I found also that I was weeping. This was a novel experience.

Whether in self-pity or self-mockery, I performed the gesture that millions of my fellow mortals must have carried out in faith and hope. I looked up to heaven.

The stars glittered with a brilliance and profusion rare in England. The Milky Way, a vague and feathery stream, phosphorescent, pricked with diamonds, divided the heavens. I was infuriated, and then utterly cowed, by the insensitiveness and vastness of the cosmos. By what right, by what right could these mindless gulfs drown the personal loveliness that had become all in all to me?

Still gazing upward, I noticed something in the darkness between the stars. At first it seemed no more than the vague shifting illumination which the eye discovers in itself when robbed of external light. But now, to my amazement, to my bewilderment and horror, but also to my incredulous amusement, I recognized that an immense and dimly lucent face was regarding me from behind the stars, from behind the Milky Way.

The fearsome thing was spread over half the sky. And it was upside down. The eyes were low in the south. The chin mounted to the zenith and beyond. Down toward the northern horizon loomed titanic shoulders, and far below them a confusion of many arms.

Such a vision clearly meant madness. It was impossible that there should be anything of the nature of a human or half-human form behind the galaxy, peering through a veil of stars. The apparition, taken at its face value, violated the whole teaching of modern science.

I know not whether I was more distressed at my derangement, or shocked at the devastatingly bad taste of the hallucination which confronted me, or tickled by the thought of the discomfiture which our scientists would suffer were it after all proved a true perception.

Anxiety for my own sanity forced me to take firm, hold on myself. Derisively I reflected that this was too crude, too banal an illusion for a scientifically minded person like me. Maidservants or savages might be haunted by such a phantom; but I, with my sceptical intelligence, could surely dismiss it by ; merely ridiculing it. Still gazing skyward, I recalled to mind the empty vastness of transgalactic space. But the image remained in view, and grew clearer.

Panic threatened me; but with a desperate effort I thrust it back. In order to calm myself, I undertook a careful study of the apparition, which indeed was so novel that even the dread of insanity could not wholly quench my curiosity.

So as to see it in the normal position, I lay flat on the heather with my head thrown back. The celestial face was like no other face, or like all faces. It was human, yet not human, animal, yet not animal, divine, yet surely not divine. I was subtly reminded of the grotesque gods of Egypt and of India, and also of the mild enigmatic expression of certain African carvings. I found myself thinking both of beasts of rapine and of gentler beasts. I saw expressions not only of tiger, hawk and snake, but also of ox and deer, elephant and gentle ape. But in the visage which overhung me, these characters, though seemingly alien to one another, were so subtly blended that they presented not a composite form made up of features selected from all living things, but one archetypal unity, from which the terrestrial creatures might well have borrowed each its distinctive nature.

The longer I regarded it, the more the apparition mastered me. It compelled me into an amazed, reluctant admiration. To call it merely beautiful would be to malign it. It was ugly, damnably ugly, almost satanic. Its anthropomorphism, hideously mixed with sheer animality, violated the austere inhumanity of the night sky. Yet in its own unique manner it was mysteriously, piercingly beautiful.