es of words are often virginal. But many words--too many
words--constitute intelligence and intelligence is the stupidity which
enables man to imprison himself in lies.

"Years have passed and I still live. I do not look for death. Death is
too simple a variant of destruction. My cleverness demands more of me
than to destroy the world by hiding myself from it. And there is a song
of windows in the high streets that sometimes relieves the black tension
of my mind.

"It is important now that I retrace my way toward a makeshift of
Omnipotence. But for this I will have to find a woman."

[Illustration: Second Drawing]

[II]

It was autumn. The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the
streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during
rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high
thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically against a
denuded sky.

Fantazius Mallare walked slowly toward his home. Over his head, trees
without leaves stamped their gnarled and intricate contours on the
shadowed air. A pallor covered the roofs. It was afternoon but a
moon-like loneliness haunted the autumn windows.

Mallare lived in another world. Neither trees nor buildings conveyed
themselves to his thought. Within his own world he was sane. His
relation to the phantoms and ideas which peopled his mind was a lucid
one. Mallare's world was his thought. He had retired within himself,
dragging his senses after him.

The street through which he walked was like an unremembered dream. The
faces that passed him vanished before his eyes. He walked, seeing
nothing that was visible, hearing nothing that had sound. He had
accomplished an annihilation.

Three months had passed since he had written in his Journal the command
to find a woman. She was waiting for him now as he returned to his home.
In the three months he had devoted himself to her transformation.

Mallare no longer raged. In the lucidity of his thought was a strange
lapse. There had vanished from it all images of life except those of his
own creation. His thought emptied of its projective sense, he found it
difficult for him to translate his ideas in their relation to the world
from which they had escaped. Yet he wrote in his Journal;

"I am aware of something that no longer lives in my mind. Dim outlines
haunt me. Dead memories peer through the windows of my tower. Life
grimaces vaguely on the ed