ng:
"Help! help! fire! fire!" Meeting some people who were already coming
on to the scene, I went back with them to see!

By this time the house was nothing but a horrible and magnificent
funeral pile, a monstrous pyre which lit up the whole country, a pyre
where men were burning, and where He was burning also, He, He, my
prisoner, that new Being, the new Master, the Horla!

Suddenly the whole roof fell in between the walls, and a volcano of
flames darted up to the sky. Through all the windows which opened on to
that furnace, I saw the flames darting, and I reflected that He was
there, in that kiln, dead.

Dead? Perhaps? His body? Was not his body, which was transparent,
indestructible by such means as would kill ours?

If He were not dead? Perhaps time alone has power over that Invisible
and Redoubtable Being. Why this transparent, unrecognizable body, this
body belonging to a spirit, if it also had to fear ills, infirmities,
and premature destruction?

Premature destruction? All human terror springs from that! After man
the Horla. After him who can die every day, at any hour, at any moment,
by any accident, He came, He who was only to die at his own proper hour
and minute, because He had touched the limits of his existence!

No--no--there is no doubt about it--He is not dead. Then--then--I
suppose I must kill MYSELF!

[1] Frog-island.

MISS HARRIET

There were seven of us in a four-in-hand, four women and three men, one
of whom was on the box seat beside the coachman. We were following, at
a foot pace, broad highway which serpentines along the coast.

Setting out from Etretat at break of day, in order to visit the ruins
of Tancarville, we were still asleep, chilled by the fresh air of the
morning. The women, especially, who were but little accustomed to these
early excursions, let their eyelids fall and rise every moment, nodding
their heads or yawning, quite insensible to the glory of the dawn.

It was autumn. On both sides of the road the bare fields stretched out,
yellowed by the corn and wheat stubble which covered the soil like a
bristling growth of beard. The spongy earth seemed to smoke. Larks were
singing high up in the air, while other birds piped in the bushes.

At length the sun rose in front of us, a bright red on the plane of the
horizon; and as it ascended, growing clearer from minute to minute, the
country seemed to awake, to smile, to shake and stretch itself, like a
young girl who