epoch:  that is all that one can say about it:  but whence that greater intensity?  I have some knowledge of the earth for only ten miles down:  but she has eight thousand miles:  and whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do not know, I do not know.  Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal:  I do not know them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same furnace of her fiery heart.  She is dark and moody, sudden and ill-fated, and rends her young like a cannibal lioness; and she is old and wise, and remembers Hur of the Chaldees which Uruk built, and that Temple of Bel which rose in seven pyramids to symbolise the planets, and Birs-i-Nimrud, and Haran, and she bears still, as a thing of yesterday, old Persepolis and the tomb of Cyrus, and those cloister-like viharah-temples of the ancient Buddhists, cut from the Himalayan rock; and returning from the Far East, I stopped at Ismailia, and so to Cairo, and saw where Memphis was, and stood one bright midnight before that great pyramid of Shafra, and that dumb Sphynx, and, seated at the well of one of the rock-tombs, looked till tears of pity streamed down my cheeks:  for great is the earth, and her Ages, but man ‘passeth away.’  These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only that these are round, and mine are square:  for I chose it so:  but the same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court, then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are crowned with boldly-projecting cornices, surmounted by an abacus.  And here, till the pressing want of food drove me back, I remained:  for more and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I ask myself this question:  ’Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic—­morose and turbulent—­fitful, and deranged, and sad—­like her?’

* * * * *

A whole month of that voyage, from May the 15th to June the 13th, I wasted at the Andaman Islands near Malay:  for that any old Chinaman could be alive in Pekin began, after some time, to seem the most quixotic notion that ever entered a human brain; and these jungled islands, to which I came after a shocking vast orgy one night at Calcutta, when I fired not only the city but the river, pleased my fancy to such