isper, and to rise and fall,
accelerate and retard, in obedience to her own voice and in accord with
it.

Jerry enjoyed the singing much in the same way the opium eater enjoys his
dreams. For dream he did, vaguely and indistinctly, eyes wide open and
awake, the lady-god's hair in a faint-scented cloud about him, her voice
mourning with his, his consciousness drowning in the dreams of
otherwhereness that came to him of the singing and that was the singing.
Memories of pain were his, but of pain so long forgotten that it was no
longer pain. Rather did it permeate him with a delicious sadness, and
lift him away and out of the _Ariel_ (lying at anchor in some coral
lagoon) to that unreal place of Otherwhere.

For visions were his at such times. In the cold bleakness of night, it
would seem he sat on a bare hill and raised his howl to the stars, while
out of the dark, from far away, would drift to him an answering howl. And
other howls, near and far, would drift along until the night was vocal
with his kind. His kind it was. Without knowing it he _knew_ it, this
camaraderie of the land of Otherwhere.

Nalasu, in teaching him the whiff-whuff language, deliberately had gone
into the intelligence of him; but Villa, unwitting of what she was doing,
went into the heart of him, and into the heart of his heredity, touching
the profoundest chords of ancient memories and making them respond.

As instance: dim shapes and shadowy forms would sometimes appear to him
out of the night, and as they flitted spectrally past he would hear, as
in a dream, the hunting cries of the pack; and, as his pulse quickened,
his own hunting instinct would rouse until his controlled soft-howling in
the song broke into eager whinings. His head would lower out of the
entanglement of the woman's hair; his feet would begin making restless,
spasmodic movements as if running; and Presto, in a flash, he would be
out and away, across the face of time, out of reality and into the dream,
himself running in the midst of those shadowy forms in the hunting
fellowship of the pack.

And as men have ever desired the dust of the poppy and the juice of the
hemp, so Jerry desired the joys that were his when Villa Kennan opened
her arms to him, embraced him with her hair, and sang him across time and
space into the dream of his ancient kind.

Not always, however, were such experiences his when they sang together.
Usually, unaccompanied by visions, he knew no mor