efore her a great pyramid of bodies rose toward an apex surrounded by
flashes of pink lightning--the seething bodies of all humanity, and of
all the animals and reptiles of the earth. Each struggled to extricate
itself from the rest, to surmount its neighbors, to wriggle toward the
apex. The bare breasts of women, whose handsome ball gowns were torn
and covered with mud, strained to be free from the enwrapping trunks of
elephants, and the coils of pythons. The torsoes of dusky savages and
the limbs of white men writhed under the fangs of lions and hyenas,
which were transfixed by spears, or lacerated by wounds that they had
inflicted on one another. The countless faces exposed on that quaking
mountain of flesh, male and female, light and dark, fair and hideous,
brutish and sensitive, expressed one look of stupid and yet agonized
desire--all eyes were turned upward toward the summit wreathed with
lightning. There those who had just gained their goal, lightly touched
by the tips of the rose-colored bolts, sank back inanimate, went
tumbling down the slope with astonishment frozen on their faces,
scattering broadcast from their hands a cascade of treasures--jewels,
scraps of paper, purses, images of gold and ivory, wreaths of laurel or
of lilies, scepters, and objects in which no one could have discovered
any meaning or any worth.

But what was the goal toward which this mass of flesh was striving so
frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the
lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and
yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure
at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of
human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging
itself to death.

The whole vision vanished.

"Hamoud! Hamoud! Now I'm afraid!"

But she could not wake the protector. She was alone.

"God, then!"

And in one last flash of distracted irony:

"If I called God in Arabic?"

She had an idea that the silently brooding forest was smiling in the
darkness.

Yes, she felt, alone; since even the God of Hamoud could not be aware
of this world, in which everything desired by the senses, or
apprehensible by them, was going to destruction--so futile a tragedy,
so contemptible a fleeting dream, a nothingness of which the miserable
woman seemed to see herself, at last, as the most insignificant part.

"But I have cast it off, left