inale--an insistent, feverish repetition of the human ache, ceasing
as with utter exhaustion.

I looked about me drinking in the night. How little this music really
expressed it! It seemed too humanly near-sighted, too egotistic, too
petty to sound out under those far-seeing stars, in that divine quiet.

I slipped on another record. This time it was a beautiful little song,
full of the sweet melancholy of love. I shut it down. The thing wouldn't
do. In the evening--yes. But _now_! Truly there is something womanly
about Night, something loverlike in a vast impersonal way; but too
big--she is too terribly big to woo with human sentiment. Only a
windlike chant would do--something with an undertone of human despair,
outsoared by brave, savage flights of invincible soul-hope--great virile
singing man-cries, winged as the starlight, weird as space--Whitman
sublimated, David's soul poured out in symphony.

I started another going. This time I did not stop it, for the Night was
singing--through its nose perhaps, but still it was singing--out of that
machine. It was Wagner's _Evening Star_ played by an orchestra. It
filled the night, swept the glittering reaches, groped about in the
glooms; and then, leaving the human theme behind, soul-like the upward
yearning violins took flight, dissolving at last into starlight and
immensity. Ages swept by me like a dream-wind. When I got back, the
machine, all but run down, was scratching hideously.

Slowly we swung about in the scarcely perceptible current. Down among
the luggage the three snored discordantly. Frank's cigarette glowed
intermittently against the dim horizon, like a bonfire far off.
Somewhere out in the gloom coyotes chattered and yelped, and from far
across the dusky valley others answered--a doleful tenson.

I dozed. Frank awoke us all with a shout. We leaped up and stared
blinkingly into the north. That whole region of the sky was aflame from
zenith to horizon with spectral fires. It was the aurora. Not the pale,
ragged glow, sputtering like the ghost of a huge lamp-flame, which is
familiar to every one, but a billowing of color, rainbows gone mad! In
the northeast the long rolling columns formed--many-colored clouds of
spectral light whipped up as by a whirlwind--flung from eastward to
westward, devouring Polaris and the Wain--rapid sequent towers of
smokeless fire!

It dazzled and whirled and mounted and fell like the illumined filmy
skirts of some invisible Titan