g;
but he would think he was still in a nightmare. It might wake
the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell.
Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had
about it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created.
There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies which
contrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary
condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene;
but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about
the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape.
But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by God
or at least by the gods, something with an aim in its anarchy.
It was very different in the final stage of the descent, where my mind
woke up from its meditations. One can only say that the whole landscape
was like a leper. It was of a wasting white and silver and grey,
with mere dots of decadent vegetation like the green spots of a plague.
In shape it not only rose into horns and crests like waves
or clouds, but I believe it actually alters like waves or clouds,
visibly but with a loathsome slowness. The swamp is alive.
And I found again a certain advantage in forgetfulness;
for I saw all this incredible country before I even remembered
its name, or the ancient tradition about its nature.
Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemed
to fall away into a universal blank under the staring sun,
as I came, in the great spaces of the circle of a lifeless sea,
into the silence of Sodom and Gomorrah.

For these are the foundations of a fallen world, and a sea
below the seas on which men sail. Seas move like clouds and
fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land.
And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty
perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death
of abominable things. I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride;
such things are hideous not because they are distant but because
they are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine,
were buried things as bad as any buried under that bitter sea,
and if He did not come to do battle with them, even in the darkness
of the brain of man, I know not why He came. Certainly it
was not only to talk about flowers or to talk about Socialism.
The more truly we can see life as a fairy-tale, the more clearly the tale
resolves its