reared white
terraced palaces, as swans that strain their throats to the sky. The day
of wrath was come. And amid the granitic clashing of the elements,
Lenyard saw the mighty East resolving into dust. Neshevna pressed his
hand.

By the waters of Babylon he wandered, and found himself at the base of a
rude little hill. The shock of the quaking earth, the silent passing of
the sheeted dead, and the rush of affrighted multitudes told him that
another cosmic tragedy was at hand. In a flare of lightning he saw
silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of the sad
little hill. He reeled away, his heart almost bursting, when Neshevna
grasped him. "You saw the death of the gods!" she hoarsely whispered.

He could not answer, for the music showed him a thunder-blasted shore
fringing a bituminous sea. This sea stirred not, while the air above it
was frozen in salty silence. Faint, thin light came up through the
waters, and Lenyard caught a glimpse in the deeps below of sparkling
pinnacles and bulbous domes of gold; a dead sea rolled over the dead
cities of the bitter plain. He trembled as Neshevna said, with a
grinding sob, "That was the death of life."

Lenyard's sombre soul modulated to another dream--the last. Suffocating
and vague, the stillness waxed and ran over the troubled edges of
eternity. The Plain, gloomy and implacable, was illuminated on its
anonymous horizon by one rift of naked, leering light. Over its
illimitable surface surged and shivered women, white, dazzling,
numberless. As waves that, lap on lap, sweep fiercely across the
sky-line, as bisons that furiously charge upon grassy wastes, "as the
rill that runs from Bulicame to be portioned out among the sinful
women," these hordes of savage creatures rose and fell in their mad
flight across the Plain. No sudden little river, no harsh accent of
knoll or hill, broke the immeasurable whiteness of bared breast and
ivoried shoulder. It was a white whirl of women, a ferocious vortex of
terrified women. Lenyard saw the petrified fear upon the faces of them
that went into the Pit; and he descried the cruel and looming figure of
Illowski piping to them as they went into the Pit. The maelstrom of
faces turned to their dream-master; faces blanched by regret, sunned by
crime, beaming with sin; faces rusted by vain virtue; wan, weary faces,
and the triumphant regard of those who loved--all gazed at the Piper as
vertiginously they boiled by. The world of w