Within and without are identical, are image and counter-image, but still not the integration which is knowledge. It was himself he found everywhere, and if he had to retain everything and was enabled to retain all, if he succeeded in laying hold on the world-multiplicity to which he was pledged, to which he was driven, given over to it in a daydream, belonging to it without effort, effortlessly possessing it, this was so because the multiplicity had been his from the very beginning; indeed before all espial, before all hearkening, before all sensibility, it had been his own because recollection and retention are never other than the innate self, self-remembered, and the self-remembered time when he must have drunk the wine, fingered the wood, tasted the oil, even before oil, wine or wood existed, when he must have recognized the unknown, because the profusion of faces or non-faces, together with their ardor, their greed, their carnality, their covetous coldness, with their animal-physical being, but also with their immense nocturnal yearning, because taken all together, whether he had ever seen them or not, whether they had ever lived or not, were all embodied in him from his primordial origins as the chaotic primal humus of his very existence, as his own carnality, his own ardor, his own greed, his own facelessness, but also as his own yearning: and even had this yearning changed in the course of his earthly wanderings, turned to knowledge, so much so that having become more and more painful it could scarcely now be called yearning, or even a yearning for yearning, and if all this transformation had been predestined by fate from the beginning in the form of expulsion or seclusion, the first bearing evil, the second bringing salvation, but both scarcely endurable for a human creature, the yearning still remained, inborn, imperishable, imperishably the primal humus of being, the groundwork of cognition and recognition which nourishes memory and to which memory returns, a refuge from fortune and misfortune, a refuge from the unbearable; almost physical this last yearning, which always and forever vibrated in every effort to attain the deeps of memory, however ripe with knowledge that memory might be. Verily it was a physical yearning and unquenchable. He kept his fingers tightly interlocked, he was conscious of the ring pressing into his skin and his tendons, he was conscious of the rocky bones of his hands, he was conscious of his blood and the memory-deeps of his body, the shadowy deeps of the far-off past united to the immediate present, to the illumination of the present immediacy and the present clarity, and he called to mind his boyhood in Andes, he called to mind the house, the stables, the granaries, the trees, he called to mind the clear eyes in that sunburnt face always on the point of laughter, the face of his mother, she of the dark curls,—oh, she was called Maja, and no name was more summerlike, none existed which could have suited her better—, he called to mind how she busied herself in the house and warmed it with her joyous labor, serene in her tireless activity even when, being constantly called for some little service by grandfather who sat in the atrium, she had to keep on hushing him and his furious blood-curdling outcries, the appeasement-craving outcries that never failed to start up at any opportunity, but especially when prices of live-stock and grain were in question and he, the white-haired Magus Polla, half-generous, half-niggardly, believed himself cheated by the tradesmen, whether buying or selling; oh how intense the memory of those outcries, how soothing the memory of the quietude that his mother restored to the house with an almost mischievous joy; and he recalled his father, enabled to become a proper farmer only through his marriage, whose former profession of potter the son had deemed inferior, although it had been most pleasant to hear the nightly tales of the work on the bellied wine-jars and nobly turned oil jugs which his father had formed from clay, tales of the shaping thumb, of the spatula and the buzzing potter’s disk, of the glazer’s art, charming tales interrupted by many a potter’s song. Oh, faces of a time remaining throughout time, oh face of the mother, remembered as a youthful face, then becoming more indistinct and significant, so that in death and already beyond physiognomy, it had almost come to resemble an unchanging landscape; oh face of the father, at first unremembered, then growing further toward a living humanity, a nearer likeness, until in death it had come to be the human face divine, modeled of hard, stiff brown clay, kind and firm in its farewell smile, unforgettable. Oh, nothing ripens to reality that is not rooted in memory, nothing can be grasped in the human being that has not been bestowed on him from the very beginning, overshadowed by the faces of his youth. For the soul stands forever at her source, stands true to the grandeur of her awakening, and to her the end itself possesses the dignity of the beginning; no song becomes lost that has ever plucked the strings of her lyre, and exposed in ever-renewed readiness, she preserves herself through every single tone in which she ever resounded. Imperishable the song, ever returning, here too it was again at hand; and he drew in the air to catch the cool scent of the earthen jars and piled-up tuns, which occasionally streamed, sombre and volatile, from the opened shed-doors, in order to breathe it into his sore lungs. Afterwards, of course, he had to cough as though he had done something insalubrious or illicit. The hob-nailed boots of the porters trotted along, clattering on the stone walks, grating on the gravel; the torch of the young guide, who swung round now and then to smile up at the litter, glimmered and glowed ahead; now they were thoroughly on the march and progressed quickly, too quickly for the aged servitor, grown gray and corpulent in the lenient service of the court, who waddled behind, sighing audibly; the mass of storage and silo roofs of various forms, some pointed, some flat, some slightly sloping, towered toward the star-dense but not entirely darkened heavens, cranes and poles cast threatening shadows under the passing of lights, one came upon carts both empty and laden, a couple of rats crossed the path, a moth lost itself on the back of the litter and remained clinging there, again lassitude and sleepiness made themselves known, the moth had six legs and many if not innumerable ones the porters to whom the litter, to whom he himself, together with the moth, had been entrusted as fine and fragile cargo; he was seized with the desire to turn round—ah, perhaps it was still possible to take count of the slave-porters and their legs—, but before he could put this into action, they had reached a narrow passage between two sheds and immediately afterwards and most unexpectedly they were again in front of the city houses, pausing at the entrance to a rather steep, very narrow, very weather-beaten, very wash-behung, ascending lane of lodging houses; as a matter of fact, they had come to a standstill because the boy had halted the porters,—yes, there were really four of them now as there had been before—, who otherwise, it seems, would have trotted on, and the very suddenness of this interruption together with the unexpected outlook produced the effect of a joyful recognition, produced so surprising and startling an effect that all of them together, master and servant and slave, laughed aloud, all the more when the boy, fired by their laughter, bowed low and pointing the way with a proud gesture, invited them to enter the alley-gorge.

THERE was, however, little cause for merriment; least of which came to be offered by this alley-gorge. Dark lay the shallow-stepped stairways peopled by sundry shades, especially by droves of children who despite the lateness of the hour chased upstairs and downstairs, shadowy bipeds who on closer inspection were mingled with quadrupeds, since goats were tethered more or less closely all along the walls; the windows without panes and mostly without shutters looked blackly into the gorge, black were the cellar-like, dark recesses of the basement-shops from which came bickerings for better bargains, bargains for the needs of the next few hours but scarcely for the next day, while nearby the tapping, rattling, tinkling, paltry and pitiable handicrafts, produced by shadows for shadows, sent out their meagre sounds, evidently requiring no light for their production, for just where the glimmer of an oil-wick or candle-stump dared to show itself, even there people crouched in the shadows. Daily life in its most wretched round of misery consummated itself here, independent of any outward circumstances, consummated itself almost timelessly as though the emperor’s celebration were miles away from this alley, as though its inhabitants knew nothing of what took place in other parts of the city, and therefore the advent of the litter-squad created no astonishment but rather an unwelcome and even hostile disturbance. This began gnome-fashion, that is to say with the children, yes with the goats too, neither stepping aside and so becoming entangled between the legs of the porters, the quadrupeds bleating, the little bipeds screaming, breaking out of the shadowy corners and running back to hide in them; it began when they attempted, unsuccessfully of course because of his fierce resistance, to snatch the torch from the hand of the youthful guide, but all this would not have been the worst, and even though slowly, they still went forward—step by step they climbed the street of misery—, no, these vexations were not so bad, but the women, they were the worst, leaning out of the windows, their bosoms crushed against the sills, dangling snake-like their naked arms ending in lapping fingers, and though the abuse into which their gossip toppled as soon as the litter-squad was sighted was nothing but senseless carping, it was at the same time the carping of insanity, imposing as every insanity, lifted to the pitch of indictment, to the pitch of truth, being yet abuse. Here at this very spot where house after house discharged a beastly excremental stench from the opened door-mouths, here in this dilapidated dwelling-canal through which he was being borne in the high-held litter so that he could look into the squalid rooms, must look into them, here, met by the furious and senseless maledictions flung into his face by the women, met by the ailing whine of the inevitable sucklings bedded on rags and tatters, met by the smoke of pine-brands fastened to the fissured walls, met by the steamy aftermath of the stoves and their greasy, long-incrusted frying-pans, met by the horrid spectacle of half-clad mumbling gray-beards squatting about there in the black cave-dwellings, here despair began to overcome him, here among these verminous hovels, here amid utmost depravity and most wretched decay, confronting the lowest earthly imprisonment, here in this precinct, malign with the racking of birth and the ravages of death, life’s entrance and exit woven into closest kinship, one as grim with foreboding as the other, one as nameless as the other in the shadowy dream of timeless woe, here in the utter namelessness of darkness and lasciviousness, here for the first time he was compelled to shield his face, compelled to it by the carping jubilation of the women, compelled to deliberate blindness while he was being carried step by step over the stairs of Misery Street.—

—: “You loafer, you litter-loafer!” “Thinks himself better than us, does he?” “Money-bags on the throne!” “If he had no money he’d soon walk!” “Lets himself be carried to work, faugh!” scolded the women—

—: senseless the hail of insults that pattered upon him, senseless, senseless, senseless, nevertheless justified, nevertheless warning, nevertheless truth, insanity heightened to truth, and every aspersion tore a bit of presumptuousness from his soul until it became naked, as naked as the sucklings, as naked as the gray-beards on their rubbish, naked with darkness, naked with loss of memory, naked with guilt, immersed in the flooding nakedness of the indiscriminate—

—: step after step they went through Misery Street, halting at every landing—

—: flood of naked creaturekind extending over the breathing earth, extending forth under the breathing heaven with its constant changing from day to night, enclosed by the immutable shores of the millenniums, the naked herd-stream of life broadly advancing, filtering up from the humus of existence, constantly filtering back into it, the inevitable togetherness of all that has been created—

—: “When you’ve croaked you’ll stink like any other!” “Pall-bearers, let him fall, let the corpse fall!”—

—: time-crests and time-hollows, oh, myriad creatures, having been carried over them by the aeons, still being carried over them constantly in the endless twilit stream of their totality, and not one of them but intended, but would continue to intend, to float forever as an eternal soul in infinity, floating freely in timeless freedom, sundered from the stream, released from the crowd, indisplaceable, no longer a creature, only a transparent flower, growing up, trailing up alone unto the stars, released and secluded, its heart trembling like a transparent blossom on the tendril no longer to be seen—

—: borne through the vilifications of Misery Street, step by step—

—: oh, everything tended toward this phantasmagoria of timelessness, and his life also, shot up from the chaotic humus of the nocturnal unnamed, grown aloft from the underbrush of mere creaturekind, trailed aloft in innumerable windings, attached here and there to what was pure and what was impure, to the perishable and the imperishable, to objects and possessions, to people, again and again to people, to words, to landscapes, this life which he continued to despise and continued to live, he had put it to ill use, he had misused it to exalt himself, to promote himself above himself, beyond all bounds, beyond all limits, as if there could be no downfall for him, as if he did not have to return into time, into earthly imprisonment, into creatureliness, as if no abyss gaped for him—

—: “Suckling!” “Diaper-pisser!” “Cacker!” “You’ve been naughty and have to be carried home!” “You’ll get a clyster and be put on the potty!” the derision rained down from the windows on every side—

—: the street shrieked with the gibes of the women but there was no escape from them; progress was made but slowly, very slowly, step by step—

—: yet was it really the voices of the women that shamed him with justified scorn and disclosed his fruitless delusion? was that which cried out here not stronger than the voices of earthly women, than the voices of the insane creatures of earth? oh, it was time itself that called down scorn upon him, the unalterable flood of time with its manifold voices, with the sucking strength inherent in time and time alone, time had embodied itself in the voices of the women so that his name should be expunged in their insults, and he, stripped of his name, stripped of his soul, stripped of his least song, stripped of the singing timelessness of his heart, would fall back into unutterable darkness and the humus of being, degraded to that bitterest shame which is the last remnant of an extinguished memory—

—: knowing voices of time, knowing how impossible the escape from the clutches of fate! oh they knew that he also had been unable to escape the immutable, that there was a ship on which despite all delusion he had had to embark, and which had carried him back, oh, they knew of the stream of creature-kind which, nakedly between naked shores of primal clay, wearily follows its course, bearing no ship, bordered by no plant-life, transparent illusions both, nevertheless reality as fate, the invisible reality of illusion, and they knew that everyone, foreordained by fate, must plunge again into the stream and that he would not be able to distinguish the spot of his re-immersion from that where he had once fancied to emerge, because the return must bring to a close the cycle of fate—

—: “We’ll be fetching you soon, you tail, you hang-tail!” they shrieked—

—: and still the voices of women deriding as if he had been a disobedient child who, after seeking a sham-freedom, now wanted to steal back home, nay more, who had to be brought back on devious and dangerous paths and therefore must be scolded for such evil ways; it was carping, but still the grave voices of mothers, imbued with the darkness of time, knowing that the cycle of fate encircled the abyss of nothingness, knowing of all the despairing, all the misled, all the exhausted ones who stumble unresistingly into the abyss of the middle as soon as they are prematurely forced to interrupt the journey—oh, was not each one so forced? had anyone ever really been permitted to pace out the cycle completely?—, and most anxiously the eternal mother-wish vibrated unspeakable within the angry chiding, the wish that each child might remain forever as naked as it had been born, nakedly imprisoned in its first enfoldment, embedded in the onflowing time of earth, embedded in the stream of creation, gently lifted out and as gently lost in it again, as it were without a fate—

—: “naked, that’s what you are, just naked!”—

—: unescapable the mother—, what had moved the young leader to choose this way? would he not fail? spell-bound under the maternal incantations as if it would never move again, the line stood still, halted in a terrible suspense, but soon released it went on again, climbing through Misery Street, step by step—

—: was the maternal might of the voices still not ample enough to bind forever? were they so lacking, so deficient in knowledge that they had to set the spell-bound free again? oh, lack of the mother who, birth in herself, has no knowledge of re-birth, wants no knowledge, unable to grasp that birth to be valid implies rebirth, that birth like rebirth could never occur did not the nothing come into being along with both, did not the nothing remain eternally and irrevocably at their back for final procreation, aye, unable to grasp that only from this indissoluble connection of being and non-being, this runic bond heavy with silence, timelessness begins to ray forth in its essential greatness as the freedom of the human soul, the veritable song of its eternity, no phantasmagoria, no presumption, but rather as the irrecusable fate of the human being, the fearful glory of the human lot—

—: oh, it was the divine destiny of man, it was that which was humanly perceptible in the destiny of the gods, it was their common unalterable fate again and again to be guided to the path of re-birth, it was their common ineradicable fated hope to be allowed to tread out the cycle once more in order that the future might become the past, and that every station on the path might encompass in itself the entire future and the entire past, arrested in the song of the unique present, bearing the moment of complete freedom, the moment of god-becoming, this time-free moment from which, nevertheless, the whole would be embraced as a single timeless memory—

—: frenetic street of evil that would not end and perhaps that might not end until it should have given over its last insult and sin and curse, and more and more slowly, step by step, they paced it through—

—: oh, unalterable human fate of the gods, forced to descend into the earthly prison, into wickedness, into sin, so that the cycle might complete itself first in mortality and close itself ever more narrowly about the inscrutability of the nothing, about the inscrutable main-spring of birth that would change some day to the motive of rebirth for all creation, as soon as gods and men should have completed their tasks—

—: oh, unalterable fate-imposed duty of man, willingly to level the path for the god, the irreproachable path, the path of timeless rebirth, for the attainment of which men and gods are joined, set free of the mother—

—: but here was Misery Street to be ascended step by step, and here was the frightfulness of malediction, the frightfulness of justifiable scorn, and he, spat upon from out the misery, blinded by misery, blinded by malediction, blinded by scorn, oh he, even with veiled head, must nevertheless hear it. Why had he been led here? did he have to be shown that he had not been permitted to close the cycle? that he had stretched the bow of his life further and further, beyond all measure, enlarging the nothingness of the middle instead of diminishing it? that he had removed himself with such sham-infinity, sham-timelessness, sham-seclusion, further and further from the goal of rebirth, that he had become increasingly in danger of crashing? was this, here and now, a warning? or even more, a threat? or was it in reality already the ultimate downfall? Mere sham-divinity, that had been the peak of his overstrained course, madly overstrained to exultation and intoxication, to the great experience of power and fame, overstrained by what he had dared to call his poetry and his knowledge, feigning that he needed only to retain all in order to capture the recollective power of a never-ending present, the never-ending constancy of holy childhood, which even now disclosed itself as a childish sham-holiness, an unchaste assumption of holiness, exposed to every sort of laughter, to the naked laughter of the womenfolk, to the laughter of the betrayed and unbetrayable mothers whose custody he had been too weak to escape, weakest in his childish play at being a god. Oh, nothing could be set against the nakedness of laughter, no counter-laughter could withstand derision, and nothing remained but to cover one’s own nakedness, the nakedness of one’s countenance, and with covered countenance he lay back in the litter, still veiled when despite all hindrances, shuffling along step by step, as it were against all expectation, they were finally discharged from the hellish alley-gorge, from the savage derision, and a quieter rocking of the litter betrayed the fact that they were again proceeding on an evener course.

TO BE SURE, their progress was not therefore appreciably accelerated; once again they jerked forward only step by step, perhaps even more slowly than before, but not as was easily seen because of ill-meant obstacles but because just here, noticeable by the human murmur, by the human odor, by the growing dampness and closeness of the human warmth, the crowd had again increased and no doubt was continuing to increase. Although they had passed beyond hearing distance of Misery Street he still believed he could feel the carping, shrieking insults in his ears as before, indeed it almost seemed to him as if they had followed him like the Erinys, intent on harassing and torturing him as their natural prey, but not less intent, however, on uniting themselves with the rapidly-mounting mass-uproar springing up on all sides, which indicated a return to the vicinity of the imperial festival, so that the torture of the chase, paired with all this jubilation, with all this tumult of power and intoxication, should persist unabated; and while he was taking in all of this, unable to repel the massed voices within and without, so unable to repel them that their raw torment almost caused him to faint, the light became similarly insistent, became so unbearably noisy, so unbearably crude, pressing so sharply through eyelids closed until now, that it forced them to blink open, their first unwilling hesitation growing quickly into wide-eyed terror: the infernal glare blazed toward him, blazing from the entrance of the fairly broad street through which, head to head, the human crowd surged forward, it gleamed out with terrifying crudity into his eyes, gleamed like some magic luminary which converted all that moved about there into a compulsorily automatic stream, one could almost think that even the litter swam with it, floated with it automatically, scarcely that it was being carried, and with every step, with every forward glide, the power of that mysterious, calamitous, senselessly-magnificent lure became more definitely felt, became more terrifying, more urgent, more intrusive, near and nearer the heart, growing, growing, growing, till at one stroke it revealed itself in that instant when the litter, shoved, pulled, carried high and swimmingly afloat, suddenly came to the entrance of the street; for here, quite abruptly, wreathed by fire, surrounded by tumult, stripped of every shield for light, of every shield for noise, in an unshielded dazzle of light and noise, gleaming and glittering, the imperial palace came to view, partly residence, partly fortress, arising vulcanically, infernally, glaringly, from the center of a shield-shaped, hunched, almost circular plaza, and this plaza was comprised of a single conglomerate flood of creaturekind, a massed, formed, forming, boiling human-humus, a flood of glossy eyes and glossy glances, all of them rigid in their ardor as though dispossessed of every other purport, directed toward the one and only goal, shining without a shadow, a human stream of fire avid to lick this fiery coast. Thus towered the citadel, irresistible and seductive, amid a surf of torches, the sole significant goal of the irresistibly attracted, crowding, snorting herd-mass, the longed-for goal of their excessive craving for direction, but for this very reason it was also the embodiment of a terrifying, gloom-showering, undiscoverably enigmatic power, incomprehensible for the individual animal, incomprehensible for the individual man, oh so incomprehensible that the question as to the meaning and source of the overpowering attraction imprisoned in the fiery house and shining out from it, throbbed in almost every one of them, in dread of an answer, in hope of an answer, and although no one was able to offer the true one, yet the most modest and inadequate gave such promise of being able to confirm their hope of salvaging consciousness, of salvaging humanity and the soul that it seemed worthy of proud utterance—; “Wine,” the call went up, “Free wine,” and the call “The Praetorians,” and “The Caesar is to speak,” and suddenly someone announced in a gasping voice: “They have started to distribute the money!” Thus the citadel cast its seductions upon them, thus they spurred on themselves and each other lest the great seduction should become dubious to them, and the fear of certain disappointment in wait for them at the long-desired, mysterious walls would not allow for the abatement of the wild lust, the great yearning for participation: cheap answers for so great a hope, cheap appeals, cheap prods, yet with each cry an impulse went through the mass, through the bodies, through the souls, a bullish obscene, irresistible impulse heading stolidly toward the common goal, a massed uproar and stampede heading, thrust after thrust, into a blazing nothing. And thickly massed the herd-smell smouldered above the heads, overhung by the smoke from the torches, the smoke a-glow, unbreathable, cough-provoking, stifling, thick brown swathes that piled up lazily tier on tier, left hanging in the motionless air; oh the heavy, indivisible, impenetrable layers of the infernal fog, a very ceiling of fog! Was there no longer a way out? was there no escape? oh, back! back to the ship, just to be allowed to die there! Where was the boy?! he should, he must lead the way back! With whom lay the decision?! Ah, wedged in the crowd and in the framework of its movement, there was nothing more to decide, and the voice that wanted to lift itself to decision could not get free of the breath; the voice remained blind! however the boy, as if he had heard the silent call, sent a smile upward, a smile from the eyes, full of serene apology, full of serene confidence, full of serene comfort in the knowledge that one was already released from every decision, yes, that the one made would be the right one, and this brought cheer notwithstanding all the frightfulness to come. On every side were the faces, one after another, usual faces with their usual though greatly exaggerated greed for food and drink, and this exaggeration, surmounting itself, had grown to an almost sinister ardor, to a brutal other-worldly possession that had left everything usual worlds behind and was conscious of nothing but the instant immediacy of the overpowering, gleaming goal, ardently longed for, ardently needed, ardently claimed, so that this very present might overshadow the cycle of their whole lives and lead on to participation, to participation in the power, the divinity, the expansive freedom and the eternity of the one who sat over there in the palace. Jerking, swaying, quivering, straining, exploding in gasps and groans, the framework moved forward, pushing to a certain extent against an elastic resistance that was undoubtedly there since it manifested itself in equally jerking counter-waves; and, in this forced-forcing to and fro, the cries of the stumbling, the down-trodden, the injured and perhaps even those of the dying became audible on every side, unnoticed or uncompas-sionately disdained, but again and again out-shouted by the jubilant hails, stifled by the furious uproar, shredded by the crackling of the flames. A momentous present was at stake, an endlessly amplified herd-present thrown up from the roaring of the herd, a present flung into uproar and at the same time flung out of the uproar itself, thrown up by the wit-lost, the soul-lost, the sense-lost, by those senseless because soul-lost, their senses so overemphasized in the mass that all things past and to come were engulfed by it, absorbing in itself as it did the uproar of all memory-depths, sheltering the remotest past and the remotest future in its tumult! Oh, greatness of human diversity, amplitude of human yearning! And floating in his awareness, floatingly borne aloft over the shouting heads, floatingly borne aloft over the festival fires of uproarious Brundisium, floating, held high in the undulant movement of the present, he experienced the boundless contraction of time’s onrush in the cycle of immutability: everything was his, all was embodied in him, in an ever-present coexistence, just as it had always been from the beginning, and it was Troy that was blazing about him and it was the unquenchable conflagration of the universe, but he who was balanced above the burning, he was Anchises, blind and seeing at once, child and gray-beard at the same time by virtue of an unutterable recollection, borne on the shoulders of the son, identified with the universal present, borne on the shoulders of Atlas, on the shoulders of the Titan. And thus, step by step, he neared the palace.

The immediate confines of the palace were barricaded by a police cordon; man after man armed with horizontally held lances bore the brunt of the surging crowd and offered it just that elastic resistance which had made itself felt, time after time, in the wavelike ebb which he had already noticed on the outskirts of the plaza. Behind the cordon, however, the Praetorian cohort, whose arrival from Rome seemed to be considered an unusual event, had taken over the guard of honor and its presence there was nothing more than a bumptious, over-sized idleness in a warlike setting, with patrols and bivouac fires and far-flung canteen-tents from which emanated the hope and scent of free wine, deluding perhaps, yet nevertheless gladly given credence. The by-standers were able to get so far; but no farther. And here was the very spot where hope and disappointment counterbalanced one another, causing apprehensions and suspense like every choice between life and death, like each moment of life, since each moment contains both; and when the warm breath of the flames brushed over the crowd, ruffling the tall plumes on the helmets and throwing the gilded armor into high relief, when the hoarsely-overbearing “Get back!” of the police warded off the noisy onslaught, then the madness, darting up like a flame, became breathless, and the faces with parched lips and dangling tongues stared stolidly and covetously into that momentary flash of immortality; for time was balanced on a knife-edge. Naturally things were at their worst at the entrance to the palace because since Caesar’s entrance the double line through which he had passed had disbanded and now there remained nothing to check the frenzied mob; completely devoid of order as if seized by a tornado, it whirled viscously toward this gateway which, outlined on both sides by a dense line of torches, resembled a fiery gullet, and into this they whirled, to be jammed and ejected again, yelling, dogged, brutal, trampling, frantic with desire; one could easier imagine oneself before the entrance to a circus than before an imperial mansion, so mad the bustle and brawling that ensued in contentions with the gatekeepers, so manifold the craftiness of impostors who tried to outwit and override the officials, so furious the shouts of those with permits whose rights were questioned, and of those who were kept waiting unduly; and when, at a word from the aged palace-servant whose usefulness only thus became apparent, the escort was admitted at once, the anger of those who, regardless of their standing, had been forced to comply to the entrance formalities rose intensely, yes even to the boiling point! they felt themselves made contemptible by this preference, they felt the contemptibleness of all human traits and all human institutions, they suddenly became conscious of all this because an exception had been made, could be made, for an individual, and it made no difference that it was only the exception due to one sick unto death, and to death itself. There was no one who might not come to despise his fellow man, and in the nameless and unutterable accumulation of contemptibleness, always disclosing and concealing itself anew, there dwelt man’s knowledge of his own incapacity for humanity, his anxiety for a dignity with which he had been endowed but which he would never truly possess. Contempt warred with contempt within the narrow, hot funnel of the entrance. Small wonder then that having come within the courtyard, having escaped the greedy struggle, having escaped the infernal raw glare of the lights, he fancied himself free of the insult which had pursued him into the streets and on the plaza, and felt a relief similar to that which had been granted him by the passing of the seasickness, the same ease of mind despite the fact that this place which he now entered did not reveal itself as quietude; on the contrary the courtyard seemed fairly bursting with disorder; but after all it was only a seeming disorder; the imperial servants well used to such contingencies preserved strict discipline, and soon a major-domo provided with a guest list approached the litter to receive the newcomer, perfunctorily turning to the servant to let him whisper the name of the guest, perfunctorily taking in the name and checking it off the list, so without diffidence or regard for a famous poet that it seemed almost offensive, so offensive that he found it necessary to confirm and emphasize the servant’s statement: “Yes, Publius Vergilius Maro, that is my name,” he said, and became bitterly angry when this brought him only a curtly-polite but no less indifferent bow, and even the youth from whom he had expected support made no sound but instead obediently joined the procession, which at a nod from the major-domo now moved on toward the second peristyle.