rose and swept away the chaos of gloom, and vast nothingness yawned before her:  a bottomless abyss—­an insatiable throat, swallowing down with greedy thirst all that was left; till where the world had been, with gods and men and all their works, there was only nothingness; hideous, inscrutable and unfathomable.  And in it, above it, around it—­for what are the dimensions of nothingness?—­there reigned the incomprehensible Unity of the Primal One, in calm and pitiless self-concentration, beyond—­the Real, nay even beyond the Conceivable—­for conception implies plurality —­the Supreme One of the Neo-Platonists to whose school she belonged.

The old woman’s blood ran cold and hot as she pictured the scene; but she believed in it, and chose to believe in it; “Nothing, nothing. . .” which she had begun by muttering, insensibly changed to “Nothingness, nothingness!” and at last she spoke it aloud.

Gorgo stood spellbound as she gazed at her grandmother.  What had come over her?  What was the meaning of this glaring eye, this gasping breath, this awful expression in her face, this convulsive action of her hands?  Was she mad?  And what did she mean by “Nothingness, nothingness. . .” repeated in a sort of hollow cry?

Terrified beyond bearing she laid her hand on Dalnia’s shoulder, saying:  “Mother, mother! wake up!  What do you mean by saying ’nothingness, nothingness’ in that dreadful way?”

Dainia collected her scattered wits, shivered with cold and then said, dully at first, but with a growing cheerfulness that made Gorgo’s blood run cold:  “Did I say ‘nothingness’?  Did I speak of the great void, my child?  You are quick of hearing.  Nothingness—­well, you have learnt to think; are you capable of defining the meaning of the word—­a monster that has neither head nor tail, neither front nor back—­can you, I say, define the idea of nothingness?”

“What do you mean, mother?” said Gorgo with growing alarm.

“No, she does not know, she does not understand,” muttered the old woman with a dreary smile.  “And yet Melampus told me, only yesterday, that you understood his lesson on conic sections better than many men.  Aye, aye, child; I, too, learnt mathematics once, and I still go through various calculations every night in my observatory; but to this day I find it difficult to conceive of a mathematical point.  It is nothing and yet it is something.  But the great final nothingness!—­And that even is nonsense, for it can be neither great nor small, and come neither sooner nor later.  Is it not so, my sweet?  Think of nothing—­who cannot do that; but it is very hard to imagine nothingness.  We can neither of us achieve that.  Not even the One has a place in it.  But what is the use of racking our brains?  Only wait till to-morrow or the day after; something will happen then which will reduce our own precious persons and this beautiful world to that nothingness which to-day is inconceivable.  It is coming; I can hear from afar the brazen tramp of the airy and incorporeal monster.  A queer sort of giant—­smaller than the mathematical point of which we were speaking, and yet vast beyond all measurement.  Aye, aye; our intelligence, polyp-like, has long arms and can apprehend vast size and wide extent; but it can no more conceive of nothingness than it can of infinite space or time.