s me, plunges into me. I drop sheer into the void, and my gaze
falls faster than I.

Through the wanton breath of the depths that assail me I see, far
below, the seashore dawning. The ghostly strand that I glimpse while I
cling to my own body is bare, endless, rain-drowned, and supernaturally
mournful. Through the long, heavy and concentric mists that the clouds
make, my eyes go searching. On the shore I see a being who wanders
alone, veiled to the feet. It is a woman. Ah, I am one with that
woman! She is weeping. Her tears are dropping on the sand where the
waves are breaking! While I am reeling to infinity, I hold out my two
heavy arms to her. She fades away as I look.

For a long time there is nothing, nothing but invisible time, and the
immense futility of rain on the sea.

* * * * * *

What are these flashes of light? There are gleams of flame in my eyes;
a surfeit of light is cast over me. I can no longer cling to
anything--fire and water!

In the beginning, there is battle between fire and water--the world
revolving headlong in the hooked claws of its flames, and the expanses
of water which it drives back in clouds. At last the water obscures
the whirling spirals of the furnace and takes their place. Under the
roof of dense darkness, timbered with flashes, there are triumphant
downpours which last a hundred thousand years. Through centuries of
centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant
and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and
its surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars,
or is it the fire? And one sees the reigning calm of a radiant plain,
a plain of incalculable greatness. The round meteor congeals into
shapes, and continental islands are sculptured by the water's boundless
hand.

I am no longer alone and abandoned on the former battlefield of the
elements. Near this rock, something like another is taking shape; it
stands straight as a flame, and moves. This sketch-model thinks. It
reflects the wide expanse, the past and the future; and at night, on
its hill, it is the pedestal of the stars. The animal kingdom dawns in
that upright thing, the poor upright thing with a face and a cry, which
hides an internal world and in which a heart obscurely beats. A lone
being, a heart! But the heart, in the embryo of the first men, beats
only for fear. He whose face has appeared