Thursday's Serial: "Edward II" by Christopher Marlowe (in English) - IV

King Edward. How fast they run to banish him I love!

   They would not stir, were it to do me good.

   Why should a king be subject to a priest?

   Proud Rome, that hatchest such imperial grooms,

   With these thy superstitious taper-lights,

   Wherewith thy antichristian churches blaze,

   I'll fire thy crazed buildings, and enforce

   The papal towers to kiss the lowly ground,

   With slaughter'd priests make Tiber's channel swell,

   And banks rais'd higher with their sepulchres!

   As for the peers, that back the clergy thus,

   If I be king, not one of them shall live.

Re-enter GAVESTON.

Gaveston. My lord, I hear it whisper'd everywhere,

   That I am banish'd and must fly the land.

King Edward. 'Tis true, sweet Gaveston: O were it false!

   The legate of the Pope will have it so,

   And thou must hence, or I shall be depos'd.

   But I will reign to be reveng'd of them;

   And therefore, sweet friend, take it patiently.

   Live where thou wilt, I'll send thee gold enough;

   And long thou shalt not stay; or, if thou dost,

   I'll come to thee; my love shall ne'er decline.

Gaveston. Is all my hope turn'd to this hell of grief?

King Edward. Rend not my heart with thy too-piercing words:

   Thou from this land, I from myself am banish'd.

Gaveston. To go from hence grieves not poor Gaveston;

   But to forsake you, in whose gracious looks

   The blessedness of Gaveston remains;

   For nowhere else seeks he felicity.

King Edward. And only this torments my wretched soul,

   That, whether I will or no, thou must depart.

   Be governor of Ireland in my stead,

   And there abide till fortune call thee home.

   Here, take my picture, and let me wear thine:

                                               [They exchange pictures.

   O, might I keep thee here, as I do this,

   Happy were I! but now most miserable.

Gaveston. 'Tis something to be pitied of a king.

King Edward. Thou shalt not hence; I'll hide thee, Gaveston.

Gaveston. I shall be found, and then 'twill grieve me more.

King Edward. Kind words and mutual talk makes our grief greater:

   Therefore, with dumb embracement, let us part,

   Stay, Gaveston; I cannot leave thee thus.

Gaveston. For every look, my love drops down a tear:

   Seeing I must go, do not renew my sorrow.

King Edward. The time is little that thou hast to stay,

   And, therefore, give me leave to look my fill.

   But, come, sweet friend; I'll bear thee on thy way.

Gaveston. The peers will frown.

King Edward. I pass not for their anger. Come, let's go:

   O, that we might as well return as go!

Enter QUEEN ISABELLA.

Queen Isabella. Whither goes my lord?

King Edward. Fawn not on me, French strumpet; get thee gone!

Queen Isabella. On whom but on my husband should I fawn?

Gaveston. On Mortimer; with whom, ungentle queen,—

   I judge no more—judge you the rest, my lord.

Queen Isabella. In saying this, thou wrong'st me, Gaveston:

   Is't not enough that thou corrupt'st my lord,

   And art a bawd to his affections,

   But thou must call mine honour thus in question?

Gaveston. I mean not so; your grace must pardon me.

King Edward. Thou art too familiar with that Mortimer,

   And by thy means is Gaveston exil'd:

   But I would wish thee reconcile the lords,

   Or thou shalt ne'er be reconcil'd to me.

Queen Isabella. Your highness knows, it lies not in my power.

King Edward. Away, then! touch me not.—Come, Gaveston.

Queen Isabella. Villain, 'tis thou that robb'st me of my lord.

Gaveston. Madam, 'tis you that rob me of my lord.

King Edward. Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine.

Queen Isabella. Wherein, my lord, have I deserv'd these words?

   Witness the tears that Isabella sheds,

   Witness this heart, that, sighing for thee, breaks,

   How dear my lord is to poor Isabel!

King Edward. And witness heaven how dear thou art to me:

   There weep; for, till my Gaveston be repeal'd,

   Assure thyself thou com'st not in my sight.

                                      [Exeunt King Edward and Gaveston.

Queen Isabella. O miserable and distressed queen!

   Would, when I left sweet France, and was embarked,

   That charming Circe, walking on the waves,

   Had chang'd my shape! or at the marriage-day

   The cup of Hymen had been full of poison!

   Or with those arms, that twin'd about my neck,

   I had been stifled, and not liv'd to see

   The king my lord thus to abandon me!

   Like frantic Juno, will I fill the earth

   With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries;

   For never doted Jove on Ganymede

   So much as he on cursed Gaveston:

   But that will more exasperate his wrath;

   I must entreat him, I must speak him fair,

   And be a means to call home Gaveston:

   And yet he'll ever dote on Gaveston;

   And so am I for ever miserable.

              Re-enter Lancaster, Warwick, Pembroke, the elder Mortimer, and the younger Mortimer.

Lancaster. Look, where the sister of the king of France

   Sits wringing of her hands and beats her breast!

Warwick. The king, I fear, hath ill-treated her.

Pembroke. Hard is the heart that injures such a saint.

Young Mortimer. I know 'tis 'long of Gaveston she weeps.

Elder Mortimer. Why, he is gone.

Young Mortimer. Madam, how fares your grace?

Queen Isabella. Ah, Mortimer, now breaks the king's hate forth,

   And he confesseth that he loves me not!

Young Mortimer. Cry quittance, madam, then, and love not him.

Queen Isabella. No, rather will I die a thousand deaths:

   And yet I love in vain; he'll ne'er love me.

Lancaster. Fear ye not, madam; now his minion's gone,

   His wanton humour will be quickly left.

Queen Isabella. O, never, Lancaster! I am enjoin'd,

   To sue unto you all for his repeal:

   This wills my lord, and this must I perform,

   Or else be banish'd from his highness' presence.

Lancaster. For his repeal, madam! he comes not back,

   Unless the sea cast up his shipwreck'd body.

Warwick. And to behold so sweet a sight as that,

   There's none here but would run his horse to death.

Young Mortimer. But, madam, would you have us call him home?

Queen Isabella. Ay, Mortimer, for, till he be restor'd,

   The angry king hath banish'd me the court;

   And, therefore, as thou lov'st and tender'st me,

   Be thou my advocate unto these peers.

Young Mortimer. What, would you have me plead for Gaveston?

Elder Mortimer. Plead for him that will, I am resolv'd.

Lancaster. And so am I, my lord: dissuade the queen.

Queen Isabella. O, Lancaster, let him dissuade the king!

   For 'tis against my will he should return.

Warwick. Then speak not for him; let the peasant go.

Queen Isabella. 'Tis for myself I speak, and not for him.

Pembroke. No speaking will prevail; and therefore cease.

Young Mortimer. Fair queen, forbear to angle for the fish

   Which, being caught, strikes him that takes it dead;

   I mean that vile torpedo, Gaveston,

   That now, I hope, floats on the Irish seas.

Queen Isabella. Sweet Mortimer, sit down by me a while,

   And I will tell thee reasons of such weight

   As thou wilt soon subscribe to his repeal.

Young Mortimer. It is impossible: but speak your mind.

Queen Isabella. Then, thus;—but none shall hear it but ourselves.

                                               [Talks to Young Mortimer. apart.

Lancaster. My lords, albeit the queen win Mortimer,

   Will you be resolute and hold with me?

Elder Mortimer. Not I, against my nephew.

Pembroke. Fear not; the queen's words cannot alter him.

Warwick. No? do but mark how earnestly she pleads!

Lancaster. And see how coldly his looks make denial!

Warwick. She smiles: now, for my life, his mind is chang'd!

Lancaster. I'll rather lose his friendship, I, than grant.

Young Mortimer. Well, of necessity it must be so.—

   My lords, that I abhor base Gaveston

   I hope your honours make no question.

   And therefore, though I plead for his repeal,

   'Tis not for his sake, but to our avail;

   Nay, for the realm's behoof, and for the king's.

Lancaster. Fie, Mortimer, dishonour not thyself!

   Can this be true, 'twas good to banish him?

   And is this true, to call him home again?

   Such reasons make white black, and dark night day.

Young Mortimer. My Lord of Lancaster, mark the respect.

Lancaster. In no respect can contraries be true.

Queen Isabella. Yet, good my lord, hear what he can allege.

Warwick. All that he speaks is nothing; we are resolv'd.

Young Mortimer. Do you not wish that Gaveston were dead?

Pembroke. I would he were!

Young Mortimer. Why, then, my lord, give me but leave to speak.

Elder Mortimer. But, nephew, do not play the sophister.

Young Mortimer. This which I urge is of a burning zeal

   To mend the king and do our country good.

   Know you not Gaveston hath store of gold,

   Which may in Ireland purchase him such friends

   As he will front the mightiest of us all?

   And whereas he shall live and be belov'd,

   'Tis hard for us to work his overthrow.

Warwick. Mark you but that, my lord of Lancaster.

Young Mortimer. But, were he here, detested as he is,

   How easily might some base slave be suborn'd

   To greet his lordship with a poniard,

   And none so much as blame the murderer,

   But rather praise him for that brave attempt,

   And in the chronicle enrol his name

   For purging of the realm of such a plague!

Pembroke. He saith true.

Lancaster. Ay, but how chance this was not done before?

Young Mortimer. Because, my lords, it was not thought upon.

   Nay, more, when he shall know it lies in us

   To banish him, and then to call him home,

   'Twill make him vail the top flag of his pride,

   And fear to offend the meanest nobleman.

Elder Mortimer. But how if he do not, nephew?

Young Mortimer. Then may we with some colour rise in arms;

   For, howsoever we have borne it out,

   'Tis treason to be up against the king;

   So shall we have the people of our side,

   Which, for his father's sake, lean to the king,

   But cannot brook a night-grown mushroom,

   Such a one as my Lord of Cornwall is,

   Should bear us down of the nobility:

   And, when the commons and the nobles join,

   'Tis not the king can buckler Gaveston;

   We'll pull him from the strongest hold he hath.

   My lords, if to perform this I be slack,

   Think me as base a groom as Gaveston.

Lancaster. On that condition Lancaster will grant.

Warwick. And so will Pembroke and I.

Elder Mortimer. And I.

Young Mortimer. In this I count me highly gratified,

   And Mortimer will rest at your command.

Queen Isabella. And when this favour Isabel forgets,

   Then let her live abandon'd and forlorn.—

   But see, in happy time, my lord the king,

   Having brought the Earl of Cornwall on his way,

   Is new return'd. This news will glad him much:

   Yet not so much as me; I love him more

   Than he can Gaveston: would he lov'd me

   But half so much! then were I treble-blest.

Re-enter King Edward, mourning.

Good Readings: “The Music of Erich Zann” by H. P. Lovecraft (in English)

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

                That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.

                The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.

                I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

                The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.

                My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.

                Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man’s acquaintance.

                One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.

                Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.

                Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder - a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.

                The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.

                The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.

                As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window - the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.

                The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.

                It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night - in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.

                What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread - the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

                Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real - the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.

                Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.

                It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.

                It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out - what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air - it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

                Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.

                At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

                A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

                I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

                He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why - knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

                Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

                Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.