Vedere Napolt epoi—pro patrid—mori 105
Granada, of the fanatical frenzy of the religious Moorish
‘rioters chopping at themselves with little sacred axes
till the blood streams down their bodies, crazily crimson
in the stabbing sunlight, and making little scabs of
mire upon the torrid trampled sand.
I thought of the mcenads and Bacchus; I saw them
through the vivid eyes of Euripides and Swinburne.
And still unsatisfied, I craved for stranger symbols
yet. I became a Witch-Doctor presiding over a cannibal
feast, driving the yellow mob of murderers into a
fiercer Comus-rout, as the maddening beat of the tom-
tom and the sinister scream of the bull-roarer destroy
every human quality 1in the worshippers and make them
elemental energies; Valkyrie-vampires surging and
shrieking on the summit of the storm.
I do not even know whether to call this a vision,
or how to classify it psychologically. It was simply
happening to me—and to Lou—though we were sitting
decorously enough in our compartment. It became
increasingly certain that Haidée, low-class, common-
place, ignorant girl that she was, had somehow been
sucked into a stupendous maelstrom of truth.
The normal actions and reactions of the mind and
the body are simply so many stupid veils upon the
face of Isis.
What happened to them didn’ t matter. The stunt
was to find some trick to make them shut up.
I understood the value of words. It depended, not
on their rational meaning, but upon their hieratic
suggestion.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-house decree.”
The names mean nothing definite, but they determine
the atmosphere of the poem. Sublimity depends upon
unintelligibility.
I understood the rapture of the names in Lord
Dunsany’s stories. I understood how the “ barbarous