really beensubjected to any serious inoculation,but it must be confessed that shewondered more about Dick. She longedto know whether Surama had doneanything for the faithful dog amidst his

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master’s oddly callous indifference.Surama’s apparent solicitude on thenight of Dick’s seizure had impressedher greatly, giving her perhaps thekindliest feeling she had ever had forthe detested clinic-man. Now, as theday advanced, she found herself think-ing more and more of Dick; till at lasther harassed nerves, finding in this onedetail a sort of symbolic summation ofthe whole horror that lay upon thehousehold, could stand the suspense nolonger.

Up to that time she had always re-spected Alfred’s imperious wish that hebe never approached or disturbed atthe clinic; but as this fateful afternoonadvanced, her resolution to breakthrough the barrier grew stronger andstronger. Finally she set out with de-termined face, crossing the yard andentering the unlocked vestibule of the

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forbidden structure with the fixed in-tention of discovering how the dog wasor of knowing the reason for her broth-er’s secrecy.

The inner door, as usual, was locked;and behind it she heard voices inheated conversation. When her knock-ing brought no response she rattled theknob as loudly as possible, but still thevoices argued on unheeding. They be-longed, of course, to Surama and herbrother; and as she stood there tryingto attract attention she could not helpcatch something of their drift. Fate hadmade her for the second time an eaves-dropper, and once more the matter sheoverheard seemed likely to tax hermental poise and nervous endurance totheir ultimate bounds. Alfred andSurama were plainly quarrelling withincreasing violence, and the purport oftheir speech was enough to arouse the

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wildest fears and confirm the gravestapprehensions. Georgina shivered asher brother’s voice mounted shrilly todangerous heights of fanatical tension.

“You, damn you—you’re a fine oneto talk defeat and moderation to me!Who started all this, anyway? Did Ihave any idea of your cursed devil-godsand elder world? Did I ever in my lifethink of your damned spaces beyondthe stars and your crawling chaos Nyar-lathotep? I was a normal scientific man,confound you, till I was fool enough todrag you out of the vaults with yourdevilish Atlantean secrets. You eggedme on, and now you want to cut meoff! You loaf around doing nothing andtelling me to go slow when you mightjust as well as not be going out and get-ting material. You know damn well thatI don’t know how to go about suchthings, whereas you must have been an

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old hand at it before the earth wasmade. It’s like you, you damned walk-ing corpse, to start something youwon’t or can’t finish!”

Surama’s evil chuckle came.“You’re insane, Clarendon. That’s the

only reason I let you rave on when Icould send you to hell in three minutes.Enough is enough, and you’ve certainlyhad enough material for any novice atyour stage. You’ve had all I’m going toget you, anyhow! You’re only a maniacon the subject now—what a cheap,crazy thing to sacrifice even your poorsister’s pet dog, when you could havespared him as well as not! You can’tlook at any living thing now withoutwanting to jab that gold syringe into it.No—Dick had to go where the Mexicanboy went—where Tsanpo and the otherseven went—where all the animalswent! What a pupil! You’re no fun any

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more—you’ve lost your nerve. You setout to control things, and they’re con-trolling you. I’m about done with you,Clarendon. I thought you had the stuffin you, but you haven’t. It’s about timeI tried somebody else. I’m afraid you’llhave to go!”

In the doctor’s shouted reply therewas both fear and frenzy.

“Be careful, you——! There arepowers against your powers—I didn’tgo to China for nothing, and there arethings in Alhazred’s Azif which weren’tknown in Atlantis! We’ve both meddledin dangerous things, but you needn’tthink you know all my resources. Howabout the Nemesis of Flame? I talked inYemen with an old man who had comeback alive from the Crimson Desert—hehad seen Irem, the City of Pillars, andhad worshipped at the underground

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shrines of Nug and Yeb—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

Through Clarendon’s shrieking fal-setto cut the deep chuckle of the clinic-man.

“Shut up, you fool! Do you supposeyour grotesque nonsense has anyweight with me? Words and formu-lae—words and formulae—what dothey all mean to one who has the sub-stance behind them? We’re in a materi-al sphere now, and subject to materiallaws. You have your fever; I have myrevolver. You’ll get no specimens, andI’ll get no fever so long as I have you infront of me with this gun between!”

That was all Georgina could hear.She felt her senses reeling, andstaggered out of the vestibule for a sav-ing breath of the lowering outside air.She saw that the crisis had come at last,and that help must now arrive quickly

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if her brother was to be saved from theunknown gulfs of madness and mys-tery. Summoning up all her reserve en-ergy, she managed to reach the houseand get to the library, where shescrawled a hasty note for Margarita totake to James Dalton.

When the old woman had gone, Ge-orgina had just strength enough tocross to the lounge and sink weaklydown into a sort of semi-stupor. Thereshe lay for what seemed like years, con-scious only of the fantastic creeping upof the twilight from the lower cornersof the great, dismal room, and plaguedby a thousand shadowy shapes of terrorwhich filed with phantasmal, half-limned pageantry through her torturedand stifled brain. Dusk deepened intodarkness, and still the spell held. Thena firm tread sounded in the hall, andshe heard someone enter the room and

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fumble at the match-safe. Her heart al-most stopped beating as the gas-jets ofthe chandelier flared up one by one,but then she saw that the arrival washer brother. Relieved to the bottom ofher heart that he was still alive, shegave vent to an involuntary sigh,profound, long-drawn, and tremulous,and lapsed at last into kindly oblivion.

At the sound of that sigh Clarendonturned in alarm toward the lounge, andwas inexpressibly shocked to see thepale and unconscious form of his sisterthere. Her face had a death-like qualitythat frightened his inmost spirit, and heflung himself on his knees by her side,awake to a realisation of what herpassing away would mean to him. Longunused to private practice amidst hisceaseless quest for truth, he had lost thephysician’s instinct of first aid, andcould only call out her name and chafe

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her wrists mechanically as fear andgrief possessed him. Then he thought ofwater, and ran to the dining-room for acarafe. Stumbling about in a darknesswhich seemed to harbour vague terrors,he was some time in finding what hesought; but at last he clutched it inshaking hand and hastened back todash the cold fluid in Georgina’s face.The method was crude but effective.She stirred, sighed a second time, andfinally opened her eyes.

“You are alive!” he cried, and put hischeek to hers as she stroked his headmaternally. She was almost glad shefainted, for the circumstance seemed tohave dispelled the strange Alfred andbrought her own brother back to her.She sat up slowly and tried to reassurehim.

“I’m all right, Al. Just give me a glassof water. It’s a sin to waste it this

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way—to say nothing of spoiling mywaist! Is that the way to behave everytime your sister drops off for a nap?You needn’t think I’m going to be sick,for I haven’t time for such nonsense!”

Alfred’s eyes shewed that her cool,common-sense speech had had its ef-fect. His brotherly panic dissolved in aninstant, and instead there came into hisface a vague, calculating expression, asif some marvellous possibility had justdawned upon him. As she watched thesubtle waves of cunning and appraisalpass fleetingly over his countenance shebecame less and less certain that hermode of reassurance had been a wiseone, and before he spoke she found her-self shivering at something she couldnot define. A keen medical instinct al-most told her that his moment of sanityhad passed, and that he was now oncemore the unrestrained fanatic for

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scientific research. There wassomething morbid in the quick narrow-ing of his eyes at her casual mention ofgood health. What was he thinking? Towhat unnatural extreme was his pas-sion for experiment about to bepushed? Wherein lay the special signi-ficance of her pure blood and abso-lutely flawless organic state? None ofthese misgivings, however, troubled Ge-orgina for more than a second, and shewas quite natural and unsuspicious asshe felt her brother’s steady fingers ather pulse.

“You’re a bit feverish, Georgie,” hesaid in a precise, elaborately restrainedvoice as he looked professionally intoher eyes.

“Why, nonsense, I’m all right,” shereplied. “One would think you were onthe watch for fever patients just for thesake of shewing off your discovery! It

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would be poetic, though, if you couldmake your final proof and demonstra-tion by curing your own sister!”

Clarendon started violently andguiltily. Had she suspected his wish?Had he muttered anything aloud? Helooked at her closely, and saw that shehad no inkling of the truth. She smiledup sweetly into his face and patted hishand as he stood by the side of thelounge. Then he took a small oblongleather case from his vest pocket, andtaking out a little gold syringe, hebegan fingering it thoughtfully, pushingthe piston speculatively in and out ofthe empty cylinder.

“I wonder,” he began with suave sen-tentiousness, “whether you wouldreally be willing to help sciencein—something like that way—if theneed arose? Whether you would havethe devotion to offer yourself to the

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cause of medicine as a sort of Jeph-thah’s daughter if you knew it meantthe absolute perfection and completionof my work?”

Georgina, catching the odd and un-mistakable glitter in her brother’s eyes,knew at last that her worst fears weretrue. There was nothing to do now butkeep him quiet at all hazards and topray that Margarita had found JamesDalton at his club.

“You look tired, Al dear,” she saidgently. “Why not take a little morphiaand get some of the sleep you need sobadly?”

He replied with a kind of craftydeliberation.

“Yes, you’re right. I’m worn out, andso are you. Each of us needs a goodsleep. Morphine is just the thing—waittill I go and fill the syringe and we’llboth take a proper dose.”

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