Then all again was void; and Margaret’s gaze was riveted upon a great, ruined tree that stood in that waste place, alone, in ghastly desolation; and though a dead thing, it seemed to suffer a more than human pain.  The lightning had torn it asunder, but the wind of centuries had sought in vain to drag up its roots.  The tortured branches, bare of any twig, were like a Titan’s arms, convulsed with intolerable anguish.  And in a moment she grew sick with fear, for a change came into the tree, and the tremulousness of life was in it; the rough bark was changed into brutish flesh and the twisted branches into human arms.  It became a monstrous, goat-legged thing, more vast than the creatures of nightmare.  She saw the horns and the long beard, the great hairy legs with their hoofs, and the man’s rapacious hands.  The face was horrible with lust and cruelty, and yet it was divine.  It was Pan, playing on his pipes, and the lecherous eyes caressed her with a hideous tenderness.  But even while she looked, as the mist of early day, rising, discloses a fair country, the animal part of that ghoulish creature seemed to fall away, and she saw a lovely youth, titanic but sublime, leaning against a massive rock.  He was more beautiful than the Adam of Michelangelo who wakes into life at the call of the Almighty; and, like him freshly created, he had the adorable languor of one who feels still in his limbs the soft rain on the loose brown earth.  Naked and full of majesty he lay, the outcast son of the morning; and she dared not look upon his face, for she knew it was impossible to bear the undying pain that darkened it with ruthless shadows.  Impelled by a great curiosity, she sought to come nearer, but the vast figure seemed strangely to dissolve into a cloud; and immediately she felt herself again surrounded by a hurrying throng.  Then came all legendary monsters and foul beasts of a madman’s fancy; in the darkness she saw enormous toads, with paws pressed to their flanks, and huge limping scarabs, shelled creatures the like of which she had never seen, and noisome brutes with horny scales and round crabs’ eyes, uncouth primeval things, and winged serpents, and creeping animals begotten of the slime.  She heard shrill cries and peals of laughter and the terrifying rattle of men at the point of death.  Haggard women, dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood.  And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins, and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place, and suddenly she knew all that was obscene.  She took part in some festival of hideous lust, and the wickedness of the world was patent to her eyes.  She saw things so vile that she screamed in terror, and she heard Oliver laugh in derision by her side.  It was a scene of indescribable horror, and she put her hands to her eyes so that she might not see.

She felt Oliver Haddo take her hands.  She would not let him drag them away.  Then she heard him speak.