3 Wyrd Things: Nina Antonia

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work:

- a book or author,

- a film or TV show,

- a piece of music or a musician.

Image courtesy of Romi 

This month: Nina Antonia

Nina Antonia is a chronicler of the decadent, a former music journalist renowned for biographies of Johnny Thunders & the New York Dolls.  More recently however, she has gained acclaim for her uncanny authorship, penning articles for that venerable journal of the strange, 'Fortean Times', for which she has written three cover stories.

Her books include 'Incurable' a collection of writings by fin-de-siècle poet Lionel Johnson featuring a biographical introduction by Antonia which 'The Gay & Lesbian Review' described as "gorgeously written", plus occult explorations of Oscar Wilde in 'A Purple Thread: The Supernatural Doom of Oscar Wilde' & 'Dancing With Salomé – Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde & Friends'. 

Lionel Johnson returns in ghostly form in Nina's first novel, 'The Greenwood Faun.' Inspired by Arthur Machen, the novel is a decadent evocation of Pan let loose in Victorian London, originally published by Egaeus Press and now available again in a very limited deluxe edition on the Snuggly Books imprint, PurpleBeardedUncle, with a paperback edition following at the end of April from Snuggly.  She has also contributed strange stories to anthologies published by Swan River Press, Nepenthe Press, Egaeus & Hellebore. 

You can follow Nina's work at...

https://ninaantoniaauthor.com/

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Image courtesy of Tartarus Press 

Book
Arthur Machen – ‘The Hill of Dreams’

Though it is a rare occurrence, some books can alter your consciousness if not your life. I cannot remember exactly when David Tibet gave me a copy of ‘The Hill of Dreams’ by Arthur Machen but it was to have a profound effect on my perception of literature and my own isolated journey as an author. It’s unfortunate that the use of the word ‘magical’ has become cheapened by overuse, much like ‘enchantment’ until we forget their transformative and oft precarious essence. Few writers have transcended the page like the mystical Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863 -1947). His work teeters between reality and vision, opening the doorway to an ineffable vista of primal evil, esoteric enticement, ancient magic, arcane secrets, incipient sorcery and disturbing beauty. Machen believed that great literature should induce an ecstatic rapture, intoxication redolent of mythic rites and revelries. To read his work is to drink deep of the wine proffered by Pan. That he was descended from a long line of Welsh clergy is discernible in his portrayal of good and evil and the certainty of the unseen. The wild countryside of Gwent which so enchanted him as a child acted as an initiation into legends of Celtic Lore and the mystery of Roman ruins, themes he would often return to in his writing. He would later describe this numinous yearning as the ‘faint echoes of the inexpressive song that the beloved land always sang to me and still sings across all the waste of weary years.’ However as much as he loved the intangible music of his surroundings, like Lucian Taylor, the doomed author in the semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Hill of Dreams’, Arthur moved to London to pursue a literary life. As vulnerable as his fictional character might have been to poverty and loneliness, Machen was never destined to become a garret specter, unlike Lucian Taylor.

.Arthur Machen arrived in the city at a pivotal moment. As the Victorian age waned, a sublime turn of the century phenomenon occurred in English art and literature which is usually typified by the work of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, although they did not bloom in isolation. From this decadent tumult ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ germinated as did ‘The Hill of Dreams’. They are of course very different books yet both feature the dissipation of the central character and possess an exquisite morbidity. Lucian Taylor is seduced by a beatific pagan revelation whilst Dorian Gray succumbs to the gorgeous phantoms of profanity. However, Machen was never part of the Decadent milieu and gravitated towards intellectual bohemianism and the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. The 1890’s were an extraordinary time, the uncertainty of what lay ahead creating a creative and psychic frisson that saw an occult revival running parallel to the Decadent’s perverse romanticism. As well as taking a job cataloguing arcane manuscripts, Arthur joined the Golden Dawn, which is still regarded as the most significant magical order the U.K. has ever produced. Fellow Golden Dawn luminaries included his close friend, the mystical scholar, A.E. Waite, W.B. Yeats and Algernon Blackwood. Although these occult intersections do not define Arthur Machen’s work, they are still integral to it, an indefinable shadow of otherness. I have wondered too if he learned to protect himself, psychically, in a way that the hapless faun-like Lucian Taylor was unable to do, as he is pulled into a nightmarish vision where he discovers that ‘All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones, circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss.’

Ultimately, Lucian Taylor dies at his writing desk, surrounded by sheaves of an illegible manuscript in a shabby, damp little room from what appears to be an overdose of laudanum – opium in alcohol – or an equivalent fatal potion. He has perished in pursuit of a phantasmagorical idyll. As if pursued by Lucian’s struggle, ‘The Hill of Dreams’ although written between 1895-1897 wasn’t published until 1907. Personally, I consider it to be Arthur Machen’s finest creation but it is the more lurid ‘The Great God Pan’ that is his most referenced work. My own novel ‘The Greenwood Faun’ begins with the rediscovery of Lucian Taylor’s manuscript. Once deciphered, ten copies are made up of a book capable of altering the very filaments of the recipient’s soul. ‘Whilst content, sympathetic font and attractive design are vital, these ingredients alone do not imbue a tome with magic or mischief. Metamorphosis requires the persuasion of other realms and elements. A transcendent alchemy brushed ‘The Greenwood Faun’ reawakening Lucian Taylor’s voice in the very fabric of the pages….’

TV
Lost Hearts

M.R. James was as unsparing of his child protagonists as he was of the adults who find themselves at the mercy of malevolent supernatural forces. The high rates of Victorian child mortality probably influenced his writing although there is a distinct lack of sentimentality, so prevalent in an era saturated by images of angels carrying tots heavenwards. In ‘The Residence At Whitminster the youngsters are dispatched after looking into an evil scrying glass. Frank, the fortunate child dies aged 12, with the certainty of a blessed reception whilst the accursed Lord Saul, 16 and unnaturally pale, returns as a particularly wretched spirit eternally pursued by demonic entities. Of all the children in M.R. James stories, only the orphaned 12 year old Stephen Elliot in ‘Lost Hearts’ manages to survive, helped by the ghosts of Phoebe and Giovanni, who are about the same age as him. The story itself is brief but chilling, set in the grand surrounds of Aswarby Hall, Lincolnshire which belongs to Stephen’s older cousin the reclusive Mr. Abney, who in an apparent act of charity takes the boy in. To add credence to the tale, Aswarby Hall did actually exist and matched the author’s description of it. Sadly, it was demolished in 1951.

In his introduction to ‘Ghosts and Marvels’ (1924) M.R. James loosely sets out the principles for writing haunting tales ‘Let us then be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently until it holds the stage….’ Using this subtle formula, Stephen’s first few months, his settling in period at Aswarby is quite idyllic. At Mr. Abney’s instructions, the elderly affable housekeeper, Mrs. Bunch feeds the lad well and offers kindly advice. In the housekeepers cozy quarters we learn of Stephen’s ragamuffin predecessors, Phoebe Stanley possibly a gypsy girl and Giovanni Paoli, a Hudy-Gurdy playing Italian tinker, both of whom have mysteriously vanished. ‘Lost Hearts’ first aired on December 23rd, 1973, as the first in a BBC series of ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’. The majority of literary adaptations fail to do justice to the original however the televised version of ‘Lost Hearts’ heightens the presence of the ghost children to terrifying effect. Bathed in blue light, it appears that all of their blood has been quite literally drained from them. By suggestion, dream, vision and the sound of faint laughter, the ghastly wraiths make themselves known to Stephen, gradually revealing their terrible fate.

Our own perceptions always intrude on how we receive information. Although watching the same production or reading the same book, each person will filter it according to their own experiences. I saw ‘Lost Hearts’ when it was first shown at the age of 13, aligning with Phoebe, Giovanni and Stephen. As a child I was particularly isolated and emotionally estranged from my parents. Needless to say, ‘Lost Hearts’ petrified me, although I understood nothing of Abney’s esoteric interests, I knew that adults were capable of being monstrous. For the longest time I couldn’t walk up the staircase without recalling the ghost children gliding towards the study, their long twisted fingernails on the banisters, poor bloodless creatures whose hearts had been torn from their chests so that Abney could harness the occult powers of Simon Magus and Hermes Trismegistus. As well as being a classic ghost story, in modern terms it is also a tale of child abuse. My own heart had been torn out, metaphorically, by my parents. Sinking into early depression, I thought more on death than was probably usual. But the haunted realm became a refuge and eventually a way of diffusing trauma that would later influence my writing.

Music

The Rolling Stones - Child of the Moon

‘Child of the Moon’ which was released as the B/side of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ in May 1968, is a crepuscular lilt in the Rolling Stone’s esoteric alignment that would culminate with ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ If the band seemed insular & no wonder with all of the drug busts they were forced to endure at this juncture, Mick Jagger remained as canny as a conjuror when it came to absorbing the currents of the counter-culture & creatively reincarnating them. As he told Melody Maker journalist Roy Carr ‘You can’t play or write outside the mood of the times, unless you live on a mountain.’ Magic was in the incense plumed air and The Stones found themselves at the fashionably dangerous epicenter of an epoch deemed to be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. When Keith Richard’s house, Redlands, was raided in February 1967, it transpired that Marianne Faithfull’s book of choice was ‘The Great God Pan’ by Arthur Machen. The glimmer, the glow, the glittering show of the Stone’s glamour drew pop Warlock’s, including Crowley acolyte and film maker Kenneth Anger into their fantastical constellation. At Anger’s behest, Mick agreed to create the soundtrack via his new moog synthesizer for the short if powerful flick ‘Invocation of my Demon Brother.’ Despite telling writer David Dalton that the Stone’s were ‘dilettante’ when it came to magic, Anger described both Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones as ‘witches’. He also had Richards and Jagger in mind for the leading roles in his cinematic satanic opus ‘Lucifer Rising.’ The film-maker envisaged Keith as the dark prince, Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, to Mick’s Lucifer. Genuinely sinister, Kenneth Anger was not a man to be trifled with. Another au courant film maker with dark leanings, Donald Cammell, was also enamored with the Stones. After all, if you film someone do you not capture something of their soul? Kenneth Anger regarded Donald Cammell as Aleister Crowley’s ‘Magickal Son’ and not without good reason. Residing in gentle, leafy Richmond upon Thames, Donald’s father, Charles, had embarked upon a book about ‘The Great Beast’, a.k.a Aleister Crowley who had conveniently moved into a nearby flat. Aleister would occasionally visit for dinner, leading Donald Cammell to claim that as a child he had sat upon Crowley’s knee and grown up in a household immersed in ‘Magick.’

Does whatever we intuit have ramifications? The shadows hadn’t yet converged on the Stone’s destiny when they recorded ‘Child of the Moon’. I often wondered if the song was a nod to Anita Pallenberg, with her flaxen halo of hair and feral crescent shaped smile. If any woman was capable of casting a spell, it was Anita who had bewitched both Brian Jones and Keith Richards. Of course, the song’s title evokes Aleister Crowley’s 1917 novel ‘Moonchild’ in which an attempt is made to create a semi human entity via magical intent and astrological planning. The reverse of the abrasive, driving ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Child of The Moon’ endeavors to capture the ineffable, a luminescent vision at the end of a mythical highway whilst the music and Jagger’s vocals are strangely drawn out as if they are trying to reach us from a faraway shore. Anticipating the age of the video, director Michael Lindsay Hogg was enlisted to shoot a short promo film of ‘Child of The Moon’ featuring the Stones. Hogg had established his reputation as the director of pioneering pop TV show ‘Ready Steady Go!’ The promo as if by sleight of hand demonstrates the growing separation of the Stones from Brian Jones who arrived late to the shoot at a farm in Enfield and had to be filmed separately. If there is a story to be told, it is the addition of three female figures – a child, a startled woman played by Eileen Atkins and Sylvia Coleridge who portrays the eldest of the female trinity. One is tempted to wonder if they are portraying the ‘Maid, The Mother and The Crone’ the triple Goddesses in Celtic mythology who are intrinsically linked to the phases of the moon. It is only the older woman who breaks through the Stone’s semi circle comprising of Mick, Keith, Charlie and Bill, walking towards a white horse, another transformative mystical symbol. Brian Jones meanwhile, is seen peeking like a nervous sprite from a hollow tree before retiring into darkness.

It is easy to decode the promo film of ‘Child of The Moon’ as a series of cinematic auguries, particularly the death of Brian Jones on July 3rd 1969. The Stones had ‘Drawn Down The Moon’ or in pagan terms summoned ‘The Goddess’ though I suspect it had more to do with the spirit of the times than any conscious working. The song captures the Rolling Stones on the cusp of darkness and light, barely a month later they would record ‘Sympathy for The Devil’. Of course some might find this a fanciful reckoning but the storm was gathering that would culminate at the Altamont Speedway Free festival on December 6th, 1969, in Tracy, California. The unfortunate decision to have the Hell’s Angel act as security as well as the distribution of badly manufactured LSD combined with the unseasonably cold weather at a bleak location lacking toilet facilities, medical aid or tents was to have serious ramifications resulting in a largely traumatized crowd and several fatalities. At Woodstock, 4 months earlier, there was birth, at Altamont, death. The dreadful spectacle was captured by the Maysles Brothers in the documentary ‘Gimme Shelter’ peaking with The Stone’s performance. Now joined by Jone’s replacement, the brilliant Mick Taylor, the Rolling Stones are vividly menacing until it becomes evident they are presiding over a feast for the flies. During ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ a young man high on methamphetamine, Meredith Hunter, waves a revolver and is stabbed by one of the Angels, who then stomp on his body. No one least of all the Rolling Stones would have wished for such a grievous outcome.

The Stones brief flirtation with the left hand path faded along with the decade. Kenneth Anger did eventually make ‘Lucifer Rising’ minus Mick and Keith although Marianne Faithfull appeared in it as Lilith whilst Donald Cammell was cast as Osiris, Egyptian god of the Underworld. It all tallies, as Marianne had once described Cammell as ‘The Dracula of The Scene’ and he did indeed vamp off Jagger in the indescribably grimy glory of ‘Performance’ undoubtedly the greatest cinematic invocation of the 1960’s. As the last of the sickly sweet scent of incense lingered over Notting Hill sunset, Jagger – the changeling prince- reinvented himself as an international social butterfly. In May 1971, he married his reflection Bianca Perez-Mora Macias in a Catholic ceremony in St. Tropez. Pictures of the couple show Mick Jagger sporting a large gold crucifix.

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Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites

Katy Soar (editor)

British Library Tales of the Weird

Standing stones, stone circles, tumps, barrows and ancient clearings still remain across the British Isles, and though their specific significance may be obscured by the passing of time, their strange allure and mysterious energy persist in our collective consciousness.
Assembled here in tribute to these relics of a lost age are accounts of terrifying spirits haunting Stonehenge itself, stories of awful fates for those who impose modernity on the sacred sites and grim tales in which unwitting trespassers into the eternal rites of pagan worship find themselves part of an enduring legacy of blood. To represent the breadth of the sub-genre, authors include Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Rosalie Muspratt alongside lesser-known writers from the periodicals and journals of the British Library collections.

It's been a little while since I dug into one of the Tales of the Weird series but this one had the perfect subject matter to lure me back.

The book opens oddly with an extract from the wonderful 'Ringstones' by Sarban, the pen name of British diplomat John W. Wall, a story I thoroughly enjoyed when I read it in the Tartarus Press edition a few years back and it doesn't deserve to be experienced in this diminished manner.

Through the rest of the book we are provided with the usual array of authors of note - Algernon Blackwood, E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, H.R. Wakefield and Nigel Kneale  - and those who are unfamiliar.  There are a number of standouts.  The quintet metioned are all well represented with Wakefield's 'The First Sheaf' being a long time pulpy fun favourite. Whilst, of those lesser known, Frederick Cowles' 'Lisheen' proved to be a devilish read and Mary Williams' 'The Dark Land' was a poignant tale of the power of the land.

For the most part this is a solid read and lovers of a stone circle or a standing stone will find much to enjoy here and the collection has a number of highlights but it's odd beginning, a stuttering ending and some thematic repetition between the stories means I'm left with a slight feeling of incompleteness and I'd love to see the series revisit the topic in a more definitively wide ranging fashion. 

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The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan

Michael Wheatley (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Many writers in the early twentieth century particularly were fascinated by Pan as a figure of unbridled vivacity and pagan ecstasy, but also associated the god and folk hero with a sense of danger and even horror.
Selecting an eclectic cross-section of tales and short poems from this boom of Pan-centric literature, many first published in the influential Weird Tales magazine, this new collection examines the roots of a cultural phenomenon and showcases Pan’s potential to introduce themes of queer awakening and celebrations of the transgressive into the thrillingly weird stories in which he was invoked.

I wonder if there's a deity more suited to these times than Pan; a god continually remoulded through his renaissance over the centuries to reflect our changing attitudes towards the untamed and the natural, a god cut adrift from his roots in Greek antiquity and now free to roam across our wildest imaginings.

Opening this fascinating collection of prose and poetry is the poem 'Pan A Double Villanelle' by the arch-decadent Oscar Wilde, a lament for the absence of the wild, the free, the colourful and imaginative in the grey lifelessness of England at that time.  

Following it we have the story that gives this collection its subtitle, Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' which despite being amongst the most famous stories revolving around the goat footed god it should be noted that Pan is entirely absent from the story. In the tale a young woman is operated on and "a slight lesion in the grey matter" is made to allow her "to see the god Pan".  Whether or not this is what happens to poor Mary we never know but after waking from the operation she experiences a moment of wonder followed by utter insanity at which point she exits the story to be eventually replaced by another.  I remain unconvinced that in his use of the name Pan that Machen is actually invoking the god but is instead using the name as a metaphor for life beyond the confines of civilisation and conventional morality.  In the aftermath of the operation Mary sees the wildness within and becomes absent of morality and sanity, a condition passed on to her daughter who lives her life in a state of wildness, in the amorality of nature, until it's pointed out to her and she crumbles away, an example of the flimsiness of a life lived without the moral restraints that modern civilisation brings.

George Egerton's 'Pan' takes a different track to its predecessor, a feature common to the rest of this very well curated anthology, where it's the music of Pan that awakens a longing in a young woman that is misunderstood until it's too late.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'A Musical Instrument' tells of the God's chase of Syrinx and the creation of his characteristic pipes before Barry Pain allows the God to catch a different quarry in his tale of irresistible compulsion, 'The Moon-Slave'.

One of the unexpected delights of the book was the chapter from Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' which I've never read or even remotely wanted to due to an aversion to anthropomorphised animals but 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' which tells of Rat and Mole's encounter with Pan proved to be a complete delight.

The brilliant Edwardian satirist Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) is represented by 'The Music on the Hill', the first of a run of stories here that I'd read before in other collections, but very happily it makes for an enjoyable re-read as a town bred socialite falls foul of Pan's more vindictive side after she spurns his existence.  Edith Hurley on the other hand is rueful for his absence in the modern world but is open to hints of his presence in her poem 'The Haunted Forest'.  

E.M. Forster's 'The Story of a Panic' positions  Pan as a liberator of the spirit, one who frees those who need it from the straightjacket of 'normal' society, in this case with a thinly veiled story of a young man's realisation of his own sexuality.

Shining above many of the others, even in a collection as good as this, is Algernon Blackwood whose 'The Touch of Pan' with its characteristic rejection of industrial society and it's submergence in the rural and the wild tells a tale of erotic freedom and purity of desire whereas A. Lloyd Bayne's poem 'Moors of Wran' tells of the more destructive aspect of the God..

Until I read it here I was convinced I'd already read Margery Lawrence's 'How Pan Came to Little Ingleton' but I'm not so sure now and very glad to now have done so as it proved to be an amusing tale of Pan's more bucolic and pastoral nature as he guides a belligerent priest to a more caring and accepting place that provided a gently wonderful and witty highlight.

In 'The Devil's Martyr' Signe Toksvig (great aunt of broadcaster Sandi) brings the gothic in the form of avaricious flagellating monks and an escape within the groves of Pan which are lamented in Willard N. Marsh's poem 'Bewitched' and which call to the newly wed Constance in David Keller's 'The Golden Bough'.

The excellent collection ends with a poem and a story by Dorothy Quick, the former an ode to the ecstatic nature of an encounter with the god whereas the latter - actually the older of the two- digs deeper into that idea and the toll it takes as a bride hankers for wildness in a time of domesticity.

At the end when we close the book we are holding a fantastic collection, possibly the best in the series, that encompasses many of the ways which authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed and explored and utilised Pan to express notions of freedom, of beauty and of self-determination often placing him in the face of an increasingly homogenised modern, industrial age and one is left wondering how Pan could be once again recalled in our own time of imminent ecological collapse as an avatar for a new green awareness.

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Literary Hauntings

Available now from Tartarus Press is this fantastic new guide book  to the uncanny or perhaps I should say to uncanny influences.

The literary equivalent of Janet and Colin Bord's essential 'Mysterious Britain' and 'The Secret Country' it provides an exploration of the real world locations that have "inspired the best fictional ghost stories of Britain and Ireland". Contributors include Tartarus Press head honchos R.B. Russell and Rosalie Parker along with Mark Valentine, John Howard, Mike Ashley, Swan River Press' Brian J Showers and others and it makes for fascinating reading

If you've ever been fabulous enough to want to float down the canals of Elizabeth Jane Howard's 'Three Miles Up', visit Thomas Carnacki at Cheyne Walk or to climb Arthur Machen's Hill of Dreams then in this fantastic book you'll find your guide to the destinations of all your best nightmares.

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Stewart Lee on Arthur Machen

Here's a lovely little snippet from The Verb on BBC Radio 3 on 26th May 2017 featuring the official 41st best stand up ever Stewart Lee telling poet /  presenter Ian McMillan about his love of the bard of London's byways and back streets Arthur Machen and reading an extract from 'Far Off Things' one of Machen's volumes of autobiography and discussing one of his (and mine) favourite Machen novels the much maligned 'The Green Round'.

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Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain

John Mller (ed)
British Library

Woods play an important and recurring role in horror, fantasy, the gothic and the weird. They are places in which strange things happen, where you often can’t see where you are or what is around you. Supernatural creatures thrive in the thickets. Trees reach into underworlds of earth, myth and magic. Forests are full of ghosts.

In this new collection, immerse yourself in the whispering voices between the branches in Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, witness an inexplicable death in Yorkshire’s Strid Wood and prepare yourself for an encounter with malignant pagan powers in the dark of the New Forest. This edition also includes notes on the real locations and folklore which inspired these deliciously sinister stories.

It's been a while since I picked up any of these British Library Tales of the Weird books but the've continued to release some very intriguing collections and I've grabbed three recently which have caught my eye.  This one, with my fondness for arboreal shenanigans, was always gong to be a must buy and indeed proved to be a solid collection of, mostly, entertaining tales of the deep dark woods.

It doesn't get off to a particularly auspicious start with the anonymous opener, 'Whisperer in the Woods', lifted from the pages of Charles Dickens' literary journal ' All Year Round'.  It's a poorly written and fairly common or garden sort of story of wronged widows and plucky sons and help from beyond and I'm not entirely convinced by the weird woodiness of Edith Nesbit's 'Man Sized in Marble' but a story as good as this always merits a reread especially on a cold wet winter's night.

Gertrude Atherton's 'The Striding Place' puts a gentleman pining and - sort of - searching for his lost friend into a battle with the elemental force of a raging river that runs through the woods in a story with a distinct but typically circuitous homosexual undertones and a sudden and jarring ending worthy of Robert Aickman.  Another classic tale with distinct homoerotic undertones comes next in the form of E.F. Benson's 'The Man Who Went Too Far' another story I'm always happy to reread.

We have a slght dip with the next two stories as neither W.H. Hudson's 'An Old Thorn' nor Elliott O'Donnell's 'The White Lady' have much to recommend although the former conjures up an interesting initial vibe before losing it's way and petering out.

We are on much more solid ground with Algernon Blackwood's 'Ancient Lights' as the venerable master spins a yarn concerning a fairy wood that reads like a forebear of Robert Holdstock's 'Mythago Wood' books.

We've and interesting and haunting proto-feminist tale of a man's selfish desire and a young woman's love of her home in Mary Webb's 'The Name Tree' whilst in Walter de la Mare's 'The Tree' a pompous and vulgar fruit merchant travels to visit his estranged artist brother who lives and works in the shadow of an exotic tree that is his inspiration.

Marjorie Bowen's 'He Made a Woman...' is a quick and beguiling riff on the story of Blodeuwedd taken from the Mabinogion and also the inspiration for Alan Garner's 'The Owl Service'.  This is followed by one of M.R. James' later and lesser tales, 'A Neighbour's Landmark', which, with it's inocuous story of a haunted wood, is lacking some of the panache of his clasic tales.

The book ends oddly with 'N' the last great flowering of Arthur Machen's genius.  Certainly there's a weird wood in there as this is one of the elder statesman of the weird's stories of the thin places but it feels out of place here and far more at home in the London collection the The British Library have published at the same time.  I rarely turn down the opportunity to reread Machen though and this is a sublime end to an enjoyable collection.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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The Cosy Room and other stories

Arthur Machen
Tartarus Press

The Cosy Room and Other Stories is a collection of Arthur Machen’s short stories curated by John Gawsworth (aka Fytton Armstrong) in 1936. As well as exhuming some very early tales published in the first half of the 1890s, Gawsworth included Machen’s decadent prose poems from Ornaments in Jade, and later work commissioned by Lady Cynthia Asquith for collec¬tions such as The Ghost Book (1926) and Shudders (1929).

This collection from Machen runs the gamut of his entire literary career featuring stories dating from his 1890s heyday through to his late period masterpiece 'N'.  The collection was originally assembled by Machen's would be biographer John Gawsworth (real name Terrance Fytton Armstrong) for publication in 1936.  Gawsworth was a noted champion of writers such as Machen and M.P. Shiel (and possibly an exploiter of) and it has to be said that here he has assembled an intriguing pot pouri of tales.

It certainly isn't all gold, there are a couple of real duffers in there - 'A New Christmas Carol is particularly woeful - but equally he's included some gems, 'Opening the Door' remains a favourite as does 'Midsummer' and, of course, we have the undisputed gem of Machen's later years, 'N'.

This isn't a Machen collection for the newcomer.  It's too fast and too fleeting to be a definitive introduction (for that I'd direct your attention here) and too scattershot to find the soul of the man.  It does though give an insight into the breadth of his writing and the many roads his imagination travelled.

Available from the publisher via the link at the top of the page.

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The Children of the Pool and Other Stories

Arthur Machen
Tartarus Press

In his room in Gray’s Inn, London, at the end of the nineteenth century Arthur Machen had one of the most memorable mystical experiences of his life: ‘the wall trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room.’ For days afterwards he went about in ‘a rapture of delight’. This encounter with another order of things reinforced his conviction that there is a world beyond the one where we usually walk.

The six stories in The Children of the Pool, reflect in their different ways this lifelong belief. The bookish recluse in ‘The Exalted Omega’, the kabbalistic artist in ‘Out of the Picture’, the holiday¬makers in a Welsh resort in ‘Change’, all encounter the truly uncanny, and cannot emerge unchanged. And in the other three stories Machen explores the edges of that unknown terrain, the human mind.


'The Children of the Pool' was (I think) the final work of Arthur Machen's long writing career.  It's a collection of 6 stories that all touch on the various preoccupations of his work that followed him through the years with the possible exception of 'The Tree of Life'.

'The Exalted Omega' that opens the book is the story of a lost and dispirited man who in his lonely digs (Machen's own) begins to hear voices and see flashes of light that offer tantalising glimpses into what appears to be the planning of a murder.  In the middle of this we are treated to a short diversion into the world of spiritualism.

The title piece is much anthologised and is an odd piece that like much of Machen's work tells of a thin place between the worlds that Machen spends much of the story explaining away.  I like these sort of stories, my habit is always to lean towards the supernatural explanations but I like the over earnest defences for rationality he makes.

'The Bright Boy' is a much more straight forward tale, if you can call a tale about the crimes of a morally repellent, seemingly unaging man with the physical appearance of a 7 year old boy (like an evil Gary Coleman) hiding in plain sight with his fake parents straightforward.  It's a story I've read before, and one I didn't think much of then or now.

The aforementioned 'Tree of Life' is a real anomaly as it's ostensibly the story of a bedridden land owner dictating the use of his land to his estate manager that has a rather lovely twist in the tail.

'Out of the Picture' is one I'm surprised I've not seen before.  It harks back to Machen's early love of Robert Louis Stevenson with a tale redolent of Jekyll and Hyde that I enjoyed it very much and, as I said, am surprised it's not been more widely anthologised.

The book ends with another hark back in the story 'Change' where we are witness to a tale of child abduction a la  'The Shining Pyramid' but with a more folkoric changeling twist to it.

It's a solid and engaging collection from a writer who knew his glory days were behind him but was still willing to put pen to paper and try to find a new angle and a new tale and it's always a joy to read that.

Available as an ebook from the publisher here.
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The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

Arthur Machen
Oxford University Press

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle... 
Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalised-late-Victorian readers. Machen's "weird fiction" has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro-and it remains no less unsettling today.
This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualise the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

When Arthur Machen died in 1947 he left behind a body of work that has proved to be amongst the most quietly influential writings in the fields of strange fiction.  Various authors, film-makers, musicians and the society that bears his name have all promoted and been inspired by his work and as such collections are often to be found.  Now, I'm of the mind that all Machen collections are good Machen collections but occasionally a real gem appears as is the case here.

Produced as part of the Oxford World's Classics series and dressed in a cover illustration of Pan dating from 1895 - the year after Machen published the title story here - by William H Bradley, the doyen of American Art Nouveau illustrators, editor Aaron Worth has compiled an eye wateringly wonderful assortment of gems taken from every era of Machen's career.

There are of course certain stories that one can guarantee will be present in any collection, the title piece, 'The Shining Pyramid', 'The White People' & 'The Bowmen' but rather than just giving us the two more famous parts of 'The Three Impostors' - 'The Novel of the Black Seal' & 'The Novel of the White Powder' - he has, rather wonderfully, included the entire novel.  Alongside these undoubted gems we find later gold such as Machen's thin place story 'N', the simple kindness of 'Tree of Life', the hidden pagan rites of 'The Ceremony', and the alchemical experiments of 'The Inmost Light' amongst many others.

As a collection it works on both levels required of such a book, it provides a wide ranging overview of the authors work featuring both the more feted and the less read tales but equally for those with a more established love of the work it is simply a well selected overview that will allow you to revisit old favourites and passing acquaintances.

Buy it here - UK  /  US
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The White People

In 2007 as part of their 'Fantastic Tales' series of strange stories from around the world BBC Radio 4 produced a reading of Arthur Machen's devastating tale of a young girl's experience of and initiation into the world of the supernatural, 'The White People'.

This excellent reading by Ioan Meredith and Louise Collins is embedded below behind that odd choice of image from the uploader.

It should be noted that the reading is slightly longer than 26 minutes and the last 10 minutes is just over-spill.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Collecting Arthur Machen

Regular readers of my scribblings here on Wyrd Britain will now that I'm a bit of an Arthur Machen fan. The Penguin Classics collection 'The White People and Other Weird Stories' was the very first post I published on the blog and he's featured in some form or other 16 more times since and there's more (lots more) to come.  His work perfectly encapsulates a large part of what I wanted to explore when I started this blog, he's one of the pantheon of authors that are the foundations of everything I love about British supernatural fiction along with the likes of Algernon Blackwood, John Wyndham, Michael Moorcock and H.G. Wells to name just a few.

Over the few years I've been reading him I've picked up a few old editions of some of his books - both in tasteful hardback and fabulously lurid paperbacks - but by far the largest part of my Machen collection consists of the beautiful hardbacks produced by Tartarus Press who have championed Machen for decades keeping his work (and the work of many of his contemporaries) in print during the times when he had been largely forgotten.

Recently Ray Russell of Tartarus took the time to make another of his wonderfully relaxing and informative videos - check out his video of Mark Valentine talking about his enviable collection here - this time exploring the various editions of Machen's work that have been published through the years.

Note - Ray has subsequently made several more videos documenting Sarban and Robert Aickman.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Short Story: "The Shining Pyramid" by Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was an author, journalist, mystic and actor.  He was the author of numerous short stories and several novels which explore the thin places where elsewheres and otherwhens push through and impact on our fragile world.
Whilst critical acclaim and literary success avoided him through his life he has always had his admirers and devotees; Stephen King described 'The Great God Pan' as "one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language." And H.P. Lovecraft called him "a Titan - perhaps the greatest living author".

'The Shining Pyramid' was written in 1895 and features 'Dyson', Machen's (sort of) supernatural sleuth searching for the meaning behind strange symbols that have appeared on a friends farm near where a young girl has gone missing.  The story opens in an almost Holmesian mode before the story heads off to the wilds of Wales and it's very dark denouement.

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The Shining Pyramid

1. The Arrow-head Character

"Haunted, you said?"

"Yes, haunted. Don't you remember, when I saw you three years ago, you told me about your place in the west with the ancient woods hanging all about it, and the wild, domed hills, and the ragged land? It has always remained a sort of enchanted picture in my mind as I sit at my desk and hear the traffic rattling in the Street in the midst of whirling London. But when did you come up?"

"The fact is, Dyson, I have only just got out of the train. I drove to the station early this morning and caught the 10.45."

"Well, I am very glad you looked in on me. How have you been getting on since we last met? There is no Mrs. Vaughan, I suppose?"

"No," said Vaughan, "I am still a hermit, like yourself. I have done nothing but loaf about."

Vaughn had lit his pipe and sat in the elbow chair, fidgeting and glancing about him in a somewhat dazed and restless manner. Dyson had wheeled round his chair when his visitor entered and sat with one arm fondly reclining on the desk of his bureau, and touching the litter of manuscript.

"And you are still engaged in the old task?" said Vaughan, pointing to the pile of papers and the teeming pigeon-holes.

"Yes, the vain pursuit of literature, as idle as alchemy, and as entrancing. But you have come to town for some time I suppose; what shall we do to-night?"

"Well, I rather wanted you to try a few days with me down in the west. It would do you a lot of good. I'm sure."

"You are very kind, Vaughan, but London in September is hard to leave. Doré could not have designed anything more wonderful and mystic than Oxford Street as I saw it the other evening; the sunset flaming, the blue haze transmuting the plain street into a road 'far in the spiritual city.'"

"I should like you to come down though. You would enjoy roaming over our hills. Does this racket go on all day and night? It quite bewilders me; I wonder how you can work through it. I am sure you would revel in the great peace of my old home among the woods."

Vaughan lit his pipe again, and looked anxiously at Dyson to see if his inducements had had any effect, but the man of letters shook his head, smiling, and vowed in his heart a firm allegiance to the streets.

"You cannot tempt me," he said.

'Well, you may be right. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong to speak of the peace of the country. There, when a tragedy does occur, it is like a stone thrown into a pond; the circles of disturbance keep on widening, and it seems as if the water would never be still again."

"Have you ever any tragedies where you are?"

"I can hardly say that. But I was a good deal disturbed about a month ago by something that happened; it may or may not have been a tragedy in the usual sense of the word."

"What was the occurrence?"

"Well, the fact is a girl disappeared in a way which seems highly mysterious. Her parents, people of the name of Trevor, are well-to-do farmers, and their eldest daughter Annie was a sort of village beauty; she was really remarkably handsome. One afternoon she thought she would go and see her aunt, a widow who farms her own land, and as the two houses are only about five or six miles apart, she started off, telling her parents she would take the short cut over the hills. She never got to her aunt's, and she never was seen again. That's putting it in a few words."

"What an extraordinary thing! I suppose there are no disused mines, are there, on the hills? I don't think you quite run to anything so formidable as a precipice?"

"No; the path the girl must have taken had no pitfalls of any description; it is just a track over wild, bare hillside, far, even from a byroad. One may walk for miles without meeting a soul, but it is perfectly safe."

"And what do people say about it?"

"Oh, they talk nonsense—among themselves. You have no notion as to how superstitious English cottagers are in out-of-the-way parts like mine. They are as bad as the Irish, every whit, and even more secretive."

"But what do they say?"

"Oh, the poor girl is supposed to have 'gone with the fairies,' or to have been 'taken by the fairies.' Such stuff!" he went on, "one would laugh if it were not for the real tragedy of the case."

Dyson looked somewhat interested.

"Yes," he said, "'fairies' certainly strike a little curiously on the ear in these days. But what do the police say? I presume they do not accept the fairy-tale hypothesis?"

"No; but they seem quite at fault. What I am afraid of is that Annie Trevor must have fallen in with some scoundrels on her way. Castletown is a large seaport, you know, and some of the worst of the foreign sailors occasionally desert their ships and go on the tramp up and down the country. Not many years ago a Spanish sailor named Garcia murdered a whole family for the sake of plunder that was not worth sixpence. They are hardly human, some of these fellows, and I am dreadfully afraid the poor girl must have come to an awful end."

"But no foreign sailor was seen by anyone about the country?"

"No; there is certainly that; and of course country people are quick to notice anyone whose appearance and dress are a little out of the common. Still it seems as if my theory were the only possible explanation."

"There are no data to go upon," said Dyson, thoughtfully. "There was no question of a love affair, or anything of the kind, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, not a hint of such a thing. I am sure if Annie were alive she would have contrived to let her mother know of her safety."

"No doubt, no doubt. Still it is barely possible that she is alive and yet unable to communicate with her friends. But all this must have disturbed you a good deal."

"Yes, it did; I hate a mystery, and especially a mystery which is probably the veil of horror. But frankly, Dyson, I want to make a clean breast of it; I did not come here to tell you all this."

"Of course not," said Dyson, a little surprised at Vaughan's uneasy manner. "You came to have a chat on more cheerful topics."

"No, I did not. What I have been telling you about happened a month ago, but something which seems likely to affect me more personally has taken place within the last few days, and to be quite plain, I came up to town with the idea that you might be able to help me. You recollect that curious case you spoke to me about on our last meeting; something about a spectacle-maker."

"Oh, yes, I remember that. I know I was quite proud of my acumen at the time; even to this day the police have no idea why those peculiar yellow spectacles were wanted. But, Vaughan, you really look quite put out; I hope there is nothing serious?"

"No, I think I have been exaggerating, and I want you to reassure me. But what has happened is very odd."

"And what has happened?"

"I am sure that you will laugh at me, but this is the story. You must know there is a path, a right of way, that goes through my land, and to be precise, close to the wall of the kitchen garden. It is not used by many people; a woodman now and again finds it useful, and five or six children who go to school in the village pass twice a day. Well, a few days ago I was taking a walk about the place before breakfast, and I happened to stop to fill my pipe just by the large doors in the garden wall. The wood, I must tell you, comes to within a few feet of the wall, and the track I spoke of runs right in the shadow of the trees. I thought the shelter from a brisk wind that was blowing rather pleasant, and I stood there smoking with my eyes on the ground. Then something caught my attention. Just under the wall, on the short grass; a number of small flints were arranged in a pattern; something like this": and Mr. Vaughan caught at a pencil and piece of paper, and dotted down a few strokes.

"You see," he went on, "there were, I should think, twelve little stones neatly arranged in lines, and spaced at equal distances, as I have shown it on the paper. They were pointed stones, and the points were very carefully directed one way."

"Yes," said Dyson, without much interest, "no doubt the children you have mentioned had been playing there on their way from school. Children, as you know, are very fond of making such devices with oyster shells or flints or flowers, or with whatever comes in their way."

"So I thought; I just noticed these flints were arranged in a sort of pattern and then went on. But the next morning I was taking the same round, which, as a matter of fact, is habitual with me, and again I saw at the same spot a device in flints. This time it was really a curious pattern; something like the spokes of a wheel, all meeting at a common centre, and this centre formed by a device which looked like a bowl; all, you understand done in flints."

"You are right," said Dyson, "that seems odd enough. Still it is reasonable that your half-a-dozen school children are responsible for these fantasies in stone."

"Well, I thought I would set the matter at rest. The children pass the gate every evening at half-past five, and I walked by at six, and found the device just as I had left it in the morning. The next day I was up and about at a quarter to seven, and I found the whole thing had been changed. There was a pyramid outlined in flints upon the grass. The children I saw going by an hour and a half later, and they ran past the spot without glancing to right or left. In the evening I watched them going home, and this morning when I got to the gate at six o'clock there was a thing like a half moon waiting for me."

"So then the series runs thus: firstly ordered lines, then, the device of the spokes and the bowl, then the pyramid, and finally, this morning, the half moon. That is the order, isn't it?"

"Yes; that is right. But do you know it has made me feel very uneasy? I suppose it seems absurd, but I can't help thinking that some kind of signalling is going on under my nose, and that sort of thing is disquieting."

"But what have you to dread? You have no enemies?"

"No; but I have some very valuable old plate."

"You are thinking of burglars then?" said Dyson, with an accent of considerable interest, "but you must know your neighbours. Are there any suspicious characters about?"

"Not that I am aware of. But you remember what I told you of the sailors."

"Can you trust your servants?"

"Oh, perfectly. The plate is preserved in a strong room; the butler, an old family servant, alone knows where the key is kept. There is nothing wrong there. Still, everybody is aware that I have a lot of old silver, and all country folks are given to gossip. In that way information may have got abroad in very undesirable quarters."

"Yes, but I confess there seems something a little unsatisfactory in the burglar theory. Who is signalling to whom? I cannot see my way to accepting such an explanation. What put the plate into your head in connection with these flints signs, or whatever one may call them?"

"It was the figure of the Bowl," said Vaughan. "I happen to possess a very large and very valuable Charles II punch-bowl. The chasing is really exquisite, and the thing is worth a lot of money. The sign I described to you was exactly the same shape as my punch-bowl."

"A queer coincidence certainly. But the other figures or devices: you have nothing shaped like a pyramid?"

"Ah, you will think that queerer. As it happens, this punch-bowl of mine, together with a set of rare old ladles, is kept in a mahogany chest of a pyramidal shape. The four sides slope upwards, the narrow towards the top."

"I confess all this interests me a good deal," said Dyson. "let us go on then. What about the other figures; how about the Army, as we may call the first sign, and the Crescent or Half moon?"

"Ah, there is no reference that I can make out of these two. Still, you see I have some excuse for curiosity at all events. I should be very vexed to lose any of the old plate; nearly all the pieces have been in the family for generations. And I cannot get it out of my head that some scoundrels mean to rob me, and are communicating with one another every night."

"Frankly," said Dyson, "I can make nothing of it; I am as much in the dark as yourself. Your theory seems certainly the only possible explanation, and yet the difficulties are immense."

He leaned back in his chair, and the two men faced each other, frowning, and perplexed by so bizarre a problem.

"By the way," said Dyson, after a long pause, "what is your geological formation down there?"

Mr. Vaughan looked up, a good deal surprised by the question.

"Old red sandstone and limestone, I believe," he said. "We are just beyond the coal measures, you know."

"But surely there are no flints either in the sandstone or the limestone?"

"No, I never see any flints in the fields. I confess that did strike me as a little curious."

"I should think so! It is very important. By the way, what size were the flints used in making these devices?"

"I happen to have brought one with me; I took it this morning."

"From the Half moon?"

"Exactly. Here it is."

He handed over a small flint, tapering to a point, and about three inches in length.

Dyson's face blazed up with excitement as he took the thing from Vaughan.

"Certainly," he said, after a moment's pause, "you have some curious neighbours in your country. I hardly think they can harbour any designs on your punch-bowl. Do you know this is a flint arrowhead of vast antiquity, and not only that, but an arrow-head of a unique kind? I have seen specimens from all parts of the world, but there are features about this thing that are quite peculiar." He laid down his pipe, and took out a book from a drawer.

"We shall just have time to catch the 5.45 to Castletown," he said.

2. The Eyes on the Wall

Mr. Dyson drew in a long breath of the air of the hills and felt all the enchantment of the scene about him. It was very early morning, and he stood on the terrace in the front of the house.

Vaughan's ancestor had built on the lower slope of a great hill, in the shelter of a deep and ancient wood that gathered on three sides about the house, and on the fourth side, the southwest, the land fell gently away and sank to the valley, where a brook wound in and out in mystic esses, and the dark and gleaming alders tracked the stream's course to the eye. On the terrace in the sheltered place no wind blew, and far beyond, the trees were still. Only one sound broke in upon the silence, and Dyson heard the noise of the brook singing far below, the song of clear and shining water rippling over the stones, whispering and murmuring as it sank to dark deep pools.

Across the stream, just below the house, rose a grey stone bridge, vaulted and buttressed, a fragment of the Middle Ages, and then beyond the bridge the hills rose again, vast and rounded like bastions, covered here and there with dark woods and thickets of undergrowth, but the heights were all bare of trees, showing only grey turf and patches of bracken, touched here and there with the gold of fading fronds; Dyson looked to the north and south, and still he saw the wall of the hills, and the ancient woods, and the stream drawn in and out between them; all grey and dim with morning mist beneath a grey sky in a hushed and haunted air.

Mr. Vaughan's voice broke in upon the silence.

"I thought you would be too tired to be about so early," he said. "I see you are admiring the view. It is very pretty, isn't it, though I suppose old Meyrick Vaughan didn't think much about the scenery when he built the house. A queer grey, old place, isn't it?"

"Yes, and how it fits into the surroundings; it seems of a piece with the grey hills and the grey bridge below."

I am afraid I have brought you down on false pretences, Dyson," said Vaughan, as they began to walk up and down the terrace. "I have been to the place, and there is not a sign of anything this morning."

"Ah, indeed. Well, suppose we go round together."

They walked across the lawn and went by a path through the ilex shrubbery to the back of the house. There Vaughan pointed out the track leading down to the valley and up to the heights above the wood, and presently they stood beneath the garden wall, by the door.

"Here, you see, it was," said Vaughan, pointing to a spot on the turf. "I was standing just where you are now that morning I first saw the flints."

"Yes, quite so. That morning it was the Army, as I call it; then the Bowl, then the Pyramid, and, yesterday, the Half moon. What a queer old stone that is," he went on, pointing to a block of limestone rising out of the turf just beneath the wall. 'It looks like a sort of dwarf pillar, but I suppose it is natural."

"Oh, yes, I think so. I imagine it was brought here, though, as we stand on the red sandstone. No doubt it was used as a foundation stone for some older building."

"Very likely," Dyson was peering about him attentively, looking from the ground to the wall, and from the wall to the deep wood that hung almost over the garden and made the place dark even in the morning.

"Look here," said Dyson at length, "it is certainly a case of children this time. Look at that." He was bending down and staring at the dull red surface of the mellowed bricks of the wall.

Vaughan came up and looked hard where Dyson's finger was pointing, and could scarcely distinguish a faint mark in deeper red.

"What is it?" he said. "I can make nothing of it."

"Look a little more closely. Don't you see it is an attempt to draw the human eye?"

"Ah, now I see what you mean. My sight is not very sharp. Yes, so it is, it is meant for an eye, no doubt, as you say. I thought the children learnt drawing at school."

"Well, it is an odd eye enough. Do you notice the peculiar almond shape; almost like the eye of a Chinaman?"

Dyson looked meditatively at the work of the undeveloped artist, and scanned the wall again, going down on his knees in the minuteness of his inquisition.

"I should like very much," he said at length, "to know how a child in this out of the way place could have any idea of the shape of the Mongolian eye. You see the average child has a very distinct impression of the subject; he draws a circle, or something like a circle, and put a dot in the centre. I don't think any child imagines that the eye is really made like that; it's just a convention of infantile art. But this almond-shaped thing puzzles me extremely. Perhaps it may be derived from a gilt Chinaman on a tea-canister in the grocer's shop. Still that's hardly likely."

"But why are you so sure it was done by a child?"

"Why! Look at the height. These old-fashioned bricks are little more than two inches thick; there are twenty courses from the ground to the sketch if we call it so; that gives a height of three and a half feet. Now, just imagine you are going to draw something on this wall. Exactly; your pencil, if you had one, would touch the wall somewhere on the level with your eyes, that is, more than five feet from the ground. It seems, therefore, a very simple deduction to conclude that this eye on the wall was drawn by a child about ten years old."

"Yes, I had not thought of that. Of course one of the children must have done it."

"I suppose so; and yet as I said, there is something singularly unchildlike about those two lines, and the eyeball itself, you see, is almost an oval. To my mind, the thing has an odd, ancient air; and a touch that is not altogether pleasant. I cannot help fancying that if we could see a whole face from the same hand it would not be altogether agreeable. However, that is nonsense, after all, and we are not getting farther in our investigations. It is odd that the flint series has come to such an abrupt end."

The two men walked away towards the house, and as they went in at the porch there was a break in the grey sky, and a gleam of sunshine on the grey hill before them.

All the day Dyson prowled meditatively about the fields and woods surrounding the house. He was thoroughly and completely puzzled by the trivial circumstances he proposed to elucidate, and now he again took the flint arrow-head from his pocket, turning it over and examining it with deep attention. There was something about the thing that was altogether different from the specimens he had seen at the museums and private collections; the shape was of a distinct type, and around the edge there was a line of little punctured dots, apparently a suggestion of ornament. Who, thought Dyson, could possess such things in so remote a place; and who, possessing the flints, could have put them to the fantastic use of designing meaningless figures under Vaughan's garden wall? The rank absurdity of the whole affair offended him unutterably; and as one theory after another rose in his mind only to be rejected, he felt strongly tempted to take the next train back to town. He had seen the silver plate which Vaughan treasured, and had inspected the punch-bowl, the gem of the collection, with close attention; and what he saw and his interview with the butler convinced him that a plot to rob the strong box was out of the limits of enquiry. The chest in which the bowl was kept, a heavy piece of mahogany, evidently dating from the beginning of the century, was certainly strongly suggestive of a pyramid, and Dyson was at first inclined to the inept manoeuvres of the detective, but a little sober thought convinced him of the impossibility of the burglary hypothesis, and he cast wildly about for something more satisfying. He asked Vaughan if there were any gipsies in the neighbourhood, and heard that the Romany had not been seen for years. This dashed him a good deal, as he knew the gipsy habit of leaving queer hieroglyphics on the line of march, and had been much elated when the thought occurred to him. He was facing Vaughan by the old-fashioned hearth when he put the question, and leaned back in his chair in disgust at the destruction of his theory.

"It is odd," said Vaughan, "but the gipsies never trouble us here. Now and then the farmers find traces of fires in the wildest part of the hills, but nobody seems to know who the fire-lighters are."

"Surely that looks like gipsies?"

"No, not in such places as those. Tinkers and gipsies and wanderers of all sorts stick to the roads and don't go very far from the farmhouses."

"Well, I can make nothing of it. I saw the children going by this afternoon, and, as you say, they ran straight on. So we shall have no more eyes on the wall at all events."

"No, I must waylay them one of these days and find out who is the artist."

The next morning when Vaughan strolled in his usual course from the lawn to the back of the house he found Dyson already awaiting him by the garden door, and evidently in a state of high excitement, for he beckoned furiously with his hand, and gesticulated violently.

"What is it?" asked Vaughan. "The flints again?"

"No; but look here, look at the wall. There; don't you see it?"

"There's another of those eyes!"

"Exactly. Drawn, you see, at a little distance from the first, almost on the same level, but slightly lower."

"What on earth is one to make of it? It couldn't have been done by the children; it wasn't there last night, and they won't pass for another hour. What can it mean?"

"I think the very devil is at the bottom of all this," said Dyson. "Of course, one cannot resist the conclusion that these infernal almond eyes are to be set down to the same agency as the devices in the arrow-heads; and where that conclusion is to lead us is more than I can tell. For my part, I have to put a strong check on my imagination, or it would run wild."

"Vaughan," he said, as they turned away from the wall, "has it struck you that there is one point—a very curious point—in common between the figures done in flints and the eyes drawn on the wall?"

"What is that?" asked Vaughan, on whose face there had fallen a certain shadow of indefinite dread.

"It is this. We know that the signs of the Army, the Bowl, the Pyramid, and the Half moon must have been done at night. Presumably they were meant to be seen at night. Well, precisely the same reasoning applies to those eyes on the wall."

"I do not quite see your point."

"Oh, surely. The nights are dark just now, and have been very cloudy, I know, since I came down. Moreover, those overhanging trees would throw that wall into deep shadow even on a clear night."

"Well?"

"What struck me was this. What very peculiarly sharp eyesight, they, whoever 'they' are, must have to be able to arrange arrow-heads in intricate order in the blackest shadow of the wood, and then draw the eyes on the wall without a trace of bungling, or a false line."

"I have read of persons confined in dungeons for many years who have been able to see quite well in the dark," said Vaughan.

"Yes," said Dyson, "there was the abbé in Monte Cristo. But it is a singular point.

3. The Search for the Bowl

"Who was that old man that touched his hat to you just now?" said Dyson, as they came to the bend of the lane near the house.

"Oh, that was old Trevor. He looks very broken, poor old fellow."

"Who is Trevor?"

"Don't you remember? I told you the story that afternoon I came to your rooms—about a girl named Annie Trevor, who disappeared in the most inexplicable manner about five weeks ago. That was her father."

"Yes, yes, I recollect now. To tell the truth I had forgotten all about it. And nothing has been heard of the girl?"

"Nothing whatever. The police are quite at fault."

"I am afraid I did not pay very much attention to the details you gave me. Which way did the girl go?"

"Her path would take her right across those wild hills above the house: the nearest point in the track must be about two miles from here."

"Is it near that little hamlet I saw yesterday?"

"You mean Croesyceiliog, where the children came from? No; it goes more to the north."

"Ah, I have never been that way."

They went into the house, and Dyson shut himself up in his room, sunk deep in doubtful thought, but yet with the shadow of a suspicion growing within him that for a while haunted his brain, all vague and fantastic, refusing to take definite form. He was sitting by the open window and looking out on the valley and saw, as if in a picture, the intricate winding of the brook, the grey bridge, and the vast hills rising beyond; all still and without a breath of wind to stir the mystic hanging woods, and the evening sunshine glowed warm on the bracken, and down below a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the stream. Dyson sat by the window as the day darkened and the huge bastioned hills loomed vast and vague, and the woods became dim and more shadowy: and the fancy that had seized him no longer appeared altogether impossible. He passed the rest of the evening in a reverie, hardly hearing what Vaughan said; and when he took his candle in the hall, he paused a moment before bidding his friend good-night.

"I want a good rest," he said. "I have got some work to do to-morrow."

"Some writing, you mean?"

"No. I am going to look for the Bowl."

"The Bowl! If you mean my punch-bowl, that is safe in the chest."

"I don't mean the punch-bowl. You may take my word for it that your plate has never been threatened. No; I will not bother you with any suppositions. We shall in all probability have something much stronger than suppositions before long. Good-night, Vaughan."

The next morning Dyson set off after breakfast. He took the path by the garden wall, and noted that there were now eight of the weird almond eyes dimly outlined on the brick.

"Six days more," he said to himself, but as he thought over the theory he had formed, he shrank, in spite of strong conviction, from such a wildly incredible fancy. He struck up through the dense shadows of the wood, and at length came out on the bare hillside, and climbed higher and higher over the slippery turf, keeping well to the north, and following the indications given him by Vaughan. As he went on, he seemed to mount ever higher above the world of human life and customary things; to his right he looked at a fringe of orchard and saw a faint blue smoke rising like a pillar; there was the hamlet from which the children came to school, and there the only sign of life, for the woods embowered and concealed Vaughan's old grey house. As he reached what seemed the summit of the hill, he realized for the first time the desolate loneliness and strangeness of the land; there was nothing but grey sky and grey hill, a high, vast plain that seemed to stretch on for ever and ever, and a faint glimpse of a blue-peaked mountain far away and to the north. At length he came to the path, a slight track scarcely noticeable, and from its position and by what Vaughan had told him he knew that it was the way the lost girl, Annie Trevor, must have taken. He followed the path on the bare hill-top, noticing the great limestone rocks that cropped out of the turf, grim and hideous, and of an aspect as forbidding as an idol of the South Seas; and suddenly he halted, astonished, although he had found what he searched for.

Almost without warning the ground shelved suddenly away on all sides, and Dyson looked down into a circular depression, which might well have been a Roman amphitheatre, and the ugly crags of limestone rimmed it round as if with a broken wall. Dyson walked round the hollow, and noted the position of the stones, and then turned on his way home.

"This," he thought to himself, "is more than curious. The Bowl is discovered, but where is the Pyramid?"

"My dear Vaughan," he said, when he got back, "I may tell you that I have found the Bowl, and that is all I shall tell you for the present. We have six days of absolute inaction before us; there is really nothing to be done."


4. The Secret of the Pyramid

"I have just been round the garden," said Vaughan one morning. "I have been counting those infernal eyes, and I find there are fourteen of them. For heaven's sake, Dyson, tell me what the meaning of it all is."

"I should be very sorry to attempt to do so. I may have guessed this or that, but I always make it a principle to keep my guesses to myself. Besides, it is really not worth while anticipating events; you will remember my telling you that we had six days of inaction before us? Well, this is the sixth day, and the last of idleness. To-night, I propose we take a stroll."

"A stroll! Is that all the action you mean to take?"

"Well, it may show you some very curious things. To be plain, I want you to start with me at nine o'clock this evening for the hills. We may have to be out all night, so you had better wrap up well, and bring some of that brandy."

"Is it a joke?" asked Vaughan, who was bewildered with strange events and strange surmises.

"No, I don't think there is much joke in it. Unless I am much mistaken we shall find a very serious explanation of the puzzle. You will come with me, I am sure?"

"Very good. Which way do you want to go?"

"By the path you told me of; the path Annie Trevor is supposed to have taken."

Vaughan looked white at the mention of the girl's name.

"I did not think you were on that track," he said. "I thought it was the affair of those devices in flint and of the eyes on the wall that you were engaged on. It's no good saying any more, but I will go with you."

At a quarter to nine that evening the two men set out, taking the path through the wood, and up the hill-side. It was a dark and heavy night, the sky was thick with clouds, and the valley full of mist, and all the way they seemed to walk in a world of shadow and gloom, hardly speaking, and afraid to break the haunted silence. They came out at last on the steep hill-side, and instead of the oppression of the wood there was the long, dim sweep of the turf, and higher, the fantastic limestone rocks hinted horror through the darkness, and the wind sighed as it passed across the mountain to the sea, and in its passage beat chill about their hearts. They seemed to walk on and on for hours, and the dim outline of the hill still stretched before them, and the haggard rocks still loomed through the darkness, when suddenly Dyson whispered, drawing his breath quickly, and coming close to his companion:

"Here," he said, "we will lie down. I do not think there is anything yet."

"I know the place," said Vaughan, after a moment. "I have often been by in the daytime. The country people are afraid to come here, I believe; it is supposed to be a fairies' castle, or something of the kind. But why on earth have we come here?"

"Speak a little lower," said Dyson. "It might not do us any good if we are overheard."

"Overheard here! There is not a soul within three miles of us."

"Possibly not; indeed, I should say certainly not. But there might be a body somewhat nearer."

"I don't understand you in the least," said Vaughan, whispering to humour Dyson, "but why have we come here?"

"Well, you see this hollow before us is the Bowl. I think we had better not talk even in whispers."

They lay full length upon the turf; the rock between their faces and the Bowl, and now and again, Dyson, slouching his dark, soft hat over his forehead, put out the glint of an eye, and in a moment drew back, not daring to take a prolonged view. Again he laid an ear to the ground and listened, and the hours went by, and the darkness seemed to blacken, and the faint sigh of the wind was the only sound.

Vaughan grew impatient with this heaviness of silence, this watching for indefinite terror; for to him there was no shape or form of apprehension, and he began to think the whole vigil a dreary farce.

"How much longer is this to last?" he whispered to Dyson, and Dyson who had been holding his breath in the agony of attention put his mouth to Vaughan's ear and said:

"Will you listen?" with pauses between each syllable, and in the voice with which the priest pronounces the awful words.

Vaughan caught the ground with his hands, and stretched forward, wondering what he was to hear. At first there was nothing, and then a low and gentle noise came very softly from the Bowl, a faint sound, almost indescribable, but as if one held the tongue against the roof of the mouth and expelled the breath. He listened eagerly and presently the noise grew louder, and became a strident and horrible hissing as if the pit beneath boiled with fervent heat, and Vaughan, unable to remain in suspense any longer, drew his cap half over his face in imitation of Dyson, and looked down to the hollow below.

It did, in truth, stir and seethe like an infernal caldron. The whole of the sides and bottom tossed and writhed with vague and restless forms that passed to and fro without the sound of feet, and gathered thick here and there and seemed to speak to one another in those tones of horrible sibilance, like the hissing of snakes, that he had heard. It was as if the sweet turf and the cleanly earth had suddenly become quickened with some foul writhing growth. Vaughan could not draw back his face, though he felt Dyson's finger touch him, but he peered into the quaking mass and saw faintly that there were things like faces and human limbs, and yet he felt his inmost soul chill with the sure belief that no fellow soul or human thing stirred in all that tossing and hissing host. He looked aghast, choking back sobs of horror, and at length the loathsome forms gathered thickest about some vague object in the middle of the hollow, and the hissing of their speech grew more venomous, and he saw in the uncertain light the abominable limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe and intertwine, and he thought he heard, very faint, a low human moan striking through the noise of speech that was not of man. At his heart something seemed to whisper ever "the worm of corruption, the worm that dieth not," and grotesquely the image was pictured to his imagination of a piece of putrid offal stirring through and through with bloated and horrible creeping things. The writhing of the dusky limbs continued, they seemed clustered round the dark form in the middle of the hollow, and the sweat dripped and poured off Vaughan's forehead, and fell cold on his hand beneath his face.

Then, it seemed done in an instant, the loathsome mass melted and fell away to the sides of the Bowl, and for a moment Vaughan saw in the middle of the hollow the tossing of human arms.

But a spark gleamed beneath, a fire kindled, and as the voice of a woman cried out loud in a shrill scream of utter anguish and terror, a great pyramid of flame spired up like a bursting of a pent fountain, and threw a blaze of light upon the whole mountain. In that instant Vaughan saw the myriads beneath; the things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed, the faces with the almond eyes burning with evil and unspeakable lusts; the ghastly yellow of the mass of naked flesh and then as if by magic the place was empty, while the fire roared and crackled, and the flames shone abroad.

"You have seen the Pyramid," said Dyson in his ear, "the Pyramid of fire."


5. The Little People

"Then you recognize the thing?"

"Certainly. It is a brooch that Annie Trevor used to wear on Sundays; I remember the pattern. But where did you find it? You don't mean to say that you have discovered the girl?"

"My dear Vaughan, I wonder you have not guessed where I found the brooch. You have not forgotten last night already?"

"Dyson," said the other, speaking very seriously, "I have been turning it over in my mind this morning while you have been out. I have thought about what I saw, or perhaps I should say about what I thought I saw, and the only conclusion I can come to is this, that the thing won't bear recollection. As men live, I have lived soberly and honestly, in the fear of God, all my days, and all I can do is believe that I suffered from some monstrous delusion, from some phantasmagoria of the bewildered senses. You know we went home together in silence, not a word passed between us as to what I fancied I saw; had we not better agree to keep silence on the subject? When I took my walk in the peaceful morning sunshine, I thought all the earth seemed full of praise, and passing by that wall I noticed there were no more signs recorded, and I blotted out those that remained. The mystery is over, and we can live quietly again. I think some poison has been working for the last few weeks; I have trod on the verge of madness, but I am sane now."

Mr. Vaughan had spoken earnestly, and bent forward in his chair and glanced at Dyson with something of entreaty.

"My dear Vaughan," said the other, after a pause, "what's the use of this? It is much too late to take that tone; we have gone too deep. Besides you know as well as I that there is no delusion in the case; I wish there were with all my heart. No, in justice to myself I must tell you the whole story, so far as I know it."

"Very good," said Vaughan with a sigh, "if you must, you must."

"Then," said Dyson, "we will begin with the end if you please. I found this brooch you have just identified in the place we have called the Bowl. There was a heap of grey ashes, as if a fire had been burning, indeed, the embers were still hot, and this brooch was lying on the ground, just outside the range of the flame. It must have dropped accidentally from the dress of the person who was wearing it. No, don't interrupt me; we can pass now to the beginning, as we have had the end. Let us go back to that day you came to see me in my rooms in London. So far as I can remember, soon after you came in you mentioned, in a somewhat casual manner, that an unfortunate and mysterious incident had occurred in your part of the country; a girl named Annie Trevor had gone to see a relative, and had disappeared. I confess freely that what you said did not greatly interest me; there are so many reasons which may make it extremely convenient for a man and more especially a woman to vanish from the circle of their relations and friends. I suppose, if we were to consult the police, one would find that in London somebody disappears mysteriously every other week, and the officers would, no doubt, shrug their shoulders, and tell you that by the law of averages it could not be otherwise. So I was very culpably careless to your story, and besides, here is another reason for my lack of interest; your tale was inexplicable. You could only suggest a blackguard sailor on the tramp, but I discarded the explanation immediately.

"For many reasons, but chiefly because the occasional criminal, the amateur in brutal crime, is always found out, especially if he selects the country as the scene of his operations. You will remember the case of that Garcia you mentioned; he strolled into a railway station the day after the murder, his trousers covered with blood, and the works of the Dutch clock, his loot, tied in a neat parcel. So rejecting this, your only suggestion, the whole tale became, as I say, inexplicable, and, therefore, profoundly uninteresting. Yes, therefore, it is a perfectly valid conclusion. Do you ever trouble your head about problems which you know to be insoluble? Did you ever bestow much thought on the old puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise? Of course not, because you knew it was a hopeless quest, and so when you told me the story of a country girl who had disappeared I simply placed the whole thing down in the category of the insoluble, and thought no more about the matter. I was mistaken, so it has turned out; but if you remember, you immediately passed on to an affair which interested you more intensely, because personally, I need not go over the very singular narrative of the flint signs, at first I thought it all trivial, probably some children's game, and if not that a hoax of some sort; but your showing me the arrow-head awoke my acute interest. Here, I saw, there was something widely removed from the commonplace, and matter of real curiosity; and as soon as I came here I set to work to find the solution, repeating to myself again and again the signs you had described. First came the sign we have agreed to call the Army; a number of serried lines of flints, all pointing in the same way. Then the lines, like the spokes of a wheel, all converging towards the figure of a Bowl, then the triangle or Pyramid, and last of all the Half moon. I confess that I exhausted conjecture in my efforts to unveil this mystery, and as you will understand it was a duplex or rather triplex problem. For I had not merely to ask myself: what do these figures mean? but also, who can possibly be responsible for the designing of them? And again, who can possibly possess such valuable things, and knowing their value thus throw them down by the wayside? This line of thought led me to suppose that the person or persons in question did not know the value of unique flint arrow-heads, and yet this did not lead me far, for a well-educated man might easily be ignorant on such a subject. Then came the complication of the eye on the wall, and you remember that we could not avoid the conclusion that in the two cases the same agency was at work. The peculiar position of these eyes on the wall made me inquire if there was such a thing as a dwarf anywhere in the neighbourhood, but I found that there was not, and I knew that the children who pass by every day had nothing to do with the matter. Yet I felt convinced that whoever drew the eyes must be from three and a half to four feet high, since, as I pointed out at the time, anyone who draws on a perpendicular surface chooses by instinct a spot about level with his face. Then again, there was the question of the peculiar shape of the eyes; that marked Mongolian character of which the English countryman could have no conception, and for a final cause of confusion the obvious fact that the designer or designers must be able practically to see in the dark. As you remarked, a man who has been confined for many years in an extremely dark cell or dungeon might acquire that power; but since the days of Edmond Dantès, where would such a prison be found in Europe? A sailor, who had been immured for a considerable period in some horrible Chinese oubliette, seemed the individual I was in search of, and though it looked improbable, it was not absolutely impossible that a sailor or, let us say, a man employed on shipboard, should be a dwarf. But how to account for my imaginary sailor being in possesion of prehistoric arrow-heads? And the possession granted, what was the meaning and object of these mysterious signs of flint, and the almond-shaped eyes? Your theory of a contemplated burglary I saw, nearly from the first, to be quite untenable, and I confess I was utterly at a loss for a working hypothesis. It was a mere accident which put me on the track; we passed poor old Trevor, and your mention of his name and of the disappearance of his daughter, recalled the story which I had forgotten, or which remained unheeded. Here, then, I said to myself, is another problem, uninteresting, it is true, by itself; but what if it prove to be in relation with all these enigmas which torture me? I shut myself in my room, and endeavoured to dismiss all prejudice from my mind, and I went over everything de novo, assuming for theory's sake that the disappearance of Annie Trevor had some connection with the flint signs and the eyes on the wall. This assumption did not lead me very far, and I was on the point of giving the whole problem up in despair, when a possible significance of the Bowl struck me. As you know there is a 'Devil's Punch-bowl' in Surrey, and I saw that the symbol might refer to some feature in the country. Putting the two extremes together, I determined to look for the Bowl near the path which the lost girl had taken, and you know how I found it. I interpreted the sign by what I knew, and read the first, the Army, thus:

"'there is to be a gathering or assembly at the Bowl in a fortnight (that is the Half moon) to see the Pyramid, or to build the Pyramid.'

"The eyes, drawn one by one, day by day, evidently checked off the days, and I knew that there would be fourteen and no more. Thus far the way seemed pretty plain; I would not trouble myself to inquire as to the nature of the assembly, or as to who was to assemble in the loneliest and most dreaded place among these lonely hills. In Ireland or China or the West of America the question would have been easily answered; a muster of the disaffected, the meeting of a secret society; vigilantes summoned to report: the thing would be simplicity itself; but in this quiet corner of England, inhabited by quiet folk, no such suppositions were possible for a moment. But I knew that I should have an opportunity of seeing and watching the assembly, and I did not care to perplex myself with hopeless research; and in place of reasoning a wild fancy entered into judgment: I remembered what people had said about Annie Trevor's disappearance, that she had been 'taken by the fairies.' I tell you, Vaughan, I am a sane man as you are, my brain is not, I trust, mere vacant space to let to any wild improbability, and I tried my best to thrust the fantasy away. And the hint came of the old name of fairies, 'the little people,' and the very probable belief that they represent a tradition of the prehistoric Turanian inhabitants of the country, who were cave dwellers: and then I realized with a shock that I was looking for a being under four feet in height, accustomed to live in darkness, possessing stone instruments, and familiar with the Mongolian cast of features! I say this, Vaughan, that I should be ashamed to hint at such visionary stuff to you, if it were not for that which you saw with your very eyes last night, and I say that I might doubt the evidence of my senses, if they were not confirmed by yours. But you and I cannot look each other in the face and pretend delusion; as you lay on the turf beside me I felt your flesh shrink and quiver, and I saw your eyes in the light of the flame. And so I tell you without any shame what was in my mind last night as we went through the wood and climbed the hill, and lay hidden beneath the rock.

"There was one thing that should have been most evident that puzzled me to the very last. I told you how I read the sign of the Pyramid; the assembly was to see a pyramid, and the true meaning of the symbol escaped me to the last moment. The old derivation from 'up, fire,' though false, should have set me on the track, but it never occurred to me.

"I think I need say very little more. You know we were quite helpless, even if we had foreseen what was to come. Ah, the particular place where these signs were displayed? Yes, that is a curious question. But this house is, so far as I can judge, in a pretty central situation amongst the hills; and possibly, who can say yes or no, that queer, old limestone pillar by your garden wall was a place of meeting before the Celt set foot in Britain. But there is one thing I must add: I don't regret our inability to rescue the wretched girl. You saw the appearance of those things that gathered thick and writhed in the Bowl; you may be sure that what lay bound in the midst of them was no longer fit for earth."

"So?" said Vaughan.

"So she passed in the Pyramid of Fire," said Dyson, "and they passed again to the underworld, to the places beneath the hills."