'Good stranger,' I continued, 'I am ill and lost.
Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.'
The man broke into a barbarous chant in an un-
known tongue, passing on and away.
An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted
dismally and was answered by another in the dis-
tance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift
in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! In all this
there was a hint of night--the lynx, the man with
the torch, the owl. Yet I saw--I saw even the stars
in absence of the darkness. I saw, but was apparently
not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did
I exist?
I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seri-
ously to consider what it were best to do. That I was
mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground
of doubt in the conviction. Of fever I had no trace.
I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigour
altogether unknown to me--a feeling of mental
and physical exaltation. My senses seemed all alert;
I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could
hear the silence.
A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk
I leaned as I sat held enclosed in its grasp a slab of
stone, a part of which protruded into a recess formed
by another root. The stone was thus partly protected
from the weather, though greatly decomposed. Its
edges were worn round, its corners eaten away, its
surface deeply furrowed and scaled. Glittering par-
ticles of mica were visible in the earth about it--
vestiges of its decomposition.
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