men's bodies.... There was no
sun, and the moon abhorred the valley. In such a place as this wandered
the souls of women who had killed their children, of monks who at dark
of night had said the Black Mass.... Here were masters who had deserted
tall, gallant ships.... Hither witches rode on the bleak east wind, to
be flogged by their masters and horribly caressed.... The Valley of the
Black Pig.... Here were those who had read the frightful inscription on
the altar of the Unknown God ... Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, and
Avicenna; Nicolas Flamel and his wife Petronella; Lady Alice Kyteler of
Kilkenny, and Gerald of Desmond, the Great Earl; and newer names, Dee
and Edward Kelly.... Degraded majesty with soiled beards.... Gray,
gray.... And the faint ghosts in cerecloths, and the horrible shapes of
the mist.... The drizzle of the rain, and the rustle of the Feet of the
Goat.... The cawing of strange birds and the wind among the boulders
and souls, weeping, weeping--unhoping, undespairing, weeping,
weeping.... The Valley of the Black Pig....

What was it? In God's name what was it that had made him this way, his
being suddenly lifeless, like a cow that goes dry, or a field that is
mysteriously, suddenly fallow.... And weariness seemed immortal.... What
had led him into this dreadful cemetery of the mind? Had he gone too far
in thought and emotion and come to a dreadful desert plane within
himself ...? Had he eaten of the tree of which the cabalist wrote:

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou
shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die.

Had he blundered on it unwittingly, eaten ignorantly and surely died?...
Or was he going mad? Good God! Could that be it? Was there something
they hadn't told him--a strange taint in his blood, or his mother's
blood.... Would he end his days in a madhouse.... What a fate, what a
dreadful fate! A slavering gray-headed man, wandering through the
Valley of the Black Pig, forever and forever?

Better to end it now.

Yes, but would that end it? The material envelope of cells and fluids
gone, might there not ...? Christ! Worse off yet, if anything were
left.... There might be something left; there was the trouble.... One
knew so little, so abominably little.... Only material wisdom was
certain, and that said: Don't chance it....

Drink? He had his men to think of,