mity proves Satan at the
other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence
of wrong at the other.

Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a
sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of
the existence of Evil.

It is this perfection of evil which has sometimes sufficed to incline
powerful intellects to a faith in the duality of the Deity, towards that
terrible bifrons of the Manichaeans.

A piece of silk stolen during the last war from the palace of the
Emperor of China represents a shark eating a crocodile, who is eating a
serpent, who is devouring an eagle, who is preying on a swallow, who in
his turn is eating a caterpillar.

All nature which is under our observation is thus alternately devouring
and devoured. The prey prey on each other.

Learned men, however, who are also philosophers, and therefore optimists
in their view of creation, find, or believe they find, an explanation.
Among others, Bonnet of Geneva, that mysterious exact thinker, who was
opposed to Buffon, as in later times Geoffrey St. Hilaire has been to
Cuvier, was struck with the idea of the final object. His notions may be
summed up thus: universal death necessitates universal sepulture; the
devourers are the sextons of the system of nature. All created things
enter into and form the elements of other. To decay is to nourish. Such
is the terrible law from which not even man himself escapes.

In our world of twilight this fatal order of things produces monsters.
You ask for what purpose. We find the solution here.

But _is_ this the solution? Is this the answer to our questionings? And
if so, why not some different order of things? Thus the question
returns.

Let us live: be it so.

But let us endeavour that death shall be progress. Let us aspire to an
existence in which these mysteries shall be made clear. Let us follow
that conscience which leads us thither.

For let us never forget that the highest is only attained through the
high.

III

ANOTHER KIND OF SEA-COMBAT

Such was the creature in whose power Gilliatt had fallen for some
minutes.

The monster was the inhabitant of the grotto; the terrible genii of the
place. A kind of sombre demon of the water.

All the splendours of the cavern existed for it alone.

On the day of the previous month when Gilliatt had first penetrated into
the grotto, the dark outline, vaguely perceived by him in the rippl