It gave me a strange sense that hitherto, all my life long, I had looked in the wrong direction for the most excellent of all kinds of beauty. It outraged me as some new mode in music or sculpture may at once outrage and revitalize the mind. Its significance tantalized and escaped me. The celestial eyes gazed at me, or gazed seemingly at me, from under the bright brow so darkly that they seemed to express equally a Buddhalike serenity, a brute’s indifference, and a rapier alertness.

Presently the apparition was transformed. I discovered that it was no single constant face but a succession of face forms imperceptibly changing into one another. It was as though the flux of thought in this being so remodelled the whole structure of its visage that nothing was left the same but a subtle air of personal continuity and identity. As a cloud changes from shape to shape, so this phantom suffered a continuous metamorphosis in such a manner that I saw it now as a mythical beast, now as a fair young man with battle in his nostrils, now as a sphinx, now as a mother bowed over her child, now as the child crucified, now as a jesting fiend, now as a huge inhuman insect face with many-faceted eyes and pincer-mandibles, now for a fleeting moment as the white-bearded Jehovah.

Yet, mysteriously, I continued to feel through all, these transformations the presence of the one unique and superb personality which had at the.. outset confronted me.

The transformations became more rapid, more bewildering. The features disintegrated from one another. Instead of a face there were a thousand eyes intermingled with a thousand searching or constructing hands. I seemed to detect also, in the obscure depths of the vision, a thousand phallic shapes, flaccid, rampant.

Yet even through these many and fantastic changes I retained the sense that I was beholding no mere chaos of images but manifestations of the unique, the superb one.

“It is God, it is God,” I said to myself. But I knew that if indeed there is a God he is no more visible than the theory of relativity. With ever lessening conviction, I reminded myself that I was mad. Even so it was impossible to believe that so novel, so overmastering an apparition was nothing whatever but a figment of insanity.

“It is indeed God,” I affirmed to myself. “It is God stirring my mad mind to create true though fantastic symbols of himself.” So at least I comforted myself.

By now I had lost sight of the stars. I had lost all perception of the planet to which I was clinging. Even my own body seemed to have melted and vanished. Yet inwardly my mind was clear, and indeed quickened to an unaccustomed agility. I remembered minutely the sequence of events that had led me to this vision. I remembered the whole trend of my life, with its many groping and unfulfilled activities. I remembered the contemporary world crisis in human affairs, the millions of unemployed, the recrudescence of barbarism in Europe and America, the forlorn struggle for a new world.

Under the innumerable and cryptic eyes of God I found myself searching in all these terrestrial aspects for some new significance. But I could not seize it.

2

CREATION

A startling change now took place in my mind. My reverie was shattered as a dream at the moment of waking, and I became aware that I had long been observing a vast pattern of cosmical and hypercosmical events. I remembered that I had been watching the visible apparition of God not for moments but for aeons, and that I had seen him create cosmos after cosmos. Now at last I was to behold God’s latest creation. I was to attend the birth of that intricate and tragic cosmos, fashioned of nebulae and stars, in which mankind occurs. Would this, his latest, be also his final sketch, before he should venture on some more finished work, which perhaps would raise his spirit from time into eternity, from mere progress to perfection?

Out of the confusion of limbs and organs which had confronted me, a face now formed itself, displaying its profile. Recognizably it was the face of God, the unique one; but this was not the God of the Jews nor of the Christians, nor was it Zeus nor Allah, nor any other deity of men. It was feline, snakelike. It was lean and keen and ruthless.

Horror seized me.