t?

* * * * * *

The clouds are crowning themselves with sheaves of stars. It is an
aviary of fire, a hell of silver and gold. Planetary cataclysms send
immense walls of light falling around me. Phantasmal palaces of
shrieking lightning, with arches of star-shells, appear and vanish amid
forests of ghastly gleams.

While the bombardment is patching the sky with continents of flame, it
is drawing still nearer. Volleys of flashes are plunging in here and
there and devouring the other lights. The supernatural army is
arriving! All the highways of space are crowded. Nearer still, a
shell bursts with all its might and glows; and among us all whom chance
defends goes frightfully in quest of flesh. Shells are following each
other into that cavity there. Again I see, among the things of earth,
a resurrected man, and he is dragging himself towards that hole! He is
wrapped in white, and the under-side of his body, which rubs the
ground, is black. Hooking the ground with his stiffened arms he
crawls, long and flat as a boat. He still hears the cry "Forward!" He
is finding his way to the hole; he does not know, and he is trailing
exactly toward its monstrous ambush. The shell will succeed! At any
second now the frenzied fangs of space will strike his side and go in
as into a fruit. I have not the strength to shout to him to fly
elsewhere with all his slowness; I can only open my mouth and become a
sort of prayer in face of the man's divinity. And yet, he is the
survivor; and along with the sleeper, to whom a dream was whispering
just now, he is the only one left to me.

A hiss--the final blow reaches him; and in a flash I see the piebald
maggot crushing under the weight of the sibilance and turning wild eyes
towards me.

No! It is not he! A blow of light--of all light--fills my eyes. I am
lifted up, I am brandished by an unknown blade in the middle of a globe
of extraordinary light. The shell----I! And I am falling, I fall
continually, fantastically. I fall out of this world; and in that
fractured flash I saw myself again--I thought of my bowels and my heart
hurled to the winds--and I heard voices saying again and again--far,
far away--"Simon Paulin died at the age of thirty-six."

CHAPTER XVI

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI

I am dead. I fall, I roll like a broken bird into bewilderments of
light, into canyons of darkness. Vertigo presses on my entrails,
strangle