“No—­not at all like a dream, and that’s just what I want to explain.  This world of yours—­and perhaps of mine too, for that matter—­doesn’t give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort.  I know it’s really here at this moment, and it’s exactly as we’re seeing it, you and I. Yet it’s false.  It’s false in this sense, Polecrab.  Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core.  And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing.”

“Perhaps there is such another world,” said Polecrab huskily.  “But did that vision also seem real and false to you?”

“Very real, but not false then, for then I didn’t understand all this.  But just because it was real, it couldn’t have been Surtur, who has no connection with reality.”

“Didn’t those drum taps sound real to you?”

“I had to hear them with my ears, and so they sounded real to me.  Still, they were somehow different, and they certainly came from Surtur.  If I didn’t hear them correctly, that was my fault and not his.”

Polecrab growled a little.  “If Surtur chooses to speak to you in that fashion, it appears he’s trying to say something.”

“What else can I think?  But, Polecrab, what’s your opinion—­is he calling me to the life after death?”

The old man stirred uneasily.  “I’m a fisherman,” he said, after a minute or two.  “I live by killing, and so does everybody.  This life seems to me all wrong.  So maybe life of any kind is wrong, and Surtur’s world is not life at all, but something else.”

“Yes, but will death lead me to it, whatever it is?”

“Ask the dead,” said Polecrab, “and not a living man.”

Maskull continued.  “In the forest I heard music and saw a light, which could not have belonged to this world.  They were too strong for my senses, and I must have fainted for a long time.  There was a vision as well, in which I saw myself killed, while Nightspore walked on toward the light, alone.”

Polecrab uttered his grunt.  “You have enough to think over.”

A short silence ensued, which was broken by Maskull.

“So strong is my sense of the untruth of this present life, that it may come to my putting an end to myself.”  The fisherman remained quiet and immobile.

Maskull lay on his stomach, propped his face on his hands, and stared at him.  “What do you think, Polecrab?  Is it possible for any man, while in the body, to gain a closer view of that other world than I have done?”

“I am an ignorant man, stranger, so I can’t say.  Perhaps there are many others like you who would gladly know.”

“Where?  I should like to meet them.”

“Do you think you were made of one stuff, and the rest of mankind of another stuff?”

“I can’t be so presumptuous.  Possibly all men are reaching out toward Muspel, in most cases without being aware of it.”