Sir Jocelin Saul, a man of intense nervosity, lived his life alone in a remote old manor-house in Suffolk, his only companion being a person of Eastern origin, named Ul-Jabal.  The baronet had consumed his vitality in the life-long attempt to sound the too fervid Maelstrom of Oriental research, and his mind had perhaps caught from his studies a tinge of their morbidness, their esotericism, their insanity.  He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to be supposed, Ul-Jabal acted somewhat in the capacity of secretary.  But I will give verbatim the extracts from his diary: 

’June 11.—­This is my birthday.  Seventy years ago exactly I slid from the belly of the great Dark into this Light and Life.  My God!  My God! it is briefer than the rage of an hour, fleeter than a mid-day trance.  Ul-Jabal greeted me warmly—­seemed to have been looking forward to it—­and pointed out that seventy is of the fateful numbers, its only factors being seven, five, and two:  the last denoting the duality of Birth and Death; five, Isolation; seven, Infinity.  I informed him that this was also my father’s birthday; and his father’s; and repeated the oft-told tale of how the latter, just seventy years ago to-day, walking at twilight by the churchyard-wall, saw the figure of himself sitting on a grave-stone, and died five weeks later riving with the pangs of hell.  Whereat the sceptic showed his two huge rows of teeth.

’What is his peculiar interest in the Edmundsbury chalice?  On each successive birthday when the cup has been produced, he has asked me to show him the stone.  Without any well-defined reason I have always declined, but to-day I yielded.  He gazed long into its sky-blue depth, and then asked if I had no idea what the inscription “Has” meant.  I informed him that it was one of the lost secrets of the world.

’June l5.—­Some new element has entered into our existence here.  Something threatens me.  I hear the echo of a menace against my sanity and my life.  It is as if the garment which enwraps me has grown too hot, too heavy for me.  A notable drowsiness has settled on my brain—­a drowsiness in which thought, though slow, is a thousandfold more fiery-vivid than ever.  Oh, fair goddess of Reason, desert not me, thy chosen child!

’June 18.—­Ul-Jabal?—­that man is the very Devil incarnate!

’June 19.—­So much for my bounty, all my munificence, to this poisonous worm.  I picked him up on the heights of the Mountain of Lebanon, a cultured savage among cultured savages, and brought him here to be a prince of thought by my side.  What though his plundered wealth—­the debt I owe him—­has saved me from a sort of ruin?  Have not I instructed him in the sweet secret of Reason?