THE EQUINOX
shall beget the day succeeding.” With increasing rapidity
they sang in this way, day by day, the genealogy of a thousand
years, and I traced on the successive generations, without a
break in one link, until the rush of their procession reached
a rapidity so awful as fully to typify eternity itself; and still
I fled on through that burning genesis of cycles. I feel that I
do not convey my meaning, but may no one else ever under-
stand it better.
Withered like a leaf in the breath of an oven, after millions
of years I felt myself tossed upon the iron floor. The fiends
had departed, the cradle was gone. I stood alone, staring
into immense and empty spaces. Presently I found that I
was in a colossal square, as of some European city, alone
at the time of evening twilight, and surrounded by houses
hundreds of stories high. I was bitterly athirst. I ran to
the middle of the square, and reached it after an infinity of
travel. There was a fountain carved in iron, every jet
inimitably sculptured in mockery of water, yet dry as the
ashes ofafurnace. “I shall perish with thirst,” Icried. “ Yet
one more trial. There must be people in all these immense
houses. Doubtless they love the dying traveller, and will
give him to drink. Good friends! water! water!” A
horribly deafening din poured down on me from the four
sides of the square. Every sash of all the hundred stories of
every house in that colossal quadrangle flew up as by one
spring. Awakened by my call, at every window stood a
terrific maniac. Sublimely in the air above me, in front,
beside me, on either hand, and behind my back, a wilderness
of insane faces gnashed at me, glared, gibbered, howled,
laughed horribly, hissed and cursed. At the unbearable sight
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