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Suddenly my pupils shrank before the apparition of a ghastly grey light, and all in a moment I was face to face with a segment of desolation more horrible than any desert. Monstrous growths of leprosy that had bubbled up and stiffened; fields of ashen slime–the sloughing of a world of corruption; hills of demon, fungus swollen with the fatness of putrefaction; and, in the midst of all, dim, convulsed shapes wallowing, protruding, or stumbling aimlessly onwards, till they sank and disappeared.

* * * * *

Madame Barbiere threw up her hands when she let me in at the door. My appearance, no doubt, was ghastly. I knew not the hour nor the lapse of time covered by my wanderings about the hills, my face hidden in my palms, a drawn feeling about my heart, my lips muttering–muttering fragments of prayers, and my throat jerking with horrible laughter.

For hours I lay face downwards on my bed.

“Monsieur has seen it?”

“I have seen it.”

“I heard the rain on the hills. The lens will have been blurred. Monsieur has been spared much.”

“God, in His mercy, pity thee! And me–oh, Camille, and me too!”

“He has held out His white hand to me. I go, when I go, with a safe conduct.”

* * * * *

He went before the week was out. The drought had broken and for five days the thunder crashed and the wild rain swept the mountains. On the morning of the sixth a drenched shepherd reported in the village that a landslip had choked the fall of Buet, and completely altered its shape. Madame Barbiere broke into the room where I was sitting with Camille, big with the news. She little guessed how it affected her listeners.

“The bon Dieu ” said Camille, when she had gone, “has thundered His curse on Nature for revealing His secrets. I, who have penetrated into the forbidden, must perish.”

“And I, Camille?”

He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasing the dying words of certain noble lips,–

“Be good, Monsieur; be good.”