of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable hope.  Of that ten minutes of terror it is not possible to speak in human words.  But then again in that damnable darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey and pale silver.  And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God.  At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment.  It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the future; this is complete and of the present.  It is not faith, for faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once doubtful and defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction.  It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part in it.  Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative paralysis of the powers of grief.  It is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good news.  In some sense, indeed, it is good news.  It seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.

Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him to the brim.  He felt with a sort of half-witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least whether he was killed or not.  This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it.  But six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries terror had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and thunder.  By the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm, careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless.  He had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down the face of the whole building.  When he dropped into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon.  He paused a little, panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving a few yards along it.  And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul.  A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way.  Michael had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with