“No, you didn’t, but you’d better! Of course, it’s not what it might be, even now, but it was a perfect chaos when I began, a sort of peaceful haze, with not so much as a suffering gnat for me to vent my disposition on.” “It’s so different from anything that----” Dolores puzzled. “Did you expect to find Pluto wallowing in a lake of fire, _á la_ Milton?” “Gehenna is a place of torture, isn’t it? I wasn’t taught what they call religion in my childhood, but I typed the sermons of a minister for a while and I know what----” She hesitated, regretting her persistence. Satan’s facial expression, always mobile, had altered for the worse. “A minister, eh?” he asked fiercely. “I suppose he ranted the regular hell-fire stuff? Let me tell you that keeping the realities of my place from the preach-praters of Earth is the hardest thing I do. If they conceived a fraction of my achievements in the torture line, even in this vestibule to the real hell farther on, I’d never have a chance to hang out the S. O. S. sign--never. Earthlings _would_ be good and The Great Intention foiled.” “The Great Intention, sir? What can you mean?” He glared at her; snarled his reply: “Greater than you have gone to the chair of perpetual voltage for the impertinence of asking that. None knows my Great Intention save myself. It is ‘closed up and sealed until the time of the end.’ But woe betide the red soul in Gehenna that does not work toward its fulfillment!” So threatening was his manner that the girl-shade shrank away; as soon as she dared, returned her attention to the topographical features of the world infernal. Back whence they had come, over incalculable miles of couchant dwellings, Apollyon Palace and its gardens glittered in the rays of the artificial sun. On either side, taxing to the eye as the illusive distances of a boundless desert, detail merged into mirage-like suggestion of detail, until nothing more could be imagined--quite nothing more except infinitude of space. As they sped through the high-tempered air, shafts of fire-flecked smoke reached up as if to devour them. Directly below, for sections which might have been miles or tens of miles each, huddled a series of convex structures with the round chimneys of pottery kilns. Massed here and there were what looked to be warehouses and factories. The tension of the royal mood relaxed in a free gesture. “Object to my furnaces smoking? I have to burn some fire and brimstone to satisfy the preconceived mortal idea of damnation. The old-timers would think less of me if I didn’t. At that, I’m sparing of it. Am bagging the gases for future needs. You look surprised. Do earthlings really believe that the idea of poison gas was made in Germany? Why, my child, I’ve looked forward for ages to the destructiveness of the fumes thrown off by burning fiends incarnate--the real thing, you know, made in Hell!” Irritation again nettled his voice at the look on the face bent low to gaze through the rising heat-hazes.