t, shaking from head to foot.

"I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each
thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small
thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a
fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight
the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the
dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have
the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for
order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real
lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that
by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You
lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this
accuser, 'We also have suffered.'

"It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken
upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from
these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of
unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered
insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not
been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom
he has accused. At least--"

He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday,
which wore a strange smile.

"Have you," he cried in a dreadful voice, "have you ever suffered?"

As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the
colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew
larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black.
Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed
to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard
somewhere, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"

* * *

When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in
some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair,
or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme's experience
was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed
anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone
through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had
swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever
come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he
knew that he was and had been wal