dy closed toward slumber, that a sudden strong thought pierced
and woke me: for I remembered that Leda was the name of a Greek woman
who had borne twins. In fact, I should not be surprised if this Greek
word Leda is the same word etymologically as the Hebrew Eve, for I have
heard of _v's_, and _b's_, and _d's_ interchanging about in this way,
and if _Di_, meaning God, or Light, and _Bi_, meaning Life, and Io_v_e,
and Iho_v_ah and Go_d_, meaning much the same, are all one, that would
be nothing astonishing to me, as wi_d_ow, and veu_v_e, are one: and
where it says, 'truly the Light is Good (_tob, b_on),' this is as if it
said, 'truly the Di is Di.' Such, at any rate, is the fatality that
attends me, even in the smallest things: for this Western Eve, or Greek
Leda, had twins.

* * * * *

Well, the next morning we crossed by the ruins of old Greek Phanar
across the triple Stamboul-wall, which still showed its deep-ivied
portal, and made our way, not without climbing, along the Golden Horn to
the foot of the Old Seraglio, where I soon found signs of the railway.
And that minute commenced our journey across Turkey, Bulgaria, Servia,
Bosnia, Croatia, to Trieste, occupying no day or two as in old times,
but four months, a long-drawn nightmare, though a nightmare of rich
happiness, if one may say so, leaving on the memory a vague vast
impression of monstrous ravines, ever-succeeding profundities, heights
and greatnesses, jungles strange as some moon-struck poet's fantasy,
everlasting glooms, and a sound of mighty unseen rivers, cataracts, and
slow cumbered rills whose bulrushes never see the sun, with largesse
everywhere, secrecies, profusions, the unimaginable, the unspeakable, a
savagery most lush and fierce and gaudy, and vales of Arcadie, and
remote mountain-peaks, and tarns shy as old-buried treasure, and
glaciers, and we two human folk pretty small and drowned and lost in
all that amplitude, yet moving always through it.

We followed the lines that first day till we came to a steam train, and
I found the engine fairly good, and everything necessary to move it at
my hand: but the metals in such a condition of twisted, broken, vaulted,
and buried confusion, due to the earthquake, that, having run some
hundreds of yards to examine them, I saw that nothing could be done in
that way. At first this threw me into a condition like despair, for what
we were to do I did not know: but after perseveri