Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always, in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and women are veiled--none see their faces. There is light, but neither sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke--incessant--of pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that has no foundations exhales--worse than pestilence--an inexplicable stupefaction. And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two opposing whirlwinds. Now appears suddenly the Women--furious, formidable--one calls Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who, rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal, she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana. Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern Messalina. _Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos._ She admits--I give here simply her confessions--to no abominations, nor does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her existence--real, imaginary--she lives and loves and lies and forgives. She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. _Elle est la reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du Mal._ She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred: she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep, sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it? Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end. Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell.