“An interesting legend,” commented Maskull.  “But who is Krag?”

“They say that when the world was born, Krag was born with it—­a spirit compounded of those vestiges of Muspel which Shaping did not know how to transform.  Thereafter nothing has gone right with the world, for he dogs Shaping’s footsteps everywhere, and whatever the latter does, he undoes.  To love he joins death; to sex, shame; to intellect, madness; to virtue, cruelty; and to fair exteriors, bloody entrails.  These are Krag’s actions, so the lovers of the world call him ‘devil.’  They don’t understand, Maskull, that without him the world would lose its beauty.”

“Krag and beauty!” exclaimed he, with a cynical smile.

“Even so.  That same beauty which you and I are now voyaging to discover.  That beauty for whose sake I am renouncing husband, children, and happiness....  Did you imagine beauty to be pleasant?”

“Surely.”

“That pleasant beauty is an insipid compound of Shaping.  To see beauty in its terrible purity, you must tear away the pleasure from it.”

“Do you say I am going to seek beauty, Gleameil?  Such an idea is far from my mind.”

She did not respond to his remark.  After waiting for a few minutes, to hear if she would speak again, he turned his back on her once more.  There was no more talk until they reached the island.

The air had grown chill and damp by the time they approached its shores.  Branchspell was on the point of touching the sea.  The Island appeared to be some three or four miles in length.  There were first of all broad sands, then low, dark cliffs, and behind these a wilderness of insignificant, swelling hills, entirely devoid of vegetation.  The current bore them to within a hundred yards of the coast, when it made a sharp angle, and proceeded to skirt the length of the land.

Gleameil jumped overboard, and began swimming to shore.  Maskull followed her example, and the raft, abandoned, was rapidly borne away by the current.  They soon touched ground, and were able to wade the rest of the way.  By the time they reached dry land, the sun had set.

Gleameil made straight for the hills; and Maskull, after casting a single glance at the low, dim outline of the Wombflash Forest, followed her.  The cliffs were soon scrambled up.  Then the ascent was gentle and easy, while the rich, dry, brown mould was good to walk upon.

A little way off, on their left, something white was shining.

“You need not go to it,” said the woman.  “It can be nothing else than one of those skeletons Polecrab talked about.  And look—­there is another one over there!”

“This brings it home!” remarked Maskull, smiling.

“There is nothing comical in having died for beauty,” said Gleameil, bending her brows at him.

And when in the course of their walk he saw the innumerable human bones, from gleaming white to dirty yellow, lying scattered about, as if it were a naked graveyard among the hills, he agreed with her, and fell into a sombre mood.