s
that girdles the earth, and severs the dead from the living men--never
had he beheld such a darkness. Presently he came as it were within the
jaws of it, dark as a wolf's mouth, so dark that he might not see the
corpses on the deck, nor the mast, nor the dead man swinging from the
yard, nor the captain of the Phoenicians who groaned aloud below, praying
to his gods. But in the wake of the ship there was one break of clear
blue sky on the horizon, in which the little isle where he had slain the
Sidonians might be discerned far off, as bright and white as ivory.

Now, though he knew it not, the gates of his own world were closing
behind the Wanderer for ever. To the North, whence he came, lay the
clear sky, and the sunny capes and isles, and the airy mountains of the
Argive lands, white with the temples of familiar Gods. But in face of
him, to the South, whither he went, was a cloud of darkness and a land
of darkness itself. There were things to befall more marvellous than are
told in any tale; there was to be a war of the peoples, and of the Gods,
the True Gods and the False, and there he should find the last embraces
of Love, the False Love and the True.

Foreboding somewhat of the perils that lay in front, the Wanderer was
tempted to shift his course and sail back to the sunlight. But he was
one that had never turned his hand from the plough, nor his foot from
the path, and he thought that now his path was fore-ordained. So he
lashed the tiller with a rope, and groped his way with his hands along
the deck till he reached the altar of the dwarf-gods, where the embers
of the sacrifice still were glowing faintly. Then with his sword he cut
some spear-shafts and broken arrows into white chips, and with them he
filled a little brazier, and taking the seed of fire from the altar
set light to it from beneath. Presently the wood blazed up through the
noonday night, and the fire flickered and flared on the faces of the
dead men that lay about the deck, rolling to larboard and to starboard,
as the vessel lurched, and the flame shone red on the golden armour of
the Wanderer.

Of all his voyages this was the strangest seafaring, he cruising alone,
with a company of the dead, deep into a darkness without measure or
bound, to a land that might not be descried. Strange gusts of sudden
wind blew him hither and thither. The breeze would rise in a moment
from any quarter, and die as suddenly as it rose, and another wind
would chase