had picked up a
little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. I
think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows.
He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran something
like

'Within the region of the air,
Compassed about with Heavens fair,
Great tracts of lands there may be found,
Where many numerous hosts,
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.'

Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. I
told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. He
admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see. He believed that
everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only
take comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you...'

"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody
for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the
Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with
me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a
stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly. There was
that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened
animal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and
bone.

"'I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrow
and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into
his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to ask
him a question.

"'Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing.
Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoke
to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am
beginning to think that there is a fourth.

"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and
gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. 'That world is the
Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, 'and perhaps I am getting near
the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of. I
tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost
screamed, 'that no mortal can think of and live.'

You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning out
of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with
mathematics? I don't see it yet... At any rate, I--You may be sure I
cursed my folly for ever pretending to take