Diary of a Drug Fiend

306 The Diary of a Drug Fiend it, in its turn, becomes a measure of the grandeur of the rock. We walked up from the station to the residence of King Lamus, high on the hillside above the neck of Jand which joins it to the rock. The cliffs towered above us. They were torn into huge pinnacles and gullies ; but above the terrific precipices we could see the remains of successive civilisations ; Greek temples, Roman walls, Saracen cisterns, Norman gateways, and houses of all periods were perishing slowly on the gaunt, parched crags. It was very hard work for Lou and myself to climb the hill in the wretched condition of our health. We had to sit down repeatedly on the huge boulders which lined the paths that wound among the well-tilled fields dotted with gnarled gray olives. - The air of the place was a sublime intoxication, and yet its enchantment merely rubbed into our souls the shame of our wretched physical condition. We had to take several goes of heroin on the way. We didn’t see why we couldn’t have had a carriage part of the way. But it was part of King Lamus’s plan, no doubt, that we should be stung with the realisation of our impotence in so divine a spot, where every voice of nature swelled the chorus that spurred us to physical activity. Our invalidism had not seemed so horribly unnatural in London as it did in this consecrated temple of beauty. Lamus himself seemed invigorated to an extraordinary degree by his home-coming. He gambolled like a young goat while we plodded gaspingly up the slope. And while we rested he told us the history of the monu- ments that crumbled on the crags. “ This place will help you to correct your ideas,” he said, “‘of what is permanent, so far as anything is permanent.” We were indeed filled with a feeling of the futility of human effort as we contemplated the layers of civilisations, and looked down upon that last of them