"I can't tell you now whether it's an exterior or an interior, whether those hellish cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole thing is crazy--one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up. "And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual demon twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a witches' sabbat with that woman as a high priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats--the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles--and the flat-nosed Ægipans dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed! "But the scene wasn't Egypt--it was _behind_ Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and myth-whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all horror on this earth, and the symbolism showed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any creatures of our planet--the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is deep under water, though everybody seems to be breathing freely. * * * * * "Well, I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the canvas. It was no mere superstition--Marsh had actually caught something of her horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and color; so that she still brooded and stared and hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. _And it was worst of all when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward me!_ "Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realized I was a guardian and a prisoner for ever. She was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung, and something in my shaken will had been captured and turned to stone at last. Never again would I be safe from those coiling snaky strands--the strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding under the lime near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the virtual indestructibility, even through centuries of burial, of the hair of the dead. "My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there has lurked the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers began whispering about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar, for not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.