hat followed the crest of a ridge,
between great darknesses, enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and
below. He was going along this path without looking back, without a
thought for those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him
on his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him walking,
without haste or avidity, walking as a man might along some great
picture gallery with which he was perhaps even over familiar. His hands
would be in his pockets, his indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him.
And as he strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him. His
figure became dim and dimmer.

Whither did that figure go? Did that enveloping darkness hide the
beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just dissolve that
figure into itself?

Was that indeed the end?

Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can neither
imagine nor disbelieve in immortality. Dimmer and dimmer grew the figure
but still it remained visible. As one can continue to see a star at dawn
until one turns away. Or one blinks or nods and it is gone.

Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless
generations. Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so clearly,
faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic peoples believed
from Avebury to Polynesia? Not always have we had to go alone and
unprepared into uncharted darknesses. For a time the dream artist used a
palette of the doctor's vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a
new roll of the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been
looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked figure,
crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific monsters, ferrying
a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the scales of judgment before the
very throne of Osiris and stood waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed
his conscience and that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead,
crouched ready if the judgment went against him. The doctor's attention
concentrated upon the scales. A memory of Swedengorg's Heaven and Hell
mingled with the Egyptian fantasy. Now at last it was possible to know
something real about this man's soul, now at last one could look into
the Secret Places of his Heart. Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis
head, were reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it
to the supreme judge.

Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams. His anxiety to
plead for his fr