iolate: it seemed to care for nothing in its rough,
sombre, indifferent, unbelieving, roaring profanation; for suddenly,
fiercely, it dragged its black waves over them, dragged them with
it--his father, his mother, all of them--and they were things that had
been, they of the blood imperial, they became a legend in the glory of
the new day that rose over the black sea....

His ancestors stared at him and they seemed to him to be spectres,
themselves legends, falsities against which tradition would no longer
act as a protection. They seemed to him like ghosts, enemies.... He
opened wider his burning eyes upon their stiff, trained and robed or
harnessed figures, which seemed to step towards him from the eight
panels of the walls, in order to stifle him in their midst, to oppress
him in a narrow circle of nightmare on his panting breast, with iron
knees forcing the breath out of his lungs, with iron hands crushing his
head, from which the sweat trickled over his temples.

Then he felt afraid, like a little child that has been told creepy
stories, afraid of those ghosts of emperors, afraid of the glimpses of
visions which again flashed pictures of the inundations before him: the
meadow with the corpses, the men in the punt fishing up the woman. The
corpses began suddenly to come to life, to burst out laughing, with
slits of mouths and hollow eyes, as though they had been making a fool
of him, as though there had been no inundations; and the dusk of the
bed-chamber, filled with emperors, pressed down upon him as with
atmospheres of nitrogen.

"Andro! Andro!" he cried, in a smothered utterance and then louder, as
though in mortal anguish, "Andro! Andro!..."

The door at the end of the room was thrown open; the valet entered,
alarmed, in his night-clothes. The reality of his presence broke through
the enchantment of the night and exorcized the ghosts back into
portraits.

"Highness!..."

"Andro, come here...."

"Highness, what's the matter?... How you frightened me, highness! What
is it?... I thought...."

"What, Andro?"

"Nothing, highness. Your voice sounded so terribly hoarse! What's the
matter?..."

"I don't know, Andro: I am ill, I think; I can't sleep...."

The man wiped Othomar's clammy forehead with a handkerchief:

"Will your highness have anything to drink? A glass of water?..."

"No, thank you, thank you.... Andro, can you come and sleep in here?"

"If you wish it, highness...."

"Yes, here, at th