Scared, as though the avenging Furies were at his heels, he quitted the scene of his nocturnal romance, leaving half his geological projects incomplete.  Had he taken the amiable Don Francesco into his confidence he might have heard something to his advantage.  But the scientist could not endure the sight of a Christian priest.  Like other intolerant folk he was now paying for his prejudices.

“An erotic little beast,” Keith went on.  “And a typical Hebrew—­a scoffer.  Have you noticed what a disruptive and irreverential brood they are?  They move up and down society like some provocative fluid, insensible to our ideals; they take a diabolical pleasure in shattering our old-established conceptions of right and wrong.  I confess I like them for that; they need shattering, some of those conceptions.  And they have their weaknesses too, their Achilles heel—­music, for instance, or chess.  When next you are in town don’t forget to go to that little chess club of theirs over Aldgate East station.  It is better than a play to watch their faces.  And with all this materialism they have a mysterious feminine leaven of enthusiasm and unworldliness.  What pecuniary advantage could Marten expect to gain from his minerals?”

“A professorship.”

“Why, possibly.  He had the professorial temperament; there was not much poetry in his composition.  If you were to ask him, ’What are those wonderful rocks over there, shaped like some Titanic organ and glowing with a kind of violet flame?’ he would say, ’Organ be blowed.  It’s columnar lithoidite.’  I learnt a little from him, but not enough.  I wish we had him here.  He could have told us something.”

And Mr. Keith, ever avid of fresh things, regretted his lost opportunities.  He was in one of this acquisitive, Corsair moods.  He said: 

“I could take geology by the throat just now.  It’s disgusting, not to know things!”

His companion, meanwhile, beheld the panorama in all its nightmarish splendour, as it drifted past him.  He saw the bluffs of feathery pumice, the lava precipices—­frozen cataracts of white, black, blood red, pale grey and sombre brown, smeared over with a vitreous enamel of obsidian or pierced by oily, writhing dykes that blazed with metallic scintillations.  Anon came some yawning cleft or an assemblage of dizzy rock-needles, fused into whimsical tints and attitudes, spiky, distorted, over-toppling; then a bold tufa rampart, immaculate in its beauty, stainless as a curtain of silk.  And as the boat moved on he looked into horrid dells which the rains had torn out of the loose scoriae.  Gaping wounds, they wore the bright hues of corruption.  Their flanks were blotched with a livid nitrous efflorescence, with flaring sulphur, unhealthy verdure of pitchstone, streaks of arsenical vermilion; their beds—­a frantic maze of boulders.

He beheld this crazy stratification, this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea.  It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, in a solar caress.