Matthew Phipps Shiel

“ The scraping and gnawing sound has multiplied itself a million-fold, amid is now clamorous and constant. At every point beneath the flooring — along the length of every wooden panel — over all the wooden ceiling, it is heard. An army of creatures boring, boring their invincible way to reach me. . . .
The floor I can no longer touch with my feet; the table of stone itself grows hot; the iron casing of the chamber, even under the scarlet gleam of the lamp, now emits the redding glow of heated metal. . . .
Tulsah! ”

“ It was when I had understood the sinister meaning of these things that, in the dim chamber which I had made my abode, I fell upon my face to the ground, and swore in my heart three oaths, to which I called every power of the Universe to witness; I would moderate, and, if necessary, quench, the zeal to know which inflamed me; I would never for any purpose wander abroad from the land, from the house in which I then found myself; no daughter of man would I ever espouse. This I swore, and thus did I resolve to break in my person the continuity of that destiny which hunted my race. ”

“ In their midst stood a very young woman — most god-like tall — surpassing lovely — delirious with opiates; her body perfumed; her head sprinkled with sandal-powder; the wife of the dead maim, who had devoted herself to the flames which were to consume him. Tulsah! — dame of my life — sovereign mistress of my destiny — Tulsah! then first, under the moon, did my eye light upon that serpentine form, that iridescent grace! I beheld how with wavy ease she ascended the pyre — the imponderable limbs of spirit composed themselves beside the shape of the dead — her eyes closed ”

“ Death among our Eastern nations is surely never a comely sight: yet it was with sorrow rather than with loathing that I looked for the last time upon the wan face of my Tulsah.
We were alone together in a court of the palace. The fulsome gloat of moon and stars shone over and about us. I held a torch to the pile: a sheet of flame shot up, crackling, around the beloved sacrifice. ”

“ A reddish cloth, studded with jewels, enwrapped my body, but the convolutions extended far below my feet, as though the swaddling had been intended for one of much greater stature than I. The coffin itself was large enough to contain the body of a man. Long I lay, first in listless dream, then with the burgeoning consciousness of entity. I rose from the coffin; I cast off the cerements; I crawled from the chamber of rock. I looked at my limbs, the limbs of a well-grown boy, and saw that they were perfect, and withy, and beautifully brown. ”

“ The doctrine has its origins deep in the roots of the universe. Loosely allied to it is phallic, and — very much more intimately — serpent, worship: for, inasmuch as the mist of constellations in the farthest heaven assumes the form of a serpent in its uneasy writhings, here have we a connection — profound enough, terrible enough — between Flame and the Serpent; and since Flame is torture, so is the Serpent the fit emblem of Hell. Hence the wisdom of the Hebrew serpent-myth of the temptation and fall of man ”

“ At Hur the heart of Obah was seduced by the specious beauty of Star and Moon: he became a devotee to the fire and the serpent. For many years he lived there a life of study and peace; not till he was a very old man did the consummation of Fate overtake him. In a forecourt of a temple of Ashtoreth he saw a maiden priestess whose loveliness kindled his sere heart. Her name was Tamar. She was vowed to chastity. How foul the crime to draw her from the service of the Goddess Obal knew. But he seems to have been a man of daring eye and headlong lust. ”

“ I was therefore more and more inclined to assert that no impression of life is explicable save by facts in their essence ‘natural.’ And yet this unauthenticated tale of the old and vanished world rent my soul, ‘like a veil,’ in twain. Let me not attempt to explain this mystery. Here is a secret too dark — too dark — for speech. The nations of the far West blab of a Deity who travails and travails and travails for ever — just as though the bursting brain of a man could realize that thought and live! ”

“ This chamber, in which — with my own hand — I have imprisoned myself, is the nethermost hell itself! Happening to rise from my seat, I saw — in the shadow thrown by the table — a sight! the skeleton of a man; having a burnt appearance; old as the mountain; dismembered now in the lower limbs, the ribs in fragments ”

“ But there remained the third: never, by my own seeking, to penetrate the ultimate secret of the world: and by this I have faithfully abided.
Ten years passed and left me, as they found me, vagabond over India. I journeyed from city to city, meditating on the manners of men, and begging my bread from the charitable. I have wandered in the streets of that Benares to which Boodh first retired from the world ”

“ Upon no heart of man has its intolerable incubus ever rested as now it rests upon mine; no eyeball has its excess of light so scorched and blasted into ashes. And this I say in foolish and feeble words; that there is knowledge, and there may be things ”

“ My disenchained spirit danced and danced in the ecstasy of a new youth. True, I had vowed — I had vowed. But Tulsah had that dear quality of the eyes to which the Greek artists gave the name ôü ýãñüí, ‘liquidity.’ This impression they produced in their statues by a slight raising of the underlid. Man is folly itself. ”

“ While the Jookaja believes that nothing exists but knowledge, things being only the forms thereof; and the Medheemuck that both knowledge and things, are sun, or cipher, and the All itself but a visionary vesture half concealing the eternal Glare ”

“ It was then that I first learned that the Boodh, who, like Obal, had left his home mad with the passion for wisdom, was of us. Of fifty kings in the direct line I found that all had lived to ages far beyond the ordinary span of human life ”

“ I have also touched the iron casing of the chamber all round, and find the same condition.
This apartment must be at a great depth in the bowels of the earth. Can it be that huge geologic forces, volcanic in character, are tumbling in Acherontic travail around me? The heat of the floor and walls slowly but steadily increases. ”