Chapter XXV

We were in the forests where the water sank and trickled toward Congo, not toward Nile. There rose about us a fearful, a magical beauty.

A path ran that seemed a chain of roots and rootlets, kindly pushed above the soil by the trees for our use. So light and yielding was this soil that we seemed to step upon black air or black water that did not wet, but into which there might be sinking. The soil was black vegetal life asleep, thick memories, premonitions of life in infinite leaf. We came into arcades, aisles where water ran, where, far up, so far up, there glowed fillets of blue. Away from these there had never been aught since the world began but a green heaven, a mighty emerald and jade arabesque.

The air hung humid, warm, oppressively still; the light, green light, rayed from a sun that must be far away and small. Birds or the face of a chimpanzee looked down or out upon us.

The thin, extended line of burdened men wound on slowly, following the naked guide ahead. Footprint fell in footprint, over the black, low-settled mist of old life, so pregnant, so fecund, so instant-ready the moment the spark should call....

I walked in a forest of my own thought. I was remembering that the earth was alive--that those whom we called planets--stars--suns were persons, individuals--that there was communication between them--that they made a society--that they pursued an ideal unity and spoke of an over-self.

Planetary consciousness--solar consciousness--universal consciousness, universal, eternal, integrated! I saw the star ahead, faint and far, and between were light-years as the sands of the sea for number, light-years and their vast successiveness of event. The strange sweetness was that the ray it sent was a ray of home and drew with the cords of home.

All feeling, all knowing, all doing rang forth from that. _There_ was the heart of action. _There_ was all the action.... But what was the action? How to further it? How definitely to let go the little will, let the One Will pour through? How to increase the mind's weak zephyr until the eternal cleansing truth blew free?

The path wound, though still it went on. The powdery earth that was half-life seemed hardly to afford footing, and yet did give support. Strange trees, ferns, mazy creepers, air-plants, roof over roof, light like the depths of the sea! Suddenly, smilingly, there walked into my mind child-verses learned at my mother's knee:

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.

Still the huge controversy! Was that so--or the mighty ocean and the pleasant land did they make the water drops, the sand grains? Or was there no true problem, and the whole vexed question but a lantern-fantasy to melt in the flooding day?

The flooding day--that was what I wanted.

The enormous forest slept, a sea of strange shapes. I wished to know the life that made the shapes--drew limiting lines around its own essence for its own uses--knew the use, the purpose, was at itself, gathered its mind together and knew itself.... The only path was the inner path, the way of the ever more inclusive, ever less inhibited "I" or "We"--just as one chooses to call it. Now Michael Forth called it "I," and now he called it "We." But never did he mean only that manacled, dungeoned particle, born in the year 1862.

The forest halted. Here came and passed and stayed a stream crossed by a swaying bridge of woven lianas. Upon the farther bank, in a brown and green space, appeared rows of smallest, frailest huts of cane, and a body of Pygmies, warned that we were friendly, drawn up by their talk-house to meet us. They struck their drums. Boom! Boom! Their fetish-men advanced, striving hard to look terrible. And all around stood the forest, the rooted, the yet further manacled.

We dwelt several months by this stream, with these Pygmies. They were a simple, low-scale folk, away down, away down.

I listened to the drum-beat in this village. I watched the ritual of the fetish-men. They were children in height, but they wore head-dresses that they thought made them towering. Around and around they went in a circle.... It was as though there was an invisible stake, an invisible rope; they got to the end of their tether and went round and round. I thought, "Break the rope, for God's sake, and rise!"

One night, in a half-dream I saw more than these Pygmies. I saw Africa and its stake and rope and weary circle.... Asia and its circle--Europe and its circle--America and its circle....

This village, this forest, this stay with the Pygmies, came, with me, into the column of turning-points, the hinge column.

I was weary of inner debate, weary of turning around my own stake in my own circle. There would come upon me here, if I stayed here forever, withered horror.... I would clear out--trust to rising--but move anyhow!

I had had intimations of a path. To treat syntheses as phenomena to be realized, used, and grown by just as their component phenomena had been realized, used, and grown by--to take Memory and Imagination as the great Powers that they were--to use Reason with a wider swing--to trust Intuition--to cease saying, "It is not penetrable," or, "It is afar," or, "It is dead," or, "Past and Future are unenterable," or, "There is no participation nor perception outside this circle."

The night held dark and warm and close. There was something tolling in the forest. A red light upsprang by the talk-tree, and the fetish-men began again their twisted dance. All the Pygmies followed with their eyes; their bodies also moved in sympathy.

At Landon once there had been a lynching. I had been among those who tried to stop it. But we had word too late and were there too late. I saw again the swinging body, the crew of masked Pygmies beneath.... I thought of many another crippled truth and frozen love. America and its weary, ancient circle....

Break, break from ignorance! Nor halt from fearing, "Is this a path?" Go the way you can go, and trust to its widening and serving the others!

That night, my body lying straight in the tent that I shared with Maxwell, I went away in the inner man. Just as much as that inner man could reap of inner space, time, and form, he might reap. Just as much as he could understand and share he might understand and share. There was no barrier save himself.

It had been an oppressive day in this forest and this Pygmy town. The rains were at hand. We faced a considerable stay here, and the prospect had some distaste.... I went away. I fled like the eagle upon the breathing air. Beneath me flowed the sea. Then there was land and mountain-tops.... But up in the air--up and up!--till it thinned, till atmosphere lay below me as hydrosphere and lithosphere lie under atmosphere. The Sea of Air--and I saw its surface as from a cliff is seen the surface of the sea. It was in waves, little and great, and the upper forces dashed against and through it, and there was a wild spray of utterest light.

Down in the Pygmy village arose some night disturbance. Maxwell sat up. "It's Ferraro's watch--"

I rose. "I'll go see."

The affair proved to be nothing more than the push of some forest beast against the last cane hut's most diminutive garden-patch. I returned to the tent. "It's all right."

Maxwell lay back. "I was dreaming of Scotland. I smelled the moors--had heather in my hand.... Michael, don't you think that the whole round earth may be within us?"

"I certainly do. Look in upon Scotland whenever you will!"

He turned. I knew that there was a woman with him upon the moor. In sleep it mattered not at all that she was what they called "dead." I divined other planes where, too, it did not matter.

The rains began in the basin of the Congo. We stayed their season out among this Pygmy people.

We made for ourselves indoor work.... For one thing, among others, while I was in this place, I wrote the beginning of a story. I never finished it, never used, later, the fragment. I place it here because I was writing out of my own straining toward light, and my own intuitions of certain of the forms and ways of that faint, faint dawn which was all that as yet I knew.

The fragment follows here as I wrote it in the huts of the Pygmies, in tropical Africa.

ESCAPE

He had been in prison ten years. The prison was a fortress where were kept offenders against the state. His prison chamber was a place of stone pillars and arches, long, but not so wide. The shadows hung about the ends of it. The loophole, grated window was set in the middle of the outer wall; the lamp swung from the middle pillar. There was a low bed and a heavy chair and table. The floor was stone and sounded when he walked to and fro, unless he walked lightly. He walked much, to and fro, and to and fro.

Morning and evening came a jailer with food and water, a silent jailer with a heavy and a weary air. He evoked pity, chained to a monotonous life. Few others came. If any came it was at tremendously long intervals. Nor were they friends of heart and mind who came.

Often enough it was cold enough in the prison room that in part was sunk below a river level. In time of flood the river might be heard without. The prisoner had a thick coverlet for his bed, and a long, wide and warm cloak. He needed both when he saw, high up, the gray snowflakes behind the window-grating. Both had been the gift of a woman. He had never seen the woman. At long intervals some comfort--a book perhaps--had come from her, brought by the jailer. She must have influence. He knew that the giver was a woman only because the jailer said, "A woman sends it." And again, "A woman--yes, the same woman--sends it." But now for a long time, for nearly two years, nothing had come from her. The prisoner believed that she was dead.

Ten years....

He knew very well his dungeon with pillars and arches. There were the two shadowy ends. Lying on his bed, he gazed at one and the other until they seemed to stretch forth like a giant stretching his arms. What was at the giant's finger-tips? And what just beyond the giant's reach? When he walked that way it was merely into dimmer parts of the fortress room. There was the window high in the side wall. Beyond it spread breadth of the earth. But the walls about the window space, and the bars across, and his body passing to and fro beneath, were alike material, and the first held back the second. The free space of the window was smaller than his body. It could not go through.

How rigid were conditions!

Ten years.... To and fro--to and fro. The dropping moments, falling in a line.... Stalactite and stalagmite meeting--the pillar of them.

When first he came to this place he had been active with plans for release or escape. His mind had moved swiftly this way and that, searching iron keys for an iron door, means to reach friends without, means to change the views of foes without. With his hands, with a file made from some scrap of iron, he had worked at the stone that cased the window. In none of these things had he succeeded. In them all like was opposed by like, by a more numerous and massive like. At last he saw that a heavy like was opposing a less heavy like, and that in the nature of things, the latter could not beat down nor penetrate the first. He desisted from these efforts. That had been a long time ago.

Dull stagnation and despair. There had been a frozen year of that--gray, icicle-hung...

Out of that, little by little, he had reached a more clement season. How he came into this he hardly knew. Something had worked for him, underground or overhead, in his own nature. As the floor upon which he trod was the roof of cellars and gave forth low sound as he walked, so, doubtless, his own being had stories.

He came to where he could help himself, in that story where he consciously dwelt--and so, doubtless, helped all the other stories....

Now he took up again, though not in the first fevered strain, and with difference of aim and method, the deliberate, day-by-day endeavor to remove himself from this prison. If what opposed was too numerous and too massive to-day, that might not be the case to-morrow. He worked with brain and hand. Necessarily, it was inch work.... The opposing forces had an air of resting yet in their age-deep bed. He persevered, but he saw that an angel must break these prison bars. Well ... make the angel! Make or awaken--he cared not which, so that the winged being arose.

He was born a thinker and artist. It was the artist in him that had set him here. He had laid hands upon a misshapen state, trying to bring it into juster proportions and beauty. But Behemoth had elected to remain for the present Behemoth. Now he was here in prison, but he would widen this from above if he could. _Where there's a will there's a way. Where there's a will there's a way_.

The books were few that he had in his prison, but worth while. He had been allowed to bring a certain number with him upon his coming here. That same woman had sent more who now sent no more. So well did he know them now that he knew much in them that was not written down. He had also the much that he had read before coming here. Pondering this mass, traveling in mind to and fro upon its surface, learning by degrees to sink into its interior, to permeate, as it were, its molecular structure--he found open to him, in a sort, fields of space and rivers of time. Emotional freedoms likewise, releases of energy, desires, longings, aspirations, satisfactions ... and higher vineyards, orchards, and wheat-fields where the mind strengthened itself ... and mountain summits where the sky of spirit seemed not far away.

It was a life.... But yet, compared to life that he longed for, it was pallid, hushed, slow, twilight, a land never to be scorned, a real land, always to be loved and thanked for good help for travelers, but yet a Stygian land compared--

Compared to what? Traveling to what?

He had a power of longing--but all was cut across by a wall of pearly mist.... There must be light there, for he saw the wall.

When neither lamp nor window showed him the page of his book, or when he lay awake upon his bed, he might sink into the sea of memory. That was a dense element in which he was at home. He could move to and fro there and take much pleasure. It was a very ancient, very wonderful sea. He became a skilled navigator, over and through its waves and currents.... Mnemosyne! Her face was fair, though turned always over her shoulder....

He wrapped memory about him like a cloak, he sat beside it like a fire. Motionless upon his bed, or in his chair beneath the faded window, he wrought until the dead lived again and the past put on the present's crown. Until the dead almost lived again and the past almost put on the present's crown. He wrought and wrought until he opened blocked-up paths. With an infinite patience he matched ends and colors....

He began to see his life as he had not seen it before. He sorted past phenomena and put them in sequences. He recovered moods and let like flow into like, and felt the river systems of them and the uninterruptedness of their being. He put together purposes and saw that always they were threads of larger purposes.

What at first he had called memory, and had bathed in for sensuous warmth, repose, security--for a finer, haunting, melancholy pleasure--for rhythm and returning chords--passed by stair and stair into Recollection. Mnemosyne came alive, looked around, moved.... The change was profound. It was as though a geisha, soft, attractive, exquisitely skilled to soothe material care, had given way to a goddess--such a goddess as a man must be very high, subtle, and deep to serve!

Yet were all these but inns, but shrines, but cities on the way out. He must not rest, lob-lie-by-the-fire, in the inn--he must not kneel too long before the image in the shrine--he must not even dwell, a busy citizen, too long in the ant-hill city. He was addressed to real escape, with all his being....

Every power of desire, will, knowledge, judgment! He brooded like a witch over her caldron upon the data of science. Each bit of knowledge was a chink in the wall. Get a finger in, work and work until the hand slipped through....

Power of Recollection. As a man awaked from sleep, as a man turned to saneness from delirium, so there might be a still, smooth, deep, and entire return to one's self. Then these walls would be paper and mist.

Power of Imagination. He was alive to possibilities here. It was his belief that mankind was not using for flight one feather of that mighty wing. Then imagine!

What was reality?

What were real perception, real knowledge, real will, real action--what was recognition of reality?

Could one make reality; give it, as it were, birth from desire, mind, and will?

Make or find or recover reality....

He was a man religiously minded, for all that nine out of ten had called him infidel or atheist. Much of that life of his, outside this prison, had been spent in what seemed to the nine destruction of ancient and venerable buildings.... The work, too, within himself, of dilapidation--how many years he had given to that! To see fall from his own interior world this tower and that keep--to take away the clinging ivy--to disturb the winged life that had built in every cranny--what sad and heavy and dogged work much of it had been! Yet he could do no else, for his own power drove him on, and there was a word that rang somewhere above him. In the light stood justification.

That anguished toil had passed into something like building and into hopeful joy in building--long ago it had passed.

Religion! To remember the god in you!

Every day a day of splendor, but fairly shadowy, almost night, before the more splendid dawn it foresaw. Ever the hunter in the keen air of his own being--ever the adventurer with the wild-grape scent from the new land just within his nostril--ever the lover with the beloved wearing a starrier crown.

Religion! Ever more comprehensive, comprehending, until there was consciously but the Various One--who might have his own vast days and dawns....

He paced his prison, up and down, across, around. He sat in his heavy chair, motionless, his eyes upon space. One entering would have thought him carved there, while all the time, within, was intensity of action. He lay upon his bed, his arms straight at his sides or crossed upon his breast, so still that he might have been thought dead. Without the grated window the snow fell, the wind struck the fortress like a flail. The river could not be heard, for it was covered with ice. His mind was warm with its own deep speed.

Freedom ...

Plato's World of Ideas--not Plato's solely, but any man's before him and after him, who might grasp the rim of that world and draw himself up into it--over the wall, through the window.

Pragmatic Sanction.... What would work, what you could bring into experience. Truth. The Actual. Make it with your magic, if you were so fortunate a magician.

The mind-born. The born of mind and will.

"If ye have faith ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove, and it shall remove."

Strength of a larger self--on the road to a larger yet.

Freedom--

Eleven years. He had been in this fortress eleven years.

He lay on his bed and the snow fell without the window. He lay wrapped in the cloak that the woman had given. The gray flakes fell, he knew that the wind was high. Then very quietly, gently, without a jar, quite simply, naturally, he himself, his consciousness, awoke outside his body.

It was both without and within. It was as though he were free in the room, but had left--just that much of himself--a guard within the body. The body lay as though it were asleep. When, presently, he would try experiments, he was immediately back within it, awake, and looking at the falling snow behind the grating. It was as if a very high volition of itself raised or lowered its rate of vibration. The lower rate laid it here within the thick body, the higher freed it. He gathered force and again passed out from that citadel. He knew where he left it, he kept a fine line of communication open between him and that guard left within. But with the intensed rest of him he was out and away.

Not, indeed, that there was fullness here, either! Even with so much of blessed freedom, he was aware of stronger and vaster volitions to be attained, to be exercised. Compared to what might be here was only a slow-spinning, cold, and dim star. The blaze of glory was yet above. But compared to what had been he experienced strength and bliss.

He passed out of the fortress, to his consciousness withdrawing from it like a cloud, a vapor, or like light, like radiant energy, passing through the pores of the stone, as if the stone were no more than a gray fog-bank. He was aware of sentries, but the sentries did not stop him. One or two might turn head as he went by, but they did not call nor start forward nor threaten with any weapon. He realized that they did not know why they had turned.

He remembered an old wood, known to him when he was a boy, and remembered it in its summer dress.... The wood was about him, and it was green and the sun filtered in between the leaves.

That fact of infinite gradations in vibration, infinite intensities of imagery and will! He was here in the wood, and as formless as air. Into mind came the old warm pressure of the soil, the odor of sun-washed pine and fern, the bird song from coverts, the boy's happy abandon, down-flung upon Mother Earth.... He took form. Whether his power slackened to that or heightened to that he was not then clear. But he was here, in the fair shape of a man, and he first kneeled and then lay upon the warm earth, and felt deep joy.

Of old time, in this wood, when he was a boy and afterward in manhood, he had been well able to image and remember, to dream and picture, to disintegrate and bring into new combinations experiences of his own or of others, to live in a manner in poetry-land, romance-land, history-land, and in the news of the world that came to him hot from the oven. His faculty in this wise had been very considerable. And he could share in elemental life. Wind and water, earth and fire, were wide and deep words to him, holding wonder.... That so straitly bound, that steel and iron, that painful fortress life, had forced, for very relief's sake, his ancient power to exert itself and grow in massiveness and edge. He recognized now that this present enormous access of strength was a matter of altered degree rather than kind. Hastened by great need, lifted at last by will grown athlete, he had in one effort overpassed many degrees. He had come into superconsciousness, but into what degree of that, or high or low, he was not prepared to say. He saw that his degree bordered the old consciousness, in part blended with it. He was not arrogantly minded, and he was prepared to believe that it was not, save relatively speaking, a high country. But oh, beside the old, it was high and wide and blissful!

This wood was dear to him whether it slumbered or whether, as now, it bent its boughs in the summer wind. A little thing that he thought he had forgotten started solidly forth again. A straying dog came by and started a rabbit-hunt. The rabbit went like a flash down the forest-scape. She and the dog disappeared, whereupon a pheasant stood out from some dead leaves and twigs upon the ground and looked at him, lying there motionless, with a knowing eye, then, turning, whirred away. That old time he had laughed, and now he sat up, arms about knees, and laughed. The dear old wood, the rabbit only half scared, the knowing pheasant!

He laughed, then that without-wire spoke to him, and immediately he was in the fortress chamber, returning as he had gone forth, slipping again into the body there, coalescing with the guard he had left. The key grated in the door, the jailer appeared bearing evening food and water. The prisoner sat up, rose from the bed, and came to the table. "Good evening, friend!"

"Good evening," said the jailer. He set down the dish and jug. "You look very well, tall and strong," he said. "I wonder!"

He stood and stared. "Things turn inside out," he said. "It seems to me that the jailed are better off than the turnkeys."

"Perhaps they are," said the prisoner. "I wish that we were well off together! There must be a way to that, too."

"Well, it's all a riddle," the other made reply, and went away. "Good night," he said at the door.

"Good night--good night!"

The key turned and was withdrawn. The prisoner, seated at the table, ate sparingly, drank water. Rising, he paced the floor, up and down, up and down. Outside the grating the snow was falling, falling, the gray light fading. The prisoner lay down upon his bed, drew the thick coverlet over him. Once or twice a fear had knocked at his heart, hurriedly whispering at a keyhole. "How do you know that you can do that again? How do you know that it was not a dream?"--Yet he knew that it was not a dream, and that he could go free.

He lay still, he gathered energy, he heightened consciousness, he felt that fear dissolve in inner light. He left the body and the fortress.

The snow. He had watched it of late and imaged the fall of it, the heaped silver of it far and wide. Now with his freed consciousness he entered, as it were, into the snow. He was finding that it would be difficult to resist the taking of form. There was here a most prolonged memory--whether to be indulged or overcome later judgment might tell. He thought of the veil, the continuity, the movement of falling snow, thought of it with pleasure....

The air was thick with snow, drifting, endless. He was snowing over vast fields, steppes, tablelands and mountain systems, steadily, quietly, restfully. He needed this great escape into space, this subdued mood, even, so solitary for so long had he been, this solitariness. With a quiet indifference, neither pleasure nor pain, but stillness, he moved in whitening flakes. He felt both the movement and the rest where they lay. He stretched himself in gleaming white over leagues of land, and touched and melted into leagues of ocean.... His thought changed and with it his form. He left the gray, multitudinous, crystalline peacefulness and became the liquid sea. He lay afar beneath the air, and here was sunlight and here dark space and the stars. The earth kept him curved about her, but he quivered also toward the moon and followed her in tides. But most, he thought, he felt the sun. When he did so he rose, in part, from himself, he became mist and vapor, he rode on high as clouds. Liquid again, he fell as rains, torrential or fine. He sank upon the earth and into the earth, he drew from springs and brooks into rivers, and then in a vein-work of rivers great and small, and with a lullaby, lullaby of going home, the mother calling and the thousand thousand children returning, bringing experience, he returned to himself and was ocean with an added hue and dream. Again, elsewhere, he mounted, and that perpetual wheel rolled on. With his waves he struck a thousand coasts and felt the rebound; in long rollers he advanced upon the smooth beaches. Currents flowed in him, rivers vast and small, and he was their stream, their bed, their shores. He felt whirlpools, deeps, and shallows. He lay quiet beneath the stars and the sun, and where the air thickened and moved against him he rose in a storm. In hills of water with far-flung spray, he contended with the air. Yet down below was quiet, and elsewhere he and the air lay at peace together. He saw how universal was drama.

Water.... He followed himself afar. Cloud and sea and stream, but he was also present elsewhere. He was locked in earth and mineral, he was held in receptacles of myriad shapes and sizes. He was cradled in the plant, in the grass of the field, the reed, the rose, the oak and the palm, the wheat ear and the grape. In him, where he gathered together and was the sea, moved the fish, waved the sea-growths, dwelt the creatures of shell houses. But likewise he was within and of the fish, the sea-flowers and the shell creatures and their houses. The ships moved over his waves, but in minute waves he moved within the timber of the ships and the bodies of the sailors. He was in the cup that was raised to the lips, and in the hand that held the cup....

Beyond this orb, far in the fields of space, he felt himself, where about other earths he stretched himself in other seas.

... Also, by likeness, in thought and imagination. Like a great dawn he realized presence in subtler fields. As at a bell from a tower, or a thunderclap, or a lark's song, he was in a realm like and not like, changed and yet similar.

In the old, more narrowly conscious life, in the old remembering, imagining, conceiving, in the huge dialectic that the emotions and the mind, under some approval of the ultimate spirit, carried forever on, there had been provided in line and color many a _mise-en-scène_ and of characters a multitude. Always there had been a central self and those portions of its periphery to which it gave provisional attention. But that peripheral world had been without visible body and self-movement. In dreams, truly, there was in some sort body and self-movement. But from dreams was lacking something of great value, present in "waking" commerce with memory and imagination and prophecy. But however strong might be these latter they had never been able to march beyond a certain point. Now, that center moving with heat and light unknown before or long forgotten, they marched. They became three-dimensional and vital. That middle power, fire of desire and of will, rayed forth in correspondence with its central strength. All that now it abstracted from itself and looked at, all that it imaged or remembered, had gone up a stage. It was become what in that old world they called reality.... And still he knew that he but dimly divined himself across great space.

The present Adventure seemed new, yet in some wise he followed old lines, traceries, co-ordinations. He had made them, they were truly to be used, scroll and arabesque, illumination in gold and silver, scarlet and green and blue border of the great text of himself that he could only stumble over, so little a child was he in Recollection! Yet he had garments that he wove and wore, wealthy, lovely, and in their moment satisfying.

He drew himself together from the silver sea. A promontory, rock and sand and sere sea-grass and small, twisted trees, rose at hand. Behind spread an ancient, lovely country wound with tendrils of the sea, and green-sloped mountains lifted above them. "Poseidon!" he said. "I am Poseidon."

He rose, a giant form, strong, immortally young and potent, fluent and various and mighty. He moved upon his sea beaches, he stood upon the promontory and looked far and wide. At no great distance gleamed a small temple with columns and a sculptured relief showing the god of the sea and the goddess Demeter. It glowed in light....

A giant woman came toward him. Majesty breathed around her, but she was genial, too.... He remembered the prisoner in the fortress, the cloak and the books that had been sent. Instantaneously he was behind the barred window, within the body there--the prisoner of state who had been shut away eleven years.

He sat up, he rose, he went to the table, he laid his hands upon the books piled there. Among others he touched a small and curiously bound volume--Dante's _Vita Nuova_.... He lifted a fold of his cloak and pressed his brow and cheek against it. This was an accustomed action. He had felt that so he touched comfort of his kind--pity, humaneness....

And all the time had she been himself? Was her name Beatrice? By the sea he had named her Demeter--

The written fragment went no farther, ended there.... The rains came down. The Pygmies swarmed or slept. They were not ill folk, and each in his casket kept the spark of intelligence. In some the spark had better fuel, in some not so good. But in all it burned and taught the fuel to draw toward it.