he lock, that, to relieve my hands
(which were burdened with the implements I had brought), I slung the
hair-chain of the cross around my neck, intending merely to raise the
coffin-lid sufficiently high to admit of my slipping the amulet in.

Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt.
The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an
influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and
nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated,
until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences.
Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of
being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized
me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It
was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in
the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words,
harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here
assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the
lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an
ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the
features of my father; at another those of Tom Wynne; at another the
leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio.

'It is an illusion,' I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; 'it
is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain
and an exhausted stomach.' Yet it disturbed me as much as if my
reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be
fighting towards my father's coffin as a dreamer lights against a
nightmare, and At last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish
bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and
I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious
state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of
phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the
'Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,' scattering seeds over the earth below.
At the pyramid's base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading
with the Queen of Death:

What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

And the Sibyl's face was that of Fenella Stanley--her voice was that
of Sinfi Lovell.

And then from that dizzy height seemed to come a cackling laugh:--

'You makes me blush, an' blow me if blushin' ain't bin an' made
_t'other_ eye dry. I lives in Primr