Stooping more and more, he threw his arms round the senseless form, and partly lifting it from the ground, brought the wax- pallid face nearer to his own.. so near that the cold mouth almost touched his, . . then filled with an awful, unnamable misgiving, he scanned his murdered comrade's perished beauty in puzzled, vague bewilderment, much as an ignorant dullard might perplexedly scan the incomprehensible characters of some hieroglyphic scroll. And, as he looked, a sharp pang shot through him like a whizzing ball of fire, . . a convulsion of mental agony shook his limbs,--he could have shrieked aloud in the extremity of his torture, but the struggling cry died gasping in his throat. Still as stone he kept his strained, steadfast gaze fixed on Sah-luma's corpse, slowly absorbing the full horror of a tremendous Suggestion, that like a scorching lava-flood swept into every subtle channel of his brain. For the dead Sah-luma's eyes grew into the semblance of his own eyes! ... the dead Sah-luma's face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face! ... it was as though he beheld the Picture of himself, slain and reflected in a magician's mirror! Round him the very heavens seemed given up to fire,--but he heeded it not,--the world might be at an end and the day of Judgment, proclaimed,--nothing would have stirred him from where he knelt, in that dreadful stillness of mystic martyrdom, drinking in the gradual, glimmering consciousness of a terrific Truth, . . the amazing, yet scarcely graspable solution of a supernatural Enigma, ... an enigma through which, like a man lost in the depths of a dark forest, he had wandered up and down, seeking light, yet finding none!
"O God!" he dumbly prayed. "Thou, with whom all things are possible, give eyes to this blind trouble of my heart! I am but as a grain of dust before thee, . . a poor perishable atom, devoid of simplest comprehension! ... Do Thou of Thy supernal pity teach me what I must know!"
As he thought out this unuttered petition, a tense cord seemed to snap suddenly in his brain, . . a rush of tears came to his relief, and through their salt and bitter haze the face of Sah-luma appeared to melt into a thin and spiritual brightness,--a mere aerial outline of what it had once been, . . the glazed dark eyes seemed to flash living lightning into his, . . the whole lost Personality of the dead Poet seemed to environ him with a mysterious, potent, incorporeal influence.. an influence that he felt he must now or never repel, reject, and utterly RESIST! ... With a shuddering cry, he tore his reluctant arms away from the beloved corpse, . . with trembling, tender fingers he closed and pressed down the white eyelids of those love-expressive eyes, and kissed the broad poetic brow!