DEATH. "It is I that make thee awful! Let us intertwine!"
[Illustration: Death: It is I that make thee awful! Let us intertwine!]
(_Death laughs mockingly; Lust roars. They clasp each other about the waist, and chant alternately_):
"Thou dost engender for my destructions!"
(_And their voices, whose rolling echoes fill the horizon, deepen and become so mighty that Anthony falls backward as if thunder-stricken. A shock from time to time causes him to reopen his eyes; and he perceives in the midst of the darkness a manner of monster before him._
_It is a skull, crowned with roses, dominating the torso of a woman nacreously white. Below, a shroud starred with specks of gold forms something like a tail; and the whole body undulates, after the fashion of a gigantic worm erect on end._
"The Devil yet again, and under his two-fold aspect: the spirit of fornication, and the spirit of destruction.
"Neither affrights me! I repel happiness; and I know myself to be eternal.
"Thus death is only an illusion, a veil-masking betimes the continuity of life.
"But Substance being unique, wherefore should forms be varied?
"Somewhere there must be primordial figures, whose bodily forms are only symbols. Could I but see them, I would know the link between matter and thought; I would know in what Being consists.
[Illustration: Anthony: Somewhere there must be primordial figures, whose bodily forms are only symbols.]
"Such were the figures painted at Babylon upon the walls of the temple of Belus; and others like them covered a mosaic in the port of Carthage. I myself have sometime beheld in the sky, as it were, forms of spirits. Those who cross the desert meet with animals surpassing all conception...."
[Illustration: I myself have sometime beheld in the sky, as it were, forms of spirits.]
(_And opposite, upon the further side of the Nile, suddenly appears the Sphinx.[1] He stretches his paws, shakes the bandelets upon his forehead, and crouches upon his belly._
_Leaping, flying, spitting fire through her nostrils, lashing her winged sides with her dragon-tail, the green-eyed Chimera circles, barks._
_The thick curls of her head tossed back upon one side mingle with the hair of her loins; on the other side they hang down to the sand, quivering with the swinging of her body, to and fro._)