Arved touched his temple significantly and nudged Quell.

“Another one of us.  Another rebel of the moon!”

“Shut up or I’ll gag you both!” imperiously commanded the doctor, as the wheels of the ambulance cut the pebbly road.  They were entering the asylum; now they passed the porter’s lodge.  In the jewelled light of a senescent moon, his wife and little daughter gazed at them curiously, without semblance of pity or fear.  Then, as if shot from the same vocal spring-board, the voices of poet and painter merged into crazy rhythmatic chanting:—­

“Rebels of the moon, rebels of the moon!  We are, we are, the rebels of the moon!”

And the great gates closed behind them with a brazen clangour—­metal gates of the moon-rebels.

V

THE SPIRAL ROAD

     There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we
     know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the
     Omniscient.—­Oriental Proverb.

I

THE STRAND OF DREAMS

“I must see him if only for a minute.  I can’t go back to the city after coming so far.  Please—­” but the girl’s face disappeared and the rickety door, which had been opened on a chain, was slammed after this imperative speech, and Gerald Shannon found himself staring exasperatedly at its rusty exterior.  To have travelled on foot such a distance only to be turned away like a beggar enraged him.  Nor was the prospect of returning over the path which had brought him to Karospina’s house a cheering one.  He turned and saw that a low, creeping mist had obliterated every vestige of the trail across the swamp lands.  There was no sun, and the twilight of a slow yellow day in late September would soon, in complicity with the fog, leave him totally adrift on this remote strand—­he could hear the curving fall and hiss of the breakers, the monotonous rumour of the sea.  So he was determined to face Karospina, even if he had to force his way into the house.

Two hours earlier, at the little railway station, they had informed him that the road was easy flatland for the greater part of the way.  He had offered money for a horse or even a wheel; but these were luxuries on this bleak, poverty-ridden coast.  As there was no alternative, Gerald had walked rapidly since three o’clock.  And he had not been told the truth about the road; where the oozing, green, unwholesome waters were not he stepped, sometimes sinking over his ankles in the soft mud.  Not a sign of humanity served him for comfort or compass.  He had been assured that if he kept his back to the sun he would reach his destination.  And he did, but not without many misgivings.  It was the vision of a squat tower-like building, almost hemmed in by a monster gas reservoir, fantastic wooden galleries, and the gigantic silhouettes of strange machinery, that relieved his mind.  But this house and its surroundings soon repelled him.  His reception was the final disenchantment.