The Book of Wonder | Page 6

very much what thing would come from the forest on
account of the deed; and having seen that forest--as you, gentle reader,
have not--I had the advantage of knowing that anything might come. It
was useless to ask the Sphinx--she seldom reveals things, like her
paramour Time (the gods take after her), and while this mood was on
her, rebuff was certain. So I quietly began to oil the lock of the door.
And as soon as they saw this simple act I won their confidence. It was
not that my work was of any use--it should have been done long before;
but they saw that my interest was given for the moment to the thing that
they thought vital. They clustered round me then. They asked me what
I thought of the door, and whether I had seen better, and whether I had
seen worse; and I told them about all the doors I knew, and said that he
doors of the baptistry in Florence were better doors, and the doors made
by a certain firm of builders in London were worse. And then I asked
them what it was that was coming after the Sphinx because of the deed.
And at first they would not say, and I stopped oiling the door; and then
they said that it was the arch-inquisitor of the forest, who is investigator
and avenger of all silverstrian things; and from that they said about him
it seemed to me that this person was quite white, and was a kind of
madness that would settle down quite blankly upon a place, a kind of
mist in which reason could not live; and it was the fear of this that
made them fumble nervously at the lock of that rotten door; but with
the Sphinx it was not so much fear as sheer prophecy.
The hope that they tried to hope was well enough in its way, but I did
not share it; it was clear that the thing that they feared was the corollary
of the deed--one saw that more by the resignation upon the face of the
Sphinx than by their sorry anxiety for the door.
The wind soughed, and the great tapers flared, and their obvious fear
and the silence of the Sphinx grew more than ever a part of the

atmosphere, and bats went restlessly through the gloom of the wind that
beat the tapers low.
Then a few things screamed far off, then a little nearer, and something
was coming towards us, laughing hideously. I hastily gave a prod to the
door that they guarded; my finger sank right into the mouldering
wood--there was not a chance of holding it. I had not leisure to observe
their fright; I thought of the back-door, for the forest was better than
this; only the Sphinx was absolutely calm, her prophecy was made and
she seemed to have seen her doom, so that no new thing could perturb
her.
But by mouldering rungs of ladders as old as Man, by slippery edges of
the dreaded abyss, with an ominous dizziness about my heart and a
feeling of horror in the soles of my feet, I clambered from tower to
tower till I found the door that I sought; and it opened on to one of the
upper branches of a huge and sombre pine, down which I climbed on to
the floor of the forest. And I was glad to be back again in the forest
from which I had fled.
And the Sphinx in her menaced house--I know not how she
fared--whether she gazes for ever, disconsolate, at the deed,
remembering only in her smitten mind, at which the little boys now leer,
that she once knew well those things at which man stands aghast; or
whether in the end she crept away, and clambering horribly from abyss
to abyss, came at last to higher things, and is wise and eternal still. For
who knows of madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?

PROBABLE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE LITERARY MEN
When the nomads came to El Lola they had no more songs, and the
question of stealing the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On the
one hand, many had sought the golden box, the receptacle (as the
Aethiopians know) of poems of fabulous value; and their doom is still
the common talk of Arabia. On the other hand, it was lonely to sit
around the camp-fire by night with no new songs.

It was the tribe of Heth that discussed these things one evening upon
the plains below the peak of Mluna. Their native land was the track
across the world of immemorial wanderers; and there was trouble
among the elders of the nomads because there