ion of the German spirit which began to invade us subtly at
about that time. His scented prose could not conceal this spirit from
the perception of Richard Strauss. Strauss recognised it and welcomed it
with the music of _nebels_, _kinnors_ and _tabors_, as the misguided
children of Israel welcomed the golden calf. Nietzche's 'Thou goest
among women?--Take thy whip' we see now to be no mere personal
expression but the voice of the soul of Germany, a black thread
interwoven in their creative art. There is a similar thread, but perhaps
of silver, interwoven in our own and in the French art. Where does it
begin and whither does it lead?"

* * * * *

Yet those days throughout which Paul laboured unceasingly for the
greatest cause of humanity were lotus days for many. London was raided
and rationed; London swore softly, demanded a change of government,
turned up its coat collar and stumped doggedly along much as usual. Men
fought and women prayed, whilst Paul worked night and day to bring some
ray of hope to the hearts of those in whom faith was dead. The black
thread crept like an ebon stain into the woof of the carpet. The image
of the Bull was set up in many a grove hitherto undefiled, and Paul
worked the more feverishly because it was one of the inscrutable cosmic
laws that the black should sometimes triumph over the white.

Paul's intimacy with Jules Thessaly had grown closer than he realised.
Thessaly was become indispensable to him. Paul, had he essayed the task,
must have found it all but impossible to disentangle his own ideas, or
those due to direct inspiration, from the ideas of Thessaly or those
based upon inquiries traceable to the astonishing data furnished by his
collection. Item by item he had revealed its treasures to the man who
alone had power to wield them as levers to move the world. Remote but
splendid creeds, mere hazy memories of mankind, were reconstructed upon
these foundations. The Izamal temples of Yucatan were looted of their
secrets--the secrets of a great Red Race, mighty in knowledge and power,
which had sought to look upon the face of God before the Great Pyramid
was fashioned, whose fleets had ruled the vanished seas known to us as
the Sahara and North Africa, whose golden capital had looked proudly out
upon an empire mightier than Rome--an empire which the Atlantic Ocean
had swallowed up. The story of this cataclysm which had engulfed
Atlantis, brought to ne